U.S./CENTRAL AMERICAN POLICY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000201370003-4
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 21, 2008
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: August 27, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 [phone]
FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS STAFF
PROGRAM All Things Considered STATION WETA Radio
NPR Network
DATE August 27, 1984 5:00 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
SUBJECT U.S./Central American Policy
NOAH ADAMS: Historically, American policy toward the
five Central American nations (Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras,
Guatemala and El Salvador) has been anything but diplomatically
routine. The United States has alternately ignored and invaded,
assisted and undermined those countries.
This year Central America is a topic hotly debated in
Congress and a factor in the presidential campaign.
NPR's foreign affairs correspondent Bill Buzenberg has
this report on U.S. Central American policy since the days of the
Cuban revolution, 25 years ago.
BILL BUZENBERG: North Americans woke up New Year's Day
1959 to news that an old order we supported was giving way to
something uncomfortably new, uncomfortably close.
NEWSMAN: The revolution is over. Order has returned to
Havana. But enthusiasm and fervor still fill the air following
the final ascension to power of the revolutionary regime, now the
legally recognized provisional government.
Havana's ovation for Fidel Castro himself has been long
deferred. In ever town and hamlet, a cheering welcome greeted
the rebel leader.
BUZENBERG: The surprising success of Cuba's revolution
profoundly disturbed the Eisenhower and soon-to-follow Kennedy
Administrations. Within a year, Castro's nationalizations and
growing Soviet ties made it clear the U.S.-Cuba client relation-
ship was dead.
Material supplied by Radio N Reports. Inc. may be used for file and reference purposes only. It may not be reproduced, sold or publicly demonstrated or exhibited.
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ABRAHAM LOWENTHAL: That did come as a shock to the
United States.
BUZENBERG: Abraham Lowenthal, a Latin American specia-
list at the University of Southern California, says it was as if
part of the United States itself had been lost.
LOWENTHAL: People in Washington and, beyond that, in
elite circles in the United States took United States control of
the Caribbean for granted, and it particularly took control of
Cuba for granted. It was, in some ways, an extensison of the
United States.
Somebody in the 1930s, I believe, wrote at one point
that Cuba was as American as Long Island.
BUZENBERG: Lowenthal says this belief came naturally,
that the United States ought to exert control over the Caribbean
and Central America. Such control had been assumed for a
century.
Indeed, Morris Blackman of the University of South
Carolina says this notion of control still exists and goes
largely unquestioned by U.S. officials, the press, members of
Congress, and the public at large.
MORRIS BLACKMAN: Through Administrations and in the
post-World War II period, there has been a fundamental concern,
in one way or another, that we control the general character of
the regimes, the general destiny of those nations. Not in the
sense of controlling all the particularities on the inside, but
in the sense of making sure that it fits in with what are
conceived as U.S. national interest. And in so doing, there is a
division as to what the best way is to control it. But in one
form or another, the idea has been that we need to control.
BUZENBERG: The Cuban revolution made American officials
extremely worried the United States might lose control throughout
the area. Both President's Eisenhower and Kennedy believed they
had to pursue policies to prevent future Castros from seizing
power.
What they came up with is essentially what the United
States has settled on every since. Basically, it's a two-track
policy. One track is largely economic, the other mostly mili-
tary. There would be problems with both.
More about that military track in a moment, but first
the economic track.
In the late '50s and early '60s, Central America was in
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particularly bad shape. Economies were growing, but everywhere
the bulk of the population lived at or near subsistence level.
Per capita income was about $150 a year Malnutrition and
illiteracy were widespread. Fast-growing urban slums coexisted
with high-walled palaces of a privileged few.
PRESIDENT JOHN KENNEDY: The hard reality of life in
much of Latin America will not be solved simply by complaining
about Castro, by blaming all problems on Communism or generals or
nationalism. The harsh facts of poverty and social injustice
will not yield easily to promises or good will.
BUZENBERG: President Kennedy, two months after taking
office, redoubled Eisenhower's economic track and called his
effort the Alliance for Progress.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY: The task we have set ourselves in
the Alliance for Progress, the development of an entire con-
tinent, is a far greater task than any we have ever undertaken in
our history. It will require difficult and painful labor over a
long period of time.
BUZENBERG: The President called for channeling $100
billion into Latin America over 10 years. Most of that money was
earmarked for South America, where it did stimulate overall
economic growth. Gross national products also grew impressively
throughout the '60s in Central America.
Harvard-trained economist Jorge Sol, a Salvadoran, was
in charge of the Alliance effort at the Organization of American
States. He says, in some ways, life did get a little better
there.
JORGE SOL: Life expectancy, for instance. Infant
mortallity went down. Some of the health services were improved.
Literacy rates increased. Attendance to primary schools in-
creased.
BUZENBERG: But Jorge Sol says there were problems with
the Alliance in Central America. Except for democratic Costa
Rica, governments did not aim their development efforts at the
poor. Instead, most of the Alliance-supported projects benefited
wealthy elites, those people closest to the dictatorships in
power. Consequently, and because of high population growth,
Jorge Sol says there were actually twice as many impoverished
people in Central America by 1980 than before the Alliance began.
