REAGAN'S DISASTERS IN CENTRAL AMERICA
Corradi, Juan E.
At mid-term, the bellicose momentum of the Reagan administration's policies toward Nicaragua, and toward Central America as a whole, has stalled. The reactionary impulse behind these...
...Political realities at home have changed significantly since 1981...
...it's a mistake...
...One part lives in a more or less free state under the rule of law, while the other lives in a police state that operates by arbitrary orders against which there is usually no appeal and over which there is no parliamentary control...
...Foreign policy was made to serve the overriding goal of reasserting American dominance in the West and fighting the Communist threat everywhere...
...They have to support their universities with contributions from abroad...
...It is difficult to gauge the extremes to which the Administration has been willing to go, to separate rhetoric from concrete steps, but it seems that the prospect of a "final assault" on Cuba caps its dreams...
...government whose priorities are elsewhere, and strong opposition from foreign governments and regional organizations which do not like the military and political conditions attached to it and object to the exclusion of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada from the package...
...They have been supplemented by active military diplomacy in Latin America at large, and by the development of a capability for direct U.S...
...they, for their "opinions" also...
...First, the middle-range powers with sizable economic and military resources (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela...
...The question will not go away, though, try as we may to forget it or cover it up...
...Where direct military aid has met legal obstacles on account of a bad human-rights record, these have been circumvented by recourse to third countries willing to intervene (Argentina and Israel...
...plans for direct intervention in trouble spots...
...In exactly the same way, they may not work or remain outside their areas of residence...
...The defenestration of the Sandinists therefore must come from the outside: at least it would depend on a foreign invasion spearheaded by exiles...
...As for the rest, U.S...
...Fourth, the Administration has not found it easy to "contain communism" around the world, and would welcome a proof of prowess nearer home...
...In the first years the routine was more humane, inter alia because it was believed that the occupation was a transitory phase...
...The Administration has fanned the flames of war along the Nicaragua-Honduras border, and it has stimulated tensions between Costa Rica and Nicaragua...
...interest in Latin America is construed as identical with easy access to strategic raw materials and business opportunity...
...This meant trimming "social fat" and building "military muscle...
...By themselves, these measures cannot topple the Sandinist regime, because they cannot count on an army that could be persuaded to stage a coup...
...It rendered U.S...
...the dismissal of allied partnership in the formulation of global policies...
...military intervention in the area...
...We are punished only for what we do...
...RONALD RADOSH, author of Prophets on the Right, and of El Salvador: Central America in the New Cold War, is teaching history at CUNY...
...Even today there are two systems of law and public administration...
...They are confined to a "pale of settlement" as the Jews of Czarist Russia once were and the blacks of 152 To fight them, we must enlist neighbors and outsiders...
...Every passing day brings us nearer to an apartheid state...
...There is no more important question today and yet, out of fatalism or hypocrisy, shame or fear, intellectual sloth, political blindness, or insensitivity, we repress discussion of it...
...None of these steps requires condoning totalitarian practices in Cuba or the drift toward Leninization in Managua...
...Ultimately, only a regional war involving at least another national army could produce the results sought by this Administration...
...Throughout 1982, many significant events have underscored the difficulties faced by Reagan's intransigent policy...
...Many refuse to talk about it, while others find it difficult to admit its existence, in the spirit of the German saying that "what is forbidden could never happen...
...reliance on Southern Cone dictatorships ineffective...
...The routine is becoming harsher year by year...
...I do not have any illusions that this Administration will reverse its course drastically or even less dramatically...
...We enjoy substantial allocations of public funds and freedom of instruction in our universities...
...First, the interventionist rhetoric feeds upon itself...
...Such pressure will increase during the 98th Congress...
...To solve it, we must destroy one party and its friends...
...We can organize ourselves in parties and express our political views...
...Toughness on the cheap, in one's own backyard, but with high symbolic yield worldwide, has been the centerpiece of Reagan's Hemispheric policy...
...According to the official doctrine, public land should routinely serve our social aims, but never theirs...
...To be sure, the charge that these policies are cruel, because they perpetuate and augment avoidable human suffering in little countries, does not disturb self-righteous officials and advisers...
