Trespassing in the Basin

Language can be very revealing. For several months now our newspapers have been filled with earnest discussions of the turmoil in the "Caribbean basin," especially since President Reagan addressed the Organization of American States (OAS) on February 24. The term "Caribbean basin" is being used to lump together all the islands and Central and South American nations that have Caribbean coastlines (including El Salvador, which doesn't) as a single region. It is a region that didn't exist until United States policy-makers declared it to be one because it was in U.S. economic and military interests to do so.

The people who live in those countries speak three different languages and come from diverse racial backgrounds. The one thing they have in common is that, at least since 1898, the countries of Central America and the Caribbean have had their existence defined in terms of U.S. interests rather than their own.

U.S. interests in the nations of Central America and the Caribbean are considerable, and as is often the case, form an inseparable blur of business and military-strategic concerns. The primary business concerns are in oil and shipping. As President Reagan pointed out in his speech, nearly half of U.S. imported goods pass through the Panama Canal or the Gulf of Mexico, including two-thirds of our imported oil. In addition, 56 per cent of the refined oil imported to the U.S. comes from refineries in the Caribbean islands, the oil companies having been lured there by deep-water ports, cheap labor, and the absence of environmental regulations. Enormous and attractive oil reserves lie in Mexico, Venezuela, and Trinidad, with the probability of similar untapped oil supplies in other countries, particularly Guatemala. The region also supplies almost all U.S. bauxite, the ore used to make aluminum, and it has sizable investments from U.S. agribusiness corporations.

U.S. military concern for the region is a natural consequence of its proximity to our borders and the need to protect these business interests. For most of a century, the U.S. has taken a very high profile in maintaining capitalist economies and friendly governments in Central America and the Caribbean. This complex of interests, accompanied by somewhat more ideological fervor than usual, is the rationale for the recent escalation of U.S. military, political, and economic activity in the region.

The present conflict in Central America has long and deep historical roots. In his Caribbean basin speech at OAS, Reagan noted, "For over 400 years our peoples have shared the dangers and dreams of building a new world." A closer look shows that the dangers have been mostly theirs, as a consequence of our nation's dreams.

While Central America and much of the Caribbean have been under U.S. dominance for most of a century, the conditions of that dominance were in place for at least 200 years before that. It began with the region's colonization by Spain, which brought successive waves of soldiers, priests, and settlers who in a quest for precious metals enslaved the Native Indian people. When the search for gold had been given up, or the meager reserves exhausted, the conquered lands were converted to agriculture. Huge plantations owned by a European elite produced coffee, spices, and sugar for sale to the new middle classes of Europe and North America. Production was facilitated by the slave, or near-slave, labor of African- and Indian-descended people.

Though the land titles may have changed hands a few times over the years (now often held by U.S. corporations like United Brands and Castle and Cooke) this mode of production and the authoritarian social and political arrangements it requires remain in place throughout the Caribbean basin.

The U.S. first entered the scene with the 1823 enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the U.S. would not tolerate any European nation competing for influence in the emerging Latin American republics. Later we added our "manifest destiny" to rule a continental empire from ocean to ocean, which cost Mexico a third of its territory. The U.S. role took on its present dimensions at the turn of the century, when a new and rapidly expanding industrial-capitalist economy began looking beyond its shores for markets and raw materials. This resulted in the 1898 war with Spain.

The Spanish-American War was justified in terms of the Monroe Doctrine, the aim being to liberate Cuba from Spanish outsiders. But after the war a peculiar thing happened. Cuba was forced to insert the Platt Amendment into its new constitution, giving the U.S. carte blanche to establish military bases and intervene in Cuba's internal affairs. At that time a U.S. naval base was established at Guantanamo Bay that is still in operation despite the wishes of the present Cuban government. Another result of the Spanish-American War was the annexation of Puerto Rico, and to this day the issue of Puerto Rico keeps U.S. government press officers busy inventing euphemisms for "colony."

In 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt, the battlefield hero of the 1898 conquests, announced a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The Roosevelt Corollary held that the U.S. had the right to "exercise international police power" at any time to prevent "chronic wrongdoing or impotence" on the part of any nation in the Western Hemisphere. This bald assertion of dominion over supposedly independent states launched a period of military adventures unparalleled in our history and interrupted only by the distraction of two world wars (see box on page 23).

