US involvement in Latin America

["Ken Hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Guardian of London November 21, 2000

Getting Away With Murder: The US Has Admitted Its Involvement in Latin
America

by Isabel Hilton

It has been a curious few days for followers of US foreign policy.
President Clinton, now safely at the end of his presidency, has afforded
himself a trip to Vietnam in a long-delayed postwar reconciliation.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the latest release of US
declassified documents has added more detail to the suspicion that has
been officially denied for decades - that US interference in the internal
politics of Latin America over fifty years from the end of the second world
war was widespread, relentless and, for the most part, disastrous in its
consequences.
Last week, the US released 17,000 previously classified documents
relating to CIA interference in Chile. The documents - many of them
heavily censored - were released by the US state department, the
defence intelligence agency, the CIA, the FBI and the justice department.
They are the fourth and last round of disclosures ordered by President
Clinton.
The "revelation" that the US helped to bring Augusto Pinochet to
power by destabilising the government of President Salvador Allende can
have come as a surprise only to those who have spent the last 27 years
in a state of acute denial. (This includes, notoriously, substantial
sections
of the British Conservative party as well as many Chilean supporters of
the right.)
But still, the documents confirm that, in addition to the well-known
dirty tricks against Allende, between 1971 and 1973 the US government
gave $4m to opposition political parties, mostly to the Christian
Democrats; that the CIA spent $2.6m supporting the Christian Democrats
in the 1964 election in Chile; and that the US went on paying political
parties into the 1980s. The newspaper El Mercurio received about $1.6m
in covert support from US agents. El Mercurio was a leading critic of the
government of Allende. None of this has raised public confidence in
Chile's political parties, or in their version of history.
A CIA memo prepared three years before the 1973 coup states: "If
civil disorders were to follow from a military action, the USG [US
government] would promptly deliver necessary support and material, (but
not personnel)." In a state department memo written weeks after the coup
that put Pinochet in power, Jack Kubisch wrote: "The junta does not
appear to represent a threat to our major national interest. No overriding
national objective seems to me to be served by supporting opposition to
it."
Chile, of course, is not the only case. The truth is that US policy in
Latin America was for several decades in thrall to a security doctrine that
argued that considerations of human rights or democracy were secondary
to the fight against what the US perceived as Soviet and Cuban influence,
however broadly defined. It came to include almost all attempts to
achieve political change or social justice. Its executives were the Latin
American military officers trained by the US in the School of the Americas
in Panama. There they learned to conduct dirty warfare against their own
civilian populations and went on to practise their lessons with enthusiasm.
So while US diplomats publicly promoted democratic ideals, the US
government was sponsoring armies and intelligence services that waged
savage internal war against political opponents - many of the left, others
simply reforming democrats, trade unionists or campaigners for land
rights. When this provoked civil war or military dictatorship, successive
US administrations colluded in the concealment of massive human rights
violations, misinforming not only US public opinion but, on occasions,
Congress itself.
The price was paid in Latin America in the deaths and disappearance
of, at a conservative estimate, around 100,000 people throughout the
subcontinent. Their ghosts continue to haunt the countries in which they
occurred.
Anything up to 30 years later, the truth is partially leaked, long after
the guilty men are dead, retired or, in the case of President Reagan,
senile. The Gipper himself, of course, was pardoned by George Bush,
without the crimes for which he was pardoned ever being officially
acknowledged. Is there such a great moral difference between Bush's
granting a pardon to Reagan for his pursuit of a war that was in violation
of US law and his government's publicly stated policy, and Pinochet's
amnesty for himself and his cohorts for the crimes they committed in
Chile? As an operation, the concealment of US operations in Latin
America for long enough for the guilty men to escape punishment rivals
the worst practices of the countries that were victims of these policies.
It has been, though, an effective strategy. By the time the documents
are allowed to filter out, the events they reveal are over; domestic public
opinion in the US, in that depressingly anti-historical phrase, has "moved
on"; the details have grown fuzzy. On the ground, the orphans have
grown up and the widows are dead or discouraged.
Just for the record, then, what were the consequences of that era
when, in the words of one US analyst, "the gang that blew Vietnam went
Latin"? Chile was the most notorious case, Central America an even more
tragic one. It covered the civil war in El Salvador, the Contra war in
Nicaragua and the genocide perpetrated against the Indian population of
Guatemala by a series of military regimes that held power after a US-
sponsored coup in the 1950s. A legion of US officials spent their careers
pretending that the deaths and disappearances, the torture and terror,
were the responsibility of a few isolated extremists who were out of the
control of the fine democrats whom the US supported. Limited US
admissions, produced decades after the event, come too late for the
victims.
In Argentina, Chile and Central America, the consequences of US
policy persist in over-powerful militaries and in the conflicts provoked by
the continuing efforts of the victims' families to locate the remains of
their
relatives and bring the perpetrators to justice. But in the country that
proclaims itself the world's best democracy there is impunity for the men
who conceived and executed these policies. In the case of the Iran-
Contra affair, for instance, in the words of the Walsh report, "the
underlying facts ... are that ... President Reagan, the secretary of state,
the secretary of defence and the director of central intelligence and their
necessary assistants committed themselves ... to two programmes
contrary to congressional policy and contrary to national policy. They
skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them tried
to cover up the president's wilful activities."
George Bush pardoned Reagan, but what of Bush's own role? After
heading the CIA, he was vice-president throughout the Reagan
presidency then succeeded Reagan as president. On December 24 1992,
12 days before former secretary of defence Caspar W Weinberger was to
go on trial, a trial in which Bush himself might have been called as a
witness, Bush pardoned him and five other defendants. The criminal
investigation of Bush himself was never completed.
Bush continues to enjoy his position as ex-president and respected
father of the man who may well get the current presidential job. Justice
and accountability, it seems, are strictly for export.