...The reactionary impulse behind these policies (in the sense of an attempt to roll back change to the status quo ante) has never been disowned...
...Or a South Africa— which is holding out, but has great natural resources that enable it to face isolation over a prolonged period...
...The only wonder is that many are still affronted, quite genuinely, when you say this...
...That illusion was shattered long ago...
...they, by contrast, live almost constantly under a heavy burden of more or less arbitrary, and sometimes draconian, orders issued by military governors, operating by authority of a mandatory law once termed "Nazi" by Menachem Begin himself...
...Our daily lives are conducted, in most cases, within the framework of a reasonably liberal set of laws enacted by the Knesset we elected...
...The world view that pervades this Administration in general, and the "theses" of Reagan's "latinamericanists" in particular, stand, under the pressure of events, exposed as a risky gamble...
...Moreover, whatever strategies Reagan's latinamericanists have agreed upon have often been resisted by career functionaries more prone to negotiation...
...What Elon writes is all the more notable, and alarming, because on the Israeli political spectrum he is far from being on the extreme left...
...their values have not changed...
...was likely to lose unless it reasserted its leadership...
...JAMES B. RULE taught at Oxford and Bordeaux before coming to SUNY, Stony Brook, where he is teaching sociology...
...Military threats, once uttered, lose credibility unless followed by action...
...the replacement of human-rights rhetoric by the Georgetown newspeak...
...If anything, American support for the 154 "contras" has won the Nicaraguan regime support abroad...
...In the Hemisphere, the consequences of this new globalism were swift and nasty: a new willing-, ness to befriend right-wing tyrannies...
...whole villages can be cut off from electricity and water supplies for no other reason than refusal to join an association of villages that the authorities wish to promote...
...Against the background of these events, some initiatives were taken by a number of Latin American and European politicians and office-holders, including elements of the non-Somozista opposition to the Nicaraguan government, to explore alternatives to the clear failure of Reagan's strategy...
...It also includes countries considered "lost to the enemy" (Cuba, Grenada, and Nicaragua...
...One is defined territorially, and applies to Israelis wherever they may be on either side of the Green Line...
...They do not...
...larger transfers of hardware and knowhow to the military establishments south of the border...
...In 1981 alone, the total amount of military and nonmilitary aid to that country's rulers was twice the size of its annual budget...
...State Department...
...They range from the infiltration of saboteurs to the denial of credit and loans...
...Hence the effort to step up the sale of weapons and the dispatch of advisers to these countries...
...But people who speak this way have usually not troubled to read what we actually offered to the Arabs in the autonomy proposal—even less than the South Africans have accorded to their Bantustans...
...That being the case, the question of the political, social, and moral regime in all parts of Eretz Israel becomes daily more acute...
...they may not...
...I am not referring to the cases that the IDF terms "irregularities" but to the routine...
...Perhaps it is not what happens in Central America that generates hysteria among the new cold warriors but secret doubts about the viability of the system they so loudly defend, an inner weakness, the lack of a serene vision befitting a great power...
...THE STRATEGIC MAP of Reagan's latinamericanists divides the region into three groups...
...policy promotes the internationalization South Africa are today...
...SEVERAL FACTORS add momentum to this fateful course of war...
...This is not apartheid, it is security," they say...
...Only they can lose their right to return by remaining abroad for more than a year...
...Rightwing ideologues are deaf to liberal advice...
...MARK LEVINSON, who has worked for Dissent over the past two years, is a graduate student in economics at the New School for Social Research, and teaches economics at SUNY, Old Westbury...
...A second group consists of "loyal allies" that can be counted on either because of ideological and business ties (Chile, Jamaica) or simply because, their preferences notwithstanding (Ecuador, Panama), they will toe the line...
...Their universities are often closed by administrative orders against which there is no appeal, and their professors are required to sign a political commitment or will be expelled...
...has unilaterally ratified a treaty that recognizes Colombian sovereignty over the keys of Roncador, Quitasueno, and Serrana, We are pleased to announce these New Members of Our Editorial Board: JEAN L. COHEN, who teaches political sociology at Bennington College, is an associate editor of Teios and a member of the editorial groups of Praxis International and of Kapitalismus...
...side in a new cold war...