After World War II, Harry Truman gave the theology of empire yet another doctrine. He extended U.S. police power to include intervention in any nation anywhere in the world that was threatened by what the U.S. considered communist aggression or communist-inspired or aided internal insurgencies. Though invented to justify U.S. intervention to prop up a right-wing dictatorship in Greece in 1947, the Truman Doctrine gave a global geopolitical and ideological cast to the old Roosevelt-style hijinks in the Americas. By the time Fidel Castro led a successful revolt in Cuba in 1959, at stake was not just a few sugar companies and Mafia gambling houses but the whole of Western Civilization. And the means of conflict went beyond gunboats and guerrillas to include nuclear missiles.

The Cuban revolution triggered a far-reaching U.S. response, including the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, several CIA attempts on Castro's life, and a complete diplomatic and economic quarantine of the new government.

While a variety of public and secret measures were being taken to overthrow the Castro government, a whole new approach to Latin American policy was being designed to keep the revolutionary disease from spreading. This included the Alliance for Progress, aimed at improving economic conditions and attracting more foreign investment to Latin America. It also entailed a massive program to train Latin American armies in counter-insurgency warfare (at the U.S. Southern Command base in Panama) and in internal security techniques, including torture, at the International Police Academy in Washington, D.C. Despite President Kennedy's proclaimed intention to encourage moderate reformist political elements, when the dust settled from the Alliance for Progress, Latin America was an almost unbroken chain of well-equipped military police states from Guatemala to Argentina.

During this period the U.S. undertook its last major military action in the Caribbean basin when 20,000 U.S. troops invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965 to suppress a leftist uprising against that country's corrupt and repressive government.

Today it is difficult for us to imagine a U.S. president sending 20,000 troops to invade another country without congressional approval or a major public outcry. That fact is directly attributable to the public reaction against the Vietnam War that heated up that year. As Vietnam ground on and the human and economic costs mounted, all the doctrines of imperial theology came under question. When the Watergate scandal exposed some of the U.S. intelligence agencies' sordid doings, the long-suppressed contradiction between the U.S.' proclaimed democratic values and its actual global policies created a vague popular distress known as the Vietnam syndrome.

Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976 with the hope that he would make the uneasiness go away and allow the U.S. to feel good about itself again. After eight years of Henry Kissinger's self-professed amorality, Carter brought the rhetoric of self-determination and human rights back into U.S. foreign policy. Though the application of his human rights policy was spotty at best, it was actually put into practice against some of the more brutal Latin American regimes, particularly Chile and Argentina. Carter wanted to return to the Kennedy-era strategy of encouraging moderate reformers, but after more than a decade of the "national security state," very few moderate reformers were alive or not in prison in Latin America.

The policies of the Carter years were rooted in the new theory of trilateralism created in the mid-1970s by scholars of the Trilateral Commission. Spearheaded by David Rockefeller, president of the globally tentacled Chase Manhattan Bank, trilateralism represented an attempt by the U.S. ruling elite to recover from the chaos engendered by the defeat in Vietnam and the OPEC oil price hikes. It sought to re-establish a manageable world order and favorable business climate under the principle that the U.S. could no longer manage the non-communist world economy, much less police the entire Third World single-handedly. The trilateralists proposed to bring in the Western European and Japanese allies as full partners in running the world. Hence the name.

For the most part, trilateralism entailed a less ideological and more pragmatic approach to world affairs. It placed a higher premium on stability than on anticommunism. The trilateral businessmen were, after all, interested in gaining access to the untapped markets of the communist nations.

But the new world order didn't unfold as planned. Carter bungled relations with our allies and proved completely unable to sell his foreign policies in the domestic political arena, as witnessed by his problems with the Panama Canal and SALT II treaties. Then in 1979 something happened that was, in concrete economic and strategic terms, more significant than either the Cuban revolution or the defeat in Vietnam. It even chilled the heart of the Rockefeller oil and banking combine. That event was the overthrow of the shah of Iran.

Iran was not merely a symbolic domino. Its oil reserves, border with the USSR, and role as U.S.-appointed cop on the Persian Gulf made it a major loss. The fall of the shah was particularly bad news for the trilateralists, who had considered his regime something of a model for Third World modernization.

At the end of that same year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and a new Cold War reached a fever pitch. In the midst of these events, Central America and the Caribbean had the misfortune to become a major stage for the Cold War script. At about the same time that the U.S. was losing Iran, the Sandinistas were driving Somoza out of Nicaragua, and a wave of rebellion was sweeping El Salvador and Guatemala. 1979 also saw a U.S.-backed dictator overthrown on the Caribbean island nation of Grenada. He was replaced by a leftist government that established friendly relations with Cuba. And Michael Manley's democratic socialist government in Jamaica was rejecting the terms of an International Monetary Fund bail-out loan and seeking non-Western sources of finance. Manley too had established close relations with Cuba.

