The Cold War Part 7

Central and South America

Inter-American Relations A Hemispheric Security System American Intervention Returns The Issue of Cuba The Struggle with Communism The Struggle for Chile Human Rights and Economic Development The Nicaraguan Revolution Debt Crisis and Neoliberalism Contemporary Relations in the Americas The War on Drugs Economic Backlash and Democracy America’s Position of Leadership

While the Cold War between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their various allies was being waged, America looked to the defence of its proverbial backyard: Central & South America and the Caribbean. While originally benign & even progressive, the policies of the United States towards the 20 fellow republics of the western hemisphere were eventually compromised by the Cold War and its demands for harsh realpolitik.

In the first 3 decades on the twentieth-century the U.S. achieved a position of economic, military & political hegemony over the western hemisphere

However in 1933 F.D.R.'s 'Good Neighbour Policy' converted direct American intervention into a more cooperative approach to working with local elites.

This in tandem with the dangers of the rising Axis powers led to Pan-American solidarity, with Brazil & Mexico as the United State's closest wartime allies and Argentina as the sole holdout until late in the war.

After the Allied victory & the founding of the United Nations, the nations of the Americas founded the Organization of American States (OAS) in April of 1948 to ensure their collective security, though the U.S. also hoped to utilize it in the struggle against global communism.

Most of the OAS leaders however were more concerned with instability at home, and hoped for American financial support to aid in their development. American military aid was forthcoming, as many Latin American leaders dealt with opposition inside their own borders.

In 1952 president Arbenz of Guatemala attempted to enact land reform to alleviate the crushing poverty of that nation's people.

However, when he attempted to expropriate vast landholdings from the American United Fruit Company, the company and various supporters pressured the U.S. government for assistance, and fearing communist infiltration, supported an army of Guatemalan exiles in overthrowing Arbenz in 1954.

In the long term this led to decades of civil for Guatemala, & in the short term many OAS states were worried about a potential return of American Interventionism.

While many OAS governments acquiesced to the events in Guatemala, public anger in those countries was directed against the U.S. During the visit of Vice-President Richard Nixon in 1958 to Latin America, angry crowds confronted his motorcade.

This caused to U.S. to consider possible remedies to the political instability in the region, the biggest cause of which was determined to be economic backwardness. While the hopes for massive infusions of U.S. money were to be disappointed, the creation of the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) saw the first use of American public money to promote development in Latin America.

Upon his assuming power in 1961, the new U.S. president John F. Kennedy proposed an 'Alliance for Progress' with the other states of the hemisphere, working to eliminate illiteracy, hunger, & disease as well as to stimulate economic growth.

This in tandem with Kennedy's insistence on economic fairness & democratic rule was received with great enthusiasm by the people of Latin America, but their rulers were less enthused. Yet this program of aid received the support of all the republics of Latin America save only one: Cuba.

Since the 1930's Cuba had been ruled by dictator Fulgencio Batista.

In Early 1959 however, the revolution of a young guerrilla fighter, Fidel Castro, succeeded in taking power in Cuba. While at first affirming friendship with the United States, his radical socio-economic policies (many of which hurt American businesses in Cuba) led to increasingly bad relations with the U.S.

Eventually, the Soviet Union replaced America as Cuba's main economic partner, with Soviet economic and military aid reducing the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions, while Cuba became an enthusiastic supporter of the Soviet Bloc and an opponent of what it claimed was American imperialism.

In April of 1961 the newly inaugurated president Kennedy authorized a CIA plan to land an army of U.S. trained Cuban exiles on the south of that island, at the so called 'Bay of Pigs'.

It was hoped that this small force would be sufficient (much like in Guatemala) to overthrow Castro, with defections from the Cuban population and military rallying to them. In fact the Cuban people and army stayed loyal, and the invasion was quickly defeated.

The U.S. continued with plans to overthrow Castro by a number of means, while in the meantime Castro turned to his Soviet patrons for help in repelling the enormously more powerful United States.

In April of 1962 the Soviets approved Cuba's request for military aid, which besides conventional forces included a number of nuclear equipped missiles.

Soviets hoped that placing these weapons in Cuba, so close to the United States, would make up for their considerable inferiority in long range delivery systems and smaller arsenal of nuclear warheads. Likewise, they hoped to use Cuba as a bargaining chip in disputes with the U.S. across the globe.

The Americans however refused to accept this, and ultimately began a blockade of Cuba to prevent Soviet weapons from arriving. After days of intense discussions within and between both countries, the Soviets agreed to withdraw their nuclear weapons from Cuba in exchange for an American promise not to invade the island.

The nations of the OAS had backed the United States during the Cuban missile crisis, but with the U.S. promise not to invade Cuba, they now had to figure out what relations they would have with this communist state.

In July 1964, when it became clear that Cuba was supporting revolutionary movements in their nations, the OAS (with the exception of Mexico) voted to break off relations with Cuba as well as all trade and contact.

