1. America and the Dictators*

WHAT IS IT WITH AMERICA AND DICTATORSHIPS?

The United States government very publicly and valiantly denounces autocratic regimes all the time: currently the targets of Washington’s ire include North Korea, Iran, and Syria. At the same time it selectively wages war on autocratic regimes, from Panama to Iraq, as the situation requires. In private, the WikiLeaks cables, gathered since 2009, show that US diplomats are often very scathing about foreign leaders and overseas governments. And yet, the US has maintained networks of sympathetic authoritarian regimes in large parts of the world where it wields influence. The very same regimes it goes to war with have, at some point, once been American allies. This is an irony that can hardly have been lost on Noriega or Saddam Hussein as they were ousted and tried in kangaroo courts for crimes carried out with US support.

In contrast, Washington stands by other regimes to the bitter end. Consider the relatively minor example of Turkmenistan. In 2009, a cable sent from the US embassy in Ashgabat contained a poison-pen thumbnail description of the country’s dictator, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow. Written by the US chargé d’affaires, it acidly depicted the dictator as “vain, suspicious, guarded, strict, very conservative, a practiced liar, ‘a good actor,’ and vindictive.” Perhaps most damning was the observation that, apart from being a vicious tinpot dictator, he was “not a very bright guy.”¹

None of this was exactly news. Berdimuhamedow had continued the despotic pattern established by his predecessor, the former Communist Party leader Saparmyrat Niyazov, when he had taken control in 2006. The US certainly knew all his methods before he was allowed to take command. But Turkmenistan provided a crucial corridor of access to Afghanistan for the US, as well as being strategically central to an energy-rich area circling the Caspian Sea.

So, if chargé d’affaires Curran’s report was intended to make officials think twice about dealing with the dictator, it did not work. Hillary Clinton stopped in for a photo op with the dictator in the year the cable was sent, at which it was reported that human rights was not very high on the agenda. The next year, US military aid to the dictatorship increased from $150,000 to $2 million.² This aid, it should be noted, is being put to sterling work funding the regime’s military exercises in the region. Berdimuhamedow was “re-elected” with 97 percent of the vote in 2012, and the US continues its warm relationship with the regime.

And there it is in black and white. The planners and strategists in Washington, DC—leaders of the Free World, as they once fondly styled themselves—think the blood-caked dictator of Turkmenistan is not just nasty but an utter dolt, and yet this personality flaw is offset by the observation that if he is good enough to sustain America’s war, he is good enough for Turkmenistan, and well worth a couple of million dollars.

This kind of realpolitik looks bad for the US, but support for this cynical axis of repression is far down the list of such instances catalogued in the WikiLeaks documents. From east to central Asia to the Middle East to Latin America, the US has cultivated, funded, armed, and coddled authoritarian states in both hemispheres. Nonetheless, if this behavior seems staggeringly at odds with the spaniel-eyed, apple-pie rhetoric of the Obama administration, it is clear that there is more to this posture than rhetoric.

At the heart of postwar US policy-making is the doctrine of liberal internationalism. Pioneered by Woodrow Wilson, and embellished by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, this doctrine is generally understood as the justification of military and other interventions by the US if they help produce a liberal world order: a global system consisting of liberal-democratic nation-states, connected by more or less free markets and ruled by international law. In this world-view, the goal of achieving a liberal world system trumps the commitment to state sovereignty. The US sees itself as the natural vanguard of such a global order, as well as the chief bearer of any right to suppress state sovereignty in the pursuit of liberal goals.

As we see from the cables, this doctrine is taken seriously by state personnel of every hue. Their criticisms of undemocratic regimes, nepotism, and human rights abuses make no sense otherwise. However, there is an aspect of liberal internationalism that is not typically explicated by its adherents, but which is visible both in its origins and its practice.

As Domenico Losurdo, the eminent historian, has written, liberalism in this broad sense has historically been subject to a series of exclusions—working-class people, women, black people, and colonial subjects have all at various points been excluded from the citizenship rights, such as voting, granted to white, propertied men.³ The logic of such exclusions in the international system is visible in the colonial origin of international law, which initially ratified the behavior of colonial states while leaving colonial peoples without rights in the emerging world system.⁴

The right of self-determination in the form of statehood was thus, for a long time, a right reserved by the overwhelmingly white citizens of Euro-American states—a fact that would become a source of anticolonial rebellion in the early twentieth century. As the American empire rose to world dominance, it met this state of affairs with a mixture of caution and sympathy for the colonial powers. Even as it gradually worked out a strategic perspective according to which territorial control was no longer an advantage, it was reluctant to see this crucial right extended to non-white peoples.

Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States from 1912 to 1920, was the austere poster boy for liberal internationalism, and the first president seriously to confront the dilemmas posed by the new anticolonial movements. Having championed American efforts to get in on the imperial racket, he witnessed the difficulties that US colonial policy experienced in the Philippines, while at the same time observing with horror the rise of global anticolonial movements. By breaking his 1916 electoral promise and leading the US into World War I, he facilitated a first attempt to construct a new world order.

Wilson did not eschew the occupation of foreign territories when it suited US interests; he was not only a champion of the US occupation of the Philippines, but himself sent troops into Haiti (1915), Nicaragua (1912), and Cuba (1912), as well as intervening in the Mexican Revolution (1914). Nonetheless, the scale of the Great War acted as a warning against unnecessary military campaigns. In addition, there was a growing idea among US planners suggesting that territorial control was less important than the control of markets in capital, labor, and resources.

In a global market dominated by the US, supporting national governments in place that were open to US investment was more important than becoming a colonial overlord. Profits could flow back to Wall Street without the debilitating costs of occupation. To achieve this world order, however, the US would need to prize open the colonial empires. One manifestation of this new strategic perspective was the Wilson administration’s discovery of the language of “national self-determination.” This has assumed a central place in the mythology of liberal internationalism, even though Wilson at first purloined the language from the Bolsheviks, the better to steal their thunder. He certainly had no intention of fulfilling the implied promise to anticolonial movements, which he regarded as having no capacity for self-government. Thus, while US propagandists enlisted the support of anticolonial forces in India for the Entente powers in World War I on the basis of Wilsonian doctrine, the ensuing negotiations at Versailles saw the US oppose a “racial equality” motion, and “self-determination” was denied to colonized nations. The result was that the anticolonial movements gravitated to the Left, with many looking to Russia as a model of successful modernization.⁵

Later, the US took the opportunity of World War II to relieve Britain of many of its colonial possessions in exchange for participation in the war on the Allied side. However, in the immediate aftermath, the US declined to push its tremendous strategic advantage home at the expense of the former colonial powers. The British were left with strategic control of South Asia, and the French maintained sovereignty in Indochina, while appeals for recognition from Sukarno in Indonesia and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam were ignored. In general, the US only lent its tacit support to anticolonial ruptures—such as the Nasserite revolt in Egypt—where there was little risk of conflict.

The chief concern of US officials during this period was that “premature independence” might lead to a new freedom for people as yet unfit to govern themselves. Given this unfitness, they might not commit to building liberal capitalist states integrated into a US-led world market, instead preferring politically immature “populist” or radical solutions. They might even, in some cases, “go communist.”

As a leading American expert on African politics, William J. Foltz, wrote in 1966, it would take more than a few generations to teach the majority of black Africans “the skills necessary to participate meaningfully and effectively in politics.”⁶ Therefore, if a further period of tutelage at the hands of white colonial masters was not possible, the “modernization theory” of US state mandarins held that these people would require a period of authoritarian rule under enlightened military regimes.⁷

The US thus responded to independence in the Congo by engineering the imposition of the kleptocratic Mobutu regime to prevent radicalism. The same policy supported a succession of dictators in South Vietnam to avert Viet Minh rule, and drove an extraordinarily bloody war to defend an allied dictatorship in South Korea. It supported the overthrow of Sukarno by the Indonesian general Suharto in a coup that killed up to a million people, but subsequently opened up the country’s markets and resources to US investors.

In the Middle East, the US took over the British role, particularly after the latter’s “East of Suez” commitments were finally abandoned in 1971. US administrators and oilmen had already co-engineered the rule of the House of Saud by this point. The CIA had helped overthrow the Iran’s Mossadegh government in 1953, replacing it with the hated shah, and later played a role in supporting the Ba’athist coup in Iraq as part of its general offensive against radical Arab nationalism. Israel—neither strictly a dictatorship nor a normal democracy—had become the major US regional client, particularly after the 1967 war, in which it had dealt a lethal blow to Arab nationalism. Later, with the Camp David accords securing peace with Israel, the Egyptian dictatorship became the second major regional client. All the while, of course, the US supported a network of right-wing dictatorships in its “backyard”—Latin America—with the aim of suppressing leftist movements hostile to American business.

The traditional Cold War justification for these imperial interventions was that it was a nasty, brutal old world out there, and that, to protect freedom against a totalitarian menace, certain unpleasant things had to be tolerated. Perhaps the most eloquent exponent of this idea was the neoconservative guru Jeane Kirkpatrick, who would become Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations. Kirkpatrick argued forcefully in defense of right-wing dictatorships in Latin America, on the grounds that the workers, peasants, and nuns they were slaughtering represented a form of totalitarianism that was far worse than authoritarianism. Kirkpatrick also offered a defense of the US alliance with El Salvador’s death squads, writing for the hallowed papers of the American Enterprise Institute that these institutions were authentically rooted organizations of the Salvadoran people, representing the organized self-defense of civil society against communism, and would be much more civilized if harnessed to legitimate state power.⁸

By this point, however, Kirkpatrick was already swimming against the tide. In the post-Vietnam era, US state elites began to articulate their policy goals much more in terms of human rights and democracy. Kirkpatrick mocked the Carter administration for its human rights rhetoric, but even during Reagan’s proxy battles with “communism” in Central America, the old anticommunist battle wagons were being carefully spruced up and re-sold as vehicles for progressive, democratic change, albeit within terms favorable to long-term US interests.

