The Latin America WikiLeaks Files | Hacker News Reader

The Latin America WikiLeaks Files

jacobinmag.com

41 pointscryoshon32 comments

As an American I am disturbed by my country's foreign policy as it relates to Latin America, largely over the last half of the 20th century. But propaganda cuts both ways. I have a hard time taking an article like this seriously when it simply hand-waves away the complete meltdown of the Venezuelan economy as a result of "right-wing student protests" and not the complete failed socialism and soft totalitarianism of Chavez.

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"In Venezuela, where a dysfunctional currency control system has generated high inflation, violent right-wing student protests seriously destabilized the country. The odds are extremely high that some of these protestors have received funding and/or training from USAID or NED, which saw its Venezuela budget increase 80 percent from 2012 to 2014."

That is not what that paragraph says though. Right-wing student protests destablized the countries != right-wing student protests lead to the meltdown of the economy. The dysfunctional currency control system mentioned in the first sentence does stand on its own. The protests came later, in the structure of the text and in reality (as far as I know).

> But propaganda cuts both ways

You are absolutely correct. But wouldn't the U.S. behave badly, people in Venezuela would perhaps have little reason to vote for soft totalitarians like Chavez.

(I also think Hitler rose to power partly because he was one of the few politicians who were willing to call BS on the Germany's WW1 debt.)

I am not actually sure this will 100% prevents rise of authoritarians (given what is going on in Hungary), however, there is some difference in ideology, and also success, if you compare Marshall doctrine to Washington consensus.

Nations get a free pass on behaving badly abroad because of nationalism. Then they get more that they bargained for. Actually, when I think of it, this dynamic is not just between states, it also happens in different social classes as well (for example, policy of being tough on unemployed or drug users, which ultimately makes things worse).

In 2002 an Irish documentary team, it seems, "accidentally" covered events surrounding the coup and countercoup of that year in Venezuala[1]. It has some unbelievable footage obtained during critical stages of the events.

I don't really know the provenance of the film, but if you take it at face value it has some fairly shocking things to say about the way propaganda and political theatre work out in practice, and touches briefly on the US role in that early attempt to unseat Chavez.

  1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhzoIcIgNrk

The article completely ignores the real reasons for US opposition to Castro, Allende, Chavez, Correa, Morales, et al. They were and are autocrats with programs of economic and social destruction. Critics are beaten and thrown in jail, wide swaths of the economy nationalized, wealth destroyed. Their economic programs lead only to empty shelves in supermarkets and widespread destitution and crime. In Venezuela, the murder rate is up 400-500% from when Chavez first took over. They can only find allies in the world among other enemies of human prosperity.

I think JFK captured the guiding principles best:

  Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill,
  that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any
  hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the
  survival and the success of liberty. [...] Let all our
  neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose
  aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let
  every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to
  remain the master of its own house.

Sometimes it's led to difficult and morally dubious decisions, like US support for Pinochet's coup against Allende in Chile. But we should consider the counterfactual. What if Allende had stayed in power? Chile would not be the beacon of stability and growth that it is today. Based on Allende's relationships with Castro and the Soviet Union, it would probably be a lot like Castro's Cuba, a society totally hollowed out by communism.

As an aside, the characterization of the situation in Greece is completely inaccurate too. Membership in the euroclub requires fiscal responsibility; governments can no longer rely on running the print presses to pay their debt. Greece continued to waste money it did not have, and was refusing the demands for budget discipline from the countries that were keeping it afloat.

No, the US supported plenty of Latin American autocrats with programs of economic and social destruction -- Noriega, Pinochet, etc. It opposed the ones it opposed for geopolitical and anti-communist ideological reasons, which are also the reasons it supported the ones it supported. Being autocrats with destructive programs wasn't a factor, except insofar as it was a positive factor in that a=corrupt autocrats are simpler to manage as pawns than leaders genuinely concerned with the interests of their people.

Communism is much more destructive than a regime like Pinochet's. And besides all of the domestic damage Allende was already doing to Chile (the Chilean Congress actually authorized the army to topple Allende), there was also the issue of Allende wanting to turn Chile into a Soviet satellite state just like Cuba. Unfortunately, there's not always morally pure option and you have to practice realpolitik.

>Communism is much more destructive than a regime like Pinochet's.

The people who voted for Allende didn't think so, and they won that election somehow.

>The issue of Allende wanting to turn Chile into a Soviet satellite state just like Cuba.

How is getting the guy killed going to make people less likely to want to ally with either the actual Soviets or with what the Soviets stood for? Look at Chavez's paranoia for an example.

>Unfortunately, there's not always morally pure option and you have to practice realpolitik.

How about this piece of realpolitik: Don't fuck up other people's democratic governments if you don't want a huge loss of reputation, moral authority and political capital.

Don't just do something! Stand there!

> The people who voted for Allende didn't think so, and they won that election somehow.

Yes. 36.6% of the population voted for him, while a combined 63.4% voted for candidates from the conservative parties. As President, Allende flat out ignored thousands of court rulings and congressional actions. The Chilean Congress itself passed a resolution calling for his ouster, by military or other means.

