Elliot Abrams Grilled on His Support for Genocide

Horhey · Feb 14, 2019

He says US covert action in Central America was about bringing democracy to the region. Turning to what that means in plain English:

U.S. Aid, Investment Climate, and Human Rights Violations

John A. Booth, Christine J. Wade, Thomas Walker, "Understanding Central America: Global Forces, Rebellion, and Change," Westview Press, 2014

The elections in Guatemala in 1985 and 1990 as well as those in El Salvador in 1982, 1984, 1988, 1989, and 1991 were held against a background of state-sponsored terror that had taken tens of thousands of lives and had disarticulated most mass-based civic and political organizations. Candidates perforce came mainly from center to far—right parties, and independent or critical media outlets were nonexistent. Repression confined most citizen participation in formal national politics to voting. Only a tiny minority of center and right—wing party activists engaged in campaigns, and repression kept turnout low.

Eventually all four countries established elected civilian regimes under pressure from the United States, but the quality of their democracies still remained to be determined as this was written. Some argue that not only must formal rules of democracy and repression-free popular participation exist but, more important, qualitative and socioeconomic foundations must also exist. To truly participate and thus influence decisions in a formally democratic country, the poor majority needs socioeconomic well-being and the fundamental human and political resources it provides. By the late 1990s Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras all had formal civilian democracies, but poverty and maldistributed income and wealth left poor citizens largely without the socioeconomic requisites of an effective democracy.

Critics have accordingly tagged the four new democracies of Central America as “low-intensity democracies” or “polyarchies” to distinguish them from more egalitarian regimes of rule “by the people and for the people.” The rankings on comparative democracy indexes (see Figure 2.1) for Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras confirm the mediocre performance of these formally democratic regimes. Thus elites—albeit including a broader circle of power contenders than in the 1970s—continue to dominate the polities and poorly meet democracy's basic norms even under formally elected civilian regimes.

Eventually the United States and the major world multilateral lending organizations such as the International Monetary Fund pressured all five [Central American] countries into adopting a new economic model known as neoliberalism and enacting programs of structural adjustment, economic reforms mandated by foreign lenders. Neoliberalism complemented regional and international political efforts to end the civil wars and promote electoral democracy. That outside elites and Central American leaders pushed together for peace, democratization, and neoliberal economic reform is no accident. [William I.] Robinson summarizes:

As the transnational ruling bloc emerged in the 1980s and 1990s it carried out a “revolution from above,” involving modifications in global social and economic structures through the agency of [transnational system] apparatuses aimed at promoting the most propitious conditions around the world for the new global capitalist production system. This global restructuring, the so-called “Washington consensus,” [or] neo-liberalism, is a doctrine [that calls for] worldwide market liberalization, the internal restructuring and global integration of each national economy [and] an explicitly political component [that] revolved around the promotion of “democracy.”
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The transnational organizations pushing the neoliberal model in Central America included the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and multilateral lenders the International Monetary Fund and Inter-American Development Bank. Together they exacted internal political and economic “reforms” from debt-ridden Central American nations in exchange for critically needed loans to keep their economies functioning. Promoted by international lenders, the United States, and Europe, this neoliberal development model advocated certain basic changes: (1) downsizing government by laying off public employees; (2) balancing public budgets by cutting programs and subsidies to food, transport, and public services; (3) privatization of state-owned enterprises; (4) deregulation of private enterprise; (5) currency devaluations to discourage imports and encourage investment; and (6) sharp reduction of tariff barriers to foreign trade.

Manuel Perez-Rocha and Julia Paley, "What 'Free Trade' Has Done to Central America," Foreign Policy in Focus, November 21, 2014

Warnings about the human and environmental costs of “free trade” went unheeded. Now the most vulnerable Central Americans are paying the price.

In 2004 and 2005, hundreds of thousands of protesters filled Central America’s streets.

They warned of the unemployment, poverty, hunger, pollution, diminished national sovereignty, and other problems that could result if DR-CAFTA were approved. But despite popular pressure, the agreement was ratified in seven countries—including Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and the United States.

Ten years after the approval of DR-CAFTA, we are seeing many of the effects they cautioned about.

Overall economic indicators in the region have been poor, with some governments unable to provide basic services to the population. Farmers have been displaced when they can’t compete with grain imported from the United States. Amid significant levels of unemployment, labor abuses continue. Workers in export assembly plants often suffer poor working conditions and low wages. And natural resource extraction has proceeded with few protections for the environment.

Contrary to the promises of U.S. officials—who claimed the agreement would improve Central American economies and thereby reduce undocumented immigration—large numbers of Central Americans have migrated to the United States, as dramatized most recently by the influx of children from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras crossing the U.S.-Mexican border last summer. Although most are urgently fleeing violence in their countries, there are important economic roots to the migration—many of which are related to DR-CAFTA.

One of the most pernicious features of the agreement is a provision called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism. This allows private corporations to sue governments over alleged violations of a long list of so-called “investor protections.”

The most controversial cases have involved public interest laws and regulations that corporations claim reduce the value of their investments. That means corporations can sue those countries for profits they say they would have made had those regulations not been put into effect.

Such lawsuits can be financially devastating to poor countries that already struggle to provide basic services to their people, much less engage in costly court battles with multinational firms. They can also prevent governments from making democratically accountable decisions in the first place, pushing them to prioritize the interests of transnational corporations over the needs of their citizens.

And it’s not just DR-CAFTA. The many investor-state cases brought under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and in countries all over the world, have exposed the perniciousness of investor protection rules shoehorned into so-called “free-trade” pacts. Many governments are realizing that these agreements have tied their hands when it comes to protecting their own environments and citizens.

We must use these egregious investor-state cases to highlight extreme corporate power in the region. We must work to help Central American people regain their livelihoods lost to ruthless extractive projects like mining. And we must change trade and investment agreements to stop these excessive lawsuits that devastate communities, the environment, and democracy itself.

Like DR-CAFTA, the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership includes investor-state provisions that are likely to hurt poor communities and undermine environmental protections.

And such agreements must not, at any cost, include investor-state mechanisms. Because trading away democracy to transnational corporations is not such a “free trade” after all.
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Horhey · Feb 14, 2019

Horhey · Feb 14, 2019

Horhey · Feb 15, 2019

Ill put ask this stuff together in a throw the bastard in prison thread.

Texas Republican · Feb 15, 2019

The Dems looked fanatical, rabid, and just plain loony.

As usual.

Horhey · Feb 15, 2019

Eleuthera · Feb 16, 2019

Texas Republican said: ↑

The Dems looked fanatical, rabid, and just plain loony.

As usual.
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And as usual, the Republicans came across as corrupt crooks in the Bush cabal.

Antiduopolist · Feb 16, 2019

Abrams is a sociopath; Omar & Code Pink are amazing.

clg311 · Feb 16, 2019

Unfortunately Omar and Tulsi are aberrations in the bloodthirsty democratic party, just as Mike Lee is and the late Walter Jones was in the republican party.

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Elliot Abrams Grilled on His Support for Genocide

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Elliot Abrams Grilled on His Support for Genocide

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