GETTING OUR WAY Clinton's Latin America Policy
In early August, the Clinton Administration announced that it was lifting a 20year ban on the sale of major weaponry to Latin American militaries. As Michael Klare explains, the White House had...
...interests in the region and by the bureaucratic legacies of past policies and events...
...Latin America policy-at least for the next four years...
...influence...
...Latin America policy...
...policy in the Americas would be the "enlargement" of the area within which free markets and free elections held sway...
...The lifting of the ban on the sale of sophisticated weapons would not have been possible without a certain level of bipartisan support...
...governing elite are revealed most clearly by the continuation of U.S...
...Free elections"-important as they are after years of brutal dictatorships in much of the hemisphere-have not allowed sovereign peoples to choose among alternate futures, as much as they have given voters the ability to choose among alternate managers of a U.S.-dominated hemispheric system...
...The long-term interests of the U.S...
...The interests of these firms have often been advanced by Pentagon officials seeking to preserve their own institutional power...
...As Clinton's first term was taking shape, then-National Security Advisor Anthony Lake wrote that the aim of U.S...
...Through foreign aid and arms sales, support for Latin American military and police forces more than quadrupled from fiscal year 1996 to fiscal year 1997...
...policy: that the region's militaries have been and remain our strongest and most reliable allies...
...firms, the logic goes, should be able to sell anything to anybody...
...Coletta Youngers argues that the drug war has strengthened the very militaries and intelligence services that at least some civilian governments in the Andes have been struggling to bring under control...
...Clinton's drive to extend NAFTA into a Free Trade Area of the Americas has been met by demands from U.S...
...military presence in the hemisphere...
...By paving the way for the sale of F-16 fighter planes to Chile and other countries in the region, the White House has linked "free trade" to another long-standing underpinning of U.S...
...Four years ago, when it looked like Clinton was naming some relatively enlightened professionals to Latin America policy posts, we wrote that any real shift in U.S...
...arms manufacturers to lift the ban and incorporate the arms industry into the conceptual core of U.S...
...Latin America policy...
...trade policy, while the bureaucratic legacy of decades of military and paramilitary intervention-compellingly detailed here by Kate Doyle-is powerfully present in the various programs and policies of the war on drugs...
...Those constraints have been strong indeed...
...Republicans and Democrats alike have happily approved increases in military aid to the region...
...As Michael Klare explains, the White House had been under heavy pressure from U.S...
...Moreover, merchants and Pentagon officials have been aided by the constant escalation of the war on drugs which has emerged as a convenient rationale for U.S...
...It looks like business as usual for U.S...
...policy toward the rest of the Americas would be severely constrained by real long-term U.S...
...Free markets" have not meant the free circulation of goods and services as much as the opening of Western Hemisphere economies to (mostly U.S.-based) transnational investment, bringing low-cost, tax-free production and the easy movement of goods and capital-but not workers-across national borders...
...arms manufacturers who want to be included in the deal...
...Since the presidency of George Bush, the elaboration and implementation of trade agreements-along with the consolidation of neoliberal market-oriented restructuring-have been the most visible facets of U.S...
...The drug war has allowed for a continued engagement with Latin American and Caribbean militaries via training, assistance and joint operation programs...
...It was understood by all the relevant players, of course, that what was really being enlarged was the scope of U.S...
Vol. 31 • September 1997 • No. 2
