National Security and United States Policy Toward Latin America

by Lars Schoultz

Overview

Lars Schoultz proposes a way for all those interested in U.S. foreign policy fully to appreciate the terms of the present debate. To understand U.S. policy in Latin America, he contends, one must critically examine the deeply held beliefs of U.S. policy makers about what Latin America means to U.S. national security.

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691609638
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #497
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Read an Excerpt

National Security and United States Policy Toward Latin America

---

By Lars Schoultz

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07741-3

---

CHAPTER 1

INSTABILITY IN LATIN AMERICA

"Since the early nineteenth century, the primary interest of the United States in Latin America has been to have the area be a peaceful, secure southern flank." Thus begins the brief discussion of Latin America in the most widely adopted national security textbook of our time. Few U.S. citizens recognize how difficult it is for policy makers to be given these obvious but vague goals — peace and security — and told to convert them into concrete public policy. It is a staggering task. No U.S. citizen knows, for example, how to make Bolivia peaceful and secure. Frustrated with attempts in this direction, in 1959 one embassy official in La Paz threw up his arms and voiced the despair that afflicts many foreign service officers who seek peace and security in Latin America. We had given $129 million in aid to Bolivia since 1953, he complained, and "we don't have a damn thing to show for it. We're wasting money. The only solution to Bolivia's problems is to abolish Bolivia."

In a casual conversation in early 1983, another beleaguered U.S. official, this time in San Salvador, was told about his predecessor's frustration in Bolivia and asked what he thought about the idea of abolishing El Salvador. "There's no comparison," he responded; "we've got a handle on stability here."

In the latter official's response was a statement about the process U.S. policy makers use to create a peaceful, secure southern flank. Unable to implement the vague general goals of "peace" and "security," Ambassador Hinton had subconsciously replaced them with something more concrete, something that could be implemented: stability. He and his colleagues had determined what means would best promote the macrogoals of peace and security and then converted that means into the goal of U.S. policy. This conversion process is not peculiar to inter-American relations. "Because most important goals (e.g. security, high influence) are too general to provide guidelines for actions," Jervis notes, "actors must establish subgoals (e.g. strong alliances, military perponderance) that are believed to contribute to the higher ones." Subgoals — more accurately, means — are thereby transformed into ends, and they "often come to be valued for their own sakes, especially when their attainment requires a great deal of time, effort, and attention." Particularly in large bureaucracies the mere act of doing something (ensuring stability) in time tends to become divorced from the goals (peace and security) that the act was intended to achieve. In this sense inertia determines policy; as John Barth once observed, "processes persisted in long enough tend to become ends in themselves."

In the aftermath of World War II, the United States passed through a brief period during which it felt obliged to commit whatever resources were necessary to ensure stability throughout the non-Communist world. Billions of dollars and tens of thousands of soldiers' lives were invested in securing the peace in such faraway places as Southeast Asia. After the sobering experience of Vietnam, however, America's ambitions moderated. Today any official who asserted that U.S. peace and security are dependent upon the maintenance of stability in, say, Burma, would be dismissed as an antiquated Cold Warrior. But any official who failed to make such an assertion in 1962 would have been accused of misunderstanding the fundamental nature of U.S. security interests. Time passes, and the early postwar conception of stability as a global requirement of U.S. peace and security has been undergoing a substantial reappraisal.

It is a quiet reappraisal, manifested less by open confrontation and debate than by simply dropping out of the discussion. In 1983, members of Congress yawned, doodled, and kibitzed with aides as Secretary of State Shultz, pleading for a larger foreign aid budget, used a tired metaphor to express an exhausted idea: "The fault line of global instability runs strongly across the continents of the Third World. This instability is inimical to our security." It was a boring message from a tedious speaker to an audience numbed by forty years of investing heavily in Third World stability. By the 1980s, the purses of few taxpayers could be pried open by citing something called the fault line of global instability. The "bear any burden, pay any price" language that symbolized the Kennedy commitment to stability has, for better or for worse, become a curious relic of an overly ambitious era. Now policy makers have more modest goals. Peace, operationalized by a subgoal — the absence of instability in countries ruled by governments friendly toward the United States — is perceived as a requirement of U.S. security in a more limited number of places. For most U.S. policy makers, Latin America remains one such place.

In the chapters that follow it will be argued that the high value most policy makers place upon stability in Latin America is not a peculiar feature of the Cold War era. The quest for stability has been the basis for U.S. policy toward Latin America for nearly two centuries. The early twentieth century, for example, was not unlike today. Kane tells us that "the constant state of political disorder in the Caribbean was generally regarded by American military strategists with something approaching horror." To Theodore Roosevelt, "the specter of German aggression in the Caribbean or elsewhere in Latin America became a veritable nightmare with him. He was absolutely convinced that the Kaiser would one day start trouble somewhere in this hemisphere." Over time the precise form of the threat has changed (from the Holy Alliance to German imperialists to Fascists to Communists), but the nature of the threat has remained fairly constant. This nature was identified in 1904 by President Roosevelt as "a general loosening of the ties of civilized society" — instability.

