by Ishaan Tharoor
[…] the United States does
have a well-documented history of interfering and sometimes interrupting
the workings of democracies elsewhere. It has occupied
and intervened militarily in a whole swath of countries in the Caribbean
and Latin America and fomented coups against democratically
elected populists.
The most infamous episodes
include the ousting of Iranian Prime
Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 — whose government was replaced by an
authoritarian monarchy favorable to Washington — the removal and assassination
of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961, and the violent toppling of
socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende, whose government was swept aside
in 1973 by a military coup led by the ruthless Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
For decades, these actions
were considered imperatives of the Cold War, part of a global struggle against
the Soviet Union and its supposed leftist proxies. Its key participants
included scheming diplomats like John
Foster Dulles and Henry Kissinger, who advocated aggressive, covert
policies to stanch the supposedly expanding threat of communism. Sometimes that
agenda also explicitly converged with the interests of U.S. business: In
1954, Washington unseated Guatemala's left-wing president, Jacobo Arbenz, who
had had the temerity to challenge the vast control of the United Fruit Co., a
U.S. corporation, with agrarian laws that would be fairer to Guatemalan
farmers. The CIA went on to install and back a series of right-wing
dictatorships that brutalized the impoverished nation for almost half a
century.
A young Che Guevara, who
happened to be traveling through Guatemala in 1954, was deeply affected by
Arbenz's overthrow. He later wrote
to his mother that the events prompted him to leave “the path of reason”
and would ground his conviction in the need for radical revolution over gradual
political reform.
Aside from its instigation of
coups and alliances with right-wing juntas, Washington sought to more subtly
influence elections in all corners of the world. And so did Moscow. Political
scientist Dov
Levin calculates that the “two powers intervened in 117 elections around
the world from 1946 to 2000 — an average of once in every nine competitive
elections.”
In the late 1940s, the newly
established CIA cut its teeth in Western Europe, pushing back against some of
the continent's most influential leftist parties and labor unions. In 1948, the
United States propped up Italy's centrist Christian Democrats and helped ensure
their electoral victory against a leftist coalition, anchored by one of the
most powerful communist parties in Europe. CIA operatives gave
millions of dollars to their Italian allies and helped orchestrate what was
then an
unprecedented, clandestine propaganda campaign: This included forging
documents to besmirch communist leaders via fabricated sex scandals,
starting a mass letter-writing campaign from Italian Americans to their
compatriots, and spreading hysteria about a Russian takeover and the
undermining of the Catholic Church.
“We had bags of money that we
delivered to selected politicians, to defray their political expenses, their
campaign expenses, for posters, for pamphlets,” recounted F. Mark
Wyatt, the CIA officer who handled the mission and later participated in
more than 2½ decades of direct support to the Christian Democrats.
This template
spread everywhere: CIA operative Edward G. Lansdale, notorious for his
efforts to bring down the North Vietnamese government, is said to have run the
successful 1953 campaign of Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay. Japan's
center-right Liberal Democratic Party was backed with secret American funds through
the 1950s and the 1960s. The U.S. government and American oil corporations
helped Christian parties in Lebanon win crucial elections in 1957 with
briefcases full of cash.
In Chile, the United
States prevented Allende from winning an election in 1964. “A total of
nearly four million dollars was spent on some fifteen covert action projects,
ranging from organizing slum dwellers to passing funds to political parties,” detailed
a Senate inquiry in the mid-1970s that started to expose the role of the CIA in
overseas elections. When it couldn't defeat Allende at the ballot box in
1970, Washington decided to remove him anyway.
“I don’t see why we need to
stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its
own people,” Kissinger is said to have quipped. Pinochet's regime presided over
years of torture, disappearances and targeted assassinations. (In a recent
op-ed, Chilean-American novelist Ariel Dorfman called on Hillary
Clinton to repudiate Kissinger if she wins the presidential election.)
After the end of the Cold War,
the United States has largely brought its covert actions into the open with
organizations like the more benign National
Endowment for Democracy, which seeks to bolster civil society and
democratic institutions around the world through grants and other assistance.
Still, U.S. critics see the American
hand in a range of more recent elections, from Honduras to Venezuela to
Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the threat of
foreign meddling in U.S. elections is not restricted to fears
of Russian plots. In the late 1990s, the specter
of illicit Chinese funds dominated concerns about Democratic campaign
financing. But some observers cautioned others not to be too indignant.
“If the Chinese indeed tried
to influence the election here . . . the United States is only getting a taste
of its own medicine,” Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security
Archive, which is affiliated with George Washington University, said in a 1997
interview with the New York Times. “China has done little more than emulate
a long pattern of U.S. manipulation, bribery and covert operations to influence
the political trajectory of countless countries around the world.”