As a result, an apparatus of “democracy promotion” sprang up, linked to the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and a series of institutions through which funding could be allocated to support US-aligned civil society forces in various countries.⁹ As a Reaganera official put it:

The incoming Reagan administration sought to turn the clock back on US foreign policy to the pre-Vietnam era, to an old-fashioned cold war approach in which the United States would accept the need to support unsavory dictators as an inevitable component of the global struggle against Soviet communism. The Reagan administration discovered fairly quickly, however, that it was not possible to forge a bipartisan foreign policy on this basis; a concern for human rights and democracy also had to be factored into the policy.¹⁰

In fact, the “concern” was hypocritical. The US was not doing anything very new. Allen Weinstein, a founder and first acting president of the NED, observed in 1991 that its existence meant that activities the CIA had performed covertly twenty-five years before could now be performed openly.¹¹ Nor did it signal a change of policy priorities. In El Salvador, for instance, the US was fully aware that the country’s ruling class was engaged in a bitter war of annihilation against leftist peasants and workers, and was disposed toward a genocidal solution, favoring the “cleansing” of up to half a million people. And while the CIA continued to train Salvadoran death squads, and US money continued to pour in, the United States began to prepare a series of “democracy promotion” programs that in fact bolstered civil society forces close to the ruling ARENA party.¹²

This pattern continues. In recent years the NED has been directly involved in funding groups and individuals involved in the coup against Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 2004, and several of those involved in the attempted coup against Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez in 2002. In short, while the language of cynical anticommunist realpolitik was being replaced with a focus on human rights, the apparatus of “human rights” was still being deployed against America’s leftist enemies. In Egypt, the United States allocated an average of $20 million per year to “democracy assistance” in the years running up to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak—while supporting the regime itself to the tune of $2 billion per year.¹³

But the advantage of the “human rights” policy was clear. While the United States could continue to rely on a series of dictatorships where it did not trust democracies to produces pro-US policies, it could simultaneously foster a pro-US bulwark in the opposition by funding and building relations with groups it trusted.

This was more than just hypocrisy. US elites may not have much sympathy for the poor and oppressed of the global South, but dictatorships lack legitimacy and have a worrying tendency to be consumed in sudden explosions of popular anger. Support for dictatorships, however essential to US grand strategy, also brings “blowback” of various types. The United States has every reason to prefer that the dictatorships it does support contain their worst tendencies in times of peace. There is therefore a strategic basis for the criticism of abuses of human rights that US diplomats sometimes direct at their overseas hosts in secret cables.

The WikiLeaks revelations are an unprecedented resource in exploring how the US government’s relationship to dictatorships has evolved in practice, and how it has reconciled this practice with its normative commitment to liberal internationalism.

THE MIDDLE EAST: THE “GREATEST PRIZE IN HISTORY”

In his poem “September 1, 1939,” W. H. Auden invoked the “elderly rubbish” spoken by dictators. It could have been written in 2011. In Libya, Muammar Qaddafi, menaced by a civil society movement that ultimately became an armed uprising, blamed drug-takers and WikiLeaks for his predicament. The president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, blamed a “foreign conspiracy” for his dilemma, as he began bombing liberated territories. Later, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—an elected leader, but an increasingly erratic, authoritarian one—would blame drunks, Twitter users, and terrorists.

But these men were hardly the only ones inconvenienced by the turmoil. It had begun with a popular movement in Tunisia, precipitated by the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on December 18, 2010. Bouazizi was protesting at the confiscation of his wares and the routine harassment he suffered at the hands of the authorities. His complaints resonated with the experiences and dissatisfactions of a wide layer of the population, who began to mount regular, sustained protests. These grew in scale, leading ultimately to the overthrow of the country’s dictator, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, on January 14, 2011.

This inspired Egypt’s opposition, who had been gradually building up steam for over a decade, to mount a popular uprising against the dictator Hosni Mubarak. Beginning on January 25, 2011, with a series of mass protests, acts of civil disobedience, and strikes, it grew into a sustained frontal confrontation with the regime, until, on February 11, Mubarak was finally forced to resign.

At this point a whole network of regional autocracies became endangered, as popular movements risked rebellion in Libya, Syria, Bahrain, and to a lesser extent in Yemen, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and later Turkey. This was all the more significant globally because most of these regimes were allies of the United States. Apart from Israel, the crux of American power in the region was formed by Egypt, the Gulf regimes, and the North African dictatorships.

This is where WikiLeaks comes in. WikiLeaks has justifiably gained much credit for helping to ignite the Middle East rebellion. One explanation for this was that, while the space of “civil society” was highly restricted, the remarkable upsurge in internet use created a virtual space in which information could be shared, discussed, and used as a basis for organization.

For example, as will be shown below, the cables released by WikiLeaks exposed the extent of corruption on the part of Tunisia’s ruling oligarchs, and revealed the enervation of Egypt’s military even as it carved itself larger slices of the economic pie. The cables also did Erdoğan the immense discourtesy of disclosing that, according to the US ambassador, he was known to have at least eight Swiss bank accounts—thus implying corrupt finances (see Chapter 8, below).¹⁴

The information disseminated through WikiLeaks gave form and substance to many lingering popular grievances. As Ibrahim Saleh notes,

The WikiLeaks releases played an influential role in fuelling public anger in the region and in shaping global audiences’ understanding of the causes of what became known as the Arab Spring. By exposing hidden secrets, double standards, and hypocrisy of the Arab leaders, they provided new perspectives on Arab politics, as well as confirming widespread suspicions, and thus put angry publics in direct confrontation with autocratic governments.¹⁵

The predictable fall of Ben Ali

In January 2011, the Tunisian dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown. One of the immediate triggers for the movement that led to his downfall was the disclosures made by WikiLeaks. In particular, two key cables—one written in June 2008, and one in July 2009—were sent by Ambassador Robert Godec, each describing the Tunisian dictatorship of Ben Ali in withering terms. The 2008 cable focuses on corruption. Tunisia was ruled not just with an iron fist, but with a grasping hand:

Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants … Seemingly half the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage … With Tunisians facing rising inflation and high unemployment, the conspicuous displays of wealth and persistent rumors of corruption have added fuel to the fire.¹⁶

On the other hand, the 2009 cable is concerned with human rights. The regime was “a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems.”¹⁷ The ambassador believed the state to be “in trouble.” The cable complained of the regime’s restrictions on various US programs, and of the hostility of the government press toward pro-American civil society figures. But, most problematically, the “risks to the regime’s long-term stability [were] increasing” due to its corruption and narrow social base, as well as the lack of a clear successor.

The repressive nature of the Ben Ali regime was hardly news to the United States. He had persecuted all opposition groups since taking power in the “bloodless coup” of 1987. But Tunisia was a regional ally, and had been so since attaining independence from French colonial rule. The state provided crucial support in the “war on terror,” and as a result it was a priority recipient of US military aid. As the “fact sheet” on the website of the US embassy in Tunisia still boasts, “Tunisia has been one of the top twenty recipients of US International Military Education and Training funding since 1994; and since 2003 has ranked tenth in overall funding.”¹⁸

Tunisia’s armed forces do not exist primarily to project military power abroad.¹⁹ Rather, the regular army exists as the last line of civil defense protecting the secular, republican state. But, within the army itself, paramilitary units were created to intervene directly in political and civil affairs, in order to suppress opposition to the regime. Military aid, in this context, was support for the regime.

What Godec’s broad-ranging cables suggested was that the US was in danger of being tied to a regime that was on a downward spiral. And this was not the first hint that US diplomatic staff had made regarding the potential vulnerability of the regime. As early as 2006, Ambassador William Hudson’s cable had noted that “an increasing number of Tunisians” were already talking about the possible “succession and end of the Ben Ali era.”²⁰ In the early flush of enthusiasm following President Obama’s victory, however, Ambassador Godec suggested that the US needed to repair its image in the Middle East, and that military aid to the regime should therefore be cut.

When these cables were leaked, they became widely available across Tunisia and caused quite a stir. For Tunisians reading them, the surprise was not the revelation of corruption, but the bluntness of the US assessment of the regime. Upon spotting the leaks, the regime went into panic mode. In December 2010 it tried to block access to websites carrying the cables, focusing specifically on the popular, progressive Beirut newspaper Al-Akhbar.²¹

Within a matter of days of this intervention, the street trader Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself in protest at the brutal and unjust treatment he had received at the hands of police. Bouazizi’s complaints were not just about intolerable state abuse, however, but also invoked the declining standard of living that he, like many Tunisians, had suffered since the global financial crash, symbolized by soaring food prices and high unemployment. Finally, the corruption of the regime epitomized its increasingly narrow social base. While the postcolonial regime of Habib Bourguiba had rested on a broad basis of support among all social classes, Ben Ali’s rested increasingly on a small number of business families with links to the state.²² Bouazizi’s protest dramatically symbolized the suffering of the populace, and the nepotism, corruption, and complacency of the elites disclosed in the cables. This was the spark that was needed for the accumulating dissent and anger against the regime, described by Godec and Hudson, to break out into a mass protest movement. In the course of the ensuing weeks, protesters often referred to the WikiLeaks exposures.²³

Ironically, the leak of these cables did not persuade the Obama administration to back away from the regime or stop sending military aid, but they did help precipitate precisely the upheaval they anticipated. In another twist of irony, many of the protesters looked to the United States to furnish its slogans—“Yes, we can” was a popular chant. Yet Obama did not even make a bloodless statement half-heartedly supporting the overthrow until after Ben Ali had safely reached exile in Saudi Arabia.²⁴ This was a pattern that was replicated as the Egyptian opposition took the baton from Tunisia, challenging the Mubarak regime.

