“Millions of babies watching the skies / Bellies swollen, with big round eyes” said the gut-wrenching poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1971 about the atrocities committed by the Pakistani army against Bengalis. His powerful verses became an important indictment of U.S. passivity when the people of West Pakistan were massacred. At the same time in Central America, leaders like the Guatemalan army officer Carlos Arana Osorio —nicknamed “the jackal of the west” for his ferocity— and the bloody Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle were polishing their anti-communist credentials and fastening control of their countries.
In Pakistan like in Central America, local power holders were emboldened by Henry Kissinger’s delegation of responsibility. Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor was busy establishing himself as master of the geopolitical game with his famed opening to China. The Pakistani army was a useful piece in his grand strategic Cold War move and therefore he chose to ignore his own diplomats in Dhaka who warned that “our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities.... Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy....”
As Rodrigo Véliz has shown recently, Kissinger’s approach was similar in Central America, in that it gave the armies free rein. He thought that “military command was key to avoid revolutionary explosions.” The master of geopolitics trusted that leaving fighting against local insurgencies in the hands of each country’s military officers was the best approach to deal with Cold War flare ups while he concentrated on more important matters. He had little time for the affairs of second-rate countries, be they Guatemala or Pakistan.
To understand the consequences of Kissinger’s hands-off approach we can look to events in El Salvador in 1972, as the ashes of the Bengali fire were still smoldering. In February of that year the moderate Christian Democrat candidate José Napoleón Duarte clearly won the presidential contest. He was an enormously popular former mayor of the capital who had demonstrated his ability to govern with the help of able technocrats. Yet, the Salvadoran oligarchy portrayed him as a radical communist and the election was blatantly stolen. When young army officers tried to reverse the decision with an uprising, Arana Osorio and Somoza helped the Salvadoran president, Fidel Sánchez Hernández, to control the situation. Duarte was beaten up and sent into exile. That was the same Napoleón Duarte that later became a CIA asset and kissed the American flag when Ronald Reagan invited him to the White House.
History is not an inexorable path. There are events that present a clear fork in the road, and the Salvadoran election of 1972 is an example. One can only speculate what would have happened if El Salvador had experienced a transition to civilian rule in 1972 and the task of governing was in the hands of a moderate political group open to the idea of reform. It would have been an imperfect exercise, but it could have included more meaningful political participation, avoided extreme polarization, and set El Salvador on a different path.
It can be argued that the Nixon-Kissinger policy toward Central America was more benign than the instructions of “make the economy scream” applied to Chile, or the conversation of Kissinger with Argentine generals in 1976 when he said: “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” But the consequences for the population and the political system were much the same. The empowered Central American army men were in constant contact with their South American counterparts, and there is plenty of evidence that they were eager students of their methods. The Argentine army, for example, was active in Central America organizing crash courses on the tactics of “Dirty War”.
Kissinger’s second foray in Central America was also deceptively benevolent. In the 1980s Ronald Reagan drafted him to preside over a bipartisan commission that gave a veneer of legitimacy to an aggressive foreign policy that had the foreseeable consequence of indiscriminately harsh military tactics. The Salvadoran conflict caused over 75,000 deaths, most of which could be attributed to the army, as documented by an international Truth Commission. Although U.S. authorities made pronouncements encouraging the protection of human rights, they helped the Salvadoran army hide instances of great brutality, such as the massacre of El Mozote, where more than a thousand civilians, including many women and children, were killed.
For all its appeals to economic reform and democratic institutions, the Kissinger report included statements that told army officers that they were defending the survival of democracy and, by implication, that they were entitled to extreme measures. “The insurgents, if they win,” said the text, “will create a totalitarian regime in the image of their sponsors’ ideology and their own.”
But Kissinger’s trust in the wisdom of the local leaders in Latin America, and in El Salvador in particular, was not the first example and may not be the last. For example, following FDR’s Good Neighbor Policy (GNP), in 1939 the U.S. envoy Robert Frazer gave a reception to honor the unconstitutional reelection of the dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez, thus sanctioning clearly undemocratic behavior for the sake of stability. It was not a unique case. There is a scholarly consensus that the GNP helped to consolidate dictatorships all over Latin America.
In 1950 George Kennan’s so called “Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine,” a poorly known but extremely influential pronouncement —not to be confused with the 1904 Roosevelt Corollary— stated that it was not advisable to be “too dogmatic about the methods by which local Communists can be dealt with,” and that “harsh governmental measures of repression may be the only answer,” even when they were taken by “regimes whose origins and methods would not stand the test of American concepts of democratic procedure.” Kissinger’s position was not distant from Kennan’s, with whom he shared similar love for grand strategy and lack of interest, even disdain, for what happened to people in lesser regions, be it West Pakistan (now Bangladesh) or El Salvador.
The U.S. practice of silence and even accommodation to undemocratic practices seemed, at the time, practical and convenient to advance its interests without making waves. But, in the end, deviating from principle meant missing golden opportunities to do the right thing and becoming accomplices to truly objectionable behavior, as exemplified by Kissinger's approach in 1972 and the 1980s, respectively.
When Ginsberg wrote “How many children are we who are lost / Whose are these daughters we see turn to ghost?” about Bengali kids on Jessore road, he could have been writing about the children of El Mozote, or of Mayan villages in Guatemala, all victims of grand, arrogant, strategic visions gone awry.
Héctor Lindo-Fuentes is Professor Emeritus of History at Fordham University.
