Getting away with murder
The US has admitted its involvement in Latin America, but those responsible
are immune
Isabel Hilton
Tuesday November 21, 2000
It has been a curious few days for followers of US foreign policy. President
Clinton, now safely at the end of his presidency, has afforded himself a trip
to Vietnam in a long-delayed postwar reconciliation. Meanwhile, on the other
side of the world, the latest release of US declassified documents has added
more detail to the suspicion that has been officially denied for decades -
that US interference in the internal politics of Latin America over fifty
years from the end of the second world war was widespread, relentless and,
for the most part, disastrous in its consequences. Last week, the US released
17,000 previously classified documents relating to CIA interference in Chile.
The documents - many of them heavily censored - were released by the US state
department, the defence intelligence agency, the CIA, the FBI and the justice
department. They are the fourth and last round of disclosures ordered by
President Clinton. Th!
e "revelation" that the US helped to bring Augusto
Pinochet to power by destabilising the government of President Salvador
Allende can have come as a surprise only to those who have spent the last 27
years in a state of acute denial. (This includes, notoriously, substantial
sections of the British Conservative party as well as many Chilean supporters
of the right.) But still, the documents confirm that, in addition to the
well-known dirty tricks against Allende, between 1971 and 1973 the US
government gave $4m to opposition political parties, mostly to the Christian
Democrats; that the CIA spent $2.6m supporting the Christian Democrats in the
1964 election in Chile; and that the US went on paying political parties into
the 1980s. The newspaper El Mercurio received about $1.6m in covert support
from US agents. El Mercurio was a leading critic of the government of
Allende. None of this has raised public confidence in Chile's politi!
cal
parties, or in their version of history. A CIA memo prepared three years
before the 1973 coup states: "If civil disorders were to follow from a
military action, the USG [US government] would promptly deliver necessary
support and material, (but not personnel)." In a state department memo
written weeks after the coup that put Pinochet in power, Jack Kubisch wrote:
"The junta does not appear to represent a threat to our major national
interest. No overriding national objective seems to me to be served by
supporting opposition to it." Chile, of course, is not the only case. The
truth is that US policy in Latin America was for several decades in thrall to
a security doctrine that argued that considerations of human rights or
democracy were secondary to the fight against what the US perceived as Soviet
and Cuban influence, however broadly defined. It came to include almost all
attempts to achieve political change or social jus!
tice. Its executives were
the Latin American military officers trained by the US in the School of the
Americas in Panama. There they learned to conduct dirty warfare against their
own civilian populations and went on to practise their lessons with
enthusiasm. So while US diplomats publicly promoted democratic ideals, US
government was sponsoring armies and intelligence services that waged savage
internal war against political opponents - many of the left, others simply
reforming democrats, trade unionists or campaigners for land rights. When
this provoked civil war or military dictatorship, successive US
administrations colluded in the concealment of massive human rights
violations, misinforming not only US public opinion but, on occasions,
Congress itself. The price was paid in Latin America in the deaths and
disappearance of, at a conservative estimate, around 100,000 people
throughout the subcontinent. Their ghosts continu!
e to haunt the countries in
which they occurred. Anything up to 30 years later, the truth is partially
leaked, long after the guilty men are dead, retired or, in the case of
President Reagan, senile. The Gipper himself, of course, was pardoned by
George Bush, without the crimes for which he was pardoned ever being
officially acknowledged. Is there such a great moral difference between
Bush's granting a pardon to Reagan for his pursuit of a war that was in
violation of US law and his government's publicly stated policy, and
Pinochet's amnesty for himself and his cohorts for the crimes they committed
in Chile? As an operation, the concealment of US operations in Latin America
for long enough for the guilty men to escape punishment rivals the worst
practices of the countries that were victims of these policies. It has been,
though, an effective strategy. By the time the documents are allowed to
filter out, the events they reveal!
are over; domestic public opinion in the
US, in that depressingly anti- historical phrase, has "moved on"; the details
have grown fuzzy. On the ground, the orphans have grown up and the widows are
dead or discouraged. Just for the record, then, what were the consequences of
that era when, in the words of one US analyst, "the gang that blew Vietnam
went Latin"? Chile was the most notorious case, Central America an even more
tragic one. It covered the civil war in El Salvador, the Contra war in
Nicaragua and the genocide perpetrated against the Indian population of
Guatemala by a series of military regimes that held power after a
US-sponsored coup in the 1950s. A legion of US officials spent their careers
pretending that the deaths and disappearances, the torture and terror, were
the responsibility of a few isolated extremists who were out of the control
of the fine democrats whom the US supported. Limited US admissions, produced !
decades after the event, come too late for the victims. In Argentina, Chile
and Central America, the consequences of US policy persist in over-powerful
militaries and in the conflicts provoked by the continuing efforts of the
victims' families to locate the remains of their relatives and bring the
perpetrators to justice. But in the country that proclaims itself the world's
best democracy there is impunity for the men who conceived and executed these
policies. In the case of the Iran-Contra affair, for instance, in the words
of the Walsh report, "the underlying facts ... are that ... President Reagan,
the secretary of state, the secretary of defence and the director of central
intelligence and their necessary assistants committed themselves ... to two
programmes contrary to congressional policy and contrary to national policy.
They skirted the law, some of them broke the law, and almost all of them
tried to cover up the presi!
dent's wilful activities." George Bush pardoned
Reagan, but what of Bush's own role? After heading the CIA, he was
vice-president throughout the Reagan presidency then succeeded Reagan as
president. On December 24 1992, 12 days before former secretary of defence
Caspar W Weinberger was to go on trial, a trial in which Bush himself might
have been called as a witness, Bush pardoned him and five other defendants.
The criminal investigation of Bush himself was never completed. Bush
continues to enjoy his position as ex-president and respected father of the
man who may well get the current presidential job. Justice and
accountability, it seems, are strictly for export.
