MAKING OF THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

Latin American has had a history of unstable democratic governments and stable authoritarian rulers. Both forms of government are inherently weak to outside influence. The difference is that almost all authoritarian rulers were backed by larger world powers. Mainly the Soviet Union and USA, in a set of proxy wars to gain influence among other countries in the Cold War.

The Soviet Union mainly funded communist revolutionaries in the Americas to have a foothold on the hemisphere. The USSR would then be able to threaten the US with nuclear strikes just like how the US was doing to the Soviets. The most famous example of this is when Fidel Castro overthrew the US backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. He was originally backed by the US until changing sides to the Soviets, which would lead the the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The fear of communist influence in the Western hemisphere would lead the US to overthrow any leader it could that showed the slightest hint of socialism, even if they held similar values. After overthrowing a possibly socialist leader the US would also take advantage of the region economically, and agree upon unequal deals to take advantage of the resources in the region.

Of the various regions we have selectively studied in class, I have found Latin America the most depressing. It could be that I knew the least about it as a region when we began the class, but nevertheless Latin America at times seems to be a case study in the worst deeds of the United States and the greatest failures of Neoliberalism.

This is partially because it seems the region has repeatedly reached for emancipation in some way and had its hopes squashed. In African examples, such as the US sponsored overthrow of the first president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and his replacement with the brutal dictator Mugabe, the example is depressing, but there is deep doubt that the original president could have surmounted the incredible odds stacked against him and his country.

In the example of Chile , which we discussed Wednesday, however, Salvador Allende entered a country with great wealth inequality but an established rule of law, which he followed, and repeatedly tried to implement policies to help the most oppressed in society. It is easy to see how he could have been successful in this aim; and yet, his policies threatened American corporate  interests and those of the Chilean military, which lead to his death and his replacement by an extremely brutal dictator, Augusto Pinochet. This example is more heartbreaking as it shows American power being used as a factor to crush the dreams of a people when they could have possibly been realized.

This pattern of failures of Neoliberalism can be seen repeatedly in Latin America. Part of the rise of Hugo Chavez from Wednesday’s lecture was the removal of price controls for food in Venezuela in return for loans from the world bank. This is a reform for economic ‘development’ that produces more upper class and middle class wealth while worsening the situation for those who had the least in society. It is as though there is no sense of collective interest, as the interests of the destitute are not counted at all in the sum total of economic development. As Galeano states in Friday’s reading on page 310, “Solidarity is considered a useless waste of energy… but the powers that be have decided to alternate the carrot and the stick .” It is discouraging to see the prevailing socio-economic philosophy to be apparently failing so many this way.

This past week we learned and discussed Latin America and the effects of colonialism and American intervention. Western intervention in developing countries has been a theme of other weeks as well. In Latin America, it was generally the United States that was intervening with political affairs. As we learned from Professor Holt’s lectures, the Bayly reading, and the Galeano reading, the United States was not always intervening on the basis of creating democracies. The U.S. also attempted to overthrow and remove democratically elected officials that they did not agree with or support. You also saw the U.S. supporting dictatorships if it meant keeping who they wanted in power and not someone they disagreed with.

When looking at Cuba, the United States on many occasions attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro. By any means necessary. For example, they attempt to kill Castro by putting LSD in his scuba mask. The United States was trying to get rid of Castro because of his communist ideals and ties to the Soviet Union, the red scare was a strong motivating factor for the U.S. Their economic intervention only strengthened those ties to the Soviet Union. The economic blockade of the US sent Cuba to rely on the U.S.S.R. Seemingly all the U.S. was trying to stop, happened because of their attempts to stop it. The U.S. wanted Castro removed and Cuba to have no ties to the Soviet Union, but instead failed at removing Castro and sent Cuba to directly rely on the Soviet Union, the opposite of what the U.S. wanted.

At the end of the Eduardo Galeano article, he lays out a series of platitudes, goals, and hopes for the future. At the top of page 337, one of these reads,

“In Argentina, the crazy women at the Plaza de Mayo shall be held up as examples of mental health because they refused to forget in a time of obligatory amnesia”

Galeano is referring to the movement known as La Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, where, despite Umbridge-esk laws against gatherings of more than three people, a group of women gathered every week to protest the activities of the military junta in power at the time. Specifically, they advocated for their children, los Desaparecidos, who disappeared during the dirty war and were never seen again.

The military coup succeeded in March of 1976, overthrowing Isabel Martínez de Perón, the third wife and successor of the democratically elected Juan Perón. Almost immediately, the new regime initiated a dirty war against the Argentine populous. It was an era of government terrorism, characterized by extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, torture, and most famously, disappearances.