Downfall in Cairo

In 2009, a cable from the US embassy in Cairo reported a conversation with a leading regime figure. It discussed the upcoming parliamentary and presidential elections, as well as the regime’s attitude to the opposition. There had been “bread riots,” but the dictatorship saw little prospect of a popular challenge—and certainly not “widespread politically-motivated unrest” because it was “not part of the ‘Egyptian mentality.’ Threats to daily survival, not politics,” the report continued, “were the only thing to bring Egyptians to the streets en masse.”²⁵ The opposition parties were too weak to challenge for power, much less run the country, the regime held, and the only viable alternative, the Muslim Brotherhood, had no legitimate role. The “common sense” of the regime therefore seemed to be that the only way in which president-for-life Hosni Mubarak would be succeeded would be through an orderly transition organized by the Egyptian military —which would most likely ease the president’s son, Gamal, into the role.²⁶

What was the basis of this somnolent complacency? US cables depicted a military elite in “intellectual and social decline,” increasingly narrow in its social basis, yet still essential to regime stability and in control of “a large network of commercial enterprises” in the “water, olive oil, cement, construction, hotel and gasoline industries.”²⁷ On the other hand, the regime had demonstrated considerable staying power, partly due to its viciousness toward enemies, or even moderate critics.

A cable sent by Ambassador Margaret Scobey took note of Mubarak’s severe brutality toward “individuals and groups.” But this, the ambassador seemed to think, was an immense strength, as it had helped maintain domestic stability through two major regional wars, and marked the dictator out as a “tried and true realist” who was willing to inflict suffering on some rather than “risk chaos for society as a whole.”²⁸ The same cable identified the gains of America’s long-standing support for the Mubarak regime: “The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the US military enjoys priority access to the Suez canal and Egyptian airspace.”

These messages from Cairo ooze with confidence in the dictator, and with gratitude for his services to empire. The back-slapping did not last long. The WikiLeaks documents pertaining to Egypt were released on November 28, 2010, as part of a cache of classified diplomatic cables allegedly leaked by a former private in the US army, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning. They were leaked alongside the disclosures about Tunisia that led to Ben Ali’s downfall.

The WikiLeaks cables had a complex series of effects inside Egypt. This was less because of the disclosures themselves than because of the processes they had already helped to instigate. The evidence of the brutality of the regime was hardly news, and some of the potentially explosive revelations—for example, that Israel preferred former spy chief Omar Suleiman as Mubarak’s successor—were never translated in Egypt. Nor was the opposition particularly dependent on the internet or social media, through which the cables could be communicated—phone conversations and face-to-face contact were far more important.²⁹ Nevertheless, they had helped trigger the Tunisian uprising that gave confidence to the democratic opposition. They also confirmed and validated the analysis of Mubarak’s opponents, and raised international awareness so that, when Egyptian protesters took to the streets, groups such as Anonymous were willing to offer assistance.³⁰

Even if WikiLeaks had played a more direct role in inciting the Egyptian revolution, the Tunisian example would not have caught on had it not been for the presence of similar characteristics. Poverty and job insecurity preceded the global economic crisis, but by late 2010, 40 percent of Egyptians were living on less than $2 per day.³¹ Also reminiscent of the Tunisian case was the narrowness and corruption of the regime—albeit that, in Egypt, the cables show that the military was directly inculpated in that corruption. Mubarak had concentrated tremendous power and patronage in the Interior Ministry, as well as accumulating up to $70 billion for his family.³² Finally, as documented in Scobey’s embassy cable, there were hundreds of firsthand accounts of police brutality, some of them recorded on video. These were the grievances that, prompted by the Tunisian uprising, galvanized support for the movement that began on July 25, 2011.

Initially, opposition groups such as the April 6 Youth Movement planned a protest outside the Interior Ministry to coincide with National Police Day, as a means of protesting police brutality. However, in the afterglow of Ben Ali’s overthrow, the protest had much wider significance, and gained the support of a broad coalition of organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and celebrities such as actor Amr Waked. In the event, the protest attracted tens of thousands of participants, including 20,000 in Alexandria and 15,000 in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The violent reaction of the authorities, far from causing the crowds to retreat, led to days of riots and growing protests, so that by Friday, January 28, the regime had decided to deploy the army, and was in regular meetings with the US military leadership.³³

This proved a huge inconvenience for the American empire. When Vice President Joe Biden suggested on television, as Egyptian protesters turned Tahrir Square into a thriving minimetropolis, that President Mubarak was not a dictator, should not step down, and was in fact “an ally of ours,” he undiplomatically made public the attitude of US authorities to the regime it had been funding.³⁴ Former British prime minister Tony Blair put matters just as starkly, warning that overthrowing Mubarak would create a vacuum in which “extremism” would prosper. The Egyptian elite was “out of touch with public opinion,” but it also had “an open-minded attitude,” whereas public opinion had “the wrong idea and a closed idea.”³⁵

Mubarak, both the British and US administrations contended, should remain in power, but should make sufficient reforms to placate the crowds. When President Obama sent businessman and former diplomat Frank G. Wisner to Egypt to negotiate a settlement of the issues causing mass unrest, Wisner made it clear that Mubarak was an “old friend” of the United States, arguing that there should be reforms, but that he “must stay in office in order to steer those changes through.”³⁶

What was the “closed idea” that Blair was frightened of? What did Mubarak offer that was so valuable to Biden and Wisner? One issue was the concord with Israel negotiated at the Camp David talks in 1978, since when the Egyptian dictatorship had been a reliable and crucial ally of the Israeli government against the Palestinians. Undoubtedly, the US was concerned that a popular government in Egypt would take a more critical attitude toward Israel, cease enforcing the Gaza blockade, and even provide material aid to the Palestinians. Another issue of concern for Washington and London was the opening of Egypt’s markets to overseas investment, the deregulation of its economy, and the privatization of its industries. Here, the pro-market attitude of the Muslim Brotherhood might have reassured them, but democratic processes are difficult to manage—particularly if the public has “the wrong idea and a closed idea.”

The more far-sighted elements of the American state, however, had been preparing for the day when the dictatorship would no longer be the best means of achieving those goals. US institutions such as the NED had not been totally oblivious as the Egyptian opposition developed—first in response to the second Palestinian intifada in 2002,³⁷ and then in opposition to the second Iraq war. They had taken an interest in the emergence of a labor movement independent of the state-controlled unions, centered on textile workers.³⁸ Indeed, the WikiLeaks cables show the NED and affiliated institutions to have played a key role in coordinating with select groups of activists.³⁹

These developments were linked to President Bush’s aggressive military drive in the Middle East. An important complementary strategy to the projection of military power was the so-called “Freedom Agenda,” by which funds for “democracy promotion” were linked to the expansion of free trade. The dictatorships had been useful allies in vigorous “counter-terrorism” policies, and partners in the implementation of free trade; but there were those in the US state bureaucracy who felt that they were ultimately unreliable allies.⁴⁰ Money had been dispersed from the NED and the IRI to the US trade union federation, the AFL-CIO, whose Solidarity Center played a crucial role in maintaining the anticommunist line during the Cold War. Through the Solidarity Center, the US sought to build links with Egypt’s workers.⁴¹

In addition, as the WikiLeaks cables demonstrate, the United States made an effort to involve itself in the growing April 6 Youth Movement, thereby creating tensions in its otherwise close relationship with Mubarak.⁴² The assistance offered was far from decisive. For example, US-funded seminars offered training in the use of social networking sites and mobile technologies in order to promote democratic change, as well as counseling non-violent strategies for achieving social change.⁴³

The small change that the US threw into the hat of the Egyptian opposition was not enough to guarantee influence. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Egypt in March 2011, she was snubbed by a coalition of youth groups that refused to meet her on the perfectly reasonable ground that the United States had supported the Mubarak regime.⁴⁴ One of Obama’s former advisers, Anne-Marie Slaughter, cited this rebuff as a key pragmatic reason why the United States had to be seen to side with the aspirations of Egypt’s young people, who happened to make up 60 percent of the Middle East’s population, and not with the decrepit dictators.⁴⁵

In practice, however, this meant a series of repressive policies, such as continuing to assist the Yemeni regime in crushing its opposition. The cables from 2010 show that the United States had collaborated with Yemen’s ruler, Ali Abdullah Saleh, in organizing air strikes against targets on Yemeni soil deemed to be bases for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Saleh offered the United States an “open door,” the cables show, while he and his subordinates joked in meetings with General David Petraeus that he had lied to the public by claiming that the strikes were exclusively the work of the Yemeni government. In reality, the popular opposition to Saleh’s regime, which it described as “terrorist,” was broad and diverse, and partly based on tribal opposition to the centralized nature of his rule, while US strikes routinely caused harm way beyond their al-Qaeda target. And as the Yemeni struggle against the regime intensified, so did the drone strikes. For example, in June 2011 alone, a major upsurge in the rate of air strikes in the province of Abyan killed over 130 people and created 40,000 refugees.⁴⁶

Among Washington’s other repressive responses to the Arab Spring was the support it gave to Saudi Arabia’s invasion of Bahrain to suppress democratic dissidents. While public statements from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama called for “restraint” as the Bahraini ruling monarchy initiated the bloodshed, private briefings suggested that they were more concerned with stability than democracy. Moreover, Defense Secretary Robert Gates leaped to the defense of the regime, claiming that it was serious about democratic reform but had to worry about the possibility of Iran exploiting the protests to stir trouble.⁴⁷ Despite the promises of democratic reform, after the Saudi invasion to protect the regime, evidence has been produced by WikiLeaks showing that the US continues to assist the regime’s security forces.⁴⁸

But perhaps most egregiously, from the point of view of America’s ostensible democratic principles, in 2013 the US government supported a military coup against the elected Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt—a coup that resulted in several bloody massacres.⁴⁹ This inevitably inaugurated a period of ferocious authoritarian dictatorship⁵⁰ and wiped out the gains of the Arab Spring. All of this suggested that any tilt that the US might make toward supporting democracy in the Middle East would be extremely limited.

Despite America’s oft-proclaimed ideals, and the post–Cold War triumphalism according to which all roads led to freedom, despotism was too valuable to forsake. To understand why, it is necessary to say something about the long-standing relationships between the United States and the region’s dictatorships.

