History of US Rule in Latin America:
Resistance to the Coup in Honduras
By
Noam Chomsky
The United States has had four presidents
who received the Nobel Peace Prize. I
haven't checked, but I presume that's a
record for heads of state. All four have
left their imprint on Latin America, "our
little region over here that has never
bothered anybody."
That's how Secretary of War Henry Stimson
described the hemisphere in May 1945.
He was at that time explaining to the world
what the post-war global system would be,
and one of its conditions would be that all
regional organizations must be disbanded,
with the exception of our own, which are to
be expanded, including "our little region
over here," the Western hemisphere. . . .
His position was correct, as others
explained, for example a very influential
liberal Democrat Abe Fortas, who said that
for us to expand our system, including "our
little region over here," is "part of our
obligation to the security of the world"
because "what is good for us is good for the
world." That's self-evident. Well, if we
look through the four presidents and their
imprint, it was significant. So, let's start
with Theodore Roosevelt, the first one.
Roosevelt was a shocking racist. I don't use
the analogy lightly, but it's a fact that
you have to go to the Nazi archive to find
anything similar. So, here's a couple of his
examples about our little region here. "[T]he
expansion of the peoples of white, or
European, blood during the past four
centuries . . . has been fraught with
lasting benefit to most of the peoples
already dwelling in the lands over which the
expansion took place."
That's despite what the remnants of Native
Americans or Blacks or Filipinos or others
might mistakenly believe. Actually, genocide
denial has been a leading and highly valued
feature of the intellectual and moral
culture in the United States and remains so
right until the present. . . . With regard
to the conquest of a half of Mexico,
Roosevelt explained that it was
"inevitable," and "in the highest degree
desirable for the good of humanity at large,
that the American people should ultimately
crowd out the Mexicans."
It was "out of the question to expect"
Texans to "submit to the mastery of the
weaker race." And, of course, stealing
Panama from Colombia was also "in the
highest degree desirable for the good of
humanity." I won't go on with Teddy
Roosevelt, whose statue graces Mount
Rushmore.
The second Nobel Peace Prize laureate was
Woodrow Wilson, the most honored and
arguably the most vicious and brutal of the
Nobel Prize laureates.
His invasion of Haiti, for example, killed
thousands of people, maybe 20,000 according
to Haitian historians, restored virtual
slavery, and left much of the country in
ruins. Wilson is famous as an apostle of
democracy, and he demonstrated his love of
democracy by sending the marines in to
disband parliament at gunpoint, for a good
reason: they had refused to pass what was
called a progressive legislation that
allowed US corporations to buy up the
country.
Therefore they were kicked out, but since we
do believe in elections, there was a
referendum under marine rule in which 5% of
the population participated and 99% voted
for the progressive legislation, so American
corporations proceeded to buy up what
remained of Haiti, which was once the
richest colony in the world -- that's worth
remembering -- now maybe the symbol of
hopelessness and despair, a tribute to the
West. At the same time, Wilson sent the
marines to invade the Dominican Republic.
That was almost as bad as Haiti, but not
quite, because, as the military commanders
pointed out, in the Dominican Republic,
there were Spics, not niggers, so you had to
treat them a little better -- not much but
some. Both countries were left under the
rule of vicious National Guards, the policy
that had been first instituted in the
Philippines a few years earlier. . . . All
of this comes down to us in history under
the framework of what is called Wilsonian
idealism, which is a leading principle of US
foreign policy. . . .
The third presidential Nobel laureate was
Jimmy Carter, for whom human rights was "the
soul of our foreign policy."
His policies in Latin America were explained
by Robert Pastor -- he is a Latin American
specialist and way at the dovish extreme.
Pastor explained why the administration had
to support the murderous Somoza regime in
Nicaragua and, when they could no longer
sustain him, they had to try to sustain,
maintain, the US-trained National Guard even
-- I'm quoting Pastor now -- even after it
was massacring the population "with the
brutality a nation usually reserves for its
enemy," killing some 40,000 people.
And the reason why the Carter administration
had to keep supporting them is elementary:
to quote Pastor again, "The United States
did not want to control Nicaragua or the
other nations in the region, but it also did
not want to allow developments to get out of
control. It wanted Nicaraguans to act
independently, except when doing so would
affect U.S. interests adversely." That's a
fair statement of policy at the dovish
extreme. . . .
Well, onto the fourth Nobel laureate, our
President Obama. . . . |
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