Year 501 (37 page)

Shortly after, the government's National Development Bank (BND) announced a new credit policy under pressure from international lending institutions,
CAR
reported: “Under the Sandinista government, the BND provided subsidies and low-interest credit to cooperatives and small farmers with very few prerequisites, but those days are over.” Now there will be “only guaranteed loans to clients with substantial collateral, leaving most peasant farmers out in the cold.” Another feature of the new credit policy is that it “is expected to make it impossible for workers to pay off debts or make monthly bank payments on the companies they intend to buy.” That will overcome a serious defect in the privatization process that the US demands as a condition for calling off its economic warfare: under the evil influence of the Sandinistas, the process allowed the wrong class of people—workers in the enterprise—to gain a share in ownership. That is quite improper, and inconsistent with the concept of “economic miracle.”

To be sure, traditional US idealism will see to it that free market policies are not carried to excessive lengths: “the BND is considering financing large producers...at up to 70 percent of production costs,”
CAR
notes.

The guiding US hand can also be seen in the measures to overcome “the unresolved status of property” that troubles the “commercial pioneers” and their cheerleaders in the US press.
Envío
reports that “The retrenching of the state banks towards medium- and large-scale production became evident in 1991, when the BND closed 16 branch offices in small towns throughout the country's central regions. Traditional financing mechanisms such as usury credit, futures sales, and sharecropping—whose costs to the peasantry are well-known—are coming into use again.” Campesinos will be forced to leave their land, and it will return to its rightful owners.

To help the natural evolution along, the Army and National Police have been “utilizing all forms of violence and humiliation” to evacuate rural farmers from their lands,
CAR
reports; these lands had been distributed by constitutional decrees introduced by the Sandinistas, under which “farmlands and other properties abandoned or liquidated...were parceled out to landless campesinos in the form of small family subsistence plots or cooperative farms.” In June 1992, 21 farms were violently “cleaned out” by the security forces, to be returned to their former owners; in 11 cases, to members of the Somoza family, according to the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH). On June 30,
CAR
continues, 300 police and army troops “violently evicted 40 campesino families” with attack dogs, beating men, women, and children and threatening to kill campesinos who did not leave, burning homes and crops, and arresting activists of the Rural Workers Association. The security forces have imposed “a state of terror and blackmail” to prevent campesinos from organizing, CENIDH charged.

The police are now almost half ex-contras, it is estimated. The US failure to regain total control of the security forces has caused much outrage in Washington and the press. One major reason for the US war against Nicaragua was to restore that traditional control, so that the security forces can once again impose the “regional standards” of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as in the Somoza days.
45

Since the US-backed UNO government won the February 1990 election, rural poverty has “drastically increased” because of the acceleration of neoliberal policies, which has “wreaked havoc on Nicaragua's small and medium-sized farmers,”
CAR
reports. In much of the countryside, people are “becoming more desperate each day, with more than 70 percent of the children in these areas suffering malnutrition and between 65 percent to 89 percent of the population unemployed.” In the Atlantic Coast region, “not only are farmers suffering, but fishermen are losing 80 percent of their livelihood to foreign companies which the UNO government has authorized to fish in the Atlantic Coast waters.” Serious diseases that were eradicated under the Sandinistas are now common in the region, where 90 percent of residents are unable to satisfy basic needs. A representative of the National Union of Farmers and Cattle Ranchers (UNAG) says that the stringent credit requirements for peasant farmers “are killing us”: “Large nontraditional farms get all the funding they need, but a subsistence farmer growing beans or com to feed his family is allowed to go bankrupt and starve.” Thirty-two-thousand families are surviving on “roots and empty tortillas with salt,” UNAG reports. Opening of the economy, reeling under the impact of the US embargo and the terrorist war, has “forced Nicaragua's homegrown industries to compete with giant multinational companies,” John Otis observes. As the country is flooded with foreign products, small industries have declined from 3800 when Chamorro took office to 2500 two years later; Nicaragua even imports its own national beer from Wisconsin, under a Nicaraguan label. Importers, middlemen, luxury goods shops, and the local wealthy are doing fine, along with the foreigners for whom the policies are designed. The rest can wait for “trickle down,” including the 50 percent or more unemployed.
46