All this turmoil in the Caribbean basin was primarily the result of an economic crisis triggered by the drastic rise in oil prices and corresponding drop in sugar and coffee prices in the middle and late 1970s. This state of affairs worsened the already miserable conditions of the region's poor majority. Carter's human rights policy also factored minimally in that it made it more difficult for the U.S. to arm the worst dictators like Somoza. This gave the people some breathing room to do something about their plight.

In this country the 1979 events of the Caribbean basin were perceived as further evidence of U.S. weakness in the face of an advancing Soviet-Cuban threat. Carter responded by beginning military aid to the junta in El Salvador, increasing the U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, and forming an inter-agency task force to come up with a long-range, comprehensive counter-offensive. Some observers of CIA activity strongly suspect that also during this time covert action was taken against the governments of Grenada and Jamaica. Whatever the source of the actions, it is known that in June, 1980, there was an attempted coup in Jamaica and a bombing intended to assassinate the leadership of the Grenadan revolution.

Carter seemed determined not to repeat in Nicaragua the policies that had driven Cuba into the Soviet orbit. Though he made some last-ditch attempts to prevent a Sandinista victory, Carter established normal diplomatic relations with the new regime and arranged an economic aid package for it. He hoped that by encouraging moderate elements of the revolution, the situation could still be salvaged.

While Carter was pursuing a tentative combination of hard and soft options in the Caribbean basin, his right-wing opposition was busy developing its own theories about the region. Conservative think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the American Security Council, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies at Georgetown University were churning out a series of papers and articles that didn't just see the Soviet Union taking advantage of Central American rebellions that had internal causes. They claimed that the Soviet Union, through Cuba, was actually initiating and orchestrating revolutionary movements in the Caribbean basin. This theoretical groundwork bore political fruit at the 1980 Republican convention where a platform was adopted that casually referred to the Nicaraguan government as Marxist and committed the party to its overthrow.

With the exception of Alexander Haig, Reagan's key foreign policy advisers were drawn from the think-tanks of the Right. Haig was a military man with an adaptable ideology and a uniquely personal hatred of Fidel Castro. In the early months of the new administration, Haig said that the U.S. would not get bogged down in a war with Central America, instead we would "go to the source" in Cuba.

Several measures have been taken toward that end. Latin American governments have been pressured to break diplomatic ties with Cuba. Now only six have full relations, and three of those are tiny islands. The economic embargo has been tightened, and plans have been announced for a Radio Free Cuba propaganda operation. U.S. military activity has been stepped up with the establishment of a new Caribbean Command base at Key West, a mock landing of Marines at the Guantanamo Naval Base, and NATO naval maneuvers in the Caribbean last summer that included simulated attacks on Cuba and Grenada.

Contingency plans have been ordered drawn up for options including invasion, blockade, and surgical air strikes against Cuba, and a more tolerant posture has been adopted toward anti-Castro commando groups in Florida. These threats have the potential to make the administration's imagined U.S.-Soviet conflict in the Caribbean real, as Cuba has responded by strengthening its defenses with new fighter planes and battleships from the Soviet Union.

The Reagan administration has tried to strangle the new government in Nicaragua by suspending the Carter aid program and making U.S. bank loans to Nicaragua ineligible for federal loan guarantees. Yet the Sandinistas have carried out only very limited nationalizations and have agreed to pay all the debts they inherited from Somoza. In recent months the U.S. has been covertly training Nicaraguan exiles for a military campaign against the new government.

Reagan's post-Nicaragua campaign has an economic component. The Caribbean Basin Initiative was unveiled in late February after several months of infighting within the administration. The plan finally adopted was largely the work of Caribbean-Central American Action, a Washington-based trade association formed and funded by the leading multinational corporations that do business in the region, including Alcoa, Gulf and Western, Chase Manhattan Bank, and United Brands.

Rarely has there been an economic assistance program more obviously aimed at benefiting U.S. corporations regardless of the needs of the countries being "aided." The Reagan initiative involves a small amount of direct economic assistance but relies primarily on tax breaks and loosened import restrictions to encourage U.S. companies to invest in the Caribbean basin. It is an attempt to implement the Third World supply-side economics Reagan pushed at the Cancun economic summit last fall.

