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army were delivered so that the junta could quell any resistance to the coup and $48 millions in commodity credits (Stephen, 2012). The US eventually acknowledged that Pinochet was creating detention camps for political prisoners, which American funds indirectly supported by providing materials such as tents and blankets, which “need not be publicly… earmarked for prisoners” (Kornbluh, 2004, p. 211). The International Commission of Jurists stated in a report that: “Pinochet was a dictator who would stop at nothing to consolidate his power. His regime eliminated thousands of opponents. During the dictatorship, arbitrary executions, arrests, assassinations, torture and disappearances were common practice. Tens of thousands of Chileans met their fate at the hands of Pinochet's ruthless regime” (International
Commission of Jurists (ICJ), 1999, p.7).
Between 1970 and 1973, the Allende government received $19.8 million in assistance, compared to $186 million provided to Pinochet between 1974 and 1976
(Livingstone, 2018). Former president Carter failed to improve the situation of human rights in Chile. In American foreign policy discourse, economic freedom equals social freedom, and to dispute this notion was seen as damaging to global order in the bipolar world of the Cold War. Therefore, to condemn Pinochet’s human rights record would also mean condemning his economic policy, as the two were inextricably linked (Creffield, 2019).
C.I.A.’s Covert War Scope
The purpose of the CIA operations was not exclusively that of providing intelligence to military groups; the intelligence agency was also tasked with gaining access to the daily life of the receiving communities, building senses, values and promoting practices. The overarching objective was set to extinguish the interest towards communism and strengthen instead the image of the United States as a guardian of freedom. To achieve this, the CIA used the following methods, as defined by the National Security Council: 1) Financing,
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advising and arming military powers such as the Contras and Pinochet; 2) Manipulation of public opinion through animated magazines on how to cause civil disobedience and create chaos, and radio stations, and; 3) Economic warfare.
In spite of the tremendous amount invested, the Contras failed to overthrow the Sandinista government by military means. Nevertheless, the combination of the economic embargo, the bombardment of the principal sea port, and the economic sabotage, in general succeed in devastating the economy. But manipulation of the public opinion is a primary means to completely eradicate a threat. In fact, the Sandinistas had the greater popular support, and the coalition of opposition parties leveraged on the economic sabotage to frame them as “evil” before the international community and win the elections in 1990.
Despite the fact that the Sandinistas won elections by popular vote by democratic elections and also Salvador Allende was democratically elected, the United States pointed an accusatory finger toward both and undermined their reputation internationally. In both the Nicaraguan and the Chilean cases, the United States through the CIA financed and assisted military powers to fight and win a coup war. Furthermore, a common thread followed by the United States to align the countries with their interests seemed to entail efforts made with the purpose of naturally stirring the population toward a given direction, without openly
imposing it.
To eliminate the Sandinista threat, the United States availed themselves of the following strategies:
● Creating chaos: despite the fact that the Contras did not succeed in defeating the Sandinista military, they brought war to several places on the Nicaraguan territory. Their acts of violence and crime against humanity, harassment, the acts of terror, created an environment of chaos, instability and insecurity;
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● The sabotage of the economy: the economic embargo, the mining of seaports, the sabotage of oil pipelines and airports, the burning of crops, the destruction of bridges, among others, were the selected means of pressure. Quoting the director of the CIA, “what else can we do with the economy so that those bastards sweat?”;
● Manipulation of public opinion: paying public relations firms, giving speeches on the defense of democracy, financing of the opposition media, creating of civil disorder manuals were some of the means leveraged to frame Contra's criminal actions as heroic for the democracy. On the flip side of the coin, the complete concealment of acts of aggression and the violation of human rights and international law in Nicaragua acted as cards to point to the Sandinistas as evil.
This investigation centers on how these actions that violated human rights and international law were hidden, and how the United States prized its actors as patriot heroes instead of condemning them, as Goffman frame theories argue that false frames can be created by impostors and scammers. Although the new government started with peace
campaigns and an end to the war, in essence, it was a conflict instigated by the United States, and it was the United States itself that financed the electoral campaign in conjunction with the threat that, if people didn’t vote for the opposition, the war and the economic blockade would continue. The chaos, the economic sabotage, and the manipulation of public opinion were all born from the common root of United States external cooperation funds, framed under the interpretation that these were necessary means to grant national security,
additionally illegal means were also used by the U.S authorities in order to keep the Contras undefeated.
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Analysis Chapter I
The international community created their unique framework to define the direction of their cooperation. As mentioned in the previous sections, in international aid strategies, it is normally the donor countries that set the framework of operation for the international aid strategy, and they subsequently impose it on the receiving countries without taking into consideration the needs, situations and experiences of these latter players. Throughout this permanent activity, donor countries set, in the words of Goffman, the edges of such frameworks in a way that their own interest is protected within the international arena.
Disguised as international aid programs, as Bateson’s theory explains, this aggressive attack is masked by an apparently positive purpose aimed at humanitarian, social and economic development of the lesser developed countries.
