Exporting the Facade
excerpted from the book
The Democratic Facade
by Daniel Hellinger and Dennis
R. Judd Brooks
Cole Publishing Company,
1991, paper
p221
Exporting the Facade
A Mirror
As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the policies
of an imperial power toward the nations within its sphere of influence
reveal the character of its own politics and culture:
We naturally look to the Central America-Caribbean
region...if we want to learn something about ourselves, just as
we look to Eastern Europe or the "internal empire" if
[we] want to learn about the Soviet Union.
In the Caribbean and in Central and South
America, the United States has acted as an imperial power for
more than a century, and during that time U.S. political and business
elites have exerted a guiding influence in the establishment of
political systems. The portrait that comes into focus through
the lens of empire reveals that the elites who manage U.S. foreign
policy have no attachment to democracy except as a device to legitimate
their political and economic domination. For this purpose the
symbols of democracy are useful indeed, and this explains why
elections in the nations south of the U.S. border have been sponsored
by the United States both as instruments for managing client states
and as a means to influence American public opinion. Such elections
are carefully staged media events designed to "demonstrate"
the worthiness of U.S.-supported regimes.
The overriding concern of U.S. elites
has been the construction and maintenance of a system of governments
that will protect inequality and class privilege at least as effectively
as in the United States. When President Reagan said in 1982, "What
I want to see above all else is that this country remains a country
where someone can always get rich and stay rich-that's the thing
we have that must be preserved," he was expressing in unusually
candid terms a sacred tenant of America's political tradition.
The nations within the orbit of the empire have been subjected
to devastating doses of violence coordinated by U.S. corporations
and government officials when they have failed to demonstrate
allegiance to the same principle.
p223
In 1935, Major General Smedley D. Butler reminisced about his
career in the Marine Corps during this period. He spoke of the
intimate relationship between military intervention and corporate
investment:
I spent 33 years and 4 months in active
service as a member of our country's most agile military force-the
Marine Corps....I spent most of my time being a high-muscle man
for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers. In short,
I was a racketeer for capitalism...
Thus I helped make Mexico...safe for American
oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place
for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in....I helped
purify Nicaragua for the International banking house of Brown
Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic
for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras "right"
for American fruit companies in 1903.
p233
New Styles of Intervention
As the rhetoric used to justify American
domination over Latin America shifted from the building of empire
to the Red Menace, the style of intervention changed accordingly.
Frequent invasions and prolonged military occupations gave way
to efforts to install governments that would act as surrogates
protecting U.S. economic and political interests. From one country
to another, these governments acted in remarkably consistent ways:
They freely used terror and repression against their own citizens.
In the Dominican Republic, the dictator
Rafael Trujillo provided a model for the sort of government favored
by U.S. elites. Trujillo had risen through the ranks of Dominican
society and military during the U.S. Marine occupation of 1912
to 1924. Described by U.S. military officers as "one of the
best in service," he was promoted to the rank of general
and put in charge of the country's police force, which became
the National Army in 1927. By 1930, having eliminated all of his
rivals by means of bullets or exile, Trujillo became president
through an election in which he was the only remaining candidate.
Until 1962, Trujillo controlled Dominican society through his
military, which he "welded into a machine of terror which
he refined over the years":
Thousands of his political enemies, automatically
called "Communists," died in secret police dungeons,
many of them after suffering hideous tortures perpetrated with
electrical devices, nail extractors, decapitation collars, and
leather-thonged whips. Young ladies who spurned his advances were
found dead in "accidents." Even those who fled abroad
lived in constant dread of kidnapping and death at the hands of
Trujillo agents who, after performing their murderous tasks were
themselves marked for extinction. In 1937 he supervised the massacre
of from 15,000 to 35,000 Haitian squatters in two days.
Using such means he was able to provide
the Aluminum Corporation of America (ALCOA) and United Fruit,
among other American corporations the stable environment and docile
work force they desired. Government and business leaders in the
United States hailed Trujillo as the "man responsible for
the great work of Dominican progress, the man who brought trade
between the Republic and the other American nations to a peak.''