Instability per se is not the issue, of course. Few U.S. policy makers would be concerned if Salvadorans or Guatemalans or Haitians spent their time shooting one another were it not for the fact that one possible consequence of this instability might be to provide hostile forces with the opportunity to seize territory in Latin America and then use it to threaten U.S. security. Thus geographic proximity is crucial in determining the high value U.S. policy makers place upon the maintenance of stability in Latin America. In a geopolitical sense Latin America is, as every president since James Monroe has repeatedly remarked, "our backyard." Some officials call Latin America our sphere of influence. Yet, just as the Soviets have discovered in Afghanistan and Poland, we too have found that the maintenance of a geographic sphere of influence is no easy task. What is ours is also ours to lose. That is why analysts in the Defense Intelligence Agency argue that any change in Latin America "will most likely work to our disadvantage."

The emphasis U.S. policy makers place upon stability in Latin America is largely a reflection of the fact that the United States is king of the surrounding hemispheric mountain, and from the summit the only way to go is down. It may not be pleasant to be forced off the summit in Vietnam, but we can live with defeat in a far off corner of Southeast Asia. Latin America is an entirely different matter, however. "Central America is America. It's at our doorstep," President Reagan asserted in his speech to the nation in May 1984. Because of this geographic proximity, if we permit instability there it will "eventually move chaos and anarchy toward the American border." This basic causal linkage — instability in Latin America causes a threat to United States security — is the cognitive bedrock of United States policy toward Latin America.

Not long ago Richard Barnet noted that nearly everyone who made U.S. foreign policy owned a piece of this rock. Writing in 1972, he found that to all policy makers "the real enemies are chaos and disorder." If this were true today, there would be no fundamental differences over an appropriate policy to pursue in Latin America. But, as the following chapters will demonstrate, it is not true. Because U.S. officials have come to perceive instability in quite different ways, they have naturally divided over what, if anything, needs to be done about it. The quiet reappraisal has reached our backyard.

The place to begin an analysis of this reappraisal is with U.S. policy makers' perceptions of the cause of instability in Latin America. Like medical doctors attempting to diagnose the ills of ailing patients, the first step to take is to listen as the patients describe their symptoms. That requires an initial focus upon U.S. policy toward Central America in the 1970s and 1980s. What officials saw in Central America tells us as much about the perceptual apparatus of U.S. policy makers as it does about the actual instability. Central America served as a focus of the policy debate, throwing into sharp contrast the conflicts that have come to plague U.S. policy.

Instability in Central America: The Carter Policy

When the policy makers appointed by President Carter sat down at their new desks in early 1977, Latin America was not on the agenda left behind by the departing Ford administration. Most of the instability that had existed in the Southern Cone was gone or, in the case of Argentina, going fast. Brazil, too, had quieted after a spate of political unrest earlier in the 1970s. In the Caribbean, Fidel Castro appeared to be occupied for the moment in rebuilding normal diplomatic relations with many of the region's governments. While this gave pause to some officials, particularly when they focused on Cuba's growing friendship with the Manley government in Jamaica, nearly everyone was relieved to note that there were no major groups of Castroite guerrillas active in Latin America. In Nicaragua there were the Sandinistas, of course, but in early 1977 they numbered perhaps one hundred and therefore showed absolutely no indication of being able to destabilize the Somoza dynasty. Two months before Jimmy Carter's election the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that "at this time, no insurgent group poses a serious threat to an existing government."

The absence of significant instability permitted a considerable amount of latitude in the making of United States policy toward Latin America, and the opportunity was seized by policy makers committed to increasing the prominence of human rights concerns in United States policy toward Latin America.

No one is certain exactly why Central America became one of the primary foci of the Carter human rights policy, but there are several plausible explanations. One is that the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua were, in fact, uncommonly repressive. Proponents of this explanation argue that these governments' violations of human rights were too gross to be overlooked. Another explanation is that the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala called attention to themselves in early 1977 by announcing that the United States could keep its military aid now that the receipt of assistance had been made dependent upon a State Department human rights report on each recipient. A further explanation is that Mark Schneider, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, had a particularly soft spot in his heart for Central America, for he had spent two years in El Salvador as a Peace Corps volunteer. A final explanation is that many national security officials were reluctant to put up much of a fight with human rights activists over control of U.S. policy toward Central America, for they needed to husband their resources for more important battles over U.S. human rights policy toward Iran, the Philippines, and South Korea.

