- Imperial interventions in civil wars have a devastating
effect on countries that last for decades and affect the entire economy
and society. One indicator of the long-term consequences of imperial military
intervention is the tremendous increase of violent crime, the multiplication
of gangs, homicides and general insecurity in Central America. Violence
increased far beyond what existed prior to imperial wars in such countries
as Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. In the period prior to imperial intervention
in Central America, during times of revolutionary ferment, high levels
of social organization via inclusive social movements, channeled discontent
into political and social channels. Revolutionary movements organized
armed resistance against specifics targets; repressive police, military
and death squad militias. Imperial intervention included military advisers
and counter-insurgency strategies which uprooted peasants via scorched
earth policies and destroyed communities. Assaults on urban barrios led
to the break-up of family and neighborhood networks. The social bonds
which integrate people into a moral and social community were ruptured:
the goal of imperial planners is to decimate any independent popular civil-society
organization as a political threat to its illegitimate collaborator regime.
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- In El Salvador, the US provided over $300 million a year
in arms and training for almost a decade. The Pentagon through its advisory
missions, in collaboration with local landlords and generals, financed
and forcibly recruited thousands of peasants into death squad 'civilian
militias' to assassinate local movement activists and terrorize farm workers'movements
and trade union organizations. Under imperial military pressure the leaders
of the major Central American guerrilla organizations signed on to a peace
agreement. The "peace accords" retained the US collaborator
regimes in power and the promised social reforms were never implemented.
As a result, the homicide rate skyrocketed. The discharged guerrilla
militants and unemployed right wing militia members, armed and trained,
and with no future, became the bases for gangs, drug and people traffickers,
kidnappers and extortionists. The number of people who were annually killed
in violent crime (1991-2011) exceeded the number who died each year during
the revolutionary struggle (1979-1990). Having successfully blocked the
prospects of positive socio-economic transformations in wealth, land ownership,
the judicial system and allocation of public investments, the US pushed
for neo-liberal 'free trade agreements' which further decimated small farmers
and retail commerce. Mass outmigration and crime became the 'roads out
of poverty' in the aftermath of imperial intervention. Violent crime became
so pervasive that the business elites of the US and Central America were
hesitant to invest and profit from the low wages and the unemployed who
crowded the labor market. The cost of hiring private security armies to
protect upscale neighborhoods, business operations, country clubs, and
exclusive restaurant and leisure centers became prohibitive.
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- Faced with the "unfavorable climate for business"
created by the very same pro-business Pentagon intervention, after two
decades of murder and mayhem, the World Bank intervened. The World Development
Report (WDR) for 2010 (published in 2011) focuses on the theme of "conflict,
security and development". The Report proposed a series of measures
to lessen what it calls "mass violence". The Report was taken
up and elaborated in the Financial Times (4/27/11 p. 9) by Martin Wolf
in an article titled "Remove the scourge of conflict". The Report
and Wolf provide time series data between 1999-2009 showing the vertical
growth of "criminal violence after civil wars"; time series data
show that countries with high poverty rates based on the (percent of population
with income below $1.25 per day) have experienced greater violence than
those with low poverty rate; time series data show that greater 'violence'
reduced real GDP growth.
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- Both the WB Report and the Financial Times fail to identify
the true nature of the 'violent conflict', the principle source of violence
and the foreign and domestic elite economic policies which deepen and prolong
'violence'.
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- In the case of Central America, particularly El Salvador,
Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras, the WB and Financial Times resort to
vacuous generalization to avoid discussing the massive military role of
US imperialism in promoting large scale, long term violence in the countries.
Instead the FT strikes a phony philosophical note "man is a violent
animal" (Alas). In fact imperialist rulers are violent animals; especially
with regard to poor countries attempting to free themselves of US backed
oligarchies. To their discredit the WB and FT obfuscate the data by claiming
that the deaths were a product of "civil wars".
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- Throughout the 1970's and 1980's the US and Israel provided
arms, advisers, technical capacity to the murderous Guatemalan regime which
slaughtered over 300,000; mostly Indians and wiped off the map over 420
villages. During the US decade long proxy war against the progressive
Sandinista revolutionary movement via the Somoza dictatorship (1969-78)
and the decade long Contra terror war against the Sandinista government
(1979-89), over 50,000 people were killed, hundreds of thousands maimed
and displaced and productive farms, factories, infrastructure, clinics
and schools and co-operatives were targeted by US counter-insurgency advisers.