American public relations firms worked diligently for Trujillo,
placing full-page newspaper advertisements designed to sell the
dictator to the American public as "their friend and best
ally in the fight against communism ,,~5
With a combination of direct and tacit
approval from the United States, similar dictators proliferated
throughout Latin America: Jorge Ubico in Guatemala, Tiburcio Carias
Andino in Honduras, Maximiliano Hernandez in El Salvador, and
Anastasio Somoza Garcia in Nicaragua. Loyal only to the United
States and supported by a small privileged elite within their
own countries, the dictators became firmly entrenched by sharing
with the multinational corporations the benefits of maintaining
a receptive environment for U.S. investment. Washington supplied
arms and financed and trained military officers and police forces
in counterinsurgency strategies and methods of torture to be used
against civilian populations. In most cases, the United States
built modern military and police organizations from the ground
up because in most Latin American countries they were badly organized
and armed, and thus not sufficiently adept at maintaining oligarchic
control.
Post-War Capital Penetration
Citizens of the United States are bombarded
with an official government propaganda that promotes the notion
that America is the leader of a free world dedicated to spreading
democracy, protecting freedom where it exists, and advancing freedom
where it is denied. Hand in hand with this rhetoric is a language
of capitalism that extols the value of free trade and free enterprise
as the only means of bringing economic well-being to the people
living in the world's underdeveloped countries. Guided by such
an ideology, investments abroad have served as a vital source
of capital accumulation for U.S. corporations. These investments
have returned huge profits, with a consistently higher return
for dollars committed than investments made domestically. This
unusually high rate of return has been ensured by a history of
military intervention to protect the property and autonomy of
U.S. investors and corporations, and by policies that have always
placed "good business climate" above all other goals.
Beginning in the late 1940s, a new wave
of investment washed over Latin America. Investment in banking,
manufacturing, tourism, and service industries added to the already
well-established markets in agriculture (mostly bananas and sugar),
mining, and lumber, thus expanding the total volume of direct
corporate investment in Latin America from $3 billion in 1946
to $8 billion by 1961. The formation of the Central American Common
Market (CACM) in 1961 spurred yet another frenzy of multinational
investment. The United Nations Economic Commission originally
conceived the idea of the CACM as a way to promote development
throughout Central America. Formulated to benefit the less developed
economies of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, the CACM established
a gradual process to eliminate trade barriers between these countries,
thus expanding the markets for their local goods to the whole
of Central America.
The notion of a planned market system
linking these countries was abhorrent to U.S. elites, because
it might compete with or even sometimes exclude U.S. trade and
investment. By offering a $100 million grant to establish the
CACM, the United States replaced the United Nations as the sponsor
and ignored its mechanisms for regional planning. The remodeled
CACM and the Agency for International Development (AID) provided
the technical and financial assistance to multinational corporations
to speed the flow of U.S. capital into Central America. Although
the large U.S. corporations of Castle and Cooke, R. J. Reynolds,
Gulf+Western, United Brands, and Hershey continued in agricultural
production, most companies diversified their holdings into other
areas such as food processing plants, plastic plants, cement plants,
breweries, gambling casinos, and tourist hotels. Banks and financial
institutions such as Citicorp, Bankamerica, and Chase Manhattan
sprinkled branches through the region to make both private and
public loans. By 1981, finance-related investment amounted to
about 40 percent of all U.S. direct investment.
The rapid expansion of the fast food industry
in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s opened a huge
market for cheap Central American beef. Investments in livestock
mushroomed when the Latin American Agribusiness Development Corporation-which
included as members Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Borden Inc.,
Caterpillar Tractor Company, and Chase Manhattan Overseas Banking
Corporation, among others-poured $75 million into livestock investment
and deforestation in Guatemala, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
Seventy-five million dollars in loans from the World Bank, AID,
and the Inter-American Development Bank underwrote beef production
projects in Costa Rica alone. Beef exports from Central America
increased from 13.7 thousand tons in 1960 to over 114 thousand
tons in 1970. At the same time, beef consumption fell by 41 percent
in Costa Rica, by 38 percent in E1 Salvador, and by 13 percent
in Guatemala and Nicaragua, because the cattle being raised were
reserved for export. A study published in 1981 concluded that
one-third of the forest land in Costa Rica and 250 square miles
of forest land each year in Nicaragua (until the Sandinistas took
power in 1979) had been converted to pasture for cattle grazing
for markets controlled by multinational corporations.
By the late 1980s, investment in Latin
America accounted for 80 percent of all U.S. direct investment
in Third World countries, with $5.3 billion of it in Central America.
