The Darker Nations, page 20
In 1951, the decade-old MNR won a key election, but given that it directly threatened the power of La Rosca and its class allies, the military stepped in and revoked the election. A year later, the MNR returned to power in a popular coup, where the militias of the campesinos and tin miners overwhelmed the military and took charge of the country. The MNR’s leader Víctor Paz Estenssoro became president and immediately put in place substantial reforms on behalf of the party’s base, and therefore the majority of the population. Three months after it came to power, the MNR opened the suffrage to everyone, both men and women, literates and illiterates. Only 6.6 percent of the population (205,000) voted in the 1951 election, but by the time of the 1956 election more than 30 percent of the population (1,127,000) registered to exercise their newly won franchise. Even if women in the MNR could not break the back of Bolivian patriarchy, their organizations, the María Barzola Movement and the Comandos Femeninas, won a substantial victory for women with the franchise, far ahead of Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Peru.5 The franchise reform had effects long after the revolution of 1952’s economic reforms had faded, and even during the military dictatorship from 1964 (considered even more illegitimate because people had once had the vote).
The two most substantial economic reforms were the nationalization of the tin mines and the land reforms. The MNR regime owed its power to the two social classes that worked these sectors: the miners and the campesinos. In October 1952, President Paz traveled to Siglo XX, the mine where the most militant workers of the Federacion Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia worked, to announce the nationalization of the tin resources. The move had a symbolic effect because Bolivia now seemed to reclaim its resources; the fact is that the quality of the tin had already begun to decline during the 1940s, no new source of tin had been found since 1927, and the Bolivian economy still had to export “raw” tin to be processed elsewhere. The nationalization alone showed that the MNR had the interests of the Bolivian people at heart, but it was an insufficient maneuver against the overwhelming dominance of external capital over the fate of the miners.
The second reform came in 1953, when the MNR conducted fairly extensive land redistribution on behalf of the landless labor, the campesinos. The 6 percent of the landowners who owned more than a thousand hectares, the hacendados, controlled 92 percent of the land, and they had not more than 1.5 percent of that land under cultivation.6 This landed elite relied on brute force to get the mainly Amerindian labor to work. The MNR’s Decree of Land Reform (August 3, 1953) confiscated large parts of the latifundias and transferred these to the comunidades (peasant communities) to be worked by the peasantry, who were mainly Amerindian. The best lands, the lands with the most capital-intensive agriculture, did not come into the communal pool, and therefore what the comunidades got was often substandard. Part of this occurred because the revolutionary regime did not incorporate the experienced leaders of the campesino, many of whom had been crucial not only to the revolution but also to the ferment in agricultural areas since the mid-1940s.7
Despite the drawbacks of the revolution, Bolivia in the early 1950s was in the same sort of social ferment as Algeria a decade later. For a few years, Bolivia trod a path unfamiliar to most Third World states, which is why it is especially important for consideration here. From 1952 until the late 1950s, the MNR attempted to dismantle the military and hand over the power of the gun to the militias of the campesinos, the tin miners, and the MNR’s own grupos de honor. Its 1951 experience with the military led the MNR to shut down the Colegio Militar, dismiss a fifth of the officer corps, drastically cut the expenditure for the army (from 22 percent in 1952 to 7 percent in 1957), and even consider the complete elimination of the armed forces.8 The lack of a central authority in Bolivia, or else the effective devolution of power to the people’s organizations, led the U.S. State Department to note in 1957 that “the whole complex of lawlessness, combined with the government’s apparent unwillingness or inability to control it, added up to a considerable degree of anarchy in the country.”9 The “anarchy” for the United States was popular democracy for the Bolivians.
