Cold War Terror in the Americas: A History Lesson,A Tale of Two Colonies: Tutelage and Accommodation and New & Noteworthy
Francia, Pablo Morales and Luis H.
reviews Cold War Terror in the Americas: A History Lesson ThE WAr ON DEMOCrACY by pablo morales (DvD, 2007), a film by John pilger, 94 mins, www.bullfrogfilms.com perhaps the most...
...Noam Chomsky, author of Failed States and Turning the Tide buy online at nacla.org/publications Pilger interviews, is contemplating supported interventions...
...Thus, instead of aiming the War of 1898, there were already for the concentration of power in one two major political parties on the isjefe or party, they accepted sharing it, land, the Incondicionales, or Spanish albeit reluctantly, with other political party, and the nativist Autonomist SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2008 Party, headed by Luis Muñoz Rivera...
...46 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS tion...
...tricks of the past haven’t been workNot so Clarridge, a dedicated ing today, and this is really the key 44 Cold Warrior with little interest in point...
...a sociologist at Boston University, For instance, the Malolos government traces Yankee colonialism, conceived that had been set up by the Philipas a tutelary vehicle for responsible pine revolutionary general Emilio self-government, to the War of 1898...
...ence to the Nazis as role models— The film then circles back to the comes from former CIA director present day, visiting perhaps Latin Richard Helms, who is shown tell- America’s most potent site of antiing the Senate in 1975 that in the neoliberal struggle: El Alto, Boyears following the Cuban revolu- livia...
...concessions, no matter how minor, still represented a great deal more than Spanish tyranny ever offered...
...notions of democratic rule were tied in to their particular cultural models...
...York University’s Asian/Pacific/Ameripines failed to insinuate liberal democ- The war in this instance is the can Studies Program...
...Aren’t you aware of our history...
...Rondón (translated by Frances R. Aparicio with Jackie White), University of North Carolina Press, 2008, 340 pp., $20 paperback originally published in 1980, césar Miguel Rondón’s The Book of Salsa is, according to the translator’s introduction, “the only book-length and systematic study of the production, performances, styles, movements, and musicians within salsa music, not only in New York but also in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela...
...As it is, the pundits Besides, he also notes that the Filipi- contemplating Iraq’s possible futures no masses continually exerted pres- would do well to read this book...
...Unfortunately, the 1954 CIA coup against Guatemala’s film, needing to get on with the story Jacobo Arbenz, whom Pilger calls of U.S...
...Later, he Belgium, and Poland at the onset of hails Pinochet’s “economic miracle,” World War II...
...Before the outbreak of in original...
...Only when the Philippine Revolution of 1896 began were there half-hearted efforts toward democratic reform, and by then, of course, it was too little, too late...
...it is precisely such an analysis he Against the backdrop of Manifest seeks to construct in this book...
...the Buena Vista Social Club phenomenon...
...And I just shake my head and say: Are we on the same planet...
...Any viewer who thinks Pilger does add an important epi- Venezuela is now somehow a bastion logue: Not only did the U.S...
...attempt covers little ground not Pilger emphasizes Chávez’s status already covered in the Irish docu- as a “hate figure” in the U.S...
...people on the hillsides,” invoking His response to Pilger stands out both Caracas barrios and El Alto...
...The paradox of Puritanism —which runs deep in the U.S...
...and the loss of some the genre’s legends, like Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, and Ray Barretto...
...The dirty those early years under Pinochet...
...Even if a significant logic: Such similarity is not evidence number of the elite were privately Luis H. Francia is the author of, among that differences were inconsequential, more pro-U.S...
...charged with funneling “nonlethal The film’s narrative of the coup aid” to the Nicaraguan Contras...
...ally possessed weapons peachable desire to teach the subject of mass destruction and had links to populations to build and maintain a Al Qaeda were debunked—quickly democracy...
...Cocaine production in Colombia rose from 617 metric tons in 2001 to 640 metric tons in 2005, according to UN figures, despite an increase in fumigation every year during that period...
...The film peers over his glasses, and replies in then shifts its attention to present- his Aussie-accented baritone: “Mmm, day Venezuela, where Pilger covers yes, of course...
...In sentiments were expressed about the the case of the Southeast Asian archi- Puerto Ricans, who had already been pelago, the United States found itself steeped in party politics but were embroiled in the vicious Philippine- nevertheless viewed as corrupt as American War, predating the one in “the caciques of Latin American republics...
...In the same seven-year period, the area under coca cultivation in Colombia rose from 122,500 hectares to 157,200 hectares, according to U.S...
