Reagan's other legacy

Fans of the late US President Ronald Reagan would do well to read this article in The London Review of Books on Greg Grandin's book The Last Colonial Massacre. They claim to love him because he allegedly spoke clearly and unambiguously about freedom and liberty.

The piece cites malicious American involvement in Latin America in general and Guatemala in particular. The objective of such meddling was to preserve feudal societies favorable to big landowners, many of whom were American companies. None of this is particularly new to anyone who's been paying attention, but it's a useful reminder to Reagan hagiographers that the Cold War was fought not only in Central and Eastern Europe

It's useful to remember that tens (hundreds?) of thousands Latin Americans were slaughtered by fascist and reactionary pro-American regimes in the name of Reagan's notion of "the free world."

The Last Colonial Massacre points out that Latin America's left became radicalized largely because the pro-American, anti-communist regimes did as much as they could to purge the moderate, democratic left. The US-engineered 1954 coup against Guatemala's democratically elected leader Jacobo Arbenz taught a young Che Guevara the impossibility of peaceful, electoral reform and promised his followers that 'Cuba will not be Guatemala.' Guevara went on to team with Fidel Castro, another Latin American disaffected by the corruption and repression of a pro-American regime.

The book points out that the domestic reactionaries' real fear wasn't communism, but popular participation. The most mythologized martyrs of the Latin American left, Arbenz and Chile's Salvador Allende, were social democrats (like the then-ruling parties of, say, Sweden and Canada), not authoritarian communists (like in the USSR or North Korea). But they occassionally cooperated with communists so that automatically made them communist, in the simplistic dichotomy of American foreign policy.

Arbenz's Agrarian Reform bill was deried by a communist legislator as 'a bourgeois law.' When complained to about the slowness of reform, Arbenz replied, 'I don't care! You have to do things right.'

But the feudal lords of Latin America didn't care for such nuance. When anti-Communists put an end to this democratic awakening in 1954, it was as much the peasant's newfound appetite for thinking and talking as the planter's expropriated land that they were worried about. As Guatemala's archbishop complained, the Arbencistas sent peasants 'gifted with facility with words' to the nation's capital, where they were 'taught . . . to speak in public'.

He COMPLAINED.

Much like America's very own Crusaders...

Relying on the power of the Catholic Church, the regime that replaced Arbenz had prelates preach the gospel against Communism and socialism, and also against democracy, liberalism and feminism. Reaching back to the rhetoric of opposition to the French Revolution, the Church fathers characterised the Cold War as a struggle between the City of God and 'the city of the devil incarnate'.

Reformists were called 'professional corrupters of the feminine soul', elevating women with 'gifts of proselytism or leadership' to 'high and well-paid positions in official bureaucracy'. Because the Church elders were sometimes too fastidious to whip up the masses, emigrés from Republican Spain, who were partial to Franco and Mussolini, frequently took their place, calling for a more ecstatic faith to counter Communism's appeal: 'We do not want a cold Catholicism. We want holiness, ardent, great and joyous holiness . . . intransigent and fanatical.'

Reagan didn't single-handedly cause the horrors of Latin America any more than he single-handedly won the Cold War. But, to continue the analogy, his influence was indispensible in perpetuating it. When he met with Guatemala's dictator, Gen. Rios Montt, Reagan described the general as 'a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy.'

This was right in the middle of the genocide being committed by the general's military.

Of course, Reagan acknowledged the awkwardness of his comments by blaming the messengers; the "do-gooders" were giving Rios Montt 'a bum rap.'

There were a lot of "hot wars" during the Cold War. El Salvador, Guatemala, Mozambique to name a few. Nearly every one of those wars ended during or shortly after, the Soviet Union's disintegration and subsequent American disengagement. In other words, once the foreign meddlers left, the domestics got tired of it and settled things amongst themselves. The singular exception was in Angola, whose conflict preceded Superpower involvement.

Most leftist intellectuals, chagrined by reality exposed, have long since dissociated themselves with repressive Stalinism and its cousins. Perhaps the Reaganites could show the integrity to do the same.