[April 17th marks the 50th anniversary of the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy U.S. invasions and interventions of Latin American nations, leading up to a weekend Guest Post on the Dominican Republic from a colleague, friend, and DR scholar!]
On what it would
mean to truly grapple with our history of alliances with dictators.
In this
post from almost exactly two years ago, on the anniversary of the famous
toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad, I wrote at length about the
history of American relationships to brutal dictators. I likewise dealt with
those histories in this
Saturday Evening Post column on
America’s longstanding and complex relationship to a neighboring nation to
Saddam’s Iraq, Iran. Those Middle Eastern nations and histories are of course
far from the only ones that feature American alliances with dictators—indeed,
from South
Vietnam to South
Africa to South
America, the history of American foreign policy in the 20th
century is dominated by such cozy relationships with brutal regimes and
leaders. And perhaps nowhere and in no period is that history more prominent
than in the Caribbean
and Central America in the second half of the 20th century, as
the bogeyman of Communism led the United States into alliance after alliance
with some of the period’s most violent and horrific dictatorial leaders and
governments (many of them, indeed, trained
at the School of the Americas).
For more than three
decades, Panama’s
Manuel Noriega was simply another one of those allies. Noriega trained at
the School of the Americas in the 1950s and became a CIA asset in that same
era, and he would remain in that role for more than 30 years, much of it spent
as chief of military intelligence in the brutal regime of President Omar Torrijos. When
Torrijos died in 1981, Noriega took over as president, and seems to have
brought even more blatant illegality to his administration, all while remaining
an asset and ally of the United States. It was only when the U.S. learned toward
the decade’s end that Noriega likewise had relationships with other nations and
their intelligence agencies (and with drug traffickers, but I would argue that it
was much more the former that truly offended the CIA) that the relationship
began to sour. In 1988
federal grand juries in Florida indicted Noriega on racketeering, money
laundering, and drug trafficking charges; he naturally refused extradition, and
the George H.W. Bush administration took that opportunity to invade Panama
in late December 1989. The United Nations General Assembly voted to
condemn the invasion as a “flagrant violation of international law,” but it
succeeded at capturing Noriega and installing a new U.S. ally, Guillermo
Endara, as the new president in his place.
Noriega was a
dictator and criminal, and Endara seems to have represented a real change, a
leader who truly sought to bring
democracy to Panama. Yet any explanation of the U.S. invasion which focuses
on that democratizing effect needs to grapple with the inarguable fact that for
the prior decade of Noriega’s rule—and the prior two decades of Torrijos’—the United
States maintained an alliance with the nation’s dictatorial regime instead. It
was the relationship, rather than our commitment to democracy, which changed (a
sentence which could be applied quite similarly to the Bush administration’s
other foreign war, with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq). None of that makes the goal of
a more democratic Panama any less meaningful—but that story should both center
on figures like Endara and feature the United States as a longstanding opponent
of democratization. Until we can truly begin to grapple with that American role
around the world, for at least the entire second half of the 20th
century (and, as this week’s series reflects, well before that), our sense of
both U.S. and global history will remain partial at best and blatantly
propagandistic at worst.
Last
InvasionStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other US-Latin America histories you’d highlight?
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