AMERICAN EMPIRE AND THE MIDDLE EAST DICTATORS

America’s grand accession to the status of global hegemon happened as a result of the decisive blow dealt by World War II to the colonial powers of Europe. After 1945, Britain and France still retained most of their possessions in the Middle East and North Africa, but, one after another, anticolonial movements that had been in the ascent since the 1920s began to shake their colonial masters loose. In 1952, a pro-British monarch was deposed by Nasser and the Free Officers movement in Egypt. Between 1954 and 1962, Algeria was in revolt against the French. In 1956, the French ceded control of Morocco and Tunisia. In 1958, the pro-British king of Iraq was overthrown by Qassem, another modernizing military leader. In the case of Palestine, liberation was delayed by the inauguration of a new colonial master in the form of the State of Israel. Gradually, however, the colonial grip on the region was being prized open.

This development was particularly essential for the United States, as the Middle East had proved through a series of discoveries in the interwar period to have a vast supply of cheap and accessible oil. In a 1945 US Department of State document, Saudi Arabia—a nation effectively constructed through the decisive intervention of the British Empire, US politicians, and oil companies—was deemed “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”⁵¹

Initially, the US strategic posture was to allow the empires to fold at their own pace, thus leaving them responsible for the deployment of military power and the maintenance of political order, while encouraging newly independent societies to adopt development strategies predicated on import substitution, in which countries would try to overcome their dependency on foreign imports by developing their own industrial base. As long as US capital was able to invest, the United States could gain access to these markets by other means than the “Open Door” that had been orthodoxy since the late nineteenth century.⁵² Within a developing global financial infrastructure underpinned by Bretton Woods, states were thus encouraged to develop markets that could be incorporated into a US-dominated world system.

As more regional states won independence, the US gradually took more responsibility for military deployment. For example, a major asset to the United States was the development of the “Baghdad Pact”—a treaty organization linking a series of regimes to the United Kingdom in a strategic military alliance. The United States had not participated directly, but had applied pressure to make the alliance come about, and offered funding. But a growing wave of Arab nationalism represented a threat to the alliance. The essential premise of Arab nationalism was that the national divisions in the Middle East were an artifice of colonialism, and should be replaced with a state unifying all Arabs, independent of the colonial powers, the United States, and the USSR. The region’s material resources would be subordinated to its own development, rather than the interests of international investors. This type of crazy thinking was exactly what had led Mossadegh, the elected prime minister of Iran, to attempt to nationalize the oil industry, thus leading to the joint CIA-MI6 enterprise to overthrow him and replace him with the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

So it was that, when the Nasser government in Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, an alliance of Israel, France, and Britain invaded the country to overthrow him. But the US government, whatever its worries about Arab nationalism, thought that this was a catastrophic miscalculation that might send Arab states rushing into the orbit of the USSR. Furthermore, its legitimacy in the world system would be harmed if it was seen to support aggression of the type Russia had just carried out in Hungary.

The following year, however, the Iraqi monarch was overthrown by Abd al-Karim Qasim and the Free Officers. It soon became clear that the new government was planning to withdraw from the Baghdad Pact, sending shockwaves through the region. President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon, who was supportive of the Baghdad Pact, was seen as particularly vulnerable. So US troops arrived in Lebanon in 1958 to secure the regime against internal opposition, as well as possible hostility from Egypt and Syria, in the first application of the “Eisenhower Doctrine,” according to which US troops would protect regimes deemed vulnerable to “international Communism.”⁵³

Indeed, the specter of radical Arab nationalism—conflated with “international Communism”—led to a US tilt in favor of the old autocracies. So while the US had quietly backed the overthrow of King Farouk in Egypt by Nasser and the Free Officers movement, it supported King Hussein of Jordan in imposing martial law in 1957, the better to halt the government’s alliance with Egypt, and more broadly its shift of allegiance toward Russia and China. The US also backed King Idris of Libya against opposition, until his overthrow by Colonel Qaddafi and the Free Officers of the Royal Libyan Army in 1969.

The withdrawal of the British navy from the Gulf region in 1971, as part of Britain’s abandonment of its “East of Suez” commitments, left the United States to take up the slack. At the height of the Vietnam War, when military spending was bleeding the US Treasury dry, this was an unwelcome development. Nonetheless, the United States deployed its Middle East Force and replaced sterling patronage with dollar diplomacy. By this point, there was already a network of dictators in place who were aligned with the United States, while Israel had inflicted a consummate defeat on the forces of Arab nationalism in the Six Day War—thus becoming the major US client in the region, alongside Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. These regimes together helped stymie the tide of Arab nationalism, while their military dependence on the United States locked them into an international framework favorable to US investors. The decisive military defeats inflicted on Egypt, coupled with a growing economic crisis, led Egypt’s rulers to realign their regime with the United States, inaugurating a relationship consecrated in the Camp David accords of 1978.

US economic aid and IMF loans were used as levers to win support for opening up these economies to global markets, superseding the import-substitution model of industrial development. They therefore became dependent on imports, and repeated balance-of-payments crises only deepened their dependence on IMF-organized loans, and thus their acceptance of their associated conditions—including the whole package of neoliberal reform dubbed “structural adjustment.”

The ability of regimes such as Mubarak’s in Egypt, and later Ben Ali’s in Tunisia, to implement these programs while containing the resulting social turmoil was, indeed, a major factor in their usefulness to Washington. The collapse of the USSR and the end of Cold War rivalries also shut down a space for other regimes to pursue a different course of national development.

The dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Iraq had been strongly supported by the United States in its invasion of Iran after the overthrow of the shah, and facilitated in its brutal war against the Kurds. But the regime was still predicated partly on Arab nationalism and heavy state involvement in the economy, and the moderation of hostilities with Iran meant that Iraq’s usefulness was drawing to an end. Its invasion of Kuwait in 1991, in what was partly an attempt to resolve its growing debt crisis, demonstrated the unreliability of the regime.

By contrast, America’s loyal dictatorships, led by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, looked to US intervention—and were rewarded in their support for the subsequent US-led war with major debt cancellations.

STRONG STATES, STRONG MARKETS

The 1991 Gulf War was a pivotal moment in the development of US policy. There would be no further tolerance of the remnants of Arab nationalism, or of the statist economic policies linked to it. In the aftermath of the short war, Iraq was caged and depleted by a UN-authorized sanctions regime. The “New World Order,” as George H. W. Bush called it, was one in which the major global battles were no longer those of Cold War ideology, but rather the new struggle to incorporate the Third World into world markets and defeat sources of instability, such as “Islamic terrorism” or the drug trade.

At the same time, international economic institutions such as the G7 were expanded, and the vast markets of Russia were opened up.⁵⁴ In the Middle East, trade agreements bolstered political alliances, as when the United States encouraged the development of so-called Qualifying Industrial Zones in Jordan and Egypt, the products of which would be given free access to US markets, provided a proportion of the inputs came from Israel.⁵⁵

The Bush administration’s 2003 war on Iraq was sold, among other things, as a death-blow to dictatorship in the region. A “free market” state built on the ashes of the Ba’ath regime would be linked to the spread of free trade in the region through the Middle East Free Trade Area. By opening up its markets, the Middle East could enjoy the benefits of globalization, while the eradication of poverty would extinguish the sources of terrorism and other regional problems.⁵⁶ With such strong growth, social peace would follow and governments could relent in their use of repression and wind down their overly centralized bureaucracies.

This vision was just as much of a mirage as the infamous weapons of mass destruction: strong markets, experience might have taught US planners, require strong states. Nonetheless, the administration invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the apparatus of “democracy promotion,” which linked the liberalization of the state to the liberalization of the economy. Even as the US government cultivated its valued relationships with regional dictators, it sought to plant a foot gingerly in the civil societies that might one day challenge these despotisms, and guide them in a pro-market direction. Such was the basis upon which the Obama administration attempted to respond to the Arab Spring.

President Obama’s speech to the United Nations in May 2011 stressed that the US would mobilize funding for Arab states to help both their economic and political reforms along these lines.⁵⁷ British prime minister David Cameron’s notable speech to the Kuwaiti national assembly in February of that year had also invoked just this coupling of “political and economic reform.”⁵⁸ And money spoke, too. The Institute of International Finance, representing the world’s major financial institutions, declared in May 2011 that the priority of the post-Mubarak and post-Ben Ali regimes in Egypt and Tunisia should be “deepening and accelerating structural economic reforms … fostering entrepreneurship, investment, and market-driven growth.”⁵⁹

In cooperation with allied governments and international financial institutions, therefore, the United States developed the Deauville Partnership with Arab Countries in Transition, launched at the G8 summit in May 2011, through which loan packages are offered to incoming Arab governments if they accept privatization, subsidy cuts, public-sector wage freezes, and deregulation.⁶⁰ This package has been implemented in a range of countries, from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen and Libya. In Tunisia, for example, where a parliamentary democracy has been stabilized, the resulting government, headed by a moderate Islamist Ennahda party, worked to implement the Deauville agenda against considerable institutional resistance in Tunisia—even at the cost of losing its popular base and allowing the former regime party to gain office.⁶¹

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood–linked Freedom and Justice Party, which won the 2011 parliamentary elections, also attempted to implement the program and access the associated loans. This was highly controversial within the country, since the military-led government that took over immediately after Mubarak’s downfall rejected the package on the ground that the conditions attached represented an abridgement of Egyptian sovereignty. Further, the Muslim Brothers had seemed to be critical of such measures before attaining office. Before Mohamed Morsi won the presidency in 2011, they had criticized the interim government’s budget, which had imposed cuts. On taking office, however, they retained the officials behind the budget and attempted to implement the same reforms, cutting fuel subsidies and other budgets in the face of strikes and protests.⁶²

Ultimately, these protests fused with a growing rebellion against the authoritarianism of the new system, in which the armed forces continued to be unleashed on protesters, generating a secularist backlash against the Islamists and a broader promilitary reaction. This was the context in which the Egyptian military launched its coup, putting General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in charge, and beginning a concerted killing spree and judicial roundup of activists.⁶³

General el-Sisi’s government was welcomed in Washington and offered some relief to worried financial institutions. It began to implement many of the measures that the IMF wanted, including slashing fuel subsidies, which caused petrol and natural gas prices to rise by 70 percent. In an article headlined, “IMF Cozies Up to Egypt amid Economic Reform,” the Wall Street Journal reported that the reform package “was a major political risk because it dramatically increased living costs for the poor.” Nonetheless, with a series of massacres under the regime’s belt, “the changes went into effect without causing serious unrest.”⁶⁴

The American empire had promised the Middle East a “new partnership,” drawing on the longstanding idiom of universal rights linked to free markets. Arguably, it would have been strengthened from a certain perspective, its international legitimacy boosted, had it chosen to support the democratizing processes. But the economic reforms that it sought—opening up service industries to international investors while attacking the living standards of the poor—proved to be fundamentally incompatible with popular rule. The dictatorship of “open-minded” elites remained indispensable.