If it didn't have international consequences, I'd agree with you that people should be allowed to elect politicians that will run their country into the ground. But preventing any further Soviet expansion into the Western hemisphere was imperative for the US at the time.

>36.6% of the population voted for him, while a combined 63.4% voted for candidates from the conservative parties

The choices weren't just between Allende or Not Allende. Every candidate had their fair chance, and if winning with 36.6% of the votes sounds odd to you, it's probably because you are accustomed to the two-party system, which has its own advantages and disadvantages.

>If it didn't have international consequences, I'd agree with you that people should be allowed to elect politicians that will run their country into the ground

So people are free to choose their own politicians only as long as they live somewhere that is literally inconsequential in the international stage?

As soon as their country gets relevant, their choices will have "international consequences" after all and they will have to ally themselves with the biggest super power one way or another. And god forbid they choose the wrong super power.

Aside from the fact that you seem quite ignorant of history ("success of liberty", are you kidding me?), what business is it of the US? When will the US stop sticking it's nose in other's business? What would be it's reaction if the reverse were happening, if a foreign global power were constantly meddling in American affairs? Why does America always think it knows what's best for everyone else? And why is what's best always more US corporate intervention?

Like ok, we get it, the US is your country, and you can completely fuck up your own republic and turn it into a surveilled and controlled human zoo dedicated to the worship of mammon. But stop going and fucking everyone else's country.

If not America, then who? The Soviet Union would have turned a lot of Latin America into their imperial possessions, like they did in Cuba and Eastern Europe. Today, the regimes that would fill the void left by an American retreat from leadership are hostile and much less concerned with elections and human rights than the US.

On a personal note, I can only wish that the US had intervened more successfully against Castro in Cuba, the home that my family and millions of others have fled to America from.

>If not America, then who?

How about the people who actually live there? I get that sometimes the people of a country can be helpless against an oppressor and need foreign aid, but people in Chile actually voted for Allende. It's not the same as Cuba.

I don't agree with practically any of Jacobin's analysis, but the idea that the real reason for US opposition to leftist autocrats is that they're evil is laughable. The primary goal of diplomacy is to advance national interests, not to promote the other country's.

It's nice that you probably genuinely want to help other nations, however, if you look at what actually happens (and thanks also to Wikileaks we have the sources), it's not so rosy. I suggest maybe better looking into what your government is doing before you're going to praise it.

> But we should consider the counterfactual. What if Allende had stayed in power? Chile would not be the beacon of stability and growth that it is today.

Excuse me, but this is utter bullshit. We don't know what would happen. I was born in communist country (Czechoslovakia), and in the 1970s and 1980s (and in fact overall), it was much more civilized than Pinochet's regime. Maybe we had slower GDP growth (probably not by much, Pinochet economic policies were no super success either); so what? Higher GDP growth, in my book, doesn't justify killing a single dissident (because, "considering the counter factual", there are plenty examples of having high growth without violence).

> Membership in the euroclub requires fiscal responsibility; governments can no longer rely on running the print presses to pay their debt.

Weirdly, in the U.S., rules like that apparently do not hold. California didn't have fiscal responsibility and is still a member of the club, and FED not running a printing press?

Castro's Cuba, a society totally hollowed out by communism

How's that again?

.. and half a century of US sanctions.

However, Cuba could trade with a lot of other countries, including some big ones like Brazil (since mid 70s, when the military government then in power had become anti-US).

Nothing new, it's just solid confirmation of what pretty much everyone suspected since long ago :/

So this joke repeated through decades never gets old. Its been like 50 years since the times of nationalist dictators, its 50 years ruled by U.S backed leftists, yep.. the same who have created the skirts of misery: ghettos and fabelas.

It should be obvious by now that USA will support the left wing if it fits with its agenda. There you have WW2 and polpot to mention just a few extreme historical cases.

I personally love the Jacobin, but I wish their tone and vocabulary was more populist..? I always feel like I need to find another article that says the same thing written differently to pass it on to the more conservative people in my life.

I'm subscribed to Jacobin and the writing style certainly feels as though they are preaching to the choir rather than trying to persuade anyone.

Pretty heavy if this is true. How reliable is this site?

That describes normal US-politic in latin-america since at least 60 years, nothing is new.

The site seems solid, see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_%28magazine%29, and the facts described are correct (for example the initial description of what happened with Greece is spot-on).

The site isn't the thing that matters. Read the documents that WikiLeaks put out. It's the US policy toward Latin America going back a century.

It opens with the extreme-left's point of view on Greece. That should give you an idea about the article's reliability and unbiasedness.

Jacobin is explicitly socialist. It's no surprise to find "extreme left" bias in a radical left magazine. Bias != "unreliable" though. No institutions exist outside of politics or ideology and the ones that claim to are the most suspect!

As a socialist myself I'm happy to see Jacobin referenced here. Maybe a few more tech workers will read it.

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