How to misunderstand Central America
Bell, Peter D.
THE PROBLEM ISN'T INFORMATION BUT PRECONCEPTION How to misunderstand Central America PETER D. BELL WITH each succeeding month, the United States becomes more entangled in Central America. Since...
...The New York Times has reported that the administration is considering a request for $ 172 million more for El Salvador this fiscal year...
...Our prejudices and preconceptions are part of our problems in Central America — and part of Central America's problems 22 March 1985: 173 as well...
...The problem is not lack of information...
...It is the United States that has decided to play a major role in Central America...
...vice-chairman of the Inter-American Dialogue, a group which meets periodically to discuss inter-American problems and cooperative approaches to them...
...The barriers to an informed understanding of Central America in the United States are more formidable...
...tary assistance...
...But President Jose Napoleon Duarte and Guillermo Ungo, the political leader of the rebel forces in El Salvador, must occasionally wonder where the United States was in 1972 when they were duly elected president and vice-president of that country...
...prices for coffee, sugar, or bananas mean millions of dollars to the economies of Central America...
...Economic growth, by itself, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for development...
...They are concerned not about our resolve to resist Soviet expansionism in our own backyard but about our capacity for farsighted leadership and genuine cooperation in this hemisphere...
...How many of us know what every Nicaraguan schoolchild learns: that an American filibusterer named William Walker seized control of that country's government in the 1850s, obtained diplomatic recognition from the United States, and, among other things, legalized slavery...
...In 1972, however, we saw no Communist threat in Central Commonweal: 172 America...
...Given the relative weakness of the region economically and militarily, the United States maintains a wide margin for error in its policies...
...Already it may needlessly be widening and prolonging the conflicts in the region, increasing the number of lives lost, properties destroyed, and hopes dashed...
...politics...
...aid to the region...
...Last month President Reagan began pressing his campaign to renew congressional funding for the rebel forces in Nicaragua, and virtually advocated the overthrow of the Sandinista government...
...Despite the deep U.S...
...Central America exists for us in terms of its current crises which we too often assume began with the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua in 1979...
...and why the views of Central America's nearest neighbors, including Mexico, are so different from those of the United States regarding the region's conflicts and how to resolve them...
...We were taken aback when the Costa Rican government rejected U.S...
...The small nations of the region are increasingly complex, with tradition and change combining in ways that are sometimes creative and sometimes jarring...
...We were caught off guard when the Sandinista government agreed to accept the regional peace plan as drafted by the Contadora countries...
...Unless we are prepared to rid ourselves of the barriers to understanding Central America in its own terms, our role there will in the end be destructive — both for Central Americans and for the United States...
...For Nicaraguans, the U.S...
...We did not, for example, anticipate President Duarte's initiative to bring the Salvadoran guerrillas into peace talks...
...Sixth, we too readily allow domestic U.S...
...One result is that the triad of church, army, and oligarchy, which once kept a lock on power in Central American societies, has been broken forever...
...policymakers talk about the increased interdependence between the United States and Latin America, but the relationship remains lopsided...
...Moreover, to varying degrees in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, the army has distanced itself from the oligarchy, and now exists as an increasingly independent center of power...
...Eden Pastora, the Nicaraguan rebel leader, recently quipped, ' 'The Americans make North American politics out of Nicaraguan politics...
...We find it similarly difficult to explain why the U.S.-backed contras have had so little success in their war against the Sandinista government...
...The United States looms very large, a veritable colossus, for the small nations of Central America...
...The full burden of misunderstanding and miscalculation in U.S.-Central American relations does not rest with the United States...
...Thus, for example, the question of conditioning U.S...
...They know that a one percent increase in interest rates here can cost them more than $1 billion in debt service payments...
...the weapons are all foreign...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, there was — thanks in part to U.S...
...Fifth, issues involving Central America capture the consciousness of most North Americans only in so far as they are infused with an East-West dimension...
...So, too, Hondurans, including those who may feel the need for protection from U.S...
...Second, we assume that political and social relations have gone largely unchanged in the countries of the region...
...Such stereotypes may once have contained some truth, but they are certainly not accurate today...
...In the aftermath of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, the United States has made a great fuss over the establishment of democracies in the region, putting our prestige and resources on the line...
...Everywhere power has become more fluid...
...Then, of course, there are those Americans on the left and on the right for whom Central America is a reenactment of the Vietnam drama...
...But they do lead to deepening resentment toward this country in the region — a resentment on which our adversaries capitalize...
...The dead," he states, "are our (Central American) dead...
...They interpret each issue in El Salvador or Nicaragua as an opportunity to validate the lessons they learned from the war in Indochina...
...credibility in a different sense...
...Whatever may have become of the Sandinista revolution, the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship resulted from one of the few broadly-based insurrectionary movements in the history of this hemisphere...
...policy it is downright dangerous...
...Our increased awareness of Central America, however, has not been accompanied by a similar advance in our understanding of either the countries or the peoples of the region...
...Fourth, we fail to comprehend the extent to which the asymmetry in power between the United States and Latin America shapes perceptions both north and south of the Rio Grande...