LATIN AMERICA: THE THREE PHASES OF EMPIRE

Among the mass of material released by WikiLeaks since 2010 is a series of documents that provide jarring insights into US foreign policy in Latin America. From Honduras to Venezuela, Haiti to Ecuador, the United States appears to have an inbuilt predilection for dictators—and a distaste for democratic government—in its own “backyard.” The documents both collectively and, at times, individually, illuminate the strategic reasoning behind such preferences.

Yet, in Latin America at least, US support for dictatorship is far from being as common as it was in previous phases of the empire. Where once dictators were the bulwark of regional stability, they now emerge chiefly as a mode of crisis management. They are the exception rather than the rule for American strategy in the region. This is partly because the old oligarchies that the US used to rely on as allies have been transformed or replaced through neoliberal modernization. This transition is worthy of some consideration.

US support for dictatorships in Latin America is vividly illustrated by the WikiLeaks cables relating to three countries in particular: Haiti, Chile, and Honduras. They enable an understanding of the historical context that has motivated changing US strategies.

The history of US empire and its relationship to dictatorships in Latin America falls into three broad phases, each corresponding to its own imperial moment. The first is that signaled by the “Monroe Doctrine,” whereby the United States claimed a strategic preeminence against colonial rivals in South America—a period reaching its zenith with the colonial turn of 1898, in which the United States first claimed formal colonies in its battle with Spain. The United States was still an up-and-coming economic power and, for much of the period, still expanding its territorial claims in North America. By the 1890s, it had defeated Native American opposition and closed the frontier, and was undertaking a longing look abroad for new territories, just as it developed a serious naval capacity. In this period, the US Marines were the main body used to impose American political authority on countries such as Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua. Once in control, they developed national security apparatuses to protect friendly client regimes. This lasted effectively until the “Good Neighbor” doctrine outlined by President Franklin Roosevelt, in which the US foreswore military intervention in Latin American states.

A new phase was opened up by the Cold War, in which the United States sought to encourage regimes to develop an industrial base and a prosperous middle class that could sustain stable political authority without creating an opening for leftist movements. This was linked to the development of a global series of institutions known collectively by the name Bretton Woods, after the location of the conference at which they were launched. These included a global monetary system in which currencies were pegged to the gold standard, and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, set up to enable the development of world trade. The prevailing orthodoxy was that national states could intervene extensively in economic affairs to support and develop productive industry. In this period, the US intervened frequently in Latin American affairs, but much less through the traditional military means than through covert CIA-coordinated interventions to bolster the national security apparatuses of friendly governments, and to sabotage movements and governments that threatened US interests.

The third phase was signaled by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system amid a global economic crisis, and the American adaptation to defeat in Vietnam and a series of related crises in its rule. The outcome, following a protracted and violent process of reorganization, was a form of rule predicated on the liberalization of markets, capital controls, and regulations on finance and labor. Rather than encouraging the state-coordinated development of industry, the IMF pursued “structural adjustment,” using debt as a mechanism to incorporate Latin American states into the global economy. Market dependency would exert its own disciplinary mechanisms, as unfriendly policies could be “punished” by capital flight, or ruled out of bounds by global institutions. This involved reorganizing national elites, reducing the power of protectionist oligarchies, and—once leftist movements had been defeated by a tornado of CIA-orchestrated violence—encouraging them to rule through parliamentary institutions. With some outstanding exceptions, such as Plan Colombia and the Venezuelan coup, the United States was largely able to withdraw from military and paramilitary interventions, and let markets do the talking.

Phase I: The “Monroe Doctrine”

The Latin American continent and the Caribbean islands had long been regarded as America’s “backyard”—a colloquial expression of the doctrine outlined by US president James Monroe in 1823, which stated that any European intervention in these territories would be regarded by the US as an “unfriendly act.”

This was arguably hubristic, given that the United States lacked the naval capacity to enforce the doctrine at this point. But it expressed the proprietorial attitude to South America that would define US policy. Just as the United States was expanding westward, it hoped to expand to its south—and to do so, it would have to break the grip of the European colonial empires. In the meantime, American capital penetrated markets in Cuba, Brazil, Nicaragua, and beyond. And by 1890, with westward overland expansion almost completed, it began to construct a much larger navy for overseas gains. A victorious war with the Spanish Empire in 1898 won it control of Cuba and inaugurated a period of frantic military activism, saber-rattling, invasions, and occupations in Honduras, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Thus was the “backyard” initially secured.⁶⁵

The administration of Woodrow Wilson, over two terms from 1913 to 1921, was the most belligerent in establishing a “right” of US military intervention in Latin America, occupying both Nicaragua and Haiti. Haiti had always troubled the United States. Its revolutionary victory over colonial France in 1804 rattled slave-owners, terrified that the example of free black men would ignite a struggle in the south to break the spine of America’s race system. Washington refused to acknowledge the country’s independence, and even considered annexing the island. Like so much in the hemisphere, Haiti was chiefly of interest to the United States as potential property. It menaced Haiti repeatedly, with the deployment of its navy to “protect American lives and property,” while Haitians could only dread the victory of an expansionist slave state behemoth to the north. But it was the occupation of 1915 that decisively involved the US in the government, politics, and economy of Haiti. This was just one of many regional exertions of power that President Woodrow Wilson, a reforming Democrat elected in 1912, would undertake. The US had already occupied Nicaragua in 1912, and after Wilson took office in 1913, he began a campaign of intervention in the Mexican Revolution. Later, against his re-election promises, he would lead the United States into participation in the charnel house of World War I. Wilson was acting in a context of rising US power, already signified by its success in the Spanish-American War and its acquisition of formal colonies in Central America and the Philippines—a venture he fervently supported. US troops had been sent to Panama and Honduras, and Cuba had been repeatedly occupied since being won from Spain in 1898. As a Southern patrician and white supremacist, Wilson strongly believed both in segregation and in America’s destiny as a global empire, which he believed should take up its share of what Kipling would call the “white man’s burden.”

The immediate purpose of the 1915 intervention was to put down a popular revolution that had ousted and executed the pro-American dictator Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The justification for the mission was that order had to be restored so that the situation would not destabilize the world system. This might have been a concern, although there were others. US investments were at risk if the revolution began to expropriate property owners. But the larger picture was that the United States faced growing competition from European powers for influence in the island—and US policy since the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 had been to treat the Caribbean islands as American property, to be shielded from European penetration. The United States regarded Haitians as children, just as they had Cubans and Filipinos when they had won those territories from Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898. It was therefore quite normal for General Smedley Butler to claim that the people of Haiti were American “wards,” who would benefit from a period of tutelage—even if some 11,500 had been killed as a result of the invasion and occupation.⁶⁶ The United States “stabilized” the country by engaging in ruthless “hunt-and-kill” expeditions and decimating the opposition, and subsequently began to restructure the country. A new gendarmerie was constructed, modeled on the US Marine Corps, and the population conscripted into forced labor. By the time the US had left the country in 1934, under the rubric of Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy, a brutal pro-business, pro-US regime had been successfully pioneered. From this point on, the United States was able to satisfy its interests by supporting a succession of dictatorships, most notably that of the notorious François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and his son Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”).

Other interventions were less intensive but equally presumptuous. For example, when US interests were threatened by the Mexican Revolution⁶⁷ against the gerontocratic dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, Wilson intervened twice. The bulk of American foreign direct investments were held in Mexico, and the US investors had a big stake in Mexican timber yards, mines, and farms. More generally, the United States preferred a business-friendly Mexico to one driven in a populist or radical direction. Hence, when Wilson decided that the revolution had run “out of control,” he decided to intervene, ostensibly to support the moderate, liberal wing of the revolution. This faction, far from being delighted with US backing, denounced it as a manifestation of yanqui imperialism.⁶⁸

Phase II: From Good Neighbors to the Cold War

This policy of occupying Latin American countries, giving the Monroe Doctrine a substance it had not acquired during the incumbency of the president whose name it bore, was successful enough in creating reliable client regimes for the United States to be able to withdraw from many of its commitments during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, under the auspices of his “Good Neighbor” policy. At any rate, as the US was gradually learning, indirect control through friendly regimes and market access was preferable in most cases to direct occupation. As Walter LaFeber argued: “The United States had hit upon a solution to its traditional dilemma of how to inject force to stop revolutions without having a long-term commitment of US troops. The answer seemed to be to use native, US-trained forces that could both pacify and protect the country.”⁶⁹

US domination in the postwar era thus tended to take the form of shoring up a network of authoritarian regimes aligned to US interests, or overthrowing governments that were not so aligned. In place of direct occupation, they negotiated with regimes to establish military bases where there was a strategic interest for the United States. In the Caribbean, the slow diminution of British rule opened opportunities for US penetration. The region was rich with resources, had abundant cheap labor, and was geographically adjacent to the Panama Canal—built with US capital, under conditions of social and racial segregation, to facilitate imports to the United States. US planners could hardly wait to nudge the limeys out of the way and start planting bases in these islands. Where they could, they co-opted anticolonial leaders; where that was not possible, they applied relentless pressure. The Monroe Doctrine had reached the zenith of its influence.