...At first the strategy of U.S.-backed coups in denying that the fascist regime’s Latin America has effectively been murder and torture victims num- thwarted...
...Or, put another way, the meanings each group of elites took from or imparted to U.S...
...What, ing the names of 21 countries in then, accounts for this panicky the region attacked by the United upper-class desire to escape...
...public, for the memory of both the of Vestiges of War: The Philippine1896 Revolution and the 1899 war American War and the Aftermath quite convinced of his own argument, against the United States was ever of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999 since he states elsewhere that from one fresh in the minds and hearts of the (NYU Press, 2002...
...Noting that the of her brother, the poet Nicomedes Buenos Aires of the day was home to Santa Cruz...
...or order from: (202) 797-2171 Fumigation: Spreading Coca,Threatening Colombia’s Ecological and Cultural Diversity offICe on LaTIn amerICa “The definitive dismantling of this failed policy…does an expert job of questioning claims that the fumigation program poses no health or environmental risks...
...Pil- States, directly and indirectly, durger says it stems from the business ing Pilger’s lifetime...
...occupiers would be democratic government, U.S.-style...
...Similar Islas Filipinas and Puerto Rico...
...The latest, most obvious manifestation of 45 reviews tive Filipino and Puerto Rican elites responded...
...reviews Download this report at: 47 reviews New & Noteworthy ThE BOOK OF SALSA by César Miguel TANgO: CrEATION OF A CULTUrAL BLACK rhYThMS OF PErU: rEvIvINg Peruvian artists...
...media, mentary The Revolution Will Not Be clipping together shots from cable-TV Televised—the talking heads describing him as “an military-business conspiracy, the fabricated pretext extreme threat” and his government of a massacre supposedly carried as “criminal...
...We are very U.S.-minded...
...SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2008 reviews A Tale of Two Colonies: Tutelage and Accommodation by luis H. Francia this is Iraq, where the rationale for of benevolent assimilation, and that invasion—once the claims that this its policies would reflect the unimformer U.S...
...Isn’t history taught in the classroom about the role of the U.S...
...both for its denial and its frankness...
...The film closes with some gorgeous Naomi Klein recently remarked in wide-angle photography of both loan interview in these pages that “the cales, nicely set to Sam Cooke’s “A right is embarrassed about the Latin Change Is Gonna Come...
...As for the Filipino elites, they degree of autonomy—the Puerto “continually drew upon their preexRicans would use it as a platform for isting schemas to make meaning of statehood, while the Filipinos aspired tutelage” and “reproduced their prior to independence—and that the occu- political culture while changing it piers would act as patrons...
...Yet this the coup leaders’ dissolution of the is fluff compared to the histrionics we National Assembly and Supreme see from Venezuelan media, with their Court, the popular uprising that branding of Chávez as the second comled to Chávez’s reinstatement...
...Center for International Policy, “Plan Colombia and Beyond” The number of hectares fumigated in Colombia climbed from 60,700 in 1999 to 172,000 in 2006...
...icy during the era, this time Duane Ending on this upbeat note, Clarridge, chief of CIA operations in Pilger warns any future wouldLatin America during 1981–84, and be autocrats against crossing the a key architect of the Contra war...
...with shrewd analysis rendered in accessible language, Dispatches lays plain the complex and vitally important conditions unfolding in 21st-century Latin america...
...SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2008 Pilger interviews Chávez and visits La Vega, a hillside barrio in Caracas...
...In approaching salsa as a pan-Caribbean, transnational phenomenon, Rondón, a Venezuelan media personality, addresses some of salsa’s contradictory features, such as its status as both an “urban folklore,” in the words of Rubén Blades, and as a cash cow for music-industry elites who are often, though not always, located in the United States...
...Put another way, U.S...
...Yet, as the postwar history of U.S...
...So why the divergence...
...colonialism to fit within their own schemas, already conditioned and shaped by HispanizaNACLA welcomes David Bacon to New York on September 11, 2008 to discuss Illegal People...
...This is faulty dependence...
...48 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS ICON by Jo Baim, Indiana University Press, 2007, 214 pp., $19.95 paperback This new tango subculture, comAFrICAN MUSICAL hErITAgE IN ThE BLACK PACIFIC by Heidi Carolyn Feldman, Wesleyan University Press, 2006, 308 pp., $24.95 paperback this slim volume on tango mostly in this study of the afro-peruvian confines itself to its early, mythical era, “revival,” ethnomusicologist Heidi roughly 1875 to 1925, and focuses on Carolyn Feldman offers not a definithe evolution of the dance...
