As was reported following the assassination
of prominent Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres in March, former
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton erased
all references to the 2009 coup in Honduras in the paperback edition of her
memoirs, “Hard Choices.” Her three-page account of the coup in the original
hardcover edition, where she admitted
to having sanctioned it, was one of several lengthy sections cut from the
paperback, published in April 2015 shortly after she had launched her
presidential campaign.
A short, inconspicuous
statement on the copyright page is the only indication that “a limited number
of sections” — amounting to roughly 96 pages — had been cut “to accommodate a
shorter length for this edition.” Many of the abridgements consist of narrative
and description and are largely trivial, but there are a number of sections
that were deleted from the original that also deserve attention.
Colombia
Clinton’s take on Plan
Colombia, a U.S. program furnishing (predominantly military) aid to Colombia to
combat both the FARC and ELN rebels as well as drug cartels, and introduced
under her husband’s administration in 2000, adopts a much more favorable tone
in the paperback compared to the original. She begins both versions by praising
the initiative as a model for Mexico — a highly controversial claim given the sharp
rise in extrajudicial killings and the proliferation
of paramilitary death squads in Colombia since the program was launched.
The two versions then diverge
considerably. In the original, she explains that the program was expanded by
Colombian President Álvaro Uribe “with strong support from the Bush
Administration” and acknowledges that “new concerns began to arise about human
rights abuses, violence against labor organizers, targeted assassinations, and
the atrocities of right-wing paramilitary groups.” Seeming to place the blame
for these atrocities on the Uribe and Bush governments, she then claims to have
“made the choice to continue America’s bipartisan support for Plan Colombia”
regardless during her tenure as secretary of state, albeit with an increased
emphasis on “governance, education and development.”
By contrast, the paperback
makes no acknowledgment of these abuses or even of the fact that the program
was widely expanded in the 2000s. Instead, it simply makes the case that the
Obama administration decided to build on President Clinton’s efforts to help
Colombia overcome its drug-related violence and the FARC insurgency —
apparently leading to “an unprecedented measure of security and prosperity” by
the time of her visit to Bogotá in 2010.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership
Also found in the original is
a paragraph where Clinton discusses her efforts to encourage other countries in
the Americas to join negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade
agreement during a regional conference in El Salvador in June 2009:
So we worked hard to improve
and ratify trade agreements with Colombia and Panama and encouraged Canada and
the group of countries that became known as the Pacific Alliance — Mexico,
Colombia, Peru, and Chile — all open-market democracies driving toward a more
prosperous future to join negotiations with Asian nations on TPP, the
trans-Pacific trade agreement.
Clinton praises Latin America
for its high rate of economic growth, which she revealingly claims has produced
“more than 50 million new middle-class consumers eager to buy U.S. goods and services.”
She also admits that the region’s inequality is “still among the worst in the
world” with much of its population “locked in persistent poverty” — even while
the TPP that she has advocated strongly for threatens to exacerbate
the region’s underdevelopment, just as NAFTA caused the
Mexican economy to stagnate.
Last October, however, she
publicly reversed
her stance on the TPP under pressure from fellow Democratic presidential
candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley. Likewise, the entire two-page
section on the conference in El Salvador where she expresses her support for
the TPP is missing from the paperback.
Brazil
In her original account of her
efforts to prevent Cuba from being admitted to the Organization of American
States (OAS) in June 2009, Clinton singles out Brazilian President Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva as a potential mediator who could help “broker a compromise”
between the U.S. and the left-leaning governments of Venezuela, Ecuador,
Bolivia and Nicaragua. Her assessment of Lula, removed from the paperback, is
mixed:
As Brazil’s economy grew, so
did Lula’s assertiveness in foreign policy. He envisioned Brazil becoming a
major world power, and his actions led to both constructive cooperation and
some frustrations. For example, in 2004 Lula sent troops to lead the UN
peacekeeping mission in Haiti, where they did an excellent job of providing
order and security under difficult conditions. On the other hand, he insisted
on working with Turkey to cut a side deal with Iran on its nuclear program that
did not meet the international community’s requirements.