From the point of view of US capital, this was ideal. US investors had brought industrial expertise that had transformed the production of fruit and sugar and the extraction of raw materials into immense, centralized productive enterprises. One effect of this was to drive small farmers and peasants off the land, filling the urban centers with willing employees. Combined with the powerful security apparatuses built by the US Marines, this centralization of economic power consolidated an economic oligarchy that had little incentive to respond to popular demands. And if the urban working and middle classes combined with peasants to pursue reforms, the United States had the means to obstruct them. In a global context of Cold War antagonism between the United States and the USSR, the former could defend renewed intervention as a means of resisting the aggressive, imperialist Soviet expansion.

Events in Guatemala in 1954 vividly illustrate this dynamic. The country’s ruling class had long depended on an essentially feudal system of control over its workforce, with labor and vagrancy laws empowering the narrow oligarchy that owned most of the land. The system was close to slavery. A postwar wave of revolt and reform began to enfranchise labor, and the 1950 elections delivered power to the left-wing Jacobo Árbenz. It would be hard to overstate Washington’s panicked reaction. A group of senators led by Lyndon B. Johnson fulminated about “international Communism”—a “new type of imperialism.” It was alleged in a House resolution that the Russians had violated the Monroe Doctrine, to which there could only be one response: war. In due course, US bombs brought down the elected government and imposed the anticommunist dictator Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas as president. The profits of the United Fruit Company, as well as the position of the country’s ruling class, were thereby protected.⁷⁰

In principle, the United States favored liberal democratic governance against the reactionary oligarchies. In principle, it was on the side of progress. And in a long-term view of US interests, it could be argued that developing local industries, breaking the oligarchies, and consolidating a broad middle class as a basis for stable democracy and consumer markets was a good idea. In practice, whatever mild steps the empire took in this direction were almost always subverted by its deeper commitment to profitable investment conditions. Consider Kennedy’s “Alliance for Progress.” This was supposed to open an era of liberal magnanimity in which a Democratic administration furnished Latin American states with vital aid in exchange for benign reform, such as the redistribution of land, the break-up of monopolies, and the mitigation of poverty. In fact, pro-US oligarchies and US firms preferred to use the money to intensify the productivity of their land, invest in updating their technologies, and leave the challenge of poverty-reduction to the miraculous powers of the economic growth that would ensue.

Where Kennedy did support reformers, he usually came to regret it. For example, in the Dominican Republic, the United States had long supported the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo—an extreme kleptocrat who took control of most of the country’s resources but preserved the political stability desired by American governments. After his assassination, elections were held in which Juan Bosch ran as a reformist candidate. The United States backed him, assuming that he would privatize the former dictator’s immense possessions. Instead, he preserved them as a public asset, and incurred the mobilization first of the oligarchs and their military supporters, then of the United States. The ensuing period of coup and counter-coup, backed by US troops, took thousands of lives and was finally concluded only when the Johnson administration engineered the accession of Trujillo’s former vice president, who duly privatized the country’s wealth and opened the economy to US investors.⁷¹

Coterminously, the United States invested in a program of military training intended to bolster the internal security apparatuses of Latin American dictatorships. This was a necessary counter-strike against the wave of radicalization already evident in Guatemala, and given extra force when the Cuban Revolution of 1959 removed the major local prize of the Spanish-American war from the American sphere of influence. A wave of right-wing military coups began, starting with Brazil in 1964 and concluding with Argentina in 1976. The apex of this reactionary wave was Augusto Pinochet’s coup in Chile, which essentially converted the country into a laboratory of neoliberalism under the guidance of experts from the University of Chicago. A range of institutions, from the State Department to the CIA, worked on the program, out of which emerged the notorious death squads whose cumulative body-count reached such staggering proportions throughout the 1970s and 1980s.⁷²

This was particularly important in the context of defeat for the US in Vietnam, which made direct military intervention in most circumstances impossible. Only in Grenada in 1982 was a direct invasion attempted, to overthrow the leftist government of Maurice Bishop. This tiny Caribbean island represented no vital interests of the United States, let alone posing the “communist” threat that was invoked. But Reagan’s intervention sent a clear message: a “New Right” administration had taken power in Washington and was openly at war with leftist movements in Latin America. In Nicaragua, the US-aligned Somoza dictatorship, despite controlling a security apparatus created and sustained over decades by its US patron, was overthrown by the popular Sandinista movement. In El Salvador, a similar popular movement of peasants and workers was poised to overthrow the country’s oligarchs. The Reagan administration characterized this as outright Soviet aggression and embarked on an extensive program of recruiting, training, and arming death squads from bases in Honduras. The CIA supplied centralized intelligence systems based in both Honduras and Panama, providing crucial information to the killers. In Nicaragua, the Contras—as the death squads were collectively known—killed approximately 50,000 people in their offensive. In El Salvador, the civil war killed up to 80,000, although the evidence suggests that the country’s oligarchs were prepared for an all-out “cleansing” operation that would have annihilated up to half a million people.

Phase III: Human rights and neoliberal reform

It was in this bleak and bloody period that the old anticommunist saws of the Cold War began to be displaced by the language of human rights. The Reagan administration claimed that its concern in Latin America was precisely to establish regimes that respected universal rights. In El Salvador, it declared that it was backing the Christian Democrats as an anticommunist alternative to the fascist ARENA party, which would go on to attain civilian rule. In Haiti, it declared that its support for the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier was at an end and that it would favor free elections. In Nicaragua, after years of Contra violence, it eventually turned to Violeta Chamorro to defeat the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections, with substantial US assistance—and the threat of economic blockade had she lost. Taken alongside its decision to ditch the Marcos regime in the Philippines, Foreign Affairs hailed such developments as a “turnaround on human rights.”⁷³ Nevertheless, in both Nicaragua and El Salvador it was the death squads that won the day, ensuring the continued dominance of the old ruling classes. In Haiti, the eventual success of the popular candidate, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in the 1990 elections was quickly overturned by génocidaires in a US-supported coup the following year. Aristide was not allowed to return to office until 1994, when he had agreed to implement the agenda of the opponent he had defeated in the elections. In each case, the US was able to accept some form of democratic rule only after the old dictatorships had proved unfit for their purpose—and only once popular forces opposed to the business classes supported by the United States had been brutally defeated.

The wave of violence in the 1980s coincided with the drastic economic restructuring of Latin American societies, for which the first major stimulus was the so-called “Volcker Shock.” International banks had lent copiously to South American dictatorships during the 1970s, leaving them vulnerable to US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker’s decision to drive up interest rates. Very soon, most Latin American export income was consumed by debt repayments, leaving the region dependent on bailouts from the IMF. The conditions attached to these bailouts included drastic “structural adjustments,” along the lines implemented in Chile under the guidance of the “Chicago Boys.” The prescriptions of the IMF involved the by now familiar mix of privatization, subsidy cuts, wage restraint, and consummation of the long-term transition to “export-led growth,” in which domestic consumption was suppressed so that goods could be produced for export. In key dictatorships like Haiti, aid and loans were similarly used to open up agricultural and industrial production to US capital. Amy Wilentz summarizes the strategic goals of the United States in Haiti as, “one, a restructured and dependent agriculture that exports to US markets and is open to American exploitation, and the other, a displaced rural population that not only can be employed in offshore US industries in the towns, but is more susceptible to army control.”⁷⁴

Despite the successes of neoliberal reform and the defeats suffered by the Left, the mitigation of Reagan-era violence, the normalization of parliamentary democracy, and the slow displacement of the power of the old oligarchies gradually created opportunities for new popular forces. In the context of the “war on terror,” the United States focused its energies on expanding its dominion in the Middle East, and several Latin American countries were able to begin the slow process of extricating themselves from US domination. Under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela defeated a US-backed coup d’état and embarked on an agenda of social reform funded by energy revenues. He was soon joined by a raft of other leftist leaders, who consolidated their regional strength through the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA). The United States, whatever it attempted to do in Venezuela, generally refrained from sustained military or proxy intervention in the continent—with the singular exception of Colombia—preferring instead to use the “democracy promotion” institutions that it had been refining since the 1980s to support pro-US currents.⁷⁵ But where it did intervene decisively, in Haiti, it was careful to use a multilateral agency and a UN mandate to legalize the post-coup situation. As violent as the post-Aristide regime frequently was, the US was anxious to normalize an electoral politics without Aristide, his Fanmi Lavalas party, and the popular politics they represented. This approach was authoritarian, undemocratic, and brutal—but it was a far cry from the near-genocidal “low-intensity warfare” of the 1980s.

HAITI: DICTATORSHIP, DEATH SQUADS, AND SWEATSHOPS

During the Cold War, an apocryphal remark attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt about America’s client dictatorship in Nicaragua was assumed to sum up America’s attitude to despotism in its “backyard”: “Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”⁷⁶ This off-the-cuff quip went to prove that if a dictatorship could be relied upon in the struggle against communism, it could enjoy the protection of the leader of the “Free World.” In fact, the story goes deeper—as the example of Haiti shows.

Among the 2011 leaks of State Department cables was a bundle of documents relating to the Caribbean island-state and American diplomacy there. The documents show the United States frantically trying to protect the interests of US corporations, anxious to prevent the return of the democratically elected leader ousted in a US-backed coup, and in league with sweatshop elites who used the police as their own private mercenary force.

One batch of cables shows that the US worked overtime to prevent the return to Haiti of the “turbulent priest” Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the elected president who had been deposed in 2004 by a US-backed coup d’état.⁷⁷ During that operation, Aristide had been “escorted” out of the country by US Navy Seals in what he described as a “modern-day kidnapping.” In its aftermath, a UN occupation force—the United Nations Stabilisation Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH)—was quickly assembled and the coup regime consecrated in power.

In the following years, US officials were worried that Aristide might gain popular “traction” and return, thus threatening the “democratic consolidation” resulting from the coup. The United States was particularly worried by the “resurgent populist and anti-market economy political forces” that might be unleashed if Aristide were able to return. It therefore applied pressure for MINUSTAH to stay and help realize “core [US government] interests in Haiti.” In turn, the head of the MINUSTAH mission, Edmond Mulet, asked the US government to press legal charges against Aristide to prevent him from returning to Haiti.⁷⁸

Another batch of documents shows that the US embassy was complicit with major US companies in lobbying the Haitian government against an increase in the minimum wage.⁷⁹ Haitian wages being among the lowest in the world, there was a political movement of the low-paid and unemployed to legislate for a higher wage. US diplomats pressured President René Préval to intervene and prevent the political situation from spiraling out of control. But Préval’s intervention, agreeing a staged increase in the minimum wage, was then scorned by the US embassy as not reflecting “economic reality”—the reality in question presumably being that Haiti’s growth and export strategy depended upon an abundance of extremely cheap labor.