The U.S. government did not intervene in Bolivia as it did with such ferocity in Guatemala, when its president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, attempted to give a socialist shape to the relationship between the state and society.10 The difference between Guatemala and Bolivia is perhaps in the role that U.S. firms played in the economy of each country. In Guatemala, the United Fruit Company owned vast tracts of land, and operated this land as an immense agricultural factory. The Arbenz government’s land reform directly threatened United Fruit’s holdings. In Bolivia, the U.S. firms did not own the tin mines. Since 1946, the U.S. firms bought half of Bolivia’s tin, and a “swarm” of experts descended on the country that quickly became one large tin mine in the eyes of the U.S. government, which saw its Bolivian counterpart as a tin-pot government.11 Bolivia’s tin would come to the United States regardless of who owned the mines, although a genuinely socialized and nationalist structure might try to get a better rate for its core constituency, the miners. Nevertheless, there was no urgency to tackle the Bolivian reforms, because they did not affect the basic structure of U.S. dominance in the short term.
Rather than try to overthrow the MNR, the U.S. government began a two-step process to undermine the radicalism of the revolution. The two stages were encapsulated in President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. In 1961, the Kennedy administration provided $20 billion to Central and South American states for economic development and military assistance. In March, Kennedy welcomed South and Central American leaders to the White House with a speech on the alliance, in which he noted, “The new generation of military leaders has shown an increasing awareness that armies cannot only defend their countries—they can, as we have learnt through our own Corps of Engineers, help to build them.”12 The U.S. government, in other words, saw the military as a stalwart institution for “development.” The United States had already funneled large amounts of money into rebuilding the Bolivian army, and it soon increased the funds astronomically (from $1.4 million in 1962 to $4.1 million in 1963). An army leadership frustrated by the cutbacks and the overall demotion of its status in the country turned to the United States for assistance. In 1960, a senior general told the U.S. ambassador and military attaché that 90 percent of the officers and troops held strong anticommunist viewpoints.13 The military put itself at the service of the U.S. government and awaited a green light for a coup.14
Indeed, when the Bolivian army, led by Barrientos, conducted its golpe (coup) in 1964, it was given substantial encouragement by the U.S. attaché, Colonel Edward Fox (alternatively known as “Fox of the Andes” or “Zorro of the Andes”). While this is unimpeachable, what is often left out of the story is that the MNR had by the late 1950s already begun to build up the military and had ceased to rely on its central allies for popular support. President Paz came from the more conservative, albeit nationalist, side of the MNR—not the more socialist, miner-union side like his vice president, Juan Lechín. To crack down on the proCastro and procommunist element in the MNR, Paz began to dismantle the massive social movements and turn for support to the institutions of the old regime (the church and the military) as well as U.S. government aid funds. Paz’s desire to concentrate power in the hands of his clique led to the departure of sections of the MNR and the alienation of the tin miners because of the removal of Lechín from his ticket for the 1964 election. By July 1962, Paz encouraged the military to crack down on the civilian militias, and by the end of the year, the renewed military had recovered ground against both the campesinos and the tin miners. The power base of the revolution was demobilized and disarmed. The MNR leadership’s fear of the Left led it into the arms of the United States and the conservative social classes that fundamentally opposed the agenda of the Third World. The U.S. government did not alone fashion the coup of 1964; it gave international support to the generals whose power increased as a result of U.S. funds, and it eroded the compact between the social movements of the revolution and the government that had taken power in their name. The 1963 Panama meeting, therefore, was simply an indication of the coup that would come soon after.
The golpe of 1964 was well prepared by the Bolivian military and the U.S. government, and was facilitated by the ideological weakness of the Paz wing in the MNR, which was keener on order than on radical social change. The events in Bolivia replicated those elsewhere in the darker nations, from its neighbor Paraguay’s 1954 coup led by General Alfredo Stroessner to the distant Thailand’s 1957 coup led by Army Chief Sarit Tanarat. From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, one scholar estimates that at the most, two hundred coups took place in Africa and Asia as well as Central and South America.15 In his prescient book, Fanon had warned about the structural role of the military in the former colonial nations: “Care must be taken to avoid turning the army into an autonomous body which sooner or later, finding itself idle and without any definite mission, will ‘go into politics’ and threaten the government. Drawing-room generals, by dint of haunting the corridors of government departments, come to dream of manifestoes.”16 Where every other institution had been battered by colonialism and neocolonialism, the military stood out as efficient and disciplined. The bureaucracy is often poorly trained and prone to corruption, whereas the political parties are frequently, even in South America, better at the struggle for freedom or the creation of manifestos than governance. In this situation, and with the general demobilization and disarmament of the population, the military is an obvious actor for social order.