For whatever reasons — and it was probably some combination of all of these — human rights quickly came to dominate U.S. policy toward Central America. In one of his first appearances before Congress as Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance announced that the proposed military assistance budget for FY1978 had been reduced to exclude funds for El Salvador and Guatemala. Eventually U.S. economic assistance to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua was halted, decreased, or redirected in order to bypass agents of the offending governments. A parade of U.S. officials flew in and out of Central America to communicate directly the concern of the United States over continued reports of gross violations of fundamental human rights. Within less than a year instability had increased dramatically throughout most of the region.

Although the growing instability in Nicaragua quickly drew the attention of the Carter administration's national security officials, initially there was little they could do. Throughout late 1977 and early 1978, the administration was deeply committed to an exhausting uphill battle for Senate confirmation of the Panama Canal treaties. Under the stern direction of the President — the only firm guidance he ever provided on U.S.-Latin American relations — no one in the administration was permitted to raise the issue of unrest in Central America, for to do so would risk upsetting already jittery senators and, in particular, revealing the active support Panamanian strongman Omar Torrijos was providing the Nicaraguan insurgents. All administration officials did their best to assuage any concern on the part of Congress. No one mentioned the mounting level of violent opposition to the Somoza government.

With the treaties safely through the Senate, the growing fears over Nicaraguan instability became more apparent. By mid-1978, the Sandinistas had emerged as a popular force. Crowds of applauding citizens lined the road to the airport in August as Edén Pastora led his forces out of Managua after successfully capturing the legislative assembly and extracting humiliating concessions from Anastasio Somoza. In September 1978, the Carter administration acknowledged that the Somozas had to go, and it stopped the military assistance pipeline.

From that moment on the growing instability in nearby El Salvador became an issue of U.S. national security. With one Central American nation already engulfed in a full-scale civil war, the Carter administration was not prepared to let another revolutionary situation develop. But after nearly two years of publicly denouncing El Salvador's human rights abuses, few officials were prepared to reverse U.S. policy and support the Romero government's indiscriminantly repressive attempts to defeat the rapidly growing guerrilla movement. While leftist in orientation, the insurgents had firmly rejected cooperation with El Salvador's Moscow-affiliated Communist party, moreover, the rebels had been active for years before either Cuba or the Soviet Union would lend so much as verbal support. Here, argued many policy makers, was a clear example of indigenous instability. Before it could be exploited by the Communists and become a threat to U.S. security Washington needed to encourage reforms that would alleviate the basic cause of the instability poverty.

While most officials in Washington agreed that reforms were essential to end the growing instability, in San Salvador the Romero government remained intransigent, rebuffing all suggestions for reform Increased pressure from the United States brought only increased resistance. Then in July 1979, the Somoza regime collapsed. The handwriting was on the wall in El Salvador- reform now or revolution later, perhaps not that much later. It was therefore with considerable relief that the Carter administration observed the overthrow of the Romero government in November by a group of army officers, some of whom appeared committed to reform. A few days later a military-civilian government was created that included several prominent civilian reformists. At last there were leaders in El Salvador with whom the United States could work to halt instability.

The cornerstone of the U S.-Salvadoran effort was a comprehensive agrarian reform. It consisted of three phases. Phase I was to nationalize all large landholdings (over 500 hectares) and convert them into cooperatives owned and operated by landless peasants. Phase II was to divide and redistribute moderately large landholdings (100 to 500 hectares). These parcels constituted the dominant pattern of ownership in the major coffee-producing regions and therefore were the very heart of the oligarchy's economic structure. The third phase, known as the "land-to-the-tiller" program, was to provide tenant farmers with titles to the land they were already working. If fully implemented, the agrarian reform would have altered substantially the existing structure of land ownership in El Salvador, a country whose economy is dominated by agriculture. To many U.S. policy makers comprehensive land reform was perceived as an absolutely essential step toward the alleviation of structural poverty and therefore instability in El Salvador.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from National Security and United States Policy Toward Latin America by Lars Schoultz. Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• List of Illustrations, pg. viii
• List of Tables, pg. ix
• Preface, pg. xi
• Acknowledgments, pg. xvii
• List of Abbreviations, pg. xix
• Introduction, pg. 1
• Chapter 1. Instability in Latin America, pg. 34
• Chapter 2. Poverty, pg. 71
• Chapter 3. Communism, pg. 106
• Chapter 4. Strategic Raw Materials, pg. 143
• Chapter 5. Military Bases and Military Support, pg. 160
• Chapter 6. Sea Lines of Communication, pg. 191
• Chapter 7. Soviet Military Bases, pg. 225
• Chapter 8. Latin America and the Global Balance of Power, pg. 268
• Conclusion, pg. 308
• Bibliography, pg. 331
• Index, pg. 367