On 19 Oct in my Latin American Government class, journalist and professor Carlos Fazio spoke about the militarization, corruption, and human rights abuses of Mexican society. I thought it was very interesting to have a real life figure in Latin American politics come into speak to us. I admire his courage in putting forth views that put him at risk of violent reprisal by those elements of society he seeks to expose in Mexico.
Professor Fazio argument went as follows. The US government, acting under the economic imperatives of maintaining the military-industrial complex and the capitalist system more generally, is interested in perpetuating the conflict which sustains the War on Drugs so that it may provide a pretext for the US to extend aid, usually of the military sort, which will bring the recipient country into a dependent relationship with it. Through international security agreements like the Security and Prosperity Pact, the USA compels countries like Mexico to undertake anti-drug measures which have historically shown little efficacy towards reducing either production of consumption of narcotics. Large infrastructure projects are financed in order to extend state presence over lands not effectively under state sovereignty. The government then becomes better able to manage the natural resources of their country, which are then sold off to American business interests.
Contrary to its officially stated purpose, the War on Drugs instead creates a pretext for American control over the natural resources of a country and over it`s political institutions. It enables the American administration to develop direct contacts with the military of the recipient country, which are needed to threaten instransient civilian administration who would dare to oppose US designs on world domination. Anti-drug aid is the proverbial foot in the door that eventually leads to the establishment of US military bases in the recipient country. The seven bases given to the US military in Colombia in the past year comes within a decade of the beginning of Plan Colombia in 1999. Professor Fazio argues that the US government in fact has no incentive to faithfully seek an end to the turmoil of the drug wars in Latin American since around `80%`of the profits from the drug trade stay inside the country.
Professor Fazio also claims that Mexico is beginning to show the early symptoms of a social cleansing campaign of undesirable elements of society. In Latin America, paramilitaries are often supported and guided to achieve some desired aim by official state institutions that are otherwise bound by the legal system. Acting with impunity, paramilitaries are tacitly empowered to attack those suspected of belonging to any identified undesirable group, guerrillas in the case of Colombia, and drug traffickers in the case of Mexico. He cites the killings of drug addicted teens by masked men in the heavily militarized Ciudad Juarez as evidence for this claim. He wonders: How could such a bold act of murder occur without bringing those responsible to justice in a city that is occupied by more than 7,500 troops stationed there with the explicit aim of ending such violence? An opinion also shared by a recent article in Reuters, Professor Fazio further alleges that the bosses of some drug cartels are protected by the official state institutions and allowed to act with impunity while poor Mexicans are scapegoated in order to boost the statistics and show artificial success in the war on drugs.
I got the impression from Professor Fazio that he lays primary responsibility for the failure of democracy in Latin America at the feet of what he perceives are the inherently wicked designs of American foreign policy. That the evidence he provides supports his theory, there can be little doubt. But if one disagrees with his base assumptions about the intentions of US foreign policy upon which his theory is based, the rest of Prof. Fazio's hypothesis has little to offer.
Is it in fact the case that US administration officials across many administrations have embarked upon on a coherent policy plan of cold blooded rational analyses of their perceived self-interest to bring about the reality Prof. Fazio describes?
I find that this argument overstates the incidence of realpolitik calculations of interests and ignores the role that values and ideals play in American policy making. While surely any country can stray from the standards it claims to pursue , anyone knowledgeable in US history knows that the Americans perceive themselves to be the bearers of liberal democratic civilization. With the end of the Cold War, the preference for democracy and its active promotion in the world were again dominant. By supposing that successive US administrations, through their championing of the War on Drugs, have in fact been involved in a grand design to undermine the very ideals which underlie American society, I think is too much of a departure from reality.
Is it possible that President's Bush I, Clinton, Bush II and Obama have actively sought to enslave Latin American governments through military aid?
Sure it is, especially considering one's partisan feelings towards any of these former executives. But is it probable that this is the case? Not likely. A fortune could be made by any disgruntled bureaucratic bold enough to blow the whistle on any of these policies, and the evidence of which would be clearly welcome in some segments of the international community.
Instead of blaming the foreign policy of the US, one can also look at domestic factors which have inhibited the formation and consolidation of effective, accountable, and transparent democracy regimes in Latin America.
One is the unique history of the region, which is punctuated with military institutions not subordinate to civilian rule. When the military feels that the civilians are threatening the constitution with radical policies, or when they try to take away military prerogatives, the military often sets in and assumes control while the government is reorganized. This was seen in Chile in 1973, and Brazil in 1963, and most recently in the coup attempt in Venezuela in 2002.
Another is the extreme social inequality that the democratic systems preside over. This gross dissimilarity in the distribution of wealth and other benefits from the system engenders little commitment to the democratic regime on the part of disaffected citizens. Also, clientelistic patronage relationships are more easily maintained when the population is so poor that they simply cannot resist the handouts offered by the party machines. This persistent economic disparity can also make the population prone to popular appeals seeking anti-democratic ends.
Blaming the US for the failures to consolidate Latin American democracies without including domestic variables as well is a misguided and selective overemphasis of certain facts over others.
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