Taking Note
FR
From Santo Domingo to Mexico: The Changing Face of Intervention As we commemorate the 30th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic, we are witness to a new display of U.S....
...The Cold War is oversettled not in the Third World, but for the Third World...
...The insurrection sought to restore Juan Bosch, the country's social-democratic-but independent-president, to power, and was opposed by the United States not so much on its merits, but as a way to demonstrate to the other countries in the hemisphere the lengths to which Washington was willing to go to prevent "another Cuba" in Latin America...
...While the basic dynamic that shapes interAmerican relations has changed, it maintains a familiar cast...
...This is as sovereigntydepriving a measure as having the U.S...
...A massive outflow of those funds would not only dim the luster of the Mexican star, but would severely damage the entire Agenda...
...A currency board is a scheme to prevent virtually all budget deficits, prevent the printing of pesos not fully backed by dollar reserves, fix the value of the peso to the dollar, and make pesos fully convertible, upon demand, into dollars...
...Thirty years ago this April 28, President Lyndon B. Johnson effectively robbed the Dominican Republic of its sovereignty by sending 23,000 troops to subdue a popular uprising...
...Revolutionary struggle has, for the most part, reached the stage of the negotiation of scaled-down demands...
...It would trigger an outflow of confidence-and capital-from the dozens of "emerging markets" around the world dependent on those same investment funds, and playing the same role vis d vis U.S...
...export-led future...
...The invasion was also more evidence that the anti-war movement was up against a system-a new kind of imperialism...
...In the invasion's wake, a radical movement grew up in the United States focused largely on the question of U.S...
...Today, as progressives view the effects of what the Pope has called "savage capitalism," the range of options seems a good deal narrower...
...public already angry, uneasy and politically active...
...Over the past 30 years, much has changed and much has remained the same...
...The Dominican invasion radicalized a nascent "new left" in the United States, and midwifed the birth of NACLA...
...there will not be "another Cuba" for some time to come...
...This is the face of the new dependency: He who holds the dollar calls the tune...
...resolve to the world, and is no less motivated by a need to bolster a U.S.-dominated world system...
...power in the hemisphere, this one long in the making, but brought to a head by Bill Clinton's signature on a loan-guarantee form...
...capital...
...Low-wage Mexican industry is meant to act as a high-return stimulant for U.S...
...Demand from new markets like Mexico is meant to be the motor force of the U.S...
...But just as Lyndon Johnson kept an insufficiently anti-Castro Dominican social democrat out of office 30 years ago by force of arms, the logic of the world system now encourages Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo to hunt down the reform-minded Zapatistas because they make investors nervous...
...It would effectively remove all discretionary power from fiscal and monetary authorities...
...The Mexican "rescue" is more complex and ambiguous an exercise in U.S...
...the investment brokers have moved to the fore...
...The dictators have stepped to the background...
...power-and on the surface a good deal less brutal-but it has no less profound an effect on a sister country's sovereignty, is no less concerned to show U.S...
...These investment flows have severely constrained national sovereignty, holding the policy making process hostage to the dictates of transnational capital and to the mass-psychology of the financial marketplace...
...Clinton has been criticized-from the right as well as the left-for having the interests of wealthy investors in mind with his Mexico rescue package, but this criticism is misplaced...
...wealth and power rest...
...investment funds...
...We are still up against a system which, as the recent events in Mexico have shown, lets good neighbors live together as long as it's clear where the servants' quarters are...
...the call for socialist transformation has given way to an attempt to salvage basic rights and protections...
...Clinton did not intervene to save a few wealthy U.S...
...Marines in charge of your army...
...The salvation now being proposed for Mexico-already effectively adopted in Argentina-is known as a "currency board...
...citizens, but to salvage a system of global investment and production-a system upon which U.S...
...military domination of other countries...
...Coming in the midst of the escalation of, and growing opposition to the war in Vietnam, the invasion was both a spur and a revelation to a sector of the U.S...
...Mexico had been the bright shining star in what has come to be called the "Washington Agenda" for developing-now known as "emerging"-nations...
Vol. 28 • March 1995 • No. 5
