David Cox defends State Department

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I don't claim any on-the-ground experience in Central America, but 1 do spend most of my time on it. I am in an office responsible for a number of regionwide programs; that is, Latin American programs, including military assistance, narcotics, our relations with international organizations as they relate to Latin America, human rights, nuclear affairs, and so on and so forth. But you can well guess that more than 50 percent of my time is spent on Central America.

The events of the last few days obviously have made this—in the minds of the general public who probably don't follow Central American matters as closely as you do-an even more contentious issue. I'd certainly be happy to take any questions on the events of the last few days. But I also think that it's important that we think a little more about the longer term matters-our interests in the region and what we as a nation are going to do over the next few years. I don't think there is much disagreement over the importance, at least in this group of people who are interested in the region, of the region to us. It was certainly recognized by the bipartisan commission on Central America as being a very, very important issue, deserving much more attention and the investment of many more resources than it has gotten in the past.

I want to go over what the administration and most people believe are our prime foreign policy goals in Central America. There is probably more agreement on longterm goals than on how to reach them, as is often the case in most foreign policy questions. I think this would be true of a Democratic as well as a Republican administrat Congress, too.

First and foremost, we wholeheartedly want to see come to full fruition the existence of democratic regimes in the region. Secondly, through our programs and in various ways, we see it as a paramount need to promote economic recovery and growth in Central America. I might say that these goals, these broad objectives, are also prime objectives of ours throughout the broader Latin American region, including the Caribbean and South America. We want to see an end to the fighting in the region, but with the chances for democracy preserved. We do not want to see a hostile force in a position of dominance in the region or the expansion of SovietCuban influence.

And finally, certainly, we do have trade and investment objectives in the region, although in the subregion of Central America they are not nearly as important as they are for Latin America as a whole, either dollar-wise or in terms of strategic material. But geographically, of course, there is a proximity to what the Navy calls the sea lanes of communications. Much of our trade goes through Gulf-Coast ports and passes through fairly close to the region.

If we go back to look a little more ciosely at these objectives, when we look at the objective of democracy, we see this as really the best long-term institutional guarantee for increased respect for human rights. There certainly is an unsatisfactory, and in many cases, deplorable situation with respect to human rights in many countries in Cen(continued on page Socialist Action May 1984

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..Stephanie Coontz

FORUMI

(continued from page 7: “CENTRAL AMERICA Socialist debates State Department attacks U.s. policy”)

Union even existed as a nation to blame things on.

The Marines went back again and again until they helped install the first member of the Somoza family in power in 1933—a family our government unflinchingly supported right up to the point it became clear they could no longer contain the opposition. The Mexican revolution, hailed by the report as the one example of a true indigenous revolution-the kind our leaders would accept-was considered Bolshevik at the time, and U.S. Marines were sent to Nicaragua to prevent Mexico from exporting its revolution to Central America!

The Kissinger report also leaves out the more recent history of U.S. interventionism. The CIA's overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 is simply ignored, though that was what set Guatemala on the pattern of rightwing civilian governments that couldn't maintain control and increasingly "gave way" to more bloody dictatorships. Also unmentioned in the history of Guatemala is the fact that U.S. corporations own almost three-fourths of the arable land there-and Guatemalan peasants have a lower per-capita food supply today than they did under the Mayans.

U.S. trained dictators

The "giving way" to military governments in the late 1960s and the 1970s is never connected up in the Kissinger Report and State Department briefings to one of its strongest incentives-the establishment of the Military Assistance Program in 1951. As Robert MacNamara explained to a House Committee on Appropriations in 1963: "Probably the greatest return to our military assistance investment comes from the training of selected officers and key specialists at our...centers in the United States and ovêrseas....They are the coming leaders....It is beyond price to us to make friends of such men?' The courses taught to these military men by U.S. specialists included international finance, industrial management, trade, transportation, and communications systems. Isn't it a wee bit hypocritical of the Kissinger Report and the State Department to bemoan the fact that these officers decided to actu...David Cox (continued from page tral America. But I think that over time history shows that the best gurantee for institutional human rights is in a democratic, pluralistic system—in which you have freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and in which it is consequently harder to abuse the rights of people and get away with it.