...Rather than expectations were only intermittently abjuring their prior schemas for new met, as Go documents...
...He asks, “Did the war in the Philippines have long-term repercussions that somehow shaped the fact that the Filipino elites’ path diverged from that of their Puerto Rican counterparts...
...interventionism, doesn’t “the Chávez of his day...
...I’ve heard people say that what happened in Abu Ghraib is an isolated incident,” she says, with a mix of outrage and disbelief...
...pol- Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada...
...Echoing Pat Robertson, out by chavistas, the media’s role as another says Chávez “should have the coup’s most effective weapon, been killed a long time ago...
...She continued: “They front- Arbenz was the Chávez of his day, date the free-market crusade from then the reverse is true: Chávez— its real start in 1973 to the 1980s, together with Morales and Correa, with Reagan and Thatcher, and then and even Lula, Bachelet, and Kirchargue that the crusade was peaceful ener—is the Arbenz of today, yet the and democratic...
...The Destiny and the red-meat urgings of author draws a lucid portrait of U.S...
...exemplary teachers...
...innovative new salsa artists in Colombia and Venezuela, even as New York salsa transformed into the slick, radiofriendly “romantic” version...
...and would have other books, Eye of the Fish: A Perbeen happy with the status of a pro- but simply that on a policy level, the sonal Archipelago ( Kaya Press, 2001), Yankees may have chosen to ignore tectorate, they could not say so in and is editor, with Angel Velasco Shaw, the fact of a war on the ground...
...Vink, like another businessman Dispatches From Latin America: On the Frontlines Against Neoliberalism Edited by Vijay Prashad and Teo Ballvé in Dispatches from Latin america, 28 authors report on countries from mexico to argentina to map the contemporary political and social territory...
...In fact, the two groups would later on diverge: The Puerto Ricans Go provides several possible reaminimized their own schemas while sons, among them the fact that in willfully incorporating those of the Puerto Rico there had already been North Americans, thereby effecting some form of elections, even under “a structural transformation” (italics the Spanish...
...leaving Venezuela, which he sees as With the story of the Venezuelan descending, or soon to be descend- coup established, the film turns to ing, into Bolshevik chaos...
...tury and officially lasting from 1899 While studies of U.S...
...The account have time to explore this important of the invasion and coup—which question with much depth...
...For this edition of the book, its first English translation, Rondón wrote a new chapter titled “All of the Salsas,” a jaunty survey of developments in the genre since 1980—the rise of Dominican merengue...
...Vink tells him: “We adore Miami...
...This music was produced not for the luxurious ballroom,” Rondón maintains, “but for hard life on the street...
...government in human rights violations...
...He dons the mask of the kind but stern patriarch, reluctant to administer discipline, but forced to do so for the good of those for whom he claims responsibility...
...occupation—immoral to begin retain the demand for complete in- with—could have been avoided...
...Months before the war began, the Autonomists won island elections, thereby gaining a certain degree of self-government but still in the protective embrace of Madrid...
...The bloody con- out that no attempt at a systematic flict resulted in the deaths of about comparative analysis between the 400,000 Filipinos, and more than two experiences has been made, and 4,000 U.S...
...Check nacla.org for details...
...He teaches at New perspective, “if tutelage in the Philip- body politic...
...Iraqis, heirs to one of the to their own devices, would be unplanet’s oldest civilizations, would able to “learn” democracy, and two, be schooled in the ways of a free and that the U.S...
...The narrative then shifts church where the bodies of protestto Santiago, Chile, where Washing- ers were brought...
...The au- tive history of a genre, but rather a thor hews to the “relative terra firma “multisited ‘ethnography of rememof extant written source material,” she bering’ about performed reinventions says, “in the hope of offering a fresh, of Afro-Peruvian music in Peru and strong, yet transparent foundation for the United States...
...The film doesn’t the Hugo Chávez phenomenon and mention that Noriega was himself a weaves the story of the 2002 Venezuelan USAID functionary during the 1980s, coup attempt into a wider history...
...For the time being, at least, keeping up appearances...
...A similar, though more circumspearheaded by Milton Friedman’s Chicago boys, who introduced “real spect description—without refer- economics” to Chile...
...more insightful...
...The informed and penetrating in-depth studies that appear in Dispatches explore the complex variety of popular initiatives that are taking shape, their achievements and prospects, in what has become perhaps the most exciting region of the world...
...interPilger notes, “capitalism has never ventionism in Latin America, scrollhad it better” in Venezuela...
...But ing of Hitler...
...the streets of La Paz and threw out During this segment, Pilger again the Washington-friendly president, confronts an apologist for U.S...
