El Salvador 2004 vote recalls cold-war power play by Washington

Horhey · May 14, 2012

This is new to me.. The US administration tried to intimidate the Salvadoran population into voting for the US-NED backed candidate.

The Christian Science Monitor: El Salvador vote recalls cold-war power play

March 19, 2004

White House Special Assistant Otto Reich gave a phone-in press conference at ARENA headquarters. According to local newspapers, he said he was worried about the impact an FMLN win could have on the country's "economic, commercial, and migratory relations with the United States."

In February, Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega told voters to "consider what kind of a relationship they want a new administration to have with us." He met with all the candidates except Mr. Handal. Last week, 28 US Congress members sent a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell saying Mr. Noriega "crossed a boundary" and that his remarks were perceived as "interference in Salvadoran electoral affairs." This week two US congressmen blasted Reich's comments as inflammatory.
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Otto Reich was the director of the the illegal domestic propaganda operation from the Office of Public Diplomacy in the N.S.C. which attempted to engineer consent for the US war against the population of Central America:

The Washington Post: Reagan's Pro-Contra Propaganda Machine

September 4, 1988 | Robert Parry; Peter Kornbluh

To a degree little understood even by the congressional investigating committees, the Reagan administration attempted to manipulate American views of the war in Nicaragua through an unprecedented, covert propaganda bureaucracy.

Ultimately, the campaign came to resemble the sort of covert political operation the CIA runs against hostile forces overseas but is outlawed from conducting at home.
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Peter Kornbluh, Senior Analyst of the National Security Archive discusses the declassified documents on the Office of Public Diplomacy
[video=youtube_share;MU4aI-G49Rg]http://youtu.be/MU4aI-G49Rg[/video]

"When I want to know about stuff like this there's nobody else better to call on than the guy you're about to meet right here. Otto Reich is who Im talking about. He can better explain what's happening in Honduras than just about anybody else."

-CNN anchor, in the Video at 2:52
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The Miami Herald: N.S.C. Supervised Office to Influence Opinion

"If you look at it as a whole," a senior S/LPD official said, "the Office of Public Diplomacy was carrying out a huge psychological operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in denied or enemy territory."

"The idea," said an official opposed to the activity, "is to slowly demonize the Sandinista government in order to turn it into a real enemy and threat in the minds of the American people, thereby eroding their resistance to US support for the Contras and, perhaps, to a future U.S. military intervention in the region."
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Horhey · May 14, 2012

"Democracy Promotion"

John Negroponte: Democratization in Latin America threatens U.S. interests
[video=youtube_share;cK2wDEKP2JE]http://youtu.be/cK2wDEKP2JE[/video]

The Reagan administration backed attempts at introducing democratic elections in El Salvador but these efforts were dismissed as a "systematic failure" by one insider..

Thomas Carothers, who describes his stand as 'Neo-Reaganite', is one of the leading international experts on democracy promotion initiatives and U.S. foreign policy. He's currently the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where he is the founder and director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Program. He writes from the perspective of an insider. While serving in the State Department, he worked with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on "democracy enhancement" programs in Latin America from 1985-1988.

Carothers observed, in El Salvador:

The administration approached the elections with two goals: ensuring that technically credible elections were held and that the Christian Democratic candidate, Jose Napoleon Duarte, won. (1) The administration could not conceive of an El Salvador in which the military was not the dominant actor, the economic elite no longer held the national economy in its hands, the left was incorporated into the political system, and all Salvadorans actually had both the formal and substantial possibility of political participation. In short, the US government had no real conception of democracy in El Salvador (2).
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Maria Julia Hemandez, a leading Salvadoran human rights monitor said:

These elections have been imposed by the U.S. State Department to legitimize the government so it can get more U.S. military aid. All this will mean is more deaths, more violations of human rights.
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The elections were held under military rule and no left or left-leaning parties or activists were permitted to participate in the electoral process. Lord Chitnis, spokesman for the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group which observed the elections noted that:

The elections were held in an atmosphere of terror and despair, of macabre rumour and grisly reality. First, and crucial to the whole standing of the exercise, was the fact that no politicians to the left of the Christian Democrats (PDC), and not all of them, were free to contest the election. Exclusion of the FDR made the election a contest of vague promises and inferences by two candidates who already bore a heavy responsibility for the situation in which El Salvador finds itself today.
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Horhey · May 14, 2012

In conclusion, Carothers writes:

The underlying U.S. goal is maintaining the basic societal orders of particular Latin American countries approximately as they are ensuring that the economics are not drastically rearranged and that the power relations of the various social sectors are not turned upside down.. the underlying objective is to maintain the basic order of what, historically at least, are quite undemocratic societies.

The deep fear in the United States government of populist-based change in Latin America with all its implications for upsetting established economic and political orders and heading off in a leftist direction leads to an emphasis on incremental change from the top down (3). The Reagan administration came to adopt pro-democracy policies as a means of relieving pressure for more radical change, but inevitably sought only limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied.(4)
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In his history of hemispheric relations, British scholar Gordon Connell-Smith writes:

Royal Institute of International Affairs: The Inter-American system

While paying lip-service to the encouragement of representative democracy in Latin America, the United States has a strong interest in just the reverse.[5] [Apart from] procedural democracy, especially the holding of elections which only too often have proved farcical.[6] Functioning democracy may respond to popular concerns, while the United States has been concerned with fostering the most favorable conditions for her private overseas investment.(7)
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Horhey · May 17, 2012

For declassified US documents on the Office of Public Diplomacy's illegal domestic propaganda program, see:

A National Security Archive

Electronic Briefing Book

Edited by Thomas Blanton

March 2, 2001

Jump to the document list
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Horhey · May 17, 2012

Col. Oliver North Questioned by Rep. Brooks on Plan to Suspend the Constitution in the event of "national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad".
[video=youtube_share;Ug0IL7k3elQ]http://youtu.be/Ug0IL7k3elQ[/video]

The Miami Herald: Reagan Aides And The 'Secret' Government

Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, for example, helped draw up a controversial plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of national crisis such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad.
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The Reagan administration was so concerned about the public's attitudes towards its terrorist wars in Central America that it developed plans to suspend the Constitution and impose martial law in the event of "national crises," such as "violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad."

For an example of how these revelations were treated by Congress, see Taking the Stand: The Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North. An excerpt (p. 643):

Rep. Brooks: Colonel North, in your work at the N.S.C. [National Security Council], were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

Mr. Sullivan [North's Lawyer]: Mr. Chairman? (Gavel sounds.)

Chairman Inouye: I believe the question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area. So may I request that you not touch upon that, sir?

Rep. Brooks: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan developed by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency that would suspend the American Constitution, and I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was, but I wanted --

Chairman Inouye: May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage? If we wish to get into this I'm certain arrangements can be made for an Executive Session.
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