We also think that long-term and sustained growth is more likely if there is a fair degree of of private enterprise involved, not necessarily copying our system and to the same degree. Certainly there have been countries in Latin America that have had more state intervention than we, in our case, would prefer. But certainly, if entrepreneurs are given reign in certain areas it will benefit more people and lead to better economic performance than would otherwise be the case with a completely state-owned economy.

Support Contadora plan

In terms of our objective of restoring peace to the region, we support the efforts of the five nations themselves, as aided by the four-nation Contadora group to try to achieve a comprehensive peace settlement. It is not going to be Socialist Action May 1984 ally use the governmental skills they'd been taught? The notion that we didn't know how brutally they'd use them doesn't hold up either.

Eighty percent of the Brazilian officers who overthrew President Goulart in 1964, for example, had been trained in the United States. In 1971 a U.S. Senate committee was informed that these "coming leaders" were still being taught "censorship, checkpoint systems, chemical and biological operations... defoliation, dissent in the United States, psychological operations, raids and searches, riots, special warfare, surveillance, terror, and undercover operations.' They learned their lessons so well that by 1977 Amnesty International That! could document tens of thousands of Brazilians tortured, exiled, or murdered.

Perhaps the height of hypocrisy is reached when the Kissinger Commission deplores the military's destruction of free trade unions and free speech in Central America. Most of the responsible military officers, including those of Latin America as a whole, were trained in the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone. Here is how Course 0-47 (in urban counterinsurgency) taught them to "recognize" communist guerrillas:

• "The refusal of peasants to pay rents, taxes or agricultural loans or any difficulty in collecting these will indicate the existence of an active insurrection easy and, as we have seen, it's taken a long time. But certainly the 21 points that these countries agreed upon last September form the basis for reaching an overall settlement. We stress that this had to be comprehensive, in other words, verifiable.

We think, besides our Nicaragua policy, that the obviously controversial element of our policy is military assistance for El Salvador, and what conditions should or should not be attached to providing such assistance. We certainly don't see anything being gained by a solely military solution in El Salvador without a return to full democracywhich they are well on their way to. Without that, if that's not accompanied by a continuation of the reforms and economic growth, then obviously military ascendency on the part of government troops is not going to lead to a lasting solution.

With regard to Nicaragua, certainly the objective of this administration is that Nicaragua fulfill the commitment it made in 1979 to the Organization of American States (OAS) for a democratic, pluralistic society. Secondly, we want to see an end to the Nicaraguan material support for the guerillas in El Salvador. And thirdly-this is covered by the Contadoran 21 points-we want to see a diminution in the amount of that has succeeded in convincing the peasants of the injustices of the present system.

• "Short, unjustified, and unusual absences from work on the part of government employees.

• "A growing hostility against governmental agencies and agencies of public order.' Subversion, according to Course O47, may also include educational activity, demonstrations, and strikes. In other words, U.S. army trainers helped the military throughout Latin America identify targets for repression, which included peasant organizations, trade unions, community organizations, and practically anyone who exercised the right of free speech.

The Kissinger Report echoes this military approach to subversion. The report attempts to prove that Central American revolutionary movements were not indigenous but foreign in origin. The critical history of these movements, of course, lies in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when increasing numbers of youth defected from the centrist parties that had been unable to deliver their promised reforms, peasants began to engage in spontaneous land seizures, urban mass organizations of workers grew more militant, and even the Catholic Church began to organize rural "Christian Base" communities.