While Cuba did attempt to support revolutions on the continent, Castro's model of revolution was unsuccessful, with various attempts being crushed by U.S. backed Latin American security forces.

As for the Alliance for Progress, while the U.S. had contributed the money it had promised (around $20 billion), corruption & mismanagement meant that it was largely ineffective in alleviating the terrible conditions of most Latin Americans.

Moreover, the new administration of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson was even more concerned with stopping the spread of communism than Kennedy's had been, and thus was willing to work with non-democratic governments while aid was transferred from economic to military uses.

Accepting the overthrow of democratic governments, and even intervening militarily in the Dominican Republic (in contravention of the 'Good Neighbour Policy' and the OAS charter) showed that the U.S. was determined to prevent the emergence of Castro-style revolutions and the consequent spread of Communism in the Americas.

With the fall of Cuba to communism, the United States and its allies took increasingly strident measures to secure the hemisphere against further infiltration by the Soviet led eastern bloc. In various ways the United States sought to prevent the rise of additional communist regimes in the Americas, while the various Latin American nations achieved increasing economic growth & prosperity in the following decades.

In the mid 1960's Chile, a nation long known for its stability & democratic political culture, elected a moderate reformer, Eduardo Frei.

Frei attempted to assuage the circumstances of the poor in Chile by a program of land redistribution & national control (but not nationalisation) of natural resource companies. However, in 1970 Frei lost power to the radical reformer Salvador Allende, who began a program of uncompensated nationalisation

To this situation the U.S. responded by undermining the Chilean economy. Finally in 1973, amid the political and economic chaos of the last several years, officers in the Chilean military launched a coup.

Allende was killed & a new military junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet took power.

The persecution of leftist groups left three thousand Chileans dead & thousands more in prison or exile, while Pinochet ruled until finally losing power in 1988.

During this period democracy suffered in the Americas, as major nations such as Brazil & Argentina entered into periods of military dictatorship.

One of the few upsides to this era was considerable economic growth, caused in part by a turn away from commodities and towards industrial production.

At the height of this progress in the late 1970's, U.S. president Jimmy Carter began to apply more stringent standards regarding human rights with regards to the various Latin American states, cutting back military aid to several right wing dictatorships.

The first nation to benefit from this was Panama, which had long had its sovereignty compromised by American control of the Panama Canal and the 5 mile wide zone surrounding it.

After long negotiations, The U.S. Senate approved a new treaty that would eventually see the Canal returned to Panamanian control, reflecting U.S. willingness at this stage to increasingly deal with the Latin American nations.

Carter's policy promoting democracy & human rights were put to a severe test by Nicaragua.

That country had been essentially ruled by the Somoza family since the mid 1930's, and in 1979 that regime was overthrown by the a broad coalition of anti-Somoza forces, the Sandinistas.

They declared a non-aligned foreign policy, and for a time it seemed they would succeed in maintaining good relations with both the neighbouring U.S. and Cuba.

However, evidence came to light that the Sandinistas were providing aid to the leftist rebels in nearby El Salvador (pictured below), while there was an increase in Marxist rhetoric in their government.

This led the new U.S. President Ronald Reagan to denounce Nicaragua as a Marxist threat to security in the Americas, and he blamed Carter's obsession with human rights for allowing this to occur.

Reagan then restored military aid to various right wing governments, and ordered the CIA to support a force attempting to overthrow the Sandinistas, known as the Contras.

Money and aid poured into Central America in support of various anti-leftist factions, and the U.S. even resorted to invading tiny Grenada when that nation saw a communist revolution succeeded in taking power, with the intent of warning Nicaragua that the same fate may await it should their aid to Salvadorian rebels not cease.

In the early 1980's all of Latin America was struck by a financial crisis that ultimately increased its dependence on the United States.

Over their period of economic growth, the nations of Latin America had become heavily indebted, and the world wide recession of the late 1970's made it impossible for them to pay the interest on their foreign debts.

In 1982 first Argentina, then Mexico defaulted on their foreign debts, and the shockwaves from this threatened not just Latin American interests, but also the international banking system itself.

As country after country succumbed to excessive indebtedness, the administration of U.S. President George H.W. Bush unveiled a government backed rescue operation (known as the Brady Plan) in the spring of 1989.

By the early 1990's several Latin American nations had entered into debt reduction agreements based on the Brady Plan, which relieved them from the threat of default and allowed them to focus on getting their financial affairs in order.

Hoping to break out of the cycle of unemployment and debt, the leaders of most Latin American nations turned to the polices of market oriented growth so successfully pursued by nations like South Korea & Taiwan.

By the mid 1990's these policies had seen considerable success as privatization and free trade swept the planet in the post-Cold War world. This new commitment to free trade and markets were known interchangeably as Neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus.