Per capita income has fallen to the level of 1945; real wages amount to 13 percent of their 1980 value, still falling. Infant mortality and low birth weight are increasing, reversing earlier progress. The reduction of the health care budget by 40 percent in March 1991 has seriously affected the already insufficient supply of medicines. Hospitals for the general public barely function, though the rich can have what they need as the country returns to the “Central American mode.” “The right to health care no longer exists in post-war Nicaragua,” apart from those rich enough to pay, the Evangelical Church (CEPAD) reports. A survey of prostitutes found that 80 percent had taken up the trade in the last year, many of them teenagers.

In May 1992, the US Congress suspended over $100 million of already approved aid, objecting to alleged government assistance to Sandinista organizations and failure to return property to former owners. “Extraofficially, it was learned that the government will give priority to United States citizens, to prominent Nicaraguan business people and to leaders of the former contras,” the Mexican press reported, notably the North American Rosario Mining Co., which claims the gold mining installations in the northeast. The central issue is “whether the more than 100,000 peasant families who received land or title to land which they were already working under the Sandinista Administration will be able to keep their lands,” as had been promised in the UNO program, Lisa Haugaard of the Central American Historical Institute observes.

Another issue is the independence of the security forces. In accord with longstanding policy, Washington insists that they be under US control—that Sandinista officials be dismissed, to use the code words preferred by government-media propaganda. Other industrial countries, not having the traditional interest in running “our little region over here,” dismiss these demands as absurd, considering the Sandinista FSLN to be a “solidly structured [party] with a significant political weight,” the only large popular-based party in the country (Detlev Nolte, head of Germany's Institute of Ibero-American Studies). They object to the US policy of “again polarizing the situation,” another German Latin American specialist adds. When the congressional hold on aid was dropped, the Bush Administration held it back anyway, in line with its deep commitment to bar even a minimal show of independence.
47

As we gaze on what we have accomplished and envision the glorious future that awaits, we can take pride in “having served as an inspiration for the triumph of democracy in our time,” as the
New Republic
exulted after the elections had been won by “the right side” in Nicaragua, a “level playing field” having been established by Washington's stern warning that any other outcome would be followed by continued economic strangulation and terror. We can, in short, join the editors in their praise for Washington's terror and violence, giving “Reagan & Co. good marks” for the gratifying mounds of mutilated corpses and hordes of starving children in Central America, recognizing, as they advised, that we must send military aid to “Latin-style fascists... regardless of how many are murdered” because “there are higher American priorities than Salvadoran human rights.”
48

Recall that in accord with official convention, the economic catastrophe of the past years in Latin America is the result of statism, populism, Marxism, and other evils, now to be cured by the newly discovered virtues of monetarism and the free market. This picture is “a complete fabrication,” James Petras and Steve Vieux point out. The highly-touted new discoveries are just those that have led to catastrophe in the past—with no little aid from US-sponsored terror and economic warfare. Furthermore, neoliberal dogma has ruled for years in these US-run “testing areas.” Social expenditures dropped sharply from 1980, leading to public health disaster and educational collapse, except for the rich; growth stagnated or declined. There was one area of progress: privatization, providing great advantages to wealthy sectors at home and abroad, and diminishing public revenues still further when “efficiently run, surplus-producing operations” were sold off, as in Chile. “The brutal austerity programs of the 1980s were obviously the work of doctrinaire neoliberals,” they point out, and the “dismal results” are directly traceable to their ideological fervor. The huge debt accumulated through the partnership of domestic military-economic elites and foreign banks awash with petrodollars is to be paid by the poor. “Wage earners sacrificed the most in making available the surplus needed to make payments on the external debt,” the UN World Economic Survey 1990 observed.