In the Caribbean Basin, where Rockefeller family corporations
dominate investment in resorts, oil, and banking, $16.9 billion
was invested in banking and finance. Sixty-seven of the top 100
U.S. corporations and one-third of the top 500 corporations did
business in Central America, and over 500 firms provided services
needed by Central American businesses.
The U.S. Development Model
Between 1950 and 1965, corporations invested
$3.8 billion in Latin America and earned $11.3 billion in profits.
This compares to a $8.1 billion investment in Europe that returned
$5.5 billion in profits during the same period. The Department
of Treasury has estimated that two dollars is returned to the
United States for every one dollar that the United States puts
into the World Bank. Ronald Reagan's 1981 Caribbean Basin Initiative
made the business climate even better by eliminating tariff barriers,
allowing U.S. manufacturers to treat the area as an extension
of the American economic system while still paying Central American
workers one-eighth of the average wage rates paid in the United
States for the same work.
Numerous studies show that capital investment
in Third World countries has led to income concentration favoring
a few and a deterioration in the quality of life for the vast
majority of citizens. Economists Irma Adelman and Cynthia Morris
report a decline in per capita personal income of up to 60 percent
in Third World countries experiencing rapid economic growth as
a result of outside investment. Their findings suggest "no
automatic or even likely trickling down of the benefits of economic
growth to the poorest segments of society." A 1982 United
Nations study reached the same conclusion: Although multinational
corporate investment sometimes contributes to high rates of growth
in "host" countries, the benefits flow "to domestic
elites associated with foreign interests" and "basic
needs of the population such as food, health, education, and housing"
are ignored.
While corporations reap huge profits from
their investments in the Caribbean and Latin America, the social
and economic well-being of the masses can best be described as
desperate. The annual income of 90 percent of Haitians is less
than $ 120 and the poorest 20 percent of the people in E1 Salvador
earn $46 annually. Malnutrition, which affects over half the Central
American population, causes mental retardation in 80 percent of
children born in rural Honduras. Dysentery, tuberculosis, and
parasites thrive in the crowded conditions of slums and squatter
settlements of Latin American cities.
Throughout Latin America, growth has occurred
but development has not. For example, in Brazil, whose growth
rate in the 1960s and 1970s was labeled an "economic miracle,"
52 percent of the population was considered malnourished in 1970.
Infant mortality grew by 45 percent between 1960 and 1973.29 In
Mexico, 1 percent of workers earn 66 percent of the nation's total
income; the majority of workers are unable to earn enough to meet
their most basic needs. In the 1980s, declining per capita income
has contributed to the further deterioration of an already desperate
situation. Two development economists have advised that the "only
hope of significantly improving the income distribution in these
countries lies in a transformation of the institutional setting."
This is precisely what U.S. foreign policy is designed to prevent.
The intimate connection between politics
and the climate for U.S. corporate investment was noted in 1972
by David Rockefeller, when he observed during his Latin American
tour that "often the more democratic the country, the more
hostile it is to foreign investment." In the same year, Frank
Zingaro of Caltex called attention to the opposite side of the
same coin when he noted that in the Philippines, the imposition
of "Martial law has significantly improved the business climate."
The important features of a "good"
business climate are: a tractable, low-paid labor force; an absence
of worker-controlled unions; weak or nonexistent environmental
protection laws; lax health and safety regulations in the workplace;
tax concessions and government subsidies for business; the use
of public money to provide the infrastructure necessary for the
functioning of business; and laws permitting tax-free repatriation
of corporate profits back to the United States. Because political
revolutions commonly arise in reaction to such a system of exploitation,
the control of the political system is inseparable from a "good"
business climate. One of America's largest corporations, Gulf+Western,
once boasted that it was a "model for American companies
in Latin America." A company spokesman told the Committee
on Foreign Affairs in 1982 that "our experience has shown
that free enterprise can work for the benefit of the developing
world." Indeed, Gulf+Western's experience was extensive and
it had been able to fine-tune its model for development, especially
in the Dominican Republic.
Gulf+Western came to the Dominican Republic
in 1966, two years after an invasion by U.S. Marines. Aided by
major tax concessions granted by President Balaguer to foreign
investors, economic penetration of the country quickly followed
U.S. military and political intervention. With loans from Chase
Manhattan Bank, Gulf+Western gained a foothold in the island's
economy with its purchase of the South Puerto Rico Sugar Company.