Other revelations disclosed the nature of the elites supported by the United States, and the brutal methods of repression they used after the 2004 coup in order to break the political spine of Aristide’s popular supporters and the Fanmi Lavalas party. Despite killing thousands through the use of its own paramilitaries—successors to the death squads that had tormented Haiti in 1991—the post-coup government could not be sure of maintaining political order. Business elites therefore supplied lethal weapons to units of the Haitian National Police force and effectively deployed them as a private army to suppress political opposition.⁸⁰

All of these facts—America’s support for an anti-democratic coup, its alliance with sweatshop owners and murderous elites, its efforts to stop Haiti’s elected leader returning—can only be made sense of in light of America’s evolving strategy in its “backyard.” For the history of US-backed dictators covers all of the three phases outlined at the beginning of this chapter. As we have seen, this history was initiated by the intervention of US forces in 1915, whose first task was to build a new client regime. At this stage, the US still prioritized direct territorial rule. It continued through a new phase in the Cold War, as the US sought stable regimes that could “modernize” while preventing the Left from taking power. Thus, while the US no longer needed to rule Haiti through direct military control, since it had already constructed a national security apparatus, it indulged, armed, and supported regimes such as that of “Papa Doc” Duvalier and then that of his son “Baby Doc.” In the case of the former, this extended to direct military intervention to protect the dictatorship.

US support for the conservative “Papa Doc” Duvalier had begun in the elections of 1957, when he stood against the wealthy French-backed candidate Louis Déjoie. Duvalier won the elections convincingly, but quickly established a brutal regime based on the deployment of his own paramilitaries, the Tontons Macoutes. And within two years, as Déjoie stood ready to organize an insurgency against the dictatorship, US Marines teamed up with Duvalier’s forces to crush the rebellion, as Duvalier’s Macoutes began rounding up suspects. US actions were justified by claims that the uprising had been organized by the Castro regime, but there was little evidence of this: Duvalier had simply proved his mastery for manipulating the US obsession with communism to reinforce the support America was already inclined to give him.⁸¹ In the aftermath, Duvalier disbanded all other law enforcement apparatuses and invested their authority in the paramilitaries, which subsequently terrorized the population with rape and massacres.

For a brief period during the Kennedy administration, Duvalier’s lavish way of spending US-supplied money, and his decision to “re-inaugurate” himself as Haiti’s ruler in 1961, led the US government to consider him an unreliable ally. As Edwin Martin, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, put it, Duvalier “would move in whatever direction [suited] his purpose in maintaining himself in power.”⁸² Kennedy debated military intervention to remove him. Indeed, plans were developed to bring Déjoie into contact with leading New York business circles who would provide funding for a coup, in exchange for access to Haitian markets and government contracts.⁸³ By this time, however, Duvalier had entrenched his power through the very bloody actions that US aid had paid for. No action was taken, and while aid was reduced, it was not eliminated. The Johnson administration resumed normal relations and increased aid.

A new phase was inaugurated by the overthrow of “Baby Doc” Duvalier in 1986, and consolidated when Aristide was allowed to take power in 1994. The Reagan administration had continued the policy of Nixon and Carter in supporting the younger Duvalier, on the pretext that he was an anticommunist regional presence. In fact, by this time the “red menace” had some substance, in that there was a strong leftist movement in Haiti. The Lavalas movement—a populist alliance growing out of the slums of Port-au-Prince—aimed to uproot the system of paramilitary rule, as well as the economic policies benefiting the country’s elite of sweatshop owners. This movement responded particularly to the passionate speeches of a priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Lavalas evidently inspired panic in the Reagan administration. It sought to adjust its posture toward Haiti, sporadically withholding aid and offering mealy-mouthed opposition to government violence. However, this was not to be a case where the United States could tolerate a democratic transition. The younger Duvalier had been making efforts to incorporate Haiti into global markets along the neoliberal lines advanced by Washington, but Aristide’s movement was threatening to undo it all. Thus, when Aristide won office in 1990 with 67 percent of the vote, compared to just 14 percent for the World Bank economist and US favorite Marc Bazin, CIA-trained death squads descended on the country and initiated three years of terror that only ended when the US government persuaded Aristide to accept the political agenda of his opponent and govern along the lines prescribed by the IMF and World Bank. He was compelled to accept a structural adjustment program that included further cuts to the wages of Haiti’s already extremely poor workers. As UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi told Haitian radio in 1996, the US would accept that political change was necessary, but when it came to economic power, the elites should know “they have the sympathy of Big Brother, capitalism.”⁸⁴

But Aristide’s reluctant acquiescence was not sufficient, and the attempt to implement structural adjustment created divisions in the Lavalas movement between a “moderate” wing close to Washington and those aligned with Aristide, who tried to dilute the program. Aristide’s wing of the Lavalas movement had not sufficiently adjusted to the political defeat wrought by death squads, nor satisfactorily internalized the new “free market” dispensation. Its ongoing failure to do so was, as had become standard US practice by this point, linked to a critique of the regime based on its human rights record. The journalist Amy Wilentz, observing the development of this line of attack, remarked on how extraordinary it was that the United States had suddenly developed a concern for Haitian human rights that had eluded them for practically the entire period of dictatorship. Nevertheless, the growing movements against the sweatshop owners and backlash against structural adjustment were, to some extent, channeled by Aristide. After he was re-elected as president in 2000, business groups began to organize a political opposition alliance called the “Group of 184,” which presented itself as a broad civil society coalition. Together with groups such as Convergence Démocratique, they attempted to annul the election results. By 2004, with the support of the Bush administration, a coup against Aristide had begun. He was soon being told by French and American leaders to resign and was escorted at gunpoint out of the country as American, Canadian, and French troops occupied the country.⁸⁵

This did not mean that the United States was intent on another period of outright dictatorship. Under a multilateral occupation that bore the seal of the United Nations, they instead imposed an emergency government, followed by elections, and relied upon UN forces to suppress the Lavalas movement—demonized as “gangs.” As long as Aristide was out of the country, and his political movement neutralized and kept under control, carefully managed elections could be allowed to take place. The meaning of ongoing US intervention in Haiti was not that it required the political rule of a dictatorship, but simply that sufficient violence had not yet been inflicted on the population to discipline them into voting for the new market regime.

CHILE: THE KISSINGER CABLES

In April 2013, Wikileaks published 1.7 million US Department of State diplomatic and intelligence records from a period when Henry Kissinger was US secretary of state: the “Kissinger cables.”⁸⁶ These cables provide a unique insight into the role of the State Department in managing the difficulties of the US empire in this period. Kissinger’s singularly cynical style of operating aside, this was clearly a period of crisis and transition, and the extraordinarily violent US interventions in this period can be understood in this context.

The immediate harvest from a first appraisal of these documents included a number of juicy, headline-grabbing morsels. These include, for example, Kissinger’s meeting with the Turkish foreign minister in 1975. The US Congress had just imposed an arms embargo on Turkey in response to the latter’s bloody invasion of Cyprus. Yet the cables show that Kissinger proposed various means of circumventing the embargo. Told that his proposals were illegal, he remarked: “Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, ‘The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.’”⁸⁷ A cynical witticism of this kind might hardly merit attention were it not for the evidence that Kissinger and the administration had already worked to instigate and enable Turkey’s invasion, and did indeed subsequently work to circumvent the arms embargo.⁸⁸

In 1973, a CIA-backed coup overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and installed in power the military dictator General Pinochet. The most cynical documents relate to the US government’s secret response to the coup that complement previous waves of declassified cables accumulated by the National Security Archive at George Washington University⁸⁹ as well as the findings of the Hinchey Report on the CIA’s activities in the coup conducted by the National Intelligence Council in 2000.⁹⁰ The facts show that the United States played a consistent role in sabotaging the administration of the elected leftist Salvador Allende, and in its ultimate overthrow.

Until 1970, Chile was a relatively stable and conservative society, where the Left was comfortably excluded from power. Yet, in the face of a rigid oligarchy that refused to accede to reforms, the Left gained a slight plurality in 1970 and secured the support of some traditionally centrist political groups. Allende thus gained a mandate to govern and implement his reform agenda. He spoke in Marxist language, in a continent where paranoid anticommunism furnished the language of the entrenched oligarchies and their justification for repression.

The immediate response of the Nixon administration was to begin looking at possibilities for a coup against the government. Kissinger instructed the CIA to keep the pressure on “every Allende weak spot in sight.” Nixon, in a meeting with CIA director Richard Helms, authorized a program of sabotage against the regime: “Make the economy scream.”⁹¹ Kissinger then embarked on a plan to kidnap and dispose of the leader of the Chilean military, who was known to oppose army meddling in electoral politics. The hope was that it would panic the Chilean parliament into denying Allende his right to take office.

Plan B—“Track II,” as it was called—was to engineer a coup against Allende then re-stage elections, in which he would be defeated. It was “firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup,” as the CIA wrote to the Track II group in Santiago. Weapons were ferried to the country in the hope that factions of the military could be signed up to such a coup effort.⁹² American companies with holdings in Chile, such as ITT and Pepsi-Cola, were drafted to the government’s aid—ITT helping to route US aid to anti-Allende factions. Meanwhile, international financial institutions were encouraged to boycott Chile, and traditional aid to US corporations investing in the country was suspended—and thus, indeed, was the economy made to scream.

Had it been up to the Nixon administration, the Chilean military would have been settling Chile’s political affairs long before 1973. However, even with such extensive interference, a coup might not have materialized had it not been for the fact that Allende’s agenda met ferocious opposition from Chile’s business community and sections of its middle class. Allende may have increased his vote from 36 percent of electors in 1970 to 44 percent in 1973, but the centrist parties that his coalition depended on had shifted back to supporting the Right.