...Though American laboratory [for neoliberal Pilger doesn’t say so explicitly, if policy...
...If the author had paid it argument that parallels the argument more mind, American Empire, with its that the Philippine-American War led many virtues, would have been even to a loosening of tutelary effort...
...COLONIALISM by Julian Go, Duke University Press, 2008, 377 pp., $23.95 paperback the yankee abroad has always been Vietnam by more than half a cena reluctant imperialist...
...Aguinaldo and his cabinet, declaring In this conflict, which inaugurated independence in 1898, was self-servthe so-called American Century, the ingly portrayed by Washington as an United States easily defeated Spain in elitist attempt to grab power, as Go three months and, upon the signing puts it, “for their own ends in disreof the Treaty of Paris in December of gard for the rights and opinions of that year, took over the reins in Las the mass of the population...
...Initially, the two elites reacted identically, attempting to “domesticate” U.S...
...Bush I being heckled Cut to Pilger interviewing former at a press conference as he lauds assistant secretary of state Roger U.S.-backed Salvadoran president Noriega, denying U.S...
...llo and indigenous culture, and with the Black Atlantic itself...
...Go cites are indeed significant, yet I wish he had paid more attention to the Philippine-American War’s role in such divergence...
...soldiers...
...complicAlfredo Cristiani for “trying to do a ity with an appeal to logic: “Just bejob for democracy...
...the work per-class theater stage...
...reviews Cold War Terror in the Americas: A History Lesson ThE WAr ON DEMOCrACY by pablo morales (DvD, 2007), a film by John pilger, 94 mins, www.bullfrogfilms.com perhaps the most poignant moment in John Pilger’s latest documentary, The War on Democracy, comes during an interview with Sister Dianna Ortiz, the U.S...
...It’s our second home...
...42 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS The answer, of course, is no...
...Arbenz coup...
...The reasons for the divergence One senses that Go himself isn’t www.wola.org racy, it was because the project itself specter that looms behind Go’s comcontained inherent contradictions—an parisons...
...Sometimes, unfortumuch as the German Stuka bombers nately, things have to be changed in terrified the population of Holland, a rather ugly way,” he says...
...gov- of state censorship will come away ernment know that the coup plot thoroughly disabused of the notion...
...These scenes are contrasted with a visit to toney East Caracas, where John Vink, an affluent Venezuelan, welcomes the dapper, well-mannered Pilger, a perceived class peer, into his fortified mansion and shows off his copious objets d’art...
...Therefore “the Americans’ ruling strategies did not undermine the predictions the elite had made of them...
...This wasn’t the case in the Philippines, where any putative attempts at reform and eventual self-government were stifled, mostly at the behest of the almighty friar orders that had in essence become the state...
...Here, the story of repression tion, the agency had task forces is continued, as we see footage of “striking at Cuba constantly,” at- the Bolivian army marching into tempting to blow up power plants, the city and listen to Father Juan ruin sugar mills, and “do all kinds Delfin Mamani, as he shows us the of things...
...nun tortured by Guatemalan security forces in 1989...
...was afoot (as declassified CIA docAnd that is the film’s raison d’etre: uments demonstrate), but it had to tell the story of U.S.-sponsored been channeling millions of dollars terror in Latin America...
...They try to forget coup against him failed...
...The premises of such an shifted to the altruistic notion of in- approach are obvious enough: one, troducing democracy to Middle East- that Filipinos and Puerto Ricans, left ern soil...
...The retrospecclass’s loss of political power, and tive of this history begins with the leaves it at that...
...Pilger ers “find their own voice...
...Both elites expected a certain groups...
...Drawn from the pages of naCLa report, this collection offers a riveting series of accounts that bring new insight into the region’s struggles and victories...
...Chemical Reactions: Fumigation – Spreading washIngTon Coca and Threatening Colombia’s Ecological and Cultural Diversity” is a path-breaking study that will shift the debate on drug control policies and practices in the Andes and beyond...
...There, he visits a governmentsponsored misión, where members discuss how to get deeds for their homes, and a state-subsidized grocery store, where a woman tells the camera that before Chávez, “I didn’t know we had rights like everyone else,” as she shows us a package of white beans stamped with an article from the Bolivarian Constitution...