By 1976, its investment had grown to $300 million in sugar, meat,
citrus, tourism, and tobacco. Other transnational corporations
also operated in the Dominican Republic, but Gulf+Western dominated
the economy as the country's largest landowner, employer, and
exporter. Because the yearly revenues of Gulf+Western were greater
than the Dominican Republic's Gross National Product, it could
accurately be called "a state within a state." 5
Immediately on entering the country, Gulf+Western
broke the sugarcane workers' union, Sindicato Unido. Denouncing
the union as communist controlled, the corporation fired the entire
union leadership, annulled its contracts, and sent in police to
occupy the plant while the American Institute for Free Labor Development
(an agency financed in part by the CIA) formed a new union that
obtained immediate acceptance from the Dominican president. The
possibility of free unions on Gulf's sugar plantations disappeared
(along with dozens of labor leaders), with the result that of
the country's 20,000 cane cutters, only one out of ten is Dominican.
Most of the cane workers are Haitian immigrants paid $1.50 to
$3.00 a day to do what Dominicans call "slave work."
Gulf+Western set up the first of the industrial
free zones that thrive in the Dominican Republic. Often called
"runaway shops" (because businesses relocate there from
U.S. communities) or "export platforms," such zones
offer a low-wage labor force, government subsidies, and freedom
from taxes and environmental regulations. Unions are not permitted
in these zones, and thus in the mid- 1980s 22,000 workers earned
an average of 65 cents per hour working in factories surrounded
by barbed wire and security guards. Dominican Law 299 grants corporations
a 100 percent exemption from Dominican taxes and also provides
them a 70 percent government subsidy of plant construction costs
to set up business in the zones. Bestform, Esmark, Milton Bradley,
Ideal Toys, Fisher Price, and North American Phillips are among
the U.S. corporations that take advantage of the free zones to
assemble and manufacture their products for export back to the
United States.
Because investment benefits a tiny upper
class in the Dominican Republic the living conditions of Dominicans
are grim. In 1985, 90 percent of Dominicans suffered from malnutrition
and 20 percent lived in "absolute poverty." Illiteracy
stood at 54 percent, with 1 million school-age children not attending
school. The Dominican Bishops' Conference issued a report stating
that 63 percent of Dominicans received an income of less than
$58 a month and that within the country 400,000 Haitians worked
under a system of "virtual slavery."
Advertisements in U.S. newspapers have
long extolled the benefits of investing in a beautiful Caribbean
Basin atmosphere free of any government regulation. A nineteen-page
supplement designed to lure investors to the Dominican Republic
appeared in the New York Times on January 28,1973. A photograph
showed President Joaquin Balaguer and Teobaldo Rosell, General
Director of Gulf+Western, locked in an embrace above the caption
"cooperation between government and industry." The supplement
promoted the La Roomona Free Zone as a haven for investors. Tax
breaks were featured under a headline that read, "Tourist
Law Offers Incentives":
Foreigners enjoy the full protection of
the law (and indeed the Dominican Republic has never in all its
history confiscated any foreign owned property). The law extends
even to apartments, hotels, condominiums, discotheques.... Benefits
include 100 percent freedom from income taxes for 10 years with
provisions for a possible additional five years...exemptions on
construction formation of the corporation, licenses, municipal
taxes, tariff duties, and import duties on equipment, furnishings
and anything else necessary for the creation of business...even
duty-free liquor-an unusual measure.
Another headline urged, "Industrialists
Dream of Chances Like These":
...both government and labor organizations
traditionally combine to cooperate with capital in attracting
and keeping industry profitable....The federal minimum in most
categories of skilled and semi-skilled labor is 25 cents per hour.
With the help of repressive governments,
corporations in countries within the orbit of the Monroe Doctrine
operate using the Gulf+Western model (though Gulf+Western sold
its Dominican holdings in 1984, when sugar prices fell). In El
Salvador, women at the Maidenform assembly plant earn $4 a day
stitching bra cups to straps. Bras are among El Salvador's ten
leading nonagricultural exports to the United States. In Haiti,
with its "tradition of respect for private property and foreign
ownership," women working for Rawlings Sporting Goods for
$2.70 a day sew all of the baseballs used by the two major leagues
in the United States. With over $60 million in annual sales from
Haiti, Rawlings is the third largest corporation operating in
that country.
When Democracy Is Unacceptable
Democratically elected governments founded
on principles of social justice, land reform, and national independence
have sometimes emerged in the countries encompassed by the Monroe
Doctrine. When that has happened, the U.S. elites have consistently
decided that democracy is inimical to their own interests. The
Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Chile provide three examples
of how U.S. elites regard popular democracy.