In the case of bilateral aid from the United States, the method of interaction was tailored as a scaffolding structure not built on issues such as modernization, development, the fight against poverty or inequality, instead centered on the political sphere and national security, and in particular on the matter of the protection of American objectives and
interests. To score this goal, the United States took the approach of continuously framing its foreign policy towards the Latin American countries as beneficial for these latter, while the center of interest was dramatically biased toward doing good for the United States of America, independently of what it would take, up to instigating political conflicts in the targeted countries and directing cooperation toward those groups that would look after the American interests.
Framing is an internally logical system, consisting in the intentions about what individuals think of the world and themselves. This definition of the situation places within the “edges” its own interpretation of what is national security, and its lasting efforts to defend
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The United States Agency for International Development defined its external assistance as particularly political and as a fundamental tool for its “National Security Strategy”. The meaning of this statement is well depicted in the below graph, placing in the smaller circle the actors who have received cooperation from the United States and outside the actors that according to the evidence have been considered a threat to the national security of the United States.
Estrada, Somoza, Pinochet and the Contras committed tremendous crimes against humanity. Despite this, they represented key pieces in the American framework for achieving US interests in Latin America, and therefore received strong cooperation. To have them condemned as the Sandinismo was condemned, or as Allende was condemned, would have been (under their own interpretations) detrimental to the American national security, as they were contributing to protect the framework set by the United States aimed at the imposition and maintenance of the American hegemony.
Evidence shows that part of the line of conduct to ensure the defense of “national security” included activities such as media manipulation and provision of weapons and resources to those groups aligning with the scopes and interests of the United States, and often legitimizing the latter to commit crimes against humanity if they were necessary means
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to achieve the purpose. Continuously nurturing and developing these activities was
fundamental to define a framework that would allow the United States to preserve its interests in the region.
The roadmap for action in the United States is established through the country’s own interest, its own interpretative frameworks that justify its actions. The essential core
characteristics which serve to this investigation is the fact that the United States has permanently exported the frameworks and its interpretations as mechanisms used to foster development of the receiving countries and, in the case of the Contras, the defense of
democracy. However, these foreign policies have placed the interest of the US above human rights, international law and moral legitimate behaviours.
The Sandinista revolution represented an extraordinary event in the context of the Cold War which was a battle for hearts and minds. By taking into account the theory of Michel Foucault previously presented, the external assistance could be thought of as part of a set of government technologies, that is, of “practical and concrete mechanisms, local and everyday practices, through which the various authorities intend to shape, normalize, guide and instrumentalize actions, yearnings and thoughts of others, in order to achieve the
objectives considered desirable. Using this theory can reflect with the methods of the CIA by manipulating the public opinion framing the Sandinistas as evil and the Contras as heroes, same way the distribution of manuals which frame civil disobedience as a heroic act.
Covert operations, ousting democratically elected governments, inciting revolts and supporting transnational companies were the run of the mill actions. Nonetheless, the CIA has been the protagonist of many academic books and news and the target of many journalists who have revealed the criminal actions of their covert operations, furthermore, the
controversy faced before the US congress, the media, and the public opinion is well
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documented. However, a very important aspect that cannot go unnoticed was the successful use of the Non-profit Organization National Endowment for Democracy (NED). NED also managed to finance communications media that framed the Contra as a heroic and an effective electoral campaign, without the need for cover operations, rather openly and consequently without controversy, which were indispensable elements in restoring Nicaragua's alignment to the philosophy of the United States.
The following part of the paper explores the update of United States national security strategies, and especially on how non-profit organizations take a critical role in the
implementation of national security strategy, by first and foremost locating the aid with the purpose of aligning countries to the “American philosophy”. For example, Allen Weinstein, cofounder of NED, said in 1991 that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”. Furthermore, this paper details some of the inside operational strategies within which the International Development Agency of the United States funds national NGOs that contribute in the creation of a framework where the political struggle, chaos and violence are meant to overthrow in 2018 the Sandinista president Ortega. As such, these violent means and the involvement of the United States’ support are once again framed either as beneficial or obfuscated.
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Chapter II
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The Neoliberal Era 1990-2006
The international system in the 1990s was essentially marked by the end of the Cold War, the consummation of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the collapse of the USSR (1991), as well as the formation of new economic blocks. In Nicaragua in 1990, the presidential candidate Violeta Chamorro of the National Opposition Unit (UNO), supported by the United States, won the election against the FSLN candidate Daniel Ortega. Noam Chomsky commented that the Nicaraguan people were voting “with a gun to their heads”, as the UNO promised to end the war if it won the elections. President Bush informed the Nicaraguan people that, if they chose not to vote for Violeta Chamorro as their president, the war and economic embargo would continue. The US spent nearly $50 million tailoring the UNO Party specifically for the election and as an alternative to the FSLN (Wilson, 2013).
The government of Chamorro and the Sandinismo tried to establish an economic plan after the elections. However, this unprecedented form of social pact was increasingly less acceptable to the United States government. To ensure the disbursement of the Economic Support Funds for 1990-1991, approved by Congress, the Nicaraguan government was forced to implement economic reforms, especially regarding privatization (Aravena, 2000). In the 1990s, privatization and structural adjustment policies weakened and fragmented Nicaraguan civil society, while business actors enhanced their power (Carrion, 2020). Nevertheless, there was also a restoration of relations and alignment with the US and the lifting of the economic embargo, which was imposed by the Reagan administration in 1985 and continued by George Bush (1989-1993).
