U.S. interventions in Latin America have served as the training grounds for White House military theorists to practice their imperial designs on the rest of the world.
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An excerpt from "Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism."
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For many of the policy and opinion makers who seized on 9/11 to promote their vision of an imperial
But decades before 9/11 raised hopes that a galvanized domestic constituency for perpetual war could at last be forged, Reagan’s Central American policy offered the opportunity to contain, and begin to roll back, the antimilitarism that had infected
By the end of the 1980s, defense intellectuals and activists had achieved a revolution in the mechanics and morals of special warfare doctrine abroad. But for their revolution to take hold, they knew they had to confront this culture of dissent at home. In the face of persistent and growing opposition to
First, to confront an adversarial press, tame a presumptuous Congress, and make inroads on college campuses, the administration orchestrated a sophisticated and centralized “public diplomacy” campaign that deployed techniques drawn from both the PR world and the intelligence community. Second, the White House either loosened or circumvented restrictions placed on domestic law-and-order surveillance operations against political dissidents, reviving tactics that the FBI and other intelligence agencies had used to intimidate the antiwar movement in the 1960s, tactics that were thought to have been repudiated by the Rockefeller Committee and other congressional investigations into domestic covert actions in the mid-1970s. Finally, and most consequentially, the administration built countervailing grassroots support to counter what seemed a permanently entrenched anti-imperialist opposition, mobilizing militarists and evangelicals on behalf of a hard-line foreign policy. Such a campaign allowed the White House to go forward with its Central American program. More critically, it also helped create the ideas and infrastructure that turned the Republican Party into a mass movement and transformed the New Right into the dominant political force in
Media Education
In January 1983, Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 77, creating a domestic interagency task force “designed to generate support for our national security objectives.”5 Five months later, the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the
Public Diplomacy was officially charged with implementing a “new, nontraditional” approach to “defining the terms of the public discussion on Central American policy” and with “unshackl[ing] . . . public perception of policy from myths and cant.”6 In reality, it was the homeland branch of Casey and North’s “
To circumvent laws that barred the White House from spending money to lobby Congress, the office implemented, as Raymond put it, a “public-private strategy,” coordinating the work of the NSC with PR firms, psychological warfare specialists, and New Right activists, intellectuals, and pressure groups. It contracted Republican-affiliated advertising firms such as Woody Kepner Associates and International Business Communications and supervised the fund-raising and publicity activity of individuals and nongovernmental organizations such as Freedom House and Accuracy in Media.9 The office also worked closely with conservative cadres such as Carl “Spitz” Channell, who as a private individual raised millions of dollars, mostly through front organizations like the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty, the American Conservative Trust, and the American Anti-Terrorism Committee. The money was used to fund “television ads, newspaper ads and grassroots activities” on behalf of the Contras.10 Channell also funneled millions of dollars in private donations through a Swiss bank account to pay for weapons for the Nicaraguan rebels.
Congress proved more willing to cooperate with Reagan on his Salvadoran policy, so the office focused on Nicaragua, using polling data to identify Sandinista “negatives” and Contra “positives” and to compile “key words, phrases, or images” that could turn Americans against the Nicaraguan government.11 A 1985 “action plan” formated according to the PR industry’s “perception management” guidelines listed simple notions or phrases, many of them repeated multiple times with no elaboration, to help administration officials and their allies to frame the debate. The Sandinistas were “evil,” Soviet “puppets,” “racist and repress human rights,” “involved in
The memo offered a few concepts that went beyond two or three syllables. The
The office used the Nicaraguan campaign to shift the understanding of the threat facing America away from Communism, which no matter how vilified was part of the Western tradition and associated with the interests of a specific nation, toward the more capacious concept of “terrorism.” In the 1980s, the United States found itself ever more involved in Middle Eastern politics, and the Reagan administration increasingly tied Nicaragua to troubles in that region.
Aside from equating the Sandinistas with the Nazis and charging Managua with fomenting “terrorism” in Costa Rica and El Salvador, Public Diplomacy operatives accused the Sandinistas of having “ties with the PLO, Libya, and terrorists,” linking them, as Reagan did in a 1985 speech, with “Arafat, Qadhafi, and the Ayatollah Khomeini.”13 The office even indicted them for persecuting Jews.14 Taking over the office from Reich in 1986, Robert Kagan recommended the distribution of reports that documented Sandinista “anti-Semitism”—supplemented with “glossy pictures” and presented in an “In Their Own Words” style—to “key Jewish journalists and interreligious publications.”15 Yet it was not the Sandinistas who traded in anti-Jewish sentiment. The American “media was controlled by Jews,” said one CIA handler, according to a respected Contra leader, “and if we could show that Jews were being persecuted it would help a lot.”16 (In the 1960s the FBI likewise spread rumors that the Black Power movement was anti-Semitic in order to drive a wedge between it and Jewish intellectuals.)
