Getting Away With Murder: The US Has Admitted Its Involvement in Latin America
by Isabel Hilton
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.
The "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 political 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 justice. 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, the 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 continue 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 president'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.