The United States hoped to parlay this new commitment into a hemisphere wide free trade zone, but ultimately pared it back to the tripartite NAFTA agreement. Other regional trade blocks also formed, most notably MERCOSUR, but also including the Andean Pact, Caricom, and the Central American Common Market.

The increasing importance of Latin America economically led President Clinton to dust off the old idea of a hemispheric free trade zone, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Optimists believed that this enormous powerhouse would lift the region out of poverty and end the dependence of many Latin American states on precarious commodities based exports.

As the Cold War came to a close, United States priorities in Latin America shifted away from preventing communist infiltration towards more broad goals of stability & development, before their priorities shifted elsewhere entirely. The United States relationship with Latin America changed after the end of the Soviet threat, and events in the wider world continue to shape relations between the two.

One item produced in Latin America was never subject to commodity fluctuations: cocaine.

Coca leaves produced in the Andes and shipped to Columbia were transformed into cocaine, and then shipped north to the United States.

Once it arrived in the United States, the street price was literally thousands of times what the poor Andean farmers had been paid to produce the original leaves.

The United States invested billions of dollars in anti-drug operations, but even after some successes against Coca production and the Cartels, as well as linking the War on Drugs to the war on Terror, 'victory' in this area was not forthcoming.

In the end, as long as American are willing to pay high prices for recreational drugs, the poor of Latin America will have incentive to produce them.

In the first decade on the new millennium, there was popular discontent with the market oriented policies of Neoliberalism.

Unrestricted competition had devastated many local industries and increased unemployment, and populist leaders took advantage of people's distress with the situation.

In Venezuela Hugo Chavez came to power, dispensing his country's petro-dollars to create lavish social programs & dispense aid to sympathetic governments & groups in the region.

In a similar vein, Evo Morales came to power in Bolivia and pursued many left wing policies.

While not as extreme in their views, the election of Luiz da Silva (popularly known as Lula) in Brazil saw that country react against Neoliberalism.

Nestor Kirchner of Argentina denounced the 'Washington Consensus' and accused some developed nations of reneging on their own Neoliberal principles.

Both these latter two presidents came to see MERCOSUR as a possible alternate to the American proposed FTAA. Overall, many Latin American nations were beginning to doubt the effectiveness of the free market ideas supported by the U.S. and its allies.

Along with neoliberal economic policies, democracy made a comeback in much of Latin America, especially with the end of the Cold War. The end of the Soviet Union not only stripped many leftist governments and factions of support, but ended the incentive for the United States to support repressive regimes because of their anticommunist credentials.

One of the most notable examples of democratization was Mexico, long a one party state in all but name, which in the year 2000 saw an opposition candidate, Vicente Fox, elected president for the first time in over 70 years.

However, democracy proved no cure for the socioeconomic problems of the continent, and in place of military strongmen, left wing populists took power in some countries, the most egregious example being Alberto Fujimori of Peru.

He essentially shut down parliament and ruled by decree, but received strong support from the people for reviving the Peruvian economy & defeating the 'Shining Path' insurgency. Eventually however, Fujimori's corruption generated opposition and led to his fleeing the country, which saw a return to democracy.

The greatest success of the 1990's was the end of two civil wars that had raged over the last decade.

In Nicaragua a peace plan put forth by other Latin American leaders eventually resulted in free elections, where president Daniel Ortega lost power in the 1990 vote. To the Sandinistas credit, they turned over power peacefully, and later as part of the leftward shift in Latin American politics in the new millennium, Ortega was re-elected president in 2006.

Likewise in El Salvador both the government and rebels came under pressure to negotiate. In 1992 a cease fire ended the civil war, and in 1997 elections saw both the former government and rebels winning seats, and continuing their struggle by democratic, political means. With this Latin America entered a, relatively, stable and peaceful time after the ideological battles of the past.

The end of the Cold War saw American interests shift from anticommunism to a variety of issues, from the War on Drugs to democracy & development. This led to two U.S. military interventions during a time when many thought the U.S. would be disengaging from Latin America.

The first of these was in Panama, where its president Manuel Antonio Noriega had been indicted for smuggling drugs into the U.S. and had repudiated democratic elections.

An invasion by U.S. troops in 1989 succeeded in capturing Noriega and extradited him to Florida, causing severe economic problems for Panama in the process.

The second intervention saw U.S. troops in 1994 occupy Haiti to restore its democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and staunch the flow of Haitian refugees into the U.S.

These proved to be the last interventions by the U.S. amongst its neighbours, as in the twenty-first century American attention has been focused on a number of new potential threats to its interests: the growing power of China, the potential of a nuclear equipped North Korea & Iran, as well as international Islamic terrorism (personified by al-Qaeda).

While Latin America's leftward shift would have generated great American anxiety in previous decades, the end of the Cold War and the presence of new concerns in the world has allowed these nations to develop of their own accord.