SOL: The end result of this period of the Alliance and
the common market is that poverty grew in Central America. In
human terms, it means that out of 20 million Central Americans,
more than 13 million don't have enough to cover their minimum
essential needs.
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BUZENBERG: So the U.S. economic track, exemplified by
the Alliance for Progress, failed for most people in Central
America. Worse, expectations it generated actually fueled
frustration and discontent.
On the second U.S. policy track, the military approach,
a similar disturbing development occurred. American arms and
counterinsurgency training were to go hand-in-hand with economic
aid, to professionalize various military establishments and
contribute to progress and democratic reform. In practice,
however, military assistance went to those who sought to repress
internal dissent and quash any calls for change.
Walter LeFaber (?), who teaches Latin American history
at Cornell University, says, in retrospect, it was naive to
expect Central American military establishments to be truly
interested in developing and democratizing their societies.
WALTER LEFABER: I think the thing that we have to
understand about Central American militaries is that the military
has always been loyal first to its own institution, not to the
national welfare. The fact of the matter is that when you create
a large institutionalized military in this area -- that is, a
military which controls the means of violence in that society
--that you're really letting loose a Frankenstein monster. And
until the military can evolve to the point where it has some
sense of the national interst and some sense of democratic
responsibility, I think it's misguided to think that by putting
more money in the Central American military, that we're going to
democratize and quiet the area.
BUZENBERG: American arms and ammunition didn't quiet
the area or change military behavior. Instead, American involve-
ment with Central American militaries accelerated revolutionary
activity as oppression was stepped up.
So, under this two-track approach, despite the expendi-
ture of two billion dollars in economic aid and nearly 500
million dollars in military aid since 1962, Central America today
is worse off, in many ways, with more poverty and more guer-
rillas.
During the Vietnam War, in the late '60s and early '70s,
American attention turned away from Latin America, and it
returned only with the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship in
Nicaragua in 1979. Once again, American policymakers began
pursuing two policy tracks to prevent further revolutions and
retain some measure of American control. American economic and
military aid to Honduras and El Salvador have increased sixteen-
fold in the last five years
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With the United States more involved in the region than
ever before, and some fearing direct American intervention,
President Reagan moved last year to name a high-level national
bipartisan commission on Central America to create a consensus
behind his two-track policy approach. There were echoes of the
past as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger announced the
commission's findings in January.
HENRY KISSINGER: The basic argument of the report is
this: that there is a crisis in Central America, that the crisis
is acute and requires urgent attention. And in an area so close
to our borders and of such consequence for our future, it should
be dealt with on a nonpartisan or bipartisan basis.
BUZENBERG: Essentially, the commission recommended more
economic assistance and enough military aid to maintain sta-
bility.
But to historian Walter LeFaber, that sounded like an
unpromising replay of what the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson
Administrations tried to do.
LEFABER: The Kissinger Commission has essentially
recommended another Alliance for Progress for Central America.
And it seems to me that the commission is very shortsighted in
thinking that anything like the Alliance or anything like and $8
billion development program -- and that's what the Kissinger
Commission is talking about, putting $8 billion of American
taxpayers' money into Central America -- is going to do anything
else except create all of the problems and the contradictions
that the original Alliance did.
BUZENBERG: Again, Abe Lowenthal, professor of inter-
national relations at USC.
LOWENTHAL: The approach of the Kissinger Report towards
Central America, when it comes to the relations of economic and
military assistance, is like applying leeches and transfusions at
the same time in dealing with a critically ill patient, a kind of
one remedy which has the effect of undermining the effect of the
other remedy.
BUZENBERG: William D. Rogers is one of the few people
who worked on both the Alliance for Progress -- he was deputy
coordinator -- and the Kissinger Commission -- he was special
counsel. Rogers has also served as Assistant Secretary of State
for Inter-American Affairs. He says the Kissinger Commission
approach can have some beneficial effects, if fully implemented.
But he questions just how much the United States can really do.
WILLIAM D. ROGERS: I think it's paradoxical that both
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the liberals and the conservatives have this notion that the
United States has a much longer lever than it really does. This
is something that brings both the right and the left together.
And it is an illusion, and a very dangerous one, and one that has
led to a large part of the problems that we have in Central
America, this notion that Central America is a kind of backyard
that we can control.
It is, in very large part, false. The developments in
those countries are beyond, in very large measure beyond, our
effective management. And it's high time, I think, that this
country came to realize the realities of that fact.
BUZENBERG: There may have been a time -- say, in Teddy
Roosevelt's day, at the turn of the century -- when the United
States, which intervened 20 times in 22 years with U.S. troops,
could still wield effective control in Central America at a
reasonable cost. But that time is past for today's more complex
Central American societies.
If the history of the last 25 years is correct, the
United States can try to influence the region's governments. But
if those governments are not willing to implement reforms and
push for change, and if the United States is not willing to
abandon such governments, then our two-track approach will lead
to ineffective economic efforts and an increasingly costly
military policy, in which the United States becomes beholden to
governments that are likely to lose.
That leaves the United States with only the power to
destroy, not to create and fashion a future to our liking.
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