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- As mentioned earlier, El Salvador's social movements
and their supporters throughout civil society were targeted by US backed
military and paramilitary groups forcing hundreds of thousands to flee
to urban squatter settlements or across borders and overseas. Similar
outcomes occurred during the US counter-insurgency campaign in Honduras
and invasions of Grenada and Panama in the 1980's.
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- Imperial backed invasions, counter-insurgency campaigns
and the subsequent imposition of corrupt oligarchs led to the total disarticulation
of local social networks and the bankruptcy of small scale farms because
of the importation of subsidized US foodstuffs. These led to the presence
of a deadly combination: thousands of automatic rifles, tens of thousands
of unemployed displaced rural youth living in urban slums and an economy
geared to enriching elite importers, exporters and US bankers and creditors.
The WB Report in all of 301 pages and numerous tables does not contain
a single phrase about the nature, consequences and the profound and lasting
impact of imperial intervention on the out of control homicide rates in
Central America or elsewhere. Instead we are told it's all about a "civil
war".
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- The mendacious cover-up proceeds to the current decade.
The WB Report and the FT sound an optimistic note claiming that annual
battle deaths have "fallen to 42,000 in the 2000's". First,
calling the US-NATO invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan a "civil war"
is a travesty to common knowledge; and then falsifying the over 1 million
Iraqi deaths into a few thousand, flies in the face of independent surveys
published in the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet.
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- What is striking about the imperialist interventions
and most relevant to the growth of violent crime, is the fact that the
subsequent client rulers, are themselves deeply enmeshed in international
criminal networks. Drug dealing and large scale theft of billions in aid
funds and public revenues is the hallmark of Central American clients who
are most intimately tied to Washington. The same is true in Iraq and Afghanistan:
tribal clans and ethnic gangs who pledged allegiance to the US occupiers
run billion dollar heroin enterprises. They murder civil society activists
and undermine the bases of community based organizations.
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- Policy Proposals
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- Based on a diagnosis that ignores the imperial
causes of social breakdown and the subsequent spiraling violent crime rate,
the WB Report and the FT propose "lessons" for a "successful
transition to ending high rates of violence".
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- Since their diagnosis of the historical roots of crime
is deeply flawed, the prescriptions fail to come to terms with the political
and economic transformations necessary to reduce spiraling homicide rates.
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- The WB Report proposes (1) "inclusive coalitions"
for change, (2) impact programs that produce quick results and impress
people, (3) reforms of the security and justice institutions, (4) a pragmatic
perspective of several decades to bring about change. In other words the
WB Report recognizes that its policies, allies and agencies are so embedded
in the current system that its "reform proposals" are at best
designed to co-opt local leaders in coalitions, to pursue incremental changes,
which will not reverse homicide rates for several decades.
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- The WB Report proposes to create bottom-up "links"
between the neo-liberal state and civic society: an impossible task when
"the state" is the principle agency undermining employment via
its free market policies. Their proposal to act against corruption and
to reform the police and judicial system overlooks the fact that the past
and present closest political and judicial collaborators of US counter-insurgency
and dominance are precisely those corrupt officials willing to repress
popular movements and provide military bases. The WB Report calls for
greater intervention by "external institutions" (like itself
and US AID) to "deliver support", when it was precisely external
intervention which short circuited changes fought for by "bottom up"
grass roots movements.
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- The point of departure for a reduction of violent crime
is precisely to reduce or eliminate external intervention by the US: the
need to eliminate military aid and training programs which block and repress
social movements and organize coups; to eliminate WB programs promoting
agro-export elites and to promote agrarian reforms led by and for co-operatives
and family farmers; to end free trade and the saturation of local market
with subsidized US food exports to allow peasants to produce for local
markets with subsidized US food exports, to allow peasants to produce for
local markets. Above all there is a need for the US and WB to pay $ multi-million
dollar compensation for the destruction caused by the counter-insurgency
war and neo-liberal policies, as a way of creating alternative employment
for young people tempted by the drug gangs. Because of the long term destruction
resulting from imperialist wars, the process of decriminalizing society
will require a profound revolution in institutions and culture, one which
will by necessity need to root out the current crop of generals, oligarchs
and World Bank trained economists who perpetuate the conditions which spawn
crime. Those changes will require supporting social movements independent
of the state; immediate positive impacts to attract popular support will
result from movements engaged in direct action like occupying large
rural estates. Police and security reforms can only be instituted as part
of a process of regime changes in which ties to repressive overseas experts
are replaced by links to community councils. Crime will be reduced in
direct relation to greater independence from the regional policemen and
with greater freedom to pursue an alternative economy based on social solidarity.
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