GG On a very broad level, you could argue that the United States’ engagement with the world has pretty much always run through Latin America. It’s through Latin America that the US political coalitions cohere, where the incoherence of competing interests and ideologies acquire form.
The Monroe Doctrine, for instance, weaved together strains of isolationism and internationalism into a fairly coherent foreign policy; Jacksonian racism forged itself via Spanish America, which it saw as an abolitionist threat; post–Civil War nation-building took place as much in Mexico and the Caribbean as it did in the western United States; Wilsonianism was, to a large degree, a weaponized version of Bolivarianism; the New Deal was saved by Latin America; and the New Right rehearsed its efforts to rehabilitate markets and militarism in Central America. Then, after Latin America’s contribution in helping nascent coalitions achieve coherence, those coalitions went global, in effect hoping to shake off the shackles of regionalism and project power on a world level.
The other half of this argument is that when engagement with the world fails, when economic or military policy enters into crisis, the United States turns back to Latin America, which in this sense serves as a strategic reserve of US power.
Here’s an example of what I mean. After the catastrophe of Vietnam, the New Right turned to Latin America to regroup. Central America in particular became a crucible for the different constituencies and ideologies of the New Right, where contradictions could be reconciled and points of affinity affirmed: secular neocons, the religious anti–Liberation Theology Christians, and the militarists looking for a new covert war. Keep in mind, Washington’s imperial retraction didn’t just take place in Southeast Asia. There were congressional prohibitions about counterinsurgency in Angola and Mozambique. Those insurgencies conti-nued in southern Africa, but they were limited by the late 1970s. So Central America became the place where the New Right could regroup and remoralize American foreign policy — and where theocons could launch their first war on a political religion, liberation theology, before they moved on to political Islam.
This is key. The New Right — the recomposition of markets and militarism — didn’t just project power. It remoralized power. That’s what all that nonsense about the Contras being “freedom fighters” was about.
JM They’re just like the Founding Fathers.
GG Yeah.
JM The United States’ military embrace of brutal, scorched-earth counterinsurgency tactics gave way to neoliberalism. What did that process look like?
GG Political terror was a predicate of neoliberalism, in a number of ways. Most obviously, it physically eliminated economic nationalists and suppressed mass movements, pushing the postwar development model into the high gear of crisis. But political violence also transformed political subjectivity.
Classic modernization theory credits the market — the commodification of social relations — with creating the modern self. This premise became, stated or unstated, the foundation of much late Cold War liberalism, which held that a refusal to make peace with the modern world, defined as the “market,” led straight to the gulag. After 9/11, the premise was revised to argue that a refusal to make peace with the modern world, still defined as the market, led straight to jihad (by the way, this is the unstated premise of that silly Vox essay that blamed “left-wing economics” for right-wing populism). The desire to return to a pre-market unity or holism, the argument goes, is really the first step toward totalitarianism.
But in Latin America, it was politics — mass politics — that served as a primary vector of modern individuality. In some of these incredibly exploited, marginal regions — where the power of the landed class was absolute, where patriarchal power was absolute, where forms of coerced, essentially slave labor lasted well into the twentieth century — to become involved in politics was a way of gaining a sense of self, agency, subjectivity, whatever you want to call it. Yet at the same time, this insurgent individuality existed in tandem with solidarity and community, be it through labor unions, peasant leagues, rural communities, Liberation Theology congregations, or other forms of collectivism.
The strength of both the Old and the New Left in Latin America was their harmonization of self and society, of individuality and solidarity. Cold War political terror had the effect of severing this relationship.