...and it is a disturbing one, given its statistical implications and a political and human situation in which repression and terror feed and justify each other but fail to solve anything...
...In its 16th year the occupation looks more permanent than ever...
...designs...
...The intensification of the civil war in El Salvador over the past two years has added a sense of urgency to this strategy...
...Since 1981, policing Central America has meant military preparations to defeat guerrilla movements in El Salvador and Guatemala, the further isolation of Cuba, the destabilization of the Sandinist regime...
...Finally, we must confront the "source" (read Cuba...
...Reagan's latinamericanists have been mostly doctrinaires of the Kirkpatrick stripe with strong sympathies for authoritarian regimes...
...They have chosen Central America and the Caribbean as a place for the U.S...
...His new book, The Rosenberg File: A Search for the Truth, will be published this fall...
...and Latin American interests, and political skill...
...or, "Let the Arabs agree to autonomy...
...Nevertheless, the danger of disaster still looms...
...Are we going to be another Rhodesia, which collapsed under the pressure...
...It showed the inter-American defense structure as a fig leaf for U.S...
...JEWS AND ARABS RECEIVE different punishments for the same offense: physical injury to an Arab is cheaper than to a Jew...
...Eos The massive settlement activity in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip continues, and official spokesmen proudly claim that the situation there is already "irreversible"—i.e., that those territories (not their Arab inhabitants, however) are now an indivisible part of Israel...
...The U.S...
...Stemming the tide of insurrection in El Salvador and Guatemala, harassing the Sandinist regime in Nicaragua to the point of collapse were early concerns of Reagan's foreign policy...
...to show who's boss...
...The overall objective should be the decoupling of Hemispheric affairs from East-West conflict...
...Navy has courted the approval of Honduras to establish a base in the Gulf of Fonseca, in waters where sovereignty is shared by Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador...
...At war's end the Administration stood as the main loser in a contest that did not require any Cuban or Soviet meddling to weaken American influence in the Hemisphere...
...First, because the realities may not suffice to dispel the myths, and second, because the commitment of massive resources to the wrong kind of policies may well trigger a process with its own dynamic...
...And Reagan got the same message in Brasilia and Bogota...
...the use of economic aid as a weapon...
...Central America and the Caribbean came to bear the burden of a new globalism defining world problems in terms of a confrontation between East and West—a contest the U.S...
...Second, the deterioration of the internal situation in El Salvador, the absence of an adequate political solution, and the impasse in the civil war exasperate trigger-happy hawks...
...Other policy options are then likely to be thrown overboard...
...The third group includes all "critical cases" in Central America and the Caribbean, defined as countries under siege (El Salvador and Guatemala) and others that could follow the same fate...
...But there are countertrends that have checked full-scale intervention...
...Amos Elon Shame on the West Bank The following is taken from an article by Amos Elon, the distinguished Israeli writer, which appeared on December 10, 1982 in Ha'aretz, the liberal Israeli daily...
...A RATIONAL ALTERNATIVE to present policies requires undoing every one of the assumptions of Reagan's strategy: a willingness to pursue NorthSouth negotiations, the demilitarization of Central America, the search for political solutions, the acceptance of the Nicaraguan revolution as an irreversible process, the acknowledgment that Nicaragua is not another Cuba, and the retrieval of Cuba, in the long run, into the Latin American community...
...We reside and move freely all over Eretz Israel...
...The resounding fiasco of the Salvadoran elections reminded U.S...
...Nor should we underestimate the moderating role played by lucid sectors of international business, the European allies, by dissident voices within organized labor and the churches, by intellectuals, and the elite press in the U.S...
...The contrast between the exaggerated fear of secondary conflicts in small countries and the cheery bravado with which the Administration responds to major threats such as economic collapse and thermonuclear war is disturbing...
...Only they are punished by exile to another town, house arrest, or deportation abroad...
...They are not allowed to buy property this side of the Green Line, while we may buy anywhere we wish, and most of our purchases are made with generous assistance from the government...
...Christian Morgenstern.] Meanwhile, our lives in Greater Israel are already based on a "democracy of supremacy," controlling a large population of a different race that is without even the most elementary human rights...
...What is beginning to give them pause is their own ineptness, the appearance of consequences they had not foreseen, the political impasse in which they have landed...