In 1962, with 59 percent of the popular
vote, Juan Bosch won the Dominican Republic's first free election
ever held. Only seven months later, he was overthrown by military
officers and forced into exile. In 1965, however, with support
from the poor, the urban working classes, and the professional
middle classes, Bosch was again elected, and he announced plans
to restore the 1963 constitution. The United States intervened
by sending 23,000 Marines to topple his government. An estimated
2,500 civilians were killed in the weeks following the invasion.
The Marines remained in the Dominican Republic through June 1,
1966, "pacifying" the population while the U.S. government
organized elections to legitimate a government that would meet
with its approval.
President Lyndon Johnson initially justified
the invasion to the American public as a rescue operation. Unless
the United States intervened, he claimed, "American blood
will run in the streets." Other justifications soon crept
into the president's speeches. On April 30, 1965, he stated that
the invasion was undertaken "to preserve law and order."
By May 1, he was explaining, "Our goal in the Dominican Republic...is
that the people of that country must be permitted freely to choose
the path of political democracy, social justice, and economic
progress." On the following day, he argued, "Communist
leaders, many of them trained in Cuba, seeing a chance to increase
disorder, to gain a foothold, joined the revolution. They took
increasing control. And what began as a popular democratic revolution...very
shortly moved and was taken over and really seized and placed
into the hands of Communist conspirators."
From the day he was elected, U.S. foreign
policy elites regarded Bosch as anathema. Like other parties on
the democratic left struggling to exist in Latin America, Bosch's
Dominican Revolutionary Party sought to gain both economic and
political independence from the United States. Bosch was opposed
by the estimated 7 percent of the population that made up the
privileged classes of Dominican society.
His support came mainly from the 93 percent
of Dominicans who, collectively, were 70 percent illiterate and
30 percent unemployed, and who received an average annual income
of less than $150.49 Bosch promised at his 1962 inauguration:
"We are changing our image-the moral, political and economic
image of the country....We are changing it into a revolutionary
democracy."
Though the seven months of his presidency
was too brief to realize extensive social reforms, Bosch made
significant moves toward establishing economic independence from
the United States and restructuring Dominican society. Although
he did not nationalize corporate holdings, Bosch placed some restrictions
on property owned by foreigners, forced foreign investors to share
profits with local firms and workers, and imposed a tax on sugar
profits. To break the stranglehold that the United States had
imposed on the Dominican economy, Bosch traveled to Europe to
secure a $150 million loan from a bank in Zurich. Under the land
reform program guaranteed by the 1963 constitution, 1,400 families
were given state-owned lands. Schools were established to educate
the peasants in the organization and management of farm cooperatives.
To finance his social reforms, Bosch cut the salaries of the military
and the bureaucracy in half, including his own, which he reduced
from $2,400 a month to $1,500 a month.
With the reestablishment of a right-wing
military government after the 1965 coups, foreign investment,
which had slowed to a trickle, once again flowed. During the military
junta's first few months, $175 million in new foreign investment
flooded in, two contracts for U.S. oil refineries were signed,
six private U.S. banks made loans totaling $30 million, and the
World Bank granted a $1.7 million loan for a hydroelectric study.
Joaquin Balaguer was elected president
in U.S.-sponsored elections held in 1966. From the moment President
Johnson reacted to the CIA's recommendation that Balaguer be elected
president by urging, "Get this guy in office down there!"
the outcome of the Dominican election was assured. It is hardly
surprising that the U.S.-backed candidate won in a country occupied
by U.S. troops, where an estimated 300 members of the opposition
party were assassinated during the election campaign. While the
U.S. media applauded the triumph of Dominican democracy, a fresh
reign of terror was unleashed on the Dominican people. With financial
backing from the United States, death squads targeted political
dissidents for torture and murder. By 1971, over 1,000 people
had been killed.
All Latin American governments face the
reality that the U.S. government stands ready to unleash a reign
of terror if governments are installed that seek independence
from international corporations and U.S. imperial ambitions. This
lesson was brought home to Guatemala in unmistakable terms in
1954, and to Chile in 1973.