On September 11, 1973, forces led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government, bombed the presidential palace, and began rounding up members of the opposition, who were then tortured and executed en masse. On September 12, General Pinochet contacted the US government—using a proxy “in view of delicacy of matter of contact at this moment in time”—and informed them that the new regime would break relations with “communist bloc” countries, and sought to “strengthen and add to traditional friendly ties with the US.”⁹³ The next day, the American reply welcomed “General Pinochet’s expression of junta desire for strengthened ties between Chile and US … the USG wishes make clear [sic] its desire to cooperate with the military junta and to assist in any appropriate way. We agree that it is best initially to avoid too much public identification between us.”⁹⁴ On September 20, the US received a message from the junta requesting special forces training for the following objectives:

A. Psychological warfare.

B. Organization and operations of special forces.

C. Organization and operations of civil affairs.⁹⁵

In the circumstances, the chief goal of the Chilean military was to suppress and control the civilian population. The response from Washington, after a few weeks of pondering, was a provisional “no,” due to the potential for negative publicity—but note the implied approval of the regime’s ends: “[I]t would be better for us if [the Chilean government] would meet these requirements at this time through other channels.”⁹⁶ Pinochet, in a subsequent conversation with State Department officials, conveyed his understanding and sensitivity toward the need for “caution in development of overly close identification.” Publicity on US involvement in delivering humanitarian supplies was welcome, but they should keep “pretty quiet” about “any cooperation in other fields.” The State Department agreed, mentioning military assistance such as “mine detector gear” as an “example of the other kind of thing.” In fact, the State Department continued to lobby the Senate for extensive military assistance for the Chilean regime.⁹⁷

Further cables demonstrate the efforts of diplomats to reconcile the US government’s support for the regime with the global criticism the regime was incurring, particularly from the UN Human Rights Commission. “Pinochet is of course quite right about the inequity of the double standard as applied to Chile on the one hand and Cuba on the other,” stated a March 1975 telegram from Ambassador Popper in Santiago. The problem was that the Chilean image had been “tarnished in the outside world.” Pinochet may have “made a case for the need to restrict human rights temporarily” in light of the “emergency civil war situation” that had prevailed under Allende, but Chile had to “convince the doubting” with a “strong reply” to the UN Human Rights Commission.⁹⁸ For cavils such as these, Ambassador Popper was seen as a “wet” by the administration. Kissinger once sent a cable to Santiago reading: “Tell Popper to cut out the political science lectures.”⁹⁹

This was, however, only the prelude to a wave of terror conducted by the regime, the most notorious phase of which was Operation Condor, carried out by a team “structured much like a US Special Forces Team,”¹⁰⁰ and involving the dictatorship in a network of military regimes across Latin America in an international program of terror, torture, and killings aimed at eliminating leftist movements and leaders wherever they lay. The head of the Chilean secret police who organized Condor was a CIA agent during the same period.¹⁰¹

Just as important as the apparatus of terror linked to the regime, though, were its economic reforms. The role of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” in advising the Chilean government on how to reform the economy has been well documented.¹⁰² The privatization of the industries nationalized by Allende, the privatization of social security, and the opening up of the country’s assets to US investors were all recommended and implemented. More than this, however, the disruption to the old oligarchic rule represented by Allende, and the Pinochet regime’s relative autonomy from the business class, enabled the dictatorship to restructure industry in such a way as to displace the dominance of old mining and industrial capital. This was part of a global trend, as investors everywhere felt shackled by the old statist models of development. They demanded the reorganization of industry, the freeing up of the financial sector, and the opening of international markets. In place of the old economic model of “import substitution,” protecting and developing the nation’s industries to overcome dependence on imports, a new model of “export-led growth” was implemented, in which domestic consumption was suppressed so that goods could be more profitably exported abroad.¹⁰³

The WikiLeaks documents, taken together with previous historical findings, show us a US government immensely relieved by the Pinochet coup, and desperate to work with the new regime. The cables display the State Department’s cavalier attitude toward the junta’s program of mass torture and executions, while they evince an anxiety to correct any movement to the left on the dictatorship’s part.¹⁰⁴ The US was clearly prepared to collaborate with the military dictatorship in a new region-wide wave of terror, and at the very beginning of a new framework of economic power underpinning the American empire.

HONDURAS: HILLARY CLINTON AND THE DRUG LORD

the richest man in Honduras today is Miguel Facussé Barjum, a landowner, bio-fuels businessman, and major cocaine trafficker whose private security apparatus has killed dozens of rural activists—campesinos—in recent years.¹⁰⁵ Facussé and his wealthy family are a textbook instance of the kinds of oligarch who benefited most from the June 2009 military coup against the elected government of Manuel Zelaya. Since then, with the backing of the coup regime, he has escalated his bloody battle against the campesinos.

The United States, of course, has declared itself on the side of democracy in Honduras. Courtesy of the State Department cables, we know that Washington was in no doubt that a coup had taken place from the moment it happened. The US embassy in Tegucigalpa sent a cable home declaring the matter an “open and shut” case.¹⁰⁶ The arguments of the coup-mongers were efficiently taken apart in this cable, which noted that all of the allegations against Zelaya that had been used to justify his overthrow were either falsehoods, speculation, or unproven allegations, and that none of them had any “substantive validity.”

Yet the public response from US officials was strangely unclear. On the day of the coup, June 28, 2009, the United States declined to condemn what had happened, instead evasively calling on Hondurans to respect democracy. The following day, even after President Obama admitted that an “illegal” and “unconstitutional” coup had taken place, setting what he called a “terrible precedent,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton refused to comment when asked whether Zelaya should be returned to office. The State Department, when challenged, declined to refer to what had happened as a coup.¹⁰⁷ Even in late August 2009, the State Department was still pretending in its press briefings not to know that a coup had taken place.¹⁰⁸

The reason for this prevarication later became clear: the United States was going to support the new regime. The State Department had conceded that, under US law, it would not be permitted to continue to send aid to the regime if it had taken power in a military coup. But the aid continued to flow. The United States funded the Honduran military and police while they acted as death squads for the elites, despite a request from Congress to stop doing so. These forces worked side by side with Facussé’s assassins, providing him with the crucial support of a US-backed state apparatus as he went about his private, often illegal, business. WikiLeaks documents showed that the State Department had known since at least 2004 of Facussé’s cocaine profiteering, and that on at least two occasions US officials had had high-level meetings with him. One of those occasions was in 2009, while the coup was ongoing.¹⁰⁹

Moreover, the United States continued to oppose any attempt to restore genuine democratic government in Honduras. A month after the coup, Clinton expressed her ire at the former president for trying to return to his country, deeming it a “provocative” action. Subsequently, the United States blocked a resolution at the Organization of American States refusing to recognize the neutered elections organized by the coup regime.¹¹⁰ The echoes of Haiti were palpable.

What did the Obama administration dislike so much about Manuel Zelaya’s elected government that it effectively embraced what Obama had publicly decried as an “unconstitutional” coup? There were a number of things that identified him as a troublemaker. First, he had formed a close alliance with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who had already embarrassed the United States by defeating a US-supported coup attempt against him in 2002, before embarking on a process of radical reform. By incorporating the country into Chávez’s Bolivarian regional alliance, ALBA, Zeleya threatened opportunities for US investors. Second, he proposed an agenda of constitutional reform that was popular with labor and grassroots constituencies, and was in danger of gaining support in a national consultation.

The existing constitution had been drafted during a period of crisis in the Central American region, when the country had been used as a base for the CIA-sponsored death squads ravaging Nicaragua and El Salvador. Honduras had avoided the catastrophes of its neighbors in the 1980s because its weaker oligarchy and more plentiful land enabled it to deliver reforms demanded by the poor. This was assisted by US economic and military aid, offered in exchange for Honduras’s hosting of the death squads.

Nonetheless, the constitution adopted in this era was seen by most of the political class as deeply flawed—particularly the rule against presidential candidates seeking re-election, a holdover from the period when the military had more political authority. What rankled the powerful about Zelaya’s proposals for reform was who was behind them, and the nature of his project. It was clear that Zelaya saw the executive branch of government as his best bulwark against the powerful forces opposing him in the Supreme Court, Congress, and the military, as well as much of the business community. By changing the constitution, he could ensure his re-election and thereby gain time to bring Honduras into ALBA, as well as pursuing other reforms.¹¹¹

But it is also important to register what the WikiLeaks cables do not show. The US alliance with the Honduran coup was not an enthusiastic one. Nor is there evidence that the US either planned or instigated the coup, even if those who did had benefited from US funding and training. What seems to have happened is that, after an evaluation of the options, and some internal argument, the US government resolved that restoring Zelaya would be a greater evil than accepting a regime that America’s partners—the Honduran elites—evidently wanted. Further, the coup regime was careful to legitimize itself by staging new elections and giving itself a constitutional gloss, rather than simply declaring emergency military rule. The scale of violence, though not negligible, was much less than in previous coups in the region.

It also seems probable that Obama’s worry about setting a “terrible precedent” was not mere dissimulation. Any return to routine coups and military rule in Latin America would upset the relatively stable political and economic climate that the United States had been able to achieve in its hemisphere. It would threaten to reanimate revolutionary political movements in an era when the threat had largely been killed off, and poison any future resurrection of the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

The WikiLeaks cables relating to Latin American dictatorships and human rights abuses thus disclose a pattern that is quite different from that of other regions, such as the Middle East, where the US has clung tenaciously to dictatorship as its favored political form. Gradually, the phase during which the American empire required direct military rule was replaced by a phase of rule-by-proxy, bolstered by constant military and paramilitary interventions. At the time of writing, after a wave of transitional violence has enabled a process of structural adjustment and the institutionalization of free trade, there is a gradually emerging regional order in which US interventions have been rarer, usually more subtle, and ultimately supplementary to the disciplinary rule of markets.

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* The author of Chapters 1 through 3 has chosen to remain anonymous.