Well, the dictatorial regimes use the military and financial aid the US sends them to smash the local citizenry into compliance. This includes training and equipping their military and police to bust unions and any civilian dissident groups, and of course to commit murders on a huge scale. It is this policy which led to the US to vigorously oppose the creation of a World Court to try crimes against humanity. The US opposed this because political leaders here are fully aware that the nations the US trains and supports murder their populations on a grand scale, with the active participation of US personnel.
Noam Chomsky refers to these countries as "terror states" and "death squad democracies" -- because it's important to note that, in elite policy and media circles, the only "dictatorship" in the Americas is Cuba. That's said without irony. I remember Clinton himself saying that, without even a smirk. All of the death squad democracies are called "republics" and so forth, but they are all brutal sources of repression and mass murder against their citizenry in the effort to prevent a more just social situation from breaking out.
While the press doesn't cover this situation, because if it did, Americans would begin pressuring their leaders to change this situation, it continues regardless, albeit under different pretexts than the old Cold War sham. So, what you get is a disconnect between American rhetoric -- all about human rights, justice, international law, and so forth -- and American actions. You can find that American Third World aid recipients tend to have terrible human rights records. Explore it yourself: check out Human Rights Watch.
Why is this done? It's done because foreign companies -- American and European -- are heavily invested in Third World nations, extracting wealth for their investors' profits. A Third World country with labor unions, thriving democracy, safe workplace conditions, pursuing a protectionist economic policy, catering to its own citizens' needs (which are incompatible with those of foreign investors) -- a country like that has what politicos call "an unfavorable business climate". The rule of thumb is that any situation the US tolerates in a First World nation (say, Europe or Japan) is intolerable in Third World nations. That's how labor leaders, land reform activists, and any political dissidents in US client regimes get tortured and murdered.
The US has made its stance abundantly clear in its actions -- corporate profits are more important than human lives. But this doesn't get any play in the media, even though it is policy. Instead, there is endless rhetoric about "free markets", "democracy", "free trade", and so forth. The noblest of sentiments awash in Third World blood.
Only when enough Americans put pressure on the politicians who run this atrocity will it change. They are counting on Americans ignoring it, or being unaware of it. I've heard many a time the smug media buttmunches talking about how Americans just aren't concerned about foreign policy. I think that's bogus. If the press covered it, if Americans saw what was being done in their name, then they'd be certainly concerned. It would help you understand why people in other countries burn American flags. It's not envy, as the ignorant like to think. It's because the US is the single largest force for repression in the world today. This isn't a loaded statement -- it's based on our foreign policy track record.
For example, every few months, the media brings up Cuba or China, typically having some Cuban or Chinese dissidents on the air, talking about being imprisoned several times for their beliefs. Much is made of this -- the most recent on I heard was on the "liberal" National Public Radio, "Talk of the Nation" (March 16, 2000). But you never see Honduran dissidents, or Guatemalan, or Chilean, or Peruvian, or Bolivian, or Colombian, or Salvadoran, and so on. Why? Because the are dead. They are murdered, or hiding for their lives.
There are no dissidents in those "democracies" because they've been killed, or "disappeared". The police states we've funded and trained have worked to ensure that anybody who sticks their necks out gets killed, eventually. The biggest beef the business elites have with Cuba is that it keeps them out. They want to exploit Cuba the way they've exploited the rest of the Third World, and so it's "newsworthy" -- although you'll never hear it put that way.
If you don't believe anything I'm writing here, then do the research yourself. Check out KILLING HOPE, detailing American foreign policy since WWII. Definitely check out the SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS WATCH page, and the HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH page. AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL has pretty good resources, too.
Here's a trick from Chomsky: Another information resource of value is the business press -- this may seem contradictory, so I'll explain. Capitalists run America. As a result, their media can't be quite so full of propagandistic nonsense that other media are: you know, like the New York Times and Washington Post. The business community has to be able to see the world as it is, and that means you can generally find better information in the business presses than in the mainstream ones. Keep in mind that these sources are writing from a particular editorial point of view: aka, pro-business; but the level of the coverage is greater because these media aren't writing for the rascal multitude like the NYT. Rather, they're writing for the corporate elite.
So, papers like the Wall Street Journal, magazines like BusinessWeek and even The Economist are of value, so long as you keep in mind their editorial bias, because they can't afford to send their business readers bad information, the way that the other presses do, simply because investment decisions hinge on good information, and American foreign policy lives and dies on investment issues.
And, of course, magazines like the Covert Action Quarterly, Multinational Monitor, and Z Magazine are useful in covering the news that's somehow not fit to print.
Once you learn about what's going on, then it's time to act for change. The change has to begin at home -- the American government is the largest funding and training source for Third World murderous regimes, undertaken to keep these countries favorable to capitalist investment. We have to cut the funding off at the source, and that means putting pressure on American leaders. They think Americans don't care about the rest of the world; they like the idea of the US as the sole superpower, never able to do wrong. We must change that. It's time to make some noise!
I started with Colombia, but it's only a beginning. American policy is far-reaching but uniform in its handling of Third World countries. The same tune played in different countries and cultures.
Return to Anarchy for Anybody