In 1951, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman became president
of Guatemala through free elections. Arbenz desired to implement
reforms that would ameliorate desperate social conditions in his
country. Following United Nations recommendations, he expropriated
lands that were held by the United Fruit Company, offering to
pay what United Fruit had claimed the lands were worth when it
filed its taxes. Though Arbenz sought to enact reforms within
a capitalist framework, he aimed to break the economic domination
that the United States had asserted over his country since the
early twentieth century.
U.S. foreign policy elites went into a
frenzy, labeling Guatemala as a "beachhead of international
communism," "a threat to the oil wells of Texas,"
and a "danger to the Panama Canal." In 1954, the Arbenz
government was overthrown by a mercenary army trained by the CIA
on a United Fruit plantation in Honduras. U.S. pilots bombed Guatemala
City as the mercenaries quickly seized power. A new president
chosen by U.S. foreign policy personnel was flown to Guatemala
in an embassy plane. He became the first of a line of dictators
that crushed Guatemalan resistance to U.S. domination. Between
1954 and 1982, 90,000 persons were killed in Guatemala.
As part of the platform that he was elected
on in 1971, Salvador Allende Gossens nationalized Chile's major
industries in an attempt to use the nation's resources for internal
development. Allende's program worked-unemployment dropped and
salaries rose for the masses. For U.S. corporations, that was
unacceptable. In October of 1971, executives of ITT, Anaconda,
Ford, and other U.S. corporations were personally assured by Secretary
of State William Rogers that "the Nixon Administration is
a business administration. Its mission is to protect business."
A three-pronged strategy was developed to destabilize the Allende
government, which involved strangling the Chilean economy by eliminating
loans and trade agreements, strengthening the Chilean military,
and exacerbating social tensions by means of CIA covert activities.
In 1973, Allende was killed in a coup d'etat coordinated by U.S.
military and CIA personnel. In the year following the coup, more
than 30,000 people were assassinated by Chile's government. This
heavy dose of terrorism was an omen of things to come. For more
than sixteen years, Chile was ruled by one of Latin America's
most repressive military regimes, presided over by General Augusto
Pinochet. He finally was replaced by a civilian president in an
election held on December 14, 1989, though Chile's constitution
continues to guarantee the independence of the armed forces from
civilian rule. Before relinquishing the presidency, Pinochet indicated
that any attempt to investigate the years of human rights violations
would trigger a military coup.
p242
A Disturbing Image
By the 1980s, there were signs of a diminishing
effectiveness in campaigns to engineer consent in support of foreign
policy goals. The Vietnam Syndrome lingers in expressed public
opposition to the use of American troops in any international
conflict that might arise in the 1980s. ABC and Washington Post
polls conducted in 1982 revealed a 79 percent to 18 percent opposition
to sending U.S. troops to aid the Salvadoran government. Sixty-five
percent of those polled said they perceived the war to be "much
like the war in Vietnam," and a 51 percent majority said
"they would support young men who refused to go to E1 Salvador
if the United States were drafting soldiers and sending them to
fight there."
The American public's current unwillingness
to support direct intervention in Third World affairs has not
changed the U.S. policy commitment to maintain a system of client
states by force and terror. During the Reagan administration alone,
at least 150,000 Central Americans died as a result of U.S.-sponsored
terrorist forces. In E1 Salvador over 50,000 people have died
since the mid- 1950s, and in Guatemala almost 100,000 people have
been killed by government forces. In Nicaragua the number of civilians
killed by contra attacks during the Reagan administration totaled
30,000.
By the end of 1988, it appeared that the
contra war had failed in its objective of overthrowing the Sandinistas.
U.S. officials expressed fear that "its failure is going
to have long-term costs for us. In E1 Salvador, Haiti, Honduras,
Guatemala, Chile, and countries outside the hemisphere, U.S.-sponsored
repression feeds revolutionary fires. Perhaps U.S. elites fear
that mass-based democracies in these countries might set a bad
example for American citizens. For elites, it is essential that
democracy invests them with legitimacy; and it is equally critical
that democracy not be captured by populist movements. Elites "sponsor"
elections within the U.S. in a manner similar to the way they
"sponsor" them abroad: to legitimate rule by the rich
and well born and to preserve a system of class privilege. If
elections are used for any other purpose, they are labeled as
fraudulent and heavy doses of terrorism are frequently applied
to nullify their results. Elites have not employed these tactics
within the United States-that is, they have not overturned democratic
institutions and processes, as they have so often done elsewhere.
They have not found it necessary to do so because elections within
their own country have never escaped their control.
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