Fanon has a prescription to prevent the golpe. “The only way to avoid this menace,” he writes, “is to educate the army politically, in other words to nationalize it. In the same way another urgent task is to increase the militia.”17 Indeed, Third World states that did not disarm the population, and that created citizens’ militias and retained the population in a general political mobilization, did not succumb to coups or easy intervention by imperialism. The classic case is revolutionary Cuba. Shortly after the Castro group took power in Cuba, the leadership of the revolution maintained the level of popular participation in revolutionary activities as part of the order of governance. To defend the nation, the Cuban government transformed the army, and supplemented it with the Milicias de Tropas Territoriales (the Territorial Militia), the National Revolutionary Militias, the various battalions of the regional militias (such as the Cienfuegos militia), the Association of Pioneer Rebels, the Ejécito Juvenil del Trabajo (the Youth Labor Army), and such smaller outfits like the Conrado Benitez Brigades and the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon.18 These militias not only provided crucial homeland defense during invasions such as the Bay of Pigs but also participated in agricultural operations (namely, the Ejécito Juvenil) and literacy campaigns (namely, the Benitez Brigades). Hours after the Cuban people routed the invasion at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, Castro offered four hours of explanation on television: “Imperialism examines geography, analyzes the number of cannons, of planes, of tanks, the positions. The revolutionary examines the social composition of the population. The imperialists don’t give a damn about how the population there thinks or feels.”19
Following Cuba’s example, Guinea mobilized sections of the population into civic brigades and popular militias (1966), Tanzania created the National Service (1964–66), and Libya created the Popular Resistance Force (1971). These militias worked against a military coup, but in some cases they also allowed the one-party state to suffocate any dissent in the population. This is a perennial problem with popular mobilization, when the organs of the people stifle dissent in civil society in the name of national progress or democracy. There is no easy solution to the problem of popular mobilization and dissent, particularly when the forces of imperialism are arrayed against national liberation—indeed, when they are pledged to overthrow the new nations. Can dissent be institutionalized, or is the space for dissent only to be produced by the attitude of the state? Dissent is a fundamental liberty, not only for its political utility (it does not alienate parts of the population), but also because dissent might carry useful suggestions and criticisms that are otherwise silenced by the echo chamber of government. Regimes that advocated popular mobilization did not pay sufficient attention to the importance of dissent, and even as they held progressive views they did not promote democratic institutions.20
Most new nations that demobilized and disarmed their populations fell prey to military intervention, often driven by imperialist pressure. The U.S. government, by the early 1950s, began to assume responsibility for corporate interests against the new nations’ attempts to nationalize production. The U.S.-engineered coup in Iran (1953) is an early example of this planetary role for Washington, DC. Whereas the evidence of U.S. involvement is unclear in most of the coups in the Third World, the footprint of the CIA and the U.S. military intelligence has been clearly documented in the coups in the Dominican Republic (1963), Ecuador (1963), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), Congo (1965), Greece (1967), Cambodia (1970), Bolivia again (1971), and most famously Chile (1973).21 This is the short, uncontroversial list. Why would the U.S. government, the champion of democracy, initiate military regimes in places where these governments would resort to brutality against the nation? In 1959, the Pentagon commissioned the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, to do a study on the role of the military in the Third World, and this report helped President Eisenhower’s Draper Committee formulate the agenda for the U.S. military assistance program. Both RAND and the Draper Committee agreed that the military in the tropics provided technical and bureaucratic skills for state construction, and that despite their shortcomings, the military in the “underdeveloped areas” should be supported by the U.S. government.22