...Third, we tend to attach too much significance to economic growth as a measure of progress in Central America, as elsewhere...
...During recent visits to Europe and South America, I found that our friends and allies there were worried about U.S...
...politics to shape our understanding of Central America...
...Reagan administration strategists talk about U.S...
...miliPETER D. bell is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...
...Up to 500,000 Central Americans have sought refuge in the United States, and thousands more will follow them if denied peace and hope in their homelands...
...Since the Latin American bishops' conference at Medellin, Colombia in 1968, the church has become the defender of the poor and defenseless, the champion of human rights and social justice...
...commander even while seeking increased U.S...
...Issues of life and death significance within the region are exploited for electoral or bureaucratic advantage here...
...Within Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, added wealth did not lead to social progress or political change but to increased division and frustration...
...the original banana republic...
...The barriers derive from preconceptions and prejudices that shape the way we interpret the information we receive...
...When peaceful efforts to promote social and political reforms were repressed, the most committed reformers were left with rebellion as their only alternative for political action...
...We have been forced into a growing awareness of the isthmus connecting North and South America, where a population one-tenth that of the U.S...
...The Reagan administration's preoccupation with Soviet expansionism causes it to see the current conflicts in Central America as part of a worldwide confrontation, thereby further diverting it from the realities of the region...
...involvement in Central America, we and our policymakers are continually surprised by critical events and changes...
...Nevertheless, Daniel Oduber, a former president of Costa Rica, has cogently argued the case for greater respect for Central American views in handling U.S...
...If the United States had supported democracy then, we might have prevented the military from stealing the election and spared El Salvador its current grief...
...Even our friends in Central America view with a jaundiced eye the recent rediscovery of their region by this country...
...assistance to El Salvador on human rights grounds is at bottom as much an expression of congressional distrust of the Reagan administration as a concern about Salvadoran lives...
...Commonweal: 174...
...In the case of Central America, these barriers include the following: First, we do not appreciate the importance for Central Americans of the history of their region and of the long U.S...
...Our overriding concern with Communism today diverts attention from the deeper realities of the region — the struggles for economic development, social justice, and national self-determination...
...occupation during two decades beginning in 1912 is part of present reality, even if easily forgotten by most of us...
...involvement there...
...credibility around the world being at stake in Central America...
...Changes of a few pennies in U.S...
...Latin Americans are very much aware of the preponderant weight of the United States in this hemisphere — our economic strength, our military might, and the sheer size of our country...
...assistance — a great deal of economic growth in the region...
...troops engaged in maneuvers there, still smart from having once been a virtual colony of the United Fruit Co...
...but income also became more skewed in most countries, thereby worsening the inequality between rich and poor...
...Costa Rica disbanded its army in establishing its democracy, and Nicaragua destroyed its oligarchy while making its revolution...
...While we discount the past, Central Americans are ever mindful of the sixty military interventions by our country in the Caribbean basin over the past 150 years, some twenty-five of them in Central America during this century...
...Among the most far-reaching institutional changes within the region over recent years have been those in the church...
...He is also U.S...
...Inattention and miscalculation apparently cost us little...
...The lack of understanding among the general public may be distressing, but among those who are formulating U.S...
...So, too, Central Americans have sometimes complained about our insensitivity or unilateral imposition while failing to assume greater responsibility for their own affairs...
...We should not be so fixated on economic growth that we underestimate the importance of demands for other social change...
...They have to do with the way we as North Americans look at the rest of the world...
...Thus we bear a special responsibility to understand what we are doing in the region, why, and with what consequence...
...Our impatience with Central Americans who insist on putting a heavy burden of history onto their relationship with the United States only adds to their uneasiness about us...
...policymakers take Central America for granted...
...He was specifically referring to the battle between the Reagan administration and Congress over the wisdom and legality of CIA support for anti-Sandinista guerrillas, but he might have been describing the treatment of any number of issues...
...Central Americans and other Latin Americans have often failed to understand either our responsibilities as a world power or the competing interests and contradictory values at work within U.S...
...Hardly anyone can doubt, however, that the United States has the economic and military power to prevail in the region if we commit ourselves to do so...
...Since the Sandinista triumph in Nicaragua in July 1979, we have raised our annual commitment of military and economic aid to the other four countries of the region from $150 million to more than one billion dollars...
...And Guatemalans, prodded by the United States to elect a civilian president by the end of this year, cannot forget the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of their last democratically-elected president in 1954...
...A consistent refrain of Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lang-horne A. Motley is, "No more Cubas, and no more Viet-nams...
...By contrast, except in moments of crisis, U.S...
...occupies one-twentieth of our land mass...
...entreaties to build up its armaments, and when Honduran army officers cashiered their pro-U.S...
...From the vantage point of our predominantly Protestant, Anglo22 March 1985: 171 Saxon culture, we still look at Central America as a collection of pre-Reformation Catholic societies and see them as rigidly absolutist, hierarchical, and fatalistic...
Vol. 112 • March 1985 • No. 6