The coup receives little global attention in relation to the Cold War. Its history in the 20th C. set apart from most of Latin America; in professor Holt’s lectures, Argentina was only mentioned once in response to a question. This omission is understandable. Neither Argentine government was directly supported by the US or the USSR, and the ideological conflict between communism and capitalism played a relatively small role in these events. The US Department of State was aware that a coup was on the horizon, but although the junta was right-wing, the US did not act. Argentina is an interesting counterpoint to Bayly’s discussion of the overarching themes of US interference in Latin America at the time. There was almost no financial, military, or ideological support from the superpower despite the turmoil plaguing the nation with the second largest economy in Latin America.

That is not to say Argentina was isolated. The Argentine Secret Service, along with Pinochet’s government and others, participated in Operation Condor, a US backed operation to suppress communist ideas in Latin America. They also aided in the training of the Contras in Nicaragua, a group fighting the Sandinista government with US support.

The regime persisted until 1982 when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands (aka: Malvinas), a territory of Britain to which Argentina lay claim. As Bayly mentions, the undeclared war between the two nations lasted 10 weeks and concluded in a clear British victory. The embarrassment in Argentina prompted public outrage—as my father once said to me regarding the reaction of the Argentine people, “It was a fucking military dictatorship. The one thing it was supposed to be able to do was win a war, but it couldn’t even manage that.”

My family is from Argentina; my grandparents immigrated to the United States in the early 1950s while most of the family remained in Argentina. When the 1976 coup overthrew the Perón government, my father’s cousin, Héctor Jorge, was a medical student at the University of Buenos Aires. At a time when freedom of speech was limited, Héctor spoke out against the military dictatorship and the crimes they committed. One night in 1976, while the family slept, their home was invaded and Héctor was abducted; he was never seen again. My grandfather’s sister, Irene (aka: Meri), was one of the mothers Galeano refers to who took to the Plaza de Mayo in protest. She is even depicted on the cover of a book written on the events: Circles of Madness (Circulos de Locura), by Marjorie Agosín. Our family has never learned what happened to Héctor, if he was tortured or thrown into the Atlantic to drown. Like so many others, his fate is lost. In the last days of their reign, the government destroyed an unknown quantity of records regarding their crimes against the civilians. As of 2015, nearly 9,000 cases of disappearances had been documented, but it is probable that that number does not account for thousands more victims of the regime.

This week, we are covering the Latin America region. We could see from professor Holt’s lecture and in Bayly, some of the trouble was from the America intervention. America believed the Cuban revolution created a threat to America people and so they tried to do put Cuba in a dictatorship. As in Bayly, we could know that the Latin America political had been struggled because of the intervention from America. America supported the dictatorship in Latin America because they want to take advantage of it. And because of that, there was an armed revolution which also had its origins in the Mexican revolution. A key event was the Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro in 1956 which also inspired by the armed revolution. America wants to get rid of Castrol because of his communist ideals and his relationship with the Soviet Union. Thank to professor Holt’s lecture this week, we have known more about the intervention of America to Latin America country which is Cuba. The America intervention only makes Cuba’s socialist movement became worst. They tried to remove or assassinate Castro, professor Holt told us that they tried to kill him by poisoning his diving suit. In Bayly, because of the America intervention, the economic blockade made Cuba economic dramatically go down and so they have to dependence on the USSR. And some of the trouble from America’s intervention was “The Bay of Pigs incident” and “Cuban missile crisis”.

It seems clear that again we are going to have to discuss the effects of western intervention in developing nations. This week while covering Latin America, it was evident both form Prof. Holt’s lectures and from the Bayly and Galeano readings that the region suffered greatly from western intervention. Specifically, the United States’ foreign policy long claimed to support democracy, yet the U.S. repeatedly interfered with democratically elected leaders, with whom they disagreed. For the purpose of brevity, let’s look merely at one example from Dr. Holt’s Lecture, Cuba.

Cuba is really what caused the U.S. to become so concerned with the progression of socialist experiments in Latin America. The ironic part is that Cuba’s socialist movement might have been less violent and maybe more successful were it not for American intervention. Galeano writes “It was the ceaseless aggression and the long, implacable blockade that drive the Cuban revolution to become more militarized, far removed from the model that was originally envisioned”( Galeano, 317) Instead, the U.S. repeatedly tried to kill or otherwise remove Castro, going so far as to poison his diving suit, as mentioned in Dr. Holt’s lecture. Castro then, naturally, turned to a more powerful country (the U.S.S.R.) for support. Bayly tells how the economic blockade of Cuba, established by the U.S. “drove the country towards ever-greater political dependence on the USSR.” (Bayly, 160) the result being the Cuban missile crisis and a period of diplomatic isolation that only ended in 2015.

It seems that American intervention in Latin America was so tainted by a Cold War hysteria that they ended up creating the very problems they wished to avoid. And this legacy of American intervention has left long-lasting, damage to Latin America. Damage that is still being repaired to this day.