Will the U.S. turn its back on C. America?
By Jonathan Power
LONDON (JP): Can one imagine when (and if) Daniel Ortega Saavedra and his ex-revolutionary Sandinistas are swept back into office after Sunday's general election Ronald Reagan saying calmly, "Here we go again. So what?" After all, this was the man when president who said of the Sandinista regime after it overthrew the landed despot, Anastasio Somoza, "If we ignore the malignancy in Nicaragua it will spread and become a mortal threat to the entire New World." For Reagan, the Sandinistas were the advance guard of the Red Army, placing themselves "just two days drive from Harlingen, Texas." And his Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, said of El Salvador, also at that time in revolutionary turmoil, that "El Salvador was on the mainland of the U.S. ...Defending the mainland ranks above all other priorities."
The sad, if bitterly ironic truth, is that I can imagine Ronald Reagan saying this -- and Weinberger, too, and Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, George Bush and all those other Cold War warriors who felt America was righteously fighting red demons right across Central America from Guatemala in the north to Panama in the South.
These days no one in the U.S., apart from Senator Jesse Helms perhaps, cares as much as a tinker's curse about Central America. Having turned it upside down and inside out and being party to the killing of over 200,000 people and the decimation of whole villages and towns, Central America has returned to its time- honored geo-political position on the American map--a banana- growing, tropical backwater.
Indeed, it is rather tempting to wish the Central Americans good riddance. The attention from big brother in Washington never did them any good. It made little tin pot dictators ruling tiny countries into world-class tyrants who commanded more air time and more superpower attention than should have ever been allowed them.
Nevertheless, there are many good and honest reasons for giving Central America continued attention, lest the same tragic sequence of brutal events start up again. The bitter fruit of a century and a half of Central American turmoil is the knowledge that there is almost a cyclical process that sucks in the too heavy hand of the U.S. every 20 years or so. Inconsequential and small the Central American backyard may be, but America's backyard it will always be.
So now that peace is at hand in Central America it is time overdue for Washington to seriously review its traditional mind- set. Four points stand out, if we are not to see another melancholic turn of the wheel of uprising, repression and intervention:
* The end of the turning of a blind eye to government misbehavior. We now know, contrary to every denial right through the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush administrations, that the CIA worked closely with elements of the Central American military whose members made up the notorious death and torture squads.
We were promised by President Bill Clinton for Guatemala at least, the worst offender, that we would get to the bottom of why and on whose authority the CIA acted. A year later we still haven't been given the full story. All we can say with the irony of Susanne Jonas in the current issue of Foreign Policy, "the last president to tell the truth about U.S.-Guatemalan relations was Dwight Eisenhower who proudly acknowledged the CIA's role in overthrowing Jacobo Arbenz (the reformist, democratically elected president)".
* A respect for the electoral process, under question, despite all Washington's democratic rhetoric, since Arbenz's demise. Not least, this means coming to terms with a possible Ortega victory on Sunday -- and not subtly undermining it by withholding aid, credits and discouraging private investment.
* A renewed awareness of the incredible service performed by UN diplomacy in bringing peace to El Salvador and Guatemala by playing the role of honest broker. The American taxpayer contributed US$6 billion towards fighting the war in El Salvador but has only contributed $430 million to the UN's peacekeeping mission that provides mediation, presided over the first fair elections and supervised the demobilization of both the guerrilla forces and the notorious National Police.
* Last but not least, a renewed attempt to get these Central American economies moving in the rapid way they were before the turbulence of the 1980s and 1990s. This means encouraging land reform, reducing trade barriers and encouraging investors.
America can decide once and for all, perhaps for all time, to help end the bloodshed, corruption and degradation of man by man that has been Central America's historic lot. Turning its back and just forgetting is no policy at all. It merely ensures the inevitability of history repeating itself in the next generation.