Operatives worked at a breakneck pace. Over just a two-month period in early 1985 the office laid out a chronology of seventy-nine tasks to accomplish, among them:
Assign
Prepare themes to approach Congressmen based on listed perceptions;
Encourage
Contact internal eyewitnesses/victims to testify before Congress about their abortive attempts to deal with Sandinistas;
Prepare list of publicly and privately expressed Congressional objections to aiding Contras;
Request that Zbigniew Brzezinski write a paper which points out geopolitical consequences of Communist domination of
Hold briefings for key Congressional members and staffers;
Supervise preparation and assignment of articles directed to special interest groups at rate of one per week (examples: article on Nicaraguan educational system for National Educational Association, article by retired military for Retired Officers Association, etc.);
Draft one op-ed per week for signature by Administration officials. Specify themes for the op-eds and retain final editorial rights;
Conduct public opinion poll of American attitudes toward Sandinistas, freedom fighters;
Martha Lida Murillo (9 year old atrocity victim) visit to
Prepare list of key media outlets interested in Central American issues; identify specific editors, commentators, talk shows, and columnists;
Call/visit newspaper editorial boards and give them background on the Nicaraguan freedom fighters;
Prepare a “Dear Colleagues” letter for signature by a responsible Democrat which counsels against “negotiating” with the Sandinistas;
Review and restate themes based on results of public opinion poll;
Prepare document on Nicaraguan narcotics involvement;
Publish and distribute “
Sponsor media events for Central American resistance leaders;
Congressional delegation visits during recess to Nicaraguan refugee camps in
Administration and prominent non-government spokesman on network shows regarding Soviet, Cuban, East German, Libyan, and Iranian connection with Sandinistas;
Distribute paper on geopolitical consequences [presumably the one that was requested of Brzezinski];
Release paper on Nicaraguan drug involvement;
Conduct telephone campaign in 120 Congressional districts. Citizens for
Organize rallies featuring Central American spokesmen throughout the country in conjunction with Citizens for
Organize nationally coordinated sermons about aid to the freedom fighters;
Organize
Organize major rally in the Orange Bowl,
Release paper on Nicaraguan media manipulation.17
The administration produced a steady flow of white papers, briefings, talking points, pamphlets, and books on
The administration distributed its literature not just to New Right organizations but to “church groups, human rights organizations, lawyers, political scientists, journalists, etc.,” each receiving “cover letters tailored” to their specific interests.20 The Office of Public Diplomacy organized conferences on Central America and invited “leaders of special interest and public policy groups (think tanks, foundations, church groups, labor organizations, Indian and Black organizations, academics) with special interest in Latin America.”21 In its first year of operations, the office arranged more that 1,500 speaking engagements and distributed material to “1,600 libraries, 520 political science faculties, 122 editorial writers and 107 religious organizations”22 It complied a comprehensive list of moral and political objections to Contra funding and drafted appropriate responses to each one, briefed the press and Congress on a regular basis, and wrote, or helped write, op-eds that were published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal under the bylines of administration officials, retired military officers, Contra leaders, foreign policy experts, and sympathetic scholars.23
The reduction of foreign policy to a series of emotionally laden talking points that linked the Sandinistas to any number of world evils manifested itself in the speeches of administration officials such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, William Casey, and Elliott Abrams. Nicaragua’s connections with terrorism, Soviet nuclear submarines, religious and ethnic persecution, totalitarianism, Castro, East Germans, Bulgarians, Libya, Iran, even the Baader-Meinhof Gang—all were to be confronted with American purpose and resolve. Yet it was Ronald Reagan, listed by Public Diplomacy as an “asset” due to his communication skills, who best embodied the triumph of emotion over substance.24 With little respect for history or fact, Reagan offered an image of the Nicaraguan struggle professionally tuned to resonate with popular fears and self-perceptions, presenting support for the Contras as keeping faith with America’s “revolutionary heritage.”25 After all, the PR mavens at the Office of Public Diplomacy listed as their two most “exploitable themes” the idea that the Contras “are Freedom Fighters” fighting for “freedom in the American tradition” and the idea that American “history requires support to freedom fighters.” Who could argue?
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Greg Grandin teaches Latin American history at New York University and is the author of a number of books, including the just published "Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism."