This is Democracy – Episode 75: Uses of Terror by Latin American Dictators

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Jeremi Suri: Welcome to our new episode of This is Democracy. Today, we’re going to discuss the rise over the last half-century and more of dictatorships in Latin America and their relationship to the United States. In particular, the use of terror in those regimes, and the ways in which that terror has both been supported by the United States and the ways in which that terror has come to the United States from these regimes. We have with us a good friend, distinguished scholar, and really a fantastic writer and professor, Alan McPherson from Temple University. Alan has written more about these issues in interesting, thoughtful, and archivally-based ways than really anyone else that I know. He comes at these issues also with as impartial a lens as possible. As someone who cares deeply about these issues, but is really empirically focused and interested in contemporary policy. He is, as I said, a Professor of History at Temple University, Director of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University. He’s written a number of books. His most recent book that just came out and available everywhere and perfectly on-topic is called Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought- Pinochet being the leader of Chile- Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice. Alan, thank you for joining us.

Alan McPherson: Thank you very much.

Jeremi Suri: It’s great to have you here. Before we turn to our discussion with Alan, we have, as always, our scene-setting poem from Mr. Zachary Suri. What is the title of your poem today, Zachary?

Zachary Suri: Excuse Us.

Jeremi Suri: Excuse Us. Okay, please.

Zachary Suri: Excuse Us. Latin America, so many generals, so many juntas, so many coup d’état, so many guerrillas, so many prisons, so much torture that it would burn your tongue to read off all the names, so many disappearing people. Latin America, how does that even work? How does a man that once walked through the park with its spraying fountains at dusk in the twilight, disappear into less atomic significance than the little droplets of vapor that become the dew that, in the morning rests on the park bench where his shadow is still staining the iron? Latin America, why Pinochet? Why Perón? Why Trujillo? Why Castro? Why Noriega? Why Ortega? Why Duarte? Latin America, I’m sorry for the condescending anaphora. I mean, who are the ones who were funneling arms to Tegucigalpa, to random bands of outcasts in Nicaragua to come down from the hills, laundering the money by illegally selling arms to Iranian fundamentalists authoritarians? Who were the ones storming that sandy dot in the middle of the Caribbean with a tiny medical school to save the 95,000 people of Grenada from the threat of a few too many leftists? Who were the ones trying to disappear the disappearances to justify the support of your far too many dictators, to justify a quickly mythological war against a Soviet battalion of walls, and who were the ones instigating civil wars in Colombia, a century ago, to tear apart a peninsula to dredge a canal that killed so many more of you? Latin America, who even are you? The nations just to the south, we barely even remember, forgetting to think about a wide-ranging, diverse expanse that was the first new world. Some testing ground for American ideology rejiggered so that we can blame you-all 20 years later for the humanitarian messes we left trying to build an excuse for imperialism. Excuse us, Latin America, if we sometimes forget. Excuse us, Latin America, if we sometimes left you to lick third-degree burns and said you were throwing yourself on to the flames.

Jeremi Suri: I’m amazed, Zachary, at how you were able to rhyme so many difficult names and so many difficult concepts.

Alan McPherson: Yes. That was so good, deep stuff.

Jeremi Suri: So what is your poem about Zachary?

Zachary Suri: My poem is about how there were so many different dictatorial regimes in Latin America, but really about how the United States, in many ways, is to blame for supporting these regimes, yet at the same time, how soon we forget about that, and how quick we are to condescend to Latin Americans about the state of their political institutions.

Jeremi Suri: Right. To claim we have no responsibility for these regimes we’ve often supported. Alan, when you teach these issues and you talk about these issues, which I know you do better than anyone else, how do you begin to explain these so-called dirty regimes, these dictatorships and their use of terror and their relationship to the US?

Alan McPherson: Right. We have to think of the dirty regimes of the ’70s and ’80s, if you want, as really particular to the Cold War. There had always been dictatorships in Latin America. In fact, democracy was quite new, but this was really a step back. A lot of these countries had experimented with democracy, and Chile itself was really the most democratic country in Latin America, and it probably took one of the biggest steps back. So something new was in the mix in the ’60s and ’70s. Partly, it was a response to the Cuban Revolution, which begins in ’59, and part of what this does is that Fidel Castro encourages guerilla activities everywhere. Sometimes directly, but sometimes, just inspires guerilla revolutions everywhere. Even though, most of the time, they’re very small, they’re quite powerless, they have almost no chance of winning, of creating another Cuba somewhere, they really spread fear throughout most of Latin America. The response, the reaction, if you want, is overwhelming.

Jeremi Suri: Wow.

Alan McPherson: The response is that we need to think of everyone who is a political opponent, whether peaceful or violent, as a subversive, somebody who wants to take down our government, and therefore, we need to multiply the repression. The torturing, the jailing, the disappearances, all the things that you talked about. The United States very much plays into this game. It’s not full, but it’s encouraging this kind of thinking, and it’s supplying the training, the ideology, a lot of the weapons, so there’s all these factors, but they all pretty much have to do with the Cold War.

Jeremi Suri: Why does the United States support these regimes? You would think the United States would, in the case of Chile, for example, see the disappearances, the killing of dissidents as something that runs against our democratic values?

Alan McPherson: That’s true. In a perfect world, I think even a lot of conservative Americans would have preferred democracy in Latin America, and they did certain things to encourage democracy, but when it didn’t really work out, or when democracy led to Marxists taking power such as they did in Chile, they would go for the alternative.

Jeremi Suri: I see.

Alan McPherson: The alternative then became a military regime, a dictatorship, because that was going to take out the bigger threat, which is communism. So a lot of Americans really thought we’d love democracy, but we don’t really trust these people to handle democracy. Therefore, we’re going to go with the dictatorship.

Jeremi Suri: This is some of the condescension that Zachary was referring to in his poem, right?

Alan McPherson: Exactly and then we want to forget about it once it happens.

Jeremi Suri: Right. One of the real innovations of your recent scholarship, especially your new book, is really to also look at how that process of supporting dictators in places like Chile actually blows back in the United States, how the terror comes home. Most people don’t know that story until they read your most recent book. Tell us more about that.

Alan McPherson: Sure. Let me start with the story itself, which is that on September 21st, 1976, the Pinochet secret police of Chile puts a bomb in the car of Orlando Letelier. He is a private citizen at this point, and he’s working in Washington, and he’s an activist against the Pinochet government.

Alan McPherson: They want to eliminate him as a potential thorn in their side. So they blow up his car, they kill him, they kill an American who happens to be riding in the car with him.

Jeremi Suri: In Washington DC?

Alan McPherson: In Washington DC, yeah. What this really means for a lot of Americans, why they react so strongly to this, and when I say Americans, I mean, Americans in government, both Democrats and Republicans. They react strongly to this because they’re realizing that the Cold War has really come home. There’s very few events of the Cold War that actually happened in the United States. We’ll send our boys to fight wars abroad like in Vietnam and Korea, but rarely is there violence in the United States, and this is one of them, it’s one of the few. So Americans are realizing that they’re losing control over the Cold War, and that this has been done by an ally. This is not Cuba setting off bombs in the United States. This is an ally of ours who’s supposed to be a strong anti-communist ally, and then kills a socialist in the streets of Washington DC. So they realize we’ve gone too far in supporting these regimes and we need to scale this back somehow.

Jeremi Suri: Is this an exceptional incident or is there a pattern of these sorts of activities?

Alan McPherson: It’s exceptional in that it happens in United States, but it’s part of a broader pattern that has an actual name called Operation Condor. Operation Condor is a conspiracy, this is the best word for it. It is a secret plan among South American dictatorships, because they all pop up right after Pinochet, in places like Argentina and Brazil. I’m sorry, Brazil is before Pinochet, but around the same time, but Pinochet is the person who activates this network. Part of what Operation Condor is, is chasing down each other’s opponents in each other’s countries. So if Chileans have moved to Argentina, the Chileans will ask the Argentinians, try to find this person, put them in jail, kill him, whatever, let us know what you did. But it then goes beyond the countries that are in Operation Condor. It might go to Mexico, it might go to France, one of the Chileans is assassinated or at least is attempted to be assassinated in Rome. Excuse me, Letelier is very much part of this pattern of war everywhere in the world, because our enemies are everywhere and therefore we need to intimidate them and terrorize them everywhere in the world.

Jeremi Suri: Wow. As I understand it there were also plots against American members of Congress, Ed Koch from New York, is that part– ?

Alan McPherson: There was talk about that, I’m not sure that the plot really went far. There was certainly nothing operational that ever happened in the United States, although we don’t necessarily have all the documents.

Jeremi Suri: There were concerns about that though.

Alan McPherson: Yes.

Jeremi Suri: How did the United States react? How did the American people react? How did the US government react to this?

Alan McPherson: Well, at first, the reaction was odd in that before we really had any evidence, newspapers and people within the US government tended to absolve the Pinochet regime, because they said, “This is too obviously Pinochet. He wouldn’t do this because he’d be the first person we’d point a finger at.” Like the NSC said this, the New York Times said this, very pretty liberal paper says [inaudible] .

Jeremi Suri: You quote this in your book.

Alan McPherson: Exactly . But then once some evidence started coming in that some Cuban Americans were involved, there was this gringo involved, and it’s really seemed all point towards Chile, then they started really believing it. But it took about 18 months for them even to find the first person who was associated with this. It was a slow investigation, but they put a lot of resources into it, largely because of the middle level technocrats, and not really President Carter. Carter wanted to solve this, but wasn’t willing to break relations with the Chileans over it.

Jeremi Suri: Why not? Why didn’t we take stronger action? I mean, this would seem like quite an affront. You point out in the book that, before 9/11, this is the most significant foreign terror attack on the United States territory.

Alan McPherson: I mean, it’s hard to tell you and I’m not sure what was in the mind of people like Carter, but I think partly the victim is important. He was a socialist, and therefore, I think a lot of Americans were saying, well, he deserve to be killed anyway, so it doesn’t really matter, and there were certain people in the right-wing media saying this exact thing. They weren’t saying it openly but that was the presumption of saying, let’s not investigate this too much because we don’t really care about this person. Pinochet was doing essentially the right thing, the wrong place, but the right thing, and plus Pinochet is a Cold War ally. So if you take him down, who knows what will replace him? You could have a Communist regime in Chile. The Carter and Reagan governments, especially the Reagan governments, there was more momentum towards replacing Pinochet, but with a liberal democratic government completely shorn of any socialism, and that’s what eventually they got. So that’s why they moved so slowly. They didn’t want an Allende type government to come back. Allende was the Marxist president from ’70 to ’73.

Jeremi Suri: So part of the Faustian bargain is being willing to tolerate a terroristic regime, even using terror on our territory to prevent communists and socialists from coming to power?

Alan McPherson: That’s right. I mean, at some point, one American policymakers says, we weren’t against a coup at all. We were against the abuse of it and the intense terrorism of it, but we’ll take some terror.

Jeremi Suri: Well, Zachary–

Zachary Suri: So going back a little bit, how does this event, but also American intervention in Latin America, contribute to the rise of intelligence agencies like the CIA and others?

Alan McPherson: That’s good question. I mean, the CIA comes from the OSS, which is a World War II spy organization. There’s a desire to extend American intelligence throughout the world and extend this vision of national security. After World War II, we need all areas of the world to somehow be under our control, almost all areas of the world, we have this huge line of protection, and so we extend what we mean by national security. So if you invade South Vietnam, for instance, you’ve started a war against the United States, and so the CIA is part of this militarization of the government, and our sort of arrogance of thinking, we have the right to spy on anyone anywhere in the world, to protect American assets, because there’s so many more American assets. So it’s really an extension of the same arrogance of maybe 1920s of American Marines saying, we have the right to land in Cuba or Haiti to protect national security, on the shores of Florida, let’s say, but it’s just further away, and so the CIA is part of this whole thing.

Jeremi Suri: What do you think, Alan, now that we’ve had the benefit of coming out of the Cold War, and a generation of scholars led by you writing about this, and a generation of activists coming out of this period? What have we learned? Have we learned any lessons? Are we able to do any better in our relationships with countries in Latin America and elsewhere?

Alan McPherson: I mean, I think we have. Not all of us have. There is always some talk of intervention. I mean, there was talking intervention this year with Venezuela, but it was interesting that the backlash was pretty unanimous. Everybody in Latin America, most Venezuelans didn’t want US intervention, almost no Latin Americans wanted it. A lot of people in the Trump administration said, well, it’s on the table but we don’t want it. A lot of people in the Pentagon and so on would say it would be crazy to try to invade Venezuela. But people like Trump are so used to thinking of intervention. They think it’s easy, they think it worked. Both those things are not true, and they don’t think that there’s a big difference between invading let’s say, the Dominican Republic which is pretty small and relatively militarily easy to control, and a huge country like Venezuela, which is the size of Iraq and the population of Iraq. So we might create another mess of the size of Iraq. So never mind the morality of it, just the practicality of it is something that we don’t understand.

Jeremi Suri: What about our relationship with a government like the government in Brazil now, which has a populist leader who in many ways looks and sounds like Trump, and in a way advocates the use of terroristic violence against his own enemies at home and doing that trying to close off certain parts of the media, things of that sort? Have we learned that that could actually be harmful to us even if in the short run he’s friendly, or are we are we still back where we started supporting dictators in the region?

Alan McPherson: Yeah. I mean, it’s harder because I think in general, we simply have a lot less influence in Latin America. We don’t have the arrogance that we think we can control Latin America. We’re largely much more pragmatic, but we’re more pragmatic because we’re less powerful. We don’t have the military presence we used to have, we don’t have the spying presence, we don’t have the economic leverage. Latin America is much more globalized than ever before.

Jeremi Suri: Interesting.

Alan McPherson: I mean, for most countries in Latin America including Brazil, China is the main economic partner. So whatever the Americans want or don’t want from a country like Brazil, doesn’t make the same difference that it would’ve made in 1964, where we were essentially able to say, go ahead and have a coup in Brazil. We didn’t participate in it, but we planned to participate in it. So we simply don’t have that leverage. I’m not sure that’s really a moral improvement, but it leads to more pragmatism, which is good.

