Slaughterhouse 28

START TIME: 9:15 PM
END TIME: 10:30
WORD COUNT: 637


What is the role of US firearms in Latin American Politics in the 20th Century? –Sam Gold

Fellow Space Monkey Sam Gold pointed out to me this week that in many of the conflicts in Latin America during the 20th Century, the United States had armed both sides – Batista and Castro in Cuba as well as a number of uprisings owing to rural revolts.

At first I thought this was one of those interesting tidbits that you always hear regarding war, such as the rule of thumb that the country who is going to win the war has the worst coffee (it speaks to a level of luxury among a citizenry that could be called upon to defend themselves and their leadership; good coffee means you have a standard of living that you may be unwilling to sacrifice your life for) or Thomas Friedman’s “The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention” in which he observed that no two countries with a McDonald's franchise had ever gone to war with one another (this theory was blown to bits during the NATO bombing of Serbia, but it’s also more dependent on the more nebulous definition of war)

But then I thought about it a little more, and I realized that the weapons themselves were probably secondary to our foreign policy regarding Latin America during the 20th century. I had to do some light Wikipedia-ish reading on this because I hadn’t paid sufficient attention to these sorts of topics when they emerged in my AP Comparative Government class, but everybody’s pal Teddy Roosevelt elected to take up the white man’s burden by establishing the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which provided for the defense of Latin America, as well as openly granted the United States to power of intervention in Latin America’s affairs.

So if you factor in the idea that, right or wrong, the march through the cold war consisted of rural areas rising up to take on the established military juntas; the suppliers of arms in these conflicts had to be from whoever the nearest and most reliable provider was. In nearly every instance that would have been the United States. To say that US firearms meant we had a puppet-master like desire to control Latin America…well, yeah, but it stretched far beyond our desire to have them shoot each other with our stuff.

We installed right-wing dictators to battle insurgent communists and when some of those people proved insufficiently pliant, we bumped them off (which is why we won’t see that Henry Kissinger jetting overseas anytime soon, because a Spanish court would like to ask him a couple questions about excessively ventilated, popularly elected left-wing Salvador Allende). Over a century we behaved only slightly better than the Spanish Empire that used to control the entire region before the Spanish-American War. Hundreds of thousands of people simply disappeared. The whole story is sordid and highly unflattering, particularly on the eve of America’s birthday, as the kids remind me. Our attempts to establish a set of colonies without being colonizers did not always leave us on the side of the angels. Against this backdrop, it’s easy to allude to the use of American ordnance as the countries waged a dirty war against each other as prima facie evidence of Krushcchev’s rantings of capitalism selling itself the noose to hang itself with.

I liken the whole situation to soda fountain licensing. Lewis Black talked about, when he was doing a show in Atlanta, the soft drink people lock up category exclusivity, so if you walk into a restaurant and ask for Pepsi, and they don’t carry it, no one starts ranting about how they’ll go across the street instead. I figured both rebel and puppet government grabbed US firearms for the same reason people order popcorn at the movies; because it’s there, it’s easy, and it would be more of a surprise if it WASN’T there.