Establishment intellectuals such as the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington created a subfield called “military modernization.”23 Huntington, who taught at Harvard University, was a regular consultant to the CIA during the 1960s, and in the circle of senior government figures such as McGeorge Bundy (also a Harvard professor who was Kennedy’s and Johnson’s special assistant on national security) and Robert McNamara (secretary of defense). Huntington’s 1968 Political Order in a Changing Society provided the best account of military modernization. Huntington played a central role in the Trilateral Commission. Founded in 1973 by representatives of the dominant classes of Asia, Europe, and North America, the Trilateral Commission was of the opinion that world elites must be “concerned more with the overall framework of order than with the management of every regional enterprise.” Huntington co-authored its 1975 study, The Crisis of Democracy. While working for the Trilateral, Huntington advised the Brazilian military.24 In the late 1970s, Huntington went on to be the coordinator of national security on the U.S. National Security Council. He has been close to power ever since. In his influential 1968 study on “political modernization,” Huntington argued that liberal democracy in the tropics might “serve to perpetuate antiquated social structure.”25 The state needed to concentrate political power as a prelude to economic development, and so there was no better social institution to govern in these parts than the military.26 Huntington’s sophisticated analysis mirrored a 1962 policy document from the National Security Council: “A change brought about through force by non-communist elements may be preferable to prolonged deterioration of government effectiveness. It is U.S. policy, when it is in the U.S. interest, to make the local military and police advocates of democracy and agents for carrying forward the developmental process.”27 Counterinsurgency, coups, and support of the most brutal military dictators could be done not simply for reasons of corporate “stability” but for development, for the sake of the people of the country now ruled by the military.
Few will be able to defend this line of analysis in hindsight—the aftermath of Mobutu’s Congo, Suharto’s Indonesia, or Pinochet’s Chile hardly validates the promise of military modernization. When Mobutu Sese Seko fled after over three decades of U.S.-backed power, he left behind a national debt of about $5 billion—a billion less than he had secreted in his accounts at various Swiss banks. Haji Mohammed Suharto, the bulwark of stability, looted the Indonesian treasury of perhaps as much as $35 billion during his three-decade rule.28 Rather than modernization, we have “primitive accumulation” for a small circle of the ruler’s family members. Few will be able to defend these dictators from the charge that they committed horrible acts of routine violation against individuals and the body politic. They did not use the institution of the army to create the basis for modern rights. To the contrary, they used the army to mutilate the population and rule by fear.
Ecuador and Guatemala offer two useful examples of the limitations of the Pentagon’s theory of military modernization. In both cases, the Pentagon backed the military rulers. Since neither ruler could fully hew to the Pentagon’s line without risk of complete alienation from the Ecuadorians and Guatemalans, they had to be deposed by an alternative ruler or else a constitutional movement from below that traduced the posture of the Pentagon’s modernization attempts. In 1958, the “exuberant reactionary” General Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes gathered the reins to run Guatemala’s military dictatorship. Ydígoras closely followed the dictates of the Alliance for Progress, created the Ley de Transformación Agraria that used the rhetoric of land reform to turn back the clock on the social experiments of the nationalist Arbenz regime, and did all that he could to insinuate the U.S. military into Guatemala’s future plans (the country provided the base for the Bay of Pigs invasion). When popular uprisings broke out in March 1962, Ydígoras unleashed the U.S.-armed and trained Guatemalan military, and welcomed the establishment of a permanent U.S. base, staffed by troops from Puerto Rico and Mexico. With the growth of resistance against Ydígoras, however, the United States ditched him in 1963 for Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia.29 Dictators come and go, but the form of dictatorship remained. Guatemala shows that none of the promises of military modernization, such as the creation of political institutions and the rule of law, had a high priority for the U.S. government.