The Report ignores these developments. As William LeoGrande points out, writing in the World Policy Journal (Winter 1984): "When guerrillas in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala were developing into serious contenders for power during the mid-1970s, the Cubans were not engaged in Central America. The hiatus in Cuban involvement in Latin America, between 1968 and 1978, is too well established to deny, so the Report simply states that Castro once again became active in the 'export of revolution' in 1978 because he saw 'new opportunities' in Central America. With this sleight of hand, the Report erases 10 years of history...in which the Central American revolutonary movements grew indigenously, without the aid of Cuba or anyone else?"

It's true that once the revolutionary movements got big enough to require the purchase of arms they were able to turn to Cuba and the Soviet Unionthough a U.S. Undersecretary of Defense estimates that up to 50 percent of the guerrillas' arms are actually captured U.S. weapons acquired in raids on the local military. Any revolutionary Soviet-Cuban military assistance in material and advice being provided to the regime. We want to see a big drop in their military ties to the Soviets and the Cubans. We think that this is very destabilizing. Most of the Central Americans will tell you that also.

Now we could expand on any one of those points, but I think I'll just kind of leave it in outline form. movement will try to get arms from wherever it can, and if our government would be on the right side for once, I'm quite sure they'd also accept them from us!

All told, the Report cites four reasons that Central American revolutions must be regarded as foreign. First, they have a "foreign ideology" —Marxism. (This is different than the indigenous ideology of U.S.-trained military officers.) Second, they have received foreign aid from Cuba and the Soviet Union-unlike the indigenous Contras in Nicaragua, or the indigenous dictators who manage to hang on only with U.S. aid more massive than anything Cuba or the USSR have sent to anyone.

Third, they must be foreign because oppression itself causes only "anguish,' not revolt: "If wretched conditions were themselves enough to create such insurgencies, we would see them in many more countries of the world.' (This argument boggles the mind, since many other State Deparment papers claim that it is precisely the widespread duplication of insurrectionary methods across the world that proves them to be externally generated!) And fourth, the movements have been able to survive much too long-i.e., the repression in which we trained the military so efficiently should have killed off all the dissenters long ago.

Was U.S. Revolution foreign?

By any one of these reasons, of course, the American Revolution should have been branded a foreign revolt. Its ideology came from Enlightenment Europe; the French sent arms and even volunteers like LaFayette; the colonists hadn't rebelled during the previous century when conditions were perhaps even more wretched; and British press gangs and repressive measures failed to defeat the network of popular committees and militias who organized the first guerrilla strategies on the American continent.

So, having looked at the strong parts of the Kissinger Report, let's examine its weaker sections. The most glaring of these is the contention that there has been improvement in El Salvador. The report lauds the 1979 coup as "opening the way" for a "democratic revolution" It fails to mention that the coalition of October 1979 lasted only three months and most of its leading civilians subsequently joined the revolutionary forces.

Since then, of course, there have been "free elections" in 1982 and again last month. But only last year the El Salvador Election Committee belatedly admitted that there may have been fraud of up to 20 percent of the 1982 vote. Add that to the fact that another 23.6 percent of the population lives in refugee camps both in and outside the country, and is therefore disenfranchised . And in 1982, as in 1984, voting was verifiable by any cop or right-wing group that stopped a person to check their identity card, and the defense minister had warned that non-voting would be an "act of treason""

You may have seen long lines of voters on television. But I doubt you were told that in San Salvador, a city with a voting population of 500,000, only 13 polling places were set up. You might also wonder why more people didn't mutilate their ballots, even if they did have to vote-unless you noticed that the ballot boxes were made of clear lucite so that a mutilated ballot could be seen by the government officials who were oh, so closely monitoring the election.

And you might remember that all this takes place in a country the size of the Greater Bay Area of San Francisco, where government and right-wing forces have killed 45,000 civilians in the past four years, without one single person ever being brought to trial, where 60 percent of the people earn less than $120 a year, 50 percent of the children die before their fifth birthday, and 2 percent of the population controls 60 percent of the land.