It is notable that the
“difficult conditions” in Haiti that Clinton refers to was a period of perhaps
the worst human rights crisis in the hemisphere at the time, following the
U.S.-backed coup d’etat against democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand
Aristide in 2004. Researchers estimate
that some 4,000 people were killed for political reasons, and some 35,000 women
and girls sexually assaulted. As various human rights investigators,
journalists and other eyewitnesses noted at the time, some of the most heinous
of these atrocities were carried out by Haiti’s National Police, with U.N.
troops often
providing support — when they were not engaging
them directly. WikiLeaked State Department cables, however, reveal that the
State Department saw the U.N. mission as strategically important, in part
because it helped to isolate
Venezuela from other countries in the region, and because it allowed the
U.S. to “manage”
Haiti on the cheap.
In contrast to Lula, Clinton
heaps praise on Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, who was recently suspended
from office pending impeachment proceedings:
Later I would enjoy working
with Dilma Rousseff, Lula’s protégée, Chief of Staff, and eventual successor as
President. On January 1, 2011, I attended her inauguration on a rainy but
festive day in Brasilia. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets as the
country’s first woman President drove by in a 1952 Rolls-Royce. She took the
oath of office and accepted the traditional green and gold Presidential sash
from her mentor, Lula, pledging to continue his work on eradicating poverty and
inequality. She also acknowledged the history she was making. “Today, all
Brazilian women should feel proud and happy.” Dilma is a formidable leader whom
I admire and like.
The paperback version deletes
almost all references to Rousseff, mentioning her only once as an alleged target
of NSA spying according to Edward Snowden.
The Arab Spring
By far the lengthiest deletion
in Clinton’s memoirs consists of a ten-page section discussing the Arab Spring
in Jordan, Libya and the Persian Gulf region — amounting to almost half of the
chapter. Having detailed her administration’s response to the mass
demonstrations that had started in Tunisia before spreading to Egypt, then
Jordan, then Bahrain and Libya, Clinton openly recognizes the profound
contradictions at the heart of the U.S.’ relationship with its Gulf allies:
The United States had
developed deep economic and strategic ties to these wealthy, conservative
monarchies, even as we made no secret of our concerns about human rights
abuses, especially the treatment of women and minorities, and the export of
extremist ideology. Every U.S. administration wrestled with the contradictions
of our policy towards the Gulf.
And it was appalling that
money from the Gulf continued funding extremist madrassas and propaganda all
over the world. At the same time, these governments shared many of our top
security concerns.
Thanks to these shared
“security concerns,” particularly those surrounding al-Qaeda and Iran, her
administration strengthened diplomatic ties and sold vast amounts of military
equipment to these countries:
The United States sold large
amounts of military equipment to the Gulf states, and stationed the U.S. Navy’s
5th Fleet in Bahrain, the Combined Air and Space Operations Center in Qatar,
and maintained troops in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, as well as key
bases in other countries. When I became Secretary I developed personal
relationships with Gulf leaders both individually and as a group through the
Gulf Cooperation Council.
Clinton continues to reveal
that the U.S.’ common interests with its Gulf allies extended well beyond mere
security issues and in fact included the objective of regime change in Libya —
which led the Obama administration into a self-inflicted dilemma as it weighed
the ramifications of condemning the violent repression of protests in Bahrain
with the need to build an international coalition, involving a number of Gulf
states, to help remove Libyan leader Muammar Gaddhafi from power:
Our values and conscience
demanded that the United States condemn the violence against civilians we were
seeing in Bahrain, full stop. After all, that was the very principle at play in
Libya. But if we persisted, the carefully constructed international coalition
to stop Qaddafi could collapse at the eleventh hour, and we might fail to
prevent a much larger abuse — a full-fledged massacre.
Instead of delving into the
complexities of the U.S.’ alliances in the Middle East, the entire discussion
is simply deleted, replaced by a pensive reflection on prospects for democracy
in Egypt, making no reference to the Gulf region at all. Having been
uncharacteristically candid in assessing the U.S.’ response to the Arab Spring,
Clinton chose to ignore these obvious inconsistencies — electing instead to
proclaim the Obama administration as a champion of democracy and human rights
across the Arab world.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Ming Chun Tang is
International Program Intern at the Center for Economic and Policy Research
(CEPR) in Washington, D.C.
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