This transition meant what the Central American sociologist Torres-Rivas (2008, p.
173) called “the authoritarian transition” in the sense of the oligarchic domination that
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underlie it. This imposition of bourgeois democracy was aimed at avoiding another experience such as the popular revolution in Nicaragua. It was carried out on the basis of exclusion, political and military control, of misery, of the advance of dependence, the conditionality of Financial Organizations International and internal authoritarianism of the dominant sectors, and under the external threat of the US invasion. This allowed the return of US interests and interventionism in Nicaragua which, in part, was carried out through one of the American agencies, i.e. the International Development Agency (IDA). For this reason, the IDA program transcended the strictly economic framework and extended to the political field, causing large-scale social changes.
The neoliberal era came with sixteen years of economic policies based on faith in the privatization of state resources, reduction of public spending and deregulation in general, around the poorest communities. Oscar-Rene Vargas, a Nicaraguan economist, argues that this era was characterized by “the preeminence of the media as modulators of social conscience, the concentration of power in an elite divorced from citizenship, the cult in the market and the fear of poverty, respect for macroeconomic equilibrium, the absence of any equivalent of a Cultural project, the assumption of democracy with lowercase; in short, the lack of a vision of the future” (Vargas, 2005).
During this neoliberal era in Nicaragua, the governments in power carried out the neoliberal and privatization policies designed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), which seriously affected social programs. For example, in the 2001-2005 period, no progress was made in reducing poverty, on the contrary, its behavior has been slightly upward. Proof of this is that in 2001, according to the consumption method, the Central American Council of Human Rights published that 45.8% of the population was poor and in 2005 it increased to 48.3%. In relation to extreme poverty, for 2001 the percentage
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was 15.1%, while for 2005 the trend increased to 17.2%. (“Políticas públicas regionales”, 2008).
The neoliberal era in Nicaragua was characterized by a general growth in the economy, which however came at the expense of the abandonment of such social issues as poverty reduction. This upward trend in the GDP path made the neoliberal a pillar of the American philosophy, and was able to allow the maintenance of a stable relationship between the two countries. This fact suggests that the priorities of the United States do not center on spurring social development or the eradication of the most urgent problems such as poverty, rather on cultivating the interests of a social class, a group of people that aligns with the American philosophy, independently of what that means for Nicaragua.
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United States Foreign Aid Strategies in the 21st century
It is from this event that the International Agency Development of the United States became agencies present in the most economically needy countries or those with weakened governments, playing an essential role in fueling the of the United States philosophy worldwide. After the attacks of September 11 by Al Qaeda, foreign policies, especially in relation to security, changed globally: part of the restructuring included greater emphasis on politically weakened governments with programs of civic participation and promotion of democracy by US government agencies (Coma, 2002).
Among the diplomatic strategies used in international relations described by -co-founder of International Relations neoliberalism and actual member of the Defense Policy Board5- Joseph Nye (1990) is soft power. Soft power is a term that describes the ability of a political actor to influence the actions of other actors using cultural and ideological means.
The exercise of international cooperation from the United States perspective can be seen as a generator of soft power, aimed at the fulfillment of three geopolitical projects, namely:
“international development; globalization; imperialism” (Petras and Veltmeyer, 2006: 276 - 277). The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is an executor of such projects worldwide exploiting international aid to achieve its three objectives: the pursuit of development through Official development assistance (ODA); globalization through the export of language; the transplantation of American organizational culture, products and supplies such as modified seeds, processed foods and technology (Hayter, 1971).
In Latin America, USAID management always maintained the parameters of
cooperation from the donor-recipient dynamic. An example of its activity in Latin America is
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the Venezuelan case, within which country, in 2002, the USAID created the Office of Initiatives towards a Transition (OTI) that aimed to improve democracy in the country.
During the 2002 political crisis in Venezuela, the American government attempted to overthrow the government of Hugo Chavez by appointing Pedro Carmona as president, which fact resulted in a violent clash between oppositions. Peaceful resolution was achieved by the unarmed retake of Miraflores, reappointing Chavez at the presidency. Objectives such as the aforementioned, the improvement of democratic institutions and the promotion of citizen participation through democratic leadership courses are cited within the official descriptions of these programs. These projects were executed mainly by local NGOs that received American goods and services (“A Review of U.S. Policy Toward Venezuela November”, 2002)
In summary, the external cooperation strategies implemented by the United States in the 21st century mostly center on programs enacted through American Agencies for
International Development. These organs were tasked with fueling the United States
philosophy worldwide. In general, external cooperation is a type of soft power which comes as an essential strategy to exert hard power. Despite the fact the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness explicitly states that donor countries must align behind the strategies set by developing countries, the United States instead located the aid in promoting its philosophy
philosophy worldwide. In general, external cooperation is a type of soft power which comes as an essential strategy to exert hard power. Despite the fact the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness explicitly states that donor countries must align behind the strategies set by developing countries, the United States instead located the aid in promoting its philosophy