...In Honduras, the victory of the Liberal party in elections gave the executive a measure of autonomy vis-a-vis the armed forces and the U.S...
...Regional and international realities have proved recalcitrant to their simplistic ideology...
...We enjoy freedom of speech, written expression, and publication...
...Resistance from Capitol Hill kept mounting throughout the 97th Congress, which issued an order barring the Administration from providing for military activities "for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua or provoking a military exchange between Nicaragua and Honduras...
...Therefore there are reasons to expect that here, as in other domains, a pragmatic approach may be substituted for myth-making...
...Moreover, the U.S...
...q also claimed by Nicaragua...
...It is today in the hands of a heartless, sometimes brutal, military bureaucracy, which is capable of thinking only in terms of bribery or violence...
...policy-makers of their inability to steer a political process at whim...
...Third, American plans to provide economic assistance as a security measure have been met by reluctance on the part of private investors, skepticism on the part of economic agencies within the U.S...
...Besides the aid just mentioned, the Reagan administration has sponsored joint military operations between Honduras and El Salvador, and maneuvers involving U.S., NATO, and Inter-American Defense Treaty forces in the Caribbean...
...has orchestrated the coordination of military action among Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador...
...And so the fight of peasants for something better than a miserable existence in a tiny corner of the planet is changed by the magic of this logic into a titanic contest between good and evil in which the power and prestige of the United States are at stake...
...It showed Reagan's obsession with East-West conflict as utterly inadequate to cope with North-South crises...
...One part of the population lives in a parliamentary republic, while the other lives under absolute rule...
...they do not...
...Yet Nicaragua today is not like Guatemala in 1954, and the Bay of Pigs fiasco is still a searing reminder that things can go wrong...
...they cannot...
...Thus U.S...
...They are singled out for preferential ties, to realign them on the U.S...
...But they do require an alternative vision of U.S...
...In Guatemala, the coup of General Rios Montt brought a new rhetoric to politics...
...The other is personal, applying to the Arab citizens of Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip alone...
...It also follows that insurrection in one country must be linked to intervention from another, that peasant revolutions are a game of dominoes, that the regimes they produce are all identical, that Nicaragua equals Cuba, and Cuba is just a Soviet proxy...
...Land is expropriated from them to be given to us, but never the other way round...
...These attempts must be construed as a concerted effort to provoke Nicaragua into war with its neighbors...
...This reasoning reveals a mentality seriously out of focus...
...Constant squabbles have reduced the effectiveness of advisers...
...relaxation of controls over intelligence activities...
...It follows that crucial attention should be focused on such countries as El Salvador, which are seen on the verge of "falling...
...All these actions are dangerous corollaries of a Manichean outlook: they foster a trained 151 incapacity to consider national situations in their own terms...
...The very question comes up against a taboo—like sex or sweat in a Victorian novel...
...In one sweep, conflict in one country is seen as conflict in its region, and conflict in the region as conflict in the world...
...Only they face collective punishment: fathers pay with their livelihood taken away...
...In the bickering that ensued, Reagan's advisers came to an open admission of their bungling amateurism...
...But there is a glimmer of a ghost of a chance that they might heed, by default, Talleyrand's caveat: "This is worse than a crime...
...With respect to Nicaragua, the Administration has set in motion the whole gamut of covert actions that proved effective in Chile between 1970 and 1973...
...Reagan's foreign policy team has never been the "happy family" that the President once mentioned...
...Their inhabitants may be frightened out of bed in the middle of the night and made to wait outside in the cold and the rain, until dawn breaks or a man in uniform decides they have had their punishment...
...There are enough pieces of evidence to suggest that it has seriously entertained such a project...
...The U.S...
...But it was the South Atlantic War of May—June '82 that gave this strategy the greatest jolt...
...153 of armed conflict in Central America...
...It disrupted the network of military collaboration in Central America...
...He is the author of Insight and Betterment, and of The Politics of Privacy...
...They believe hemispheric affairs are but a chapter in the general contest of the superpowers...
...Only they are tried in a closed military court and found guilty without knowing what they are accused of...
...Vietnamizing El Salvador, attacking Nicaragua are like coming home to kick the cat...
Vol. 30 • April 1983 • No. 2