“More than any geographic area in the world,” correspondent Marc Cooper writes, “Latin America over the past decade took seriously the promise of the Reagan revolution”—not quite by choice. The decade was marked by privatization, deregulation, “free trade,” destruction of unions and popular organizations, opening of resources (including national parks and reserves) to foreign investors, and all the rest of the package. The effects have been disastrous, predictably.
49

The celebration in the doctrinal institutions is also entirely predictable. Blame for past catastrophes has to be shifted to the shoulders of others. Any role that the US masters have played is, by definition, marginal at most, to be attributed to Cold War imperatives. And as the old doctrines produce new “economic miracles,” there is every reason for the ideologues of privilege to applaud, as they always have, and as they will continue to do as long as power offers them that task.

Chapter 8

The Tragedy of Haiti

1. “The First Free Nation of Free Men”

“
H
aiti
was
more than the New World's second oldest republic,” anthropologist Ira Lowenthal observed, “more than even the first black republic of the modern world. Haiti was the first
free
nation of
free
men to arise within, and in resistance to, the emerging constellation of Western European empire.” The interaction of the New World's two oldest republics for 200 years again illustrates the persistence of basic themes of policy, their institutional roots and cultural concomitants.

The Republic of Haiti was established on January 1, 1804, after a slave revolt expelled the French colonial rulers and their allies. The revolutionary chiefs discarded the French “Saint-Domingue” in favor of the name used by the people who had greeted Columbus in 1492, as he arrived to establish his first settlement in Europe's New World. The descendants of the original inhabitants could not celebrate the liberation. They had been reduced to a few hundred within 50 years from a pre-Colombian population estimated variously from hundreds of thousands to 8 million, with none remaining at all, according to contemporary French scholars, when France took the western third of Hispaniola, now Haiti, from Spain in 1697. The leader of the revolt, Toussaint L'Ouverture, could not celebrate the victory either. He had been captured by deceit and sent to a French prison to die a “slow death from cold and misery,” in the words of a 19th century French historian. Medical anthropologist Paul Farmer observes that Haitian schoolchildren to this day know by heart his final words as he was led to prison: “In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep.”
1

The tree of liberty broke through the soil again in 1985, as the population revolted against the murderous Duvalier dictatorship. After many bitter struggles, the popular revolution led to the overwhelming victory of Haiti's first freely elected president, the populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Seven months after his February 1991 inauguration he was driven from office by the military and commercial elite who had ruled for 200 years, and would not tolerate loss of their traditional rights of terror and exploitation.

“As soon as the last Duvalier had fled Haiti,” Puerto Rican ethnohistorian Jalil Sued-Badillo recounts, “an angry crowd toppled the statue of Christopher Columbus in Port-au-Prince and threw it in the sea,” protesting “the ravages of colonialism” under “a long line of despots” from Columbus to Duvalier, and on to today's rulers, who have reinstated Duvalier savagery. There were similar scenes in the neighboring Dominican Republic, subjected to a US-imposed terror regime after another Marine invasion in 1965 and a victim of IMF Fundamentalism from the early 1980s. In February 1992, President Balaguer “unleashed his security forces to beat peaceful demonstrators who were protesting the exorbitant expenditures shelled out for the 500-year celebration while the average Dominican starves,” the Council on Hemispheric Affairs reported. Its centerpiece is a multi-million-dollar 100-foot-high half-mile-long recumbent cross with powerful searchlights that “rises above a slum of rat-infested shacks where malnourished, illiterate children slosh through the fetid water that washes through the streets during tropical rainstorms,” the news services reported. Slums were cleared to accommodate its sprawling terraced gardens, and a stone wall conceals “the desperate poverty that its beams will soon illuminate.” The huge expenses “coincide with one of the worst economic crises since the ‘30s,” the former president of the Central Bank pointed out. After ten years of structural adjustment, health care and education have radically declined, electricity cutoffs up to 24 hours are used to ration power, unemployment exceeds 25 percent, and poverty is rampant. “The big fish eat the little ones,” one old women says in the nearby slum.
2