Letter from South America - Our Special Correspondent

Naval War College Review, Summer, 2002 by Geoffrey Wawro

Although the United States must think and deploy strategically in every hemisphere, it is here in its own that it confronts some of the greatest challenges to American peace and prosperity. Richly provided with energy, farmlands, potable water, and other natural resources, Latin Americans have nevertheless stumbled from one failed regime to another, often looking to fulfill the words of the real author of the Monroe Doctrine, John Quincy Adams, who saw in 1823 a continent "stamped with arbitrary power and civil dissension," far more likely to become "a domicile of despotism" than "a house of freedom."

With no history of political unity, the South American continent has long been divided into marginal states of doubtful self-sufficiency. This insufficiency--legal, economic, administrative, political, military--has today created the optimal conditions for organized crime, drug trafficking, and terrorism. With 220 million Latin Americans, 45 percent of the region's population, living well below the poverty line, governments are everywhere obsessed with the "social question": how to lance the putrefying slums--the favelas of Brazil, the villas miserias of Argentina, the pueblos jovenes of Peru--and drain away their crime and misery.

If only it were as simple as that. In a January 2002 report, the Brazilian government frankly admitted that it has lost control of the shantytowns around Rio de Janeiro, which are in the hands of heavily armed, drug-running paramilitaries, six thousand strong. The situation is even worse in Sao Paolo.

Insert a lancet in either place, and the government is liable to provoke an armed insurrection, by narcos and youth gangs like "Third Command," toting machine guns, light artillery, and rocket-propelled grenades. Other Latin American countries face similar distractions, which give the terrorists, forgers, drug dealers, and other criminals time and impunity to sink their roots.

It is, for example, supposed that Muhammed Atta, who was a naturalized Nicaraguan, carried at least two passports. (One of the 1993 World Trade Center bombers had a sack full of blank Nicaraguan passports in his hotel room.) The Islamist terrorists who blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and the city's Jewish community center two years later fled into Argentina's lawless "triborder area"--the tropical northeastern strip where Argentina meets Paraguay and Brazil--and have never been caught. It is now mooted by Jane's that Argentine investigators early on identified the Hezbollah assassins and traced the bombings to Tehran, which, to forestall Israeli reprisals, allegedly resorted to a time-honored South American dodge. Iran's supreme leader paid ten million dollars into Argentine president Carlos Menem's Swiss bank account; we are told that Menem obligingly called off the investigation, no doubt with one of those roguish winks for which he is famous.

Democracy has replaced dictatorship in twenty--one of twenty-three Latin American countries over the last twenty years, but these could not be called strong democratic institutions. In many states of Latin America, law, order, and public authority have receded so far as to be almost invisible. It is not that anarchy reigns--Latin Americans are generally too decent for that--but that terrorists and drug traffickers are able to settle and operate freely in many of the South and Central American countries, using them as bases for their nefarious purposes. Julio Cirino, an Argentine analyst, calls this the "essential territoriality" of the so--called extraterritorial, transnational movements. "Shadowy, transnational" operations like al-Qa'ida or the Russian mafiya are often flagrantly national--that is, they lodge themselves in weak, failing states like Ecuador, Colombia, Paraguay, or Suriname, building elaborate criminal and terrorist infrastructures that seem "shadowy" to Americans only because we do not know t he half of what goes on inside them. For the new guerrillas, territorial conquest has nothing to do with the 1970s theory of "liberated areas" (where a more enlightened social model would be implanted); rather, it seeks soft spots and gray areas inside sovereign states from which to operate criminal and terrorist enterprises. Crime and complicity, of course, breed corruption, which in turn further erodes public support for Latin America's "democratic" governments. Drug trafficking earns Mexico thirty billion dollars a year--6 percent of GDP--smearing fraud and chicanery through the entire system. Polling reveals that more than two-thirds of Latin American governments are perceived by their citizens as being irreparably corrupt, what John Quincy Adams might have termed "domiciles of despotism."

Buenos Aires, usually throbbing beneath its ever-present cloud of smog, is today oddly quiet. Shops are empty (or closed), pedestrians and revisteros--the usually voluble newsstand operators--subdued. This great city of eleven million is passing through its fifth year of recession, which by now feels like a depression. The high-end shops are all deserted and garrisoned by armed security guards in SWAT uniforms, on the lookout for the looters who occasionally appear to sack boutiques and supermarkets. All middle-class Argentines--a dying breed after the January 2002 devaluation--will tell you that this fat land of pampas and rivers was among the world's richest in 1914, with per capita income equal to Germany and Holland, higher than Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, or Spain. Corn, wheat, leather, wool, and beef-raised in the rich central grasslands and the vast spaces of Patagonia--made fortunes in Argentina, which alone accounted for half of Latin America's total exports in 1914. You see traces of that wealth eve rywhere you go in Buenos Aires: the palatial railroad stations of Retiro and Constitucion (modeled on big-city stations in Liverpool and London); the baroque headquarters of the newspaper La Prensa; the broad, jacaranda-lined boulevards; the cool, clean sidewalks paved with Swedish granite; the elegant northern barrio (district) of Recoleta-virtually indistinguishable from Paris s XVIth Arrondissement--and, of course, the Jockey Club, where the new porteno ("people of the port") dynasties--the Drysdales, Devotos, Bunges, Zuberbuhlers--and the old--the Saenz, Unzues, Anchorenas, Uriburus--mingled to relish their wealth and standing.