Jeremi Suri: That makes sense. Zachary?

Zachary Suri: What about other countries? How have other countries, both American allies and America enemies, intervened in Latin America and how has United States responded to that?

Alan McPherson: I mean, they barely have. I’m not talking about colonial days when obviously I’d say it was intervening. But since the early 19th century, there practically hasn’t been any intervention by other countries. I mean, the French momentarily took Mexico during the US Civil War, the Spanish momentarily took the Dominican Republic, but those are actually due to the American Civil War. That’s what they were taking advantage of. But since then, there was really no Soviet intervention. There was some Soviet help to some countries like Nicaragua and Cuba.

Jeremi Suri: Missiles in Cuba, of course,

Alan McPherson: Yes, missiles in Cuba, of course, but that wasn’t really a military intervention, it was an invited thing. But you could say that about a lot of Latin American countries inviting American weapons on to their shores. But an intervention, I don’t think so. But there is the American fear that will happen again. There have been certainly military exercises between the Russians and the Venezuelans on the shores of Venezuela. If you look at the latest season of Jack Ryan, The TV show, it’s all about the fear that the Venezuelans are harboring Russian weapons, and there’s the assumption that Jack Ryan has the right to go in there and stop this. That this is completely unacceptable to the Americans, even though, if a country in South America harbors American weapons, that’s perfectly fine, but you cannot possibly harbor the weapons of another country.

Jeremi Suri: So there is still a hypocrisy there. We like to always in our discussions, Alan, turn at the end toward positive lessons, sources of optimism because we need optimism today for thinking forward about American democracy. For our young listeners, who hopefully will read your book and have thought about these issues and are learning about these issues, what are some opportunities you see going forward to improve US-Latin American relations, and to move this region out of this ugly history of terror that you talked about?

Alan McPherson: Well, let me pick a relatively small example, but for Latin Americans it’s not small, which is really improvements in human rights, which is a huge part of democracy. So the Letelier case actually leads to thousands of other cases of trying to identify violators of human rights during the Cold War and punish them. At the very least identify them and identify the victims so that the families actually know. So there’s been a whole process going on for really the last 30 years or so, of trying to find everybody who was a victim and hopefully all the perpetrators of that violence towards them and bring many of them to justice. Many of them are still free, but right now, there’s about 1000 cases that have been adjudicated just in Chile alone of human rights.

Jeremi Suri: Wow that many.

Alan McPherson: I mean, probably about the same number in neighboring Argentina. So this is due to regular activists, to journalists, to people like Amnesty International who find out the facts, and to jurists and judges who are willing to change the court system to try different cases and to be creative about bringing more democracy through bringing of the truth.

Jeremi Suri: This is a great example. So it’s really an example of young people finding the evidence, bringing out the facts, and then bringing this before legal and other places where there can be some adjudication, some response.

Alan McPherson: Yeah. I mean, I’ll give you another example which is the latest riots in Chile. They’ve been mostly led by young Chileans, and they’ve mostly been in response to the fact that the Chilean economy is an unequal economy. It really punishes the poor. It really is no different from the economy that Pinochet himself instituted in the ’70s. While Pinochet left and there was some democracy and voting, there really was never economic democracy in Chile. That’s what this current revolt is really about. Is about rewriting the constitution to have some economic democracy, because Chile is the most unequal country in Latin America and one of the most unequal in the world.

Jeremi Suri: Well, this is a stirring account of the power of citizen activism and how knowing history and investigating history can help bring out the dark skeletons from the closet, bring them up forward and actually mobilize people for change. It’s a very powerful example. Zachary, do you find that persuasive? Is that something that can motivate young people like you to get involved in these issues?

Zachary Suri: Yeah. I think that’s something that’s also overlooked too, is the fact that so many of us now are growing up with Latin Americans in our schools, in our neighborhoods. I think that’s something that will really contribute in the next few years and now to real reckoning with the United States role in Latin America.

Jeremi Suri: It’s a history that you think people would be interested in?

Zachary Suri: Yeah, I think it’s a history that really encapsulates so many of the issues that the United States is reckoning with in the new century.

Jeremi Suri: Well, I think from your poem through Alan’s deep account as well as his recent writings and his recent book, I think we have a great example of where knowing history allows us first of all to confront some experiences from the past that still linger, that are important for us to confront, and how it can give us a roadmap not simply to learn about the past, but to make for a better future. Alan, thank you for joining us.

Alan McPherson: Thank you very much. It was a great pleasure.

Jeremi Suri: Zachary, thank you for your poem as always, and thank you for joining us in this episode of This is Democracy.

MALE 1: This podcast was produced by the Liberal Arts Development Studio, and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

MALE 2: The music in this episode was written and recorded by Harrison Lemke, and you can find his music at harrisonlemke.com.

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