The economic initiative is supposedly a shared venture of the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Venezuela. The other nations have already enacted their parts of the plan, with Canada almost doubling its direct aid to the region and Mexico and Venezuela giving special oil discounts. But they were suspicious of Reagan's approach from the beginning because he insisted that Nicaragua and Grenada be excluded from the plan. Reagan's OAS speech tied the economic package to his threats against Cuba and Nicaragua and to his support for the Salvadoran military, which has made it difficult for our allies, particularly Mexico, to take the plan seriously at all.

The ideological and military slant of the proposal was clear in the distribution of the economic aid scheduled for 1982: Of the $350 million being offered, $100 million is to go to El Salvador, with Honduras, Costa Rica, and the new conservative government of Jamaica also receiving disproportionate shares. The administration admits that aid will be granted not according to need but according to U.S. national interest and compliance with the free enterprise thrust of the plan.

The Caribbean Basin Initiative is no bargain for the aid recipients. The $350 million is woefully insufficient. In 1982 the countries of the Caribbean basin will incur a balance of payments deficit of about $3.9 billion as a result of low export prices. The investment incentives of the plan are based on the assumption that infusions of foreign capital will eventually trickle down to the impoverished masses in the form of new jobs. But the trickle-down theory hasn't worked any better in the Caribbean basin than it has in the U.S.

In 1948 Puerto Rico undertook Operation Bootstrap, in many ways the model for Reagan's initiative. Between 1948 and 1968, 2,000 U.S.-owned factories were built in Puerto Rico. Yet today the unemployment rate is more than 20 per cent, and 60 per cent of the island's population depends on U.S. food stamps to survive. Operation Bootstrap resulted in a near-total collapse of local agricultural production and a massive migration of Puerto Ricans to the U.S.

Jamaica pursued similar policies between 1950 and 1970. An Inter-American Development Bank economist estimates that in those years $73 million in foreign capital entered the Jamaican economy, but due to the capital-intensive nature of the investments, only 9,257 new jobs were created, while Jamaica's work force grew by 150,000.

What the Caribbean basin countries need is a guarantee of fair prices for their commodity exports. This could be done through a subsidy that would be granted any time prices for a particular crop fell below a designated level. It would be nothing more than an international version of what the U.S. already does for domestic farmers, and it would allow the Caribbean and Central American countries to deal with their balance of payments problems and eventually have an income base for self-directed development projects. The Reagan plan does not address the export price issue at all. The lifting of U.S. import restrictions will have no impact on the problem because 90 per cent of Caribbean basin imports already enter the U.S. duty-free.

In the long run, the greatest need of the Central American and Caribbean nations is the freedom to determine their own future. They must be able to create the systems, institutions, and international alliances that will serve their people's needs--precisely what U.S. economic and military domination has denied them. As long as this domination continues, the cycle of grinding poverty, revolt, and war can only escalate, whether or not the Soviet Union does anything to encourage it.

Of course, another theology of empire has been around even longer than the doctrines of Monroe, Roosevelt, and Truman. It is found in the Bible where imperial oppression is a central theme. It tells the story of the Hebrew people who suffered under one empire after another for centuries: the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Yet they held fast to the promise that God would liberate them and give them a life of justice and peace in their own land.

The story continued with Jesus, who was executed by Roman officials because he challenged the authority of their empire. For 200 years thousands of his followers met the same fate as the Christian communities became an oppressed and persecuted people who asserted the lordship of Jesus over that of Caesar and refused to fight the empire's wars. The Revelation of John came out of that experience, speaking of the rejoicing in heaven when Babylon, the great imperial beast that extorted wealth and wreaked bloodshed throughout the world, had fallen at last. Revelation's references to Babylon signified the Roman empire, but also all nations to come that would lust after wealth and dominion.

The biblical theology of empire has inspired great hope among the Christians of Central America. They see in the story of the Hebrews and the early church their own story, and they claim the promise of liberation. The story should give us hope as well, for it is clearer every day that a future for the world depends in large part on the United States learning to live peacefully with its neighbors. There is no better place for that to begin than with our closest neighbors to the south.

Our biblical faith and historical situation in the United States call us to unmask the false and idolatrous claims of the empire, to refuse to fight its wars, and to place our allegiance not with the policies of our nation but with Jesus, who is among its victims. In everyday political terms that will mean recognizing, as a beginning, that the nations of Central America and the Caribbean are not our backyard. They are other peoples' homes, where they are sovereign.

Eventually our call will mean seeking to turn this nation away from an economic order and culture that requires the subjugation of other peoples and toward a recognition of our limits and our interdependence. We seem further from that possibility now than we have ever been, but we can undertake to journey toward it because we too have been given the promise of liberation.

Danny Collum was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.