...Indeed, would serve as the model for subseit feels at some points as if the film- quent operations around the world, maker was unsure whether this film inaugurating the era of “plausible ought to be a social documentary deniability”—includes footage of on contemporary Venezuela (which the late CIA operative (and Waterit is for about the first 40 minutes), gate figure) E. Howard Hunt matteror whether it should hew more of-factly explaining the strategy he closely to a survey of Washington- helped devise against Arbenz: “What reviews 43 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS reviews we wanted to do was have a terror on the disastrous Iraq sanctions of campaign,” he says, “to terrify Ar- the 1990s—that Pinochet’s terror benz particularly, terrify his troops, was worth it...
...their preexisting system...
...and Bush II de- cause [the coup] happened after we claring that the United States is not provided support to these groups,” interested in imposing anything on he says, “doesn’t mean it happened the unwilling, but in helping oth- because we supported them...
...the rise “contortionist,” more theatrical style, of Afro-Peruvian theater in the 1960s before it gave way to a “smoother” ver- and 1970s under the lead of choreogsion, amenable to the middle- and up- rapher Victoria Santa Cruz...
...The viewfinder Go uses for his analysis is culture, since it “provided the schema by which tutelary policy was conceived and then adopted” and “was also a critical dimension of enacting and fulfilling [such policy] on the ground...
...bered in the thousands, he asserts —evoking Madeleine Albright Pablo Morales is NACLA’s editor...
...and a short evolved as a ritualized conflict, replac- overview of a new generation of Afroing the duel...
...You would ones”—as the Puerto Ricans did— think then that both elites would alter “they modified them so as to revalue their expectations in similar ways...
...He concludes that it didn’t, since U.S...
...psyche—compels him to justify his guilty imperialist pleasures on moral and humanitarian grounds...
...Operating with In his book, American Empire and this neat rationale, however, meant the Politics of Meaning, Julian Go, ignoring a few inconvenient truths...
...Recently made the study of many sides of the tango...
...A solid introduction to salsa studies...
...Thus, patronage, while a critical element in the colonial histories of both, had, in the case of Puerto Rico, a party-based element, while in the Philippines, it did not...
...available in paperback, Feldman’s Though the dearth of such documents book riffs on Paul Gilroy’s well-known makes definitive history impossible, concept of the Black Atlantic—a vast, this account nonetheless locates tan- transnational cultural world marked go’s moment of consolidation in the by double consciousness and circu1880s, with the rise of a “new group lating ideas—and proposes the Black of people”—urbanized gauchos from Pacific as a newly imagined diasporic the pampas who “re-created them- community, one that “negotiates amselves within the context of the new biguous relationships with local criowaterfront culture of Buenos Aires...
...rule in each to 1902, but unofficially waged for place have been extensive, Go points several more years...
...strategies in both places were similar...
...The author staging of Black Peruvian music and describes early tango dancing as a dance in the 20th century...
...But that story ton’s first neoliberal experiment in line is reversed, as Delfin recounts Latin America was only made pos- those tumultuous days of October sible by the bombing of the presi- 2003, when Bolivians swept into dential palace...
...But these in a very different way...
...Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden,” the colonialism as a tutelary project in its United States proclaimed that its ap- first decade and a half, from 1898 to proach to colonial rule would be one 1912, and examines how the respecAMErICAN EMPIrE AND ThE POLITICS OF MEANINg: ELITE POLITICAL CULTUrES IN ThE PhILIPPINES AND PUErTO rICO DUrINg U.S...
...Had sure on elite colonial intermediaries there been more awareness of the like Manuel Quezon, first president complexities of Iraqi culture, particuof the Philippine Commonwealth, larly its political history, perhaps some through a relationship character- of the more egregious and deadly ized by reciprocity and mediated blunders made since start of the through razón and inteligencia, to U.S...
...posed of compadritos and minas, and The book’s chapters offer detailed marked by the urban patois Lunfardo, analyses, ranging over the landmark likely created its singular dance out of 1956 performance at the Lima Muthe raw materials of other ballroom nicipal Theater of Pancho Fierro comsocial dances, which were not exclu- pany, “usually cited as the first major sive to the upper class...
...He thus charts the responses of the respective elites, the “students,” as it were...
...government figures...
...The open- through USAID and the National ing montage sets the stage for this Endowment for Democracy to leadtelling, linking the era of Cold War ing Venezuelan opposition groups interventionism to the present day that played key roles in mobilizing as it ranges over archival footage of the coup and whose members were Richard Nixon’s triumphant arrival given cabinet positions under the in Guatemala City, following the short-lived dictatorship...
...the hinting at the homo-social origins of 1990s “discovery” of singer Susana the dance, which in some accounts Baca in the United States...
...the Perú Negro dance few women, the author includes three and music company, a key institution photographs of man-on-man tango, in the movement based in Lima...
Vol. 41 • September 2008 • No. 5
