For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Introducing Saul Landau.
He's Professor Emeritus at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, award-winning documentary filmmaker and author, and commentator for Pacifica Radio.
His latest book is Bush and Botox World.
And I believe your website is saullandau.com, right?
That's it, yes.
Great.
And so welcome to the show.
Good to talk to you.
Thank you, Scott.
Oh, I should also mention you write at least at times for Counterpunch.
Yes, every week.
Oh, every week for Counterpunch.
Oh, okay, great.
All right, so the reason I wanted to have you on was this great article we ran as the spotlight on Antiwar.com yesterday about repudiating the Monroe Doctrine.
And I like this, getting right to the heart of America's relationship with the rest of the world from the very, very beginning.
The Monroe Doctrine, of course, referring to James Monroe, the president.
I guess he's the guy that came right after James Madison, right?
That's exactly right.
Fifth president there.
And then Secretary of State John Quincy Adams.
The actual author of the doctrine.
I see.
Okay, so now take us all the way back.
How did this start?
What exactly did it mean?
And then maybe we can talk about the evolution of the doctrine through the 19th century and then kind of maybe between the Roosevelt's and Cold War era, and we can kind of cover all this, if that's cool with you.
Well, in 1823, the United States put forward this absolutely audacious document.
The word, I think, that would have been used at the time would have been chutzpah, meaning effrontery to the nth degree, saying Europe should stay out, that it not colonize any more of the Western Hemisphere, that the United States would take care of the stability and security of those countries down there, meaning South America and Central America.
Well, I say that with audacity.
The United States had neither an army nor a navy in those days, so I think the Europeans just sort of smirked and shrugged it off.
There was a second part of the doctrine that nobody ever brings up, by the way, which said, and in return, the United States will stay out of European affairs.
Oh, yeah, that is the most forgotten part of it indeed right there.
I've never heard of that.
I guess I admit I never went back and read the original one.
Well, the Monroe Doctrine didn't really mean much until, of course, the Roosevelt Corollary came in the early 20th century, and the Roosevelt Corollary said that the United States had the military duty to intervene in Latin America when the security or stability was at risk, meaning when, for example, Latin American countries owed money to banks and didn't pay on time, the navy would sail down there, the marines would go take over the customs house of the banana republics, as they were known in those days, and collect the revenues and pay them straight to the banks.
Well, and I think in your article you mentioned that as far as them being in debt was the excuse that they would be in debt to a European bank, and that could cost them their independence, so we're going to save them.
That was the excuse.
That was the pretext.
That's funny.
That sounds like a Theodore Roosevelt kind of thing, I guess.
Yes, and of course, I mean, this was the era of what the United States called the Spanish-American War, which was fought in Cuba and in the Philippines, which was more important, of course.
But I mean, ironically, in Cuba it's called the Second War for Cuban Independence, and Americans all learn of it as the Spanish-American War.
The importance of that is there's two different prisms through which people see history, and of course then the present.
But the Spanish-American War was really fought essentially to get a stop-off base so that U.S. warships and other commercial ships could reach China, and that stop-off place, of course, was the Philippines, which the United States also took by force from Spain and occupied it until 1933, as, of course, they occupied Haiti and Nicaragua until that year.
They intervened three times altogether in Cuba, and if one looks at U.S. policy, let's say from the late 1890s through the Mexican Revolution in 1920, you will find a whole series, a pattern of intervention in Central America and parts of South America.
That was when the United States basically stole the Panama Canal, as former President Reagan put it.
We stole it fair and square.
It's ours.
So the United States established a pattern of intervention and a pattern of exercising domination.
That is, obedience was the word.
The policy had a variety of names.
It was called gunboat diplomacy and dollar diplomacy in the first two decades of the 20th century, and then it reverted to good neighbor diplomacy under President Roosevelt, although the policy was the same.
And then came the Cold War.
Well, hold it right there before we get to the Cold War.
I think, you know, in your article you list an astonishing number of interventions between the two Roosevelts in the era, and I think probably half of them can be chalked up to Woodrow Wilson before he got us into World War I.
He went into the Dominican Republic.
Yes, he was the supreme anti-interventionist who intervened as much or more than anybody else.
Yeah, he even invaded Mexico twice, right?
That's right.
He had to be, as he was making his great speech about self-determination and sovereignty and the importance of both, the Secretary of State had to advise him that the American troops were occupying Haiti at the time and were about to go into the Dominican Republic.
Yeah, well, we had to go in there to teach them to elect good men so then they can be free and independent.
Well, I think that there's a very long tradition of do as we say and not as we do.
I mean, the United States, even after World War II, authored really good laws.
I mean, I would include the Nuremberg Laws, what came out of the war crimes trials in Germany, the United Nations Charter, many of the human rights doctrines.
And only gradually did the rest of the world understand that these rules weren't supposed to be applied to the United States, only to the rest of the world.
Yeah, well, and we can see the shining example of that right now as Bush, Cheney, and all their cohorts get away scot-free.
So it's interesting, though.
I guess I kind of want to go back to the beginning.
Was it strictly, you know, we want to invade Cuba someday kind of a thing when they first proclaimed this doctrine, the Democratic-Republican Party there as it was back then?
Or was there any kind of real defensive, virtuous purpose in this in just keeping European colonialists out?
And so now what's happened is it's all just been twisted and defamed and turned into this tool of imperialism by America itself?
Well, I think if one goes back even further, you can find correspondence between Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s in which they're talking about one day an American empire extending from Hudson Bay to Patagonia.
And this was long before they achieved independence from England.
So the dreams of expansion were certainly not new.
I mean, if one just looks at 13 colonies rebelled against England in 1776 and won independence in 1783.
And by 1900, these 13 colonies had expanded almost 3,000 miles to the west and had taken huge amounts of territory from Spain or Mexico.
They had taken territory, bought it on the cheap from France, Russia.
And certainly they had conquered hundreds of Indian nations just in a period of just a little over 100 years.
And they didn't wait until one heartbeat after the frontier closed to then go and, as you said, conquer the Philippines and kill hundreds of thousands of people there too.
Well, and the debate in the 1890s, both in the political arena and among intellectuals and business people and military people, was how do we get out of the Depression?
Because in the 1890s, the United States had suffered its worst depression in its history.
Massive unemployment.
There was coxy armies of homeless and unemployed people marching on Washington.
Strikes.
And people were panicked.
And they had tried various solutions.
Ironically, Karl Marx was revived in those days, and people began to think about depressions as cyclical.
And in the discussions of how to get out of the Depression, a consensus was achieved that the United States had to become an overseas empire.
The debate centered around whether we should do it colonial style, as the Europeans had done it, or whether we should do it and then what the anti-imperialists, who were the modern imperialists, said we don't want to go that route because Americans believe in democracy and colonialism is also expensive and people don't like to pay taxes.
And so the anti-imperialists so-called won the debate.
And the anti-imperialist idea was you extend American power through American investment, through American business.
And that essentially was the policy that was laid out.
It was laid out very formally in a series of notes called the Open Door Notes.
And these were notes sent by the Secretary of State John Hay to all of the powers of the world saying we're advising you, and you needn't reply, that we are going to expand into what you consider your spheres of influence.
Our companies are going to be there to invest.
And we're simply advising you that that is how we're going to proceed.
And that was essentially the announcement.
So it was a public-private partnership.
Exactly.
And it was discovered in the 1890s that a small investment, let's say in Mongolia, could control an enormous amount of people and territory.
The Rockefeller Railroad investment there, albeit it failed, showed also that with $5 million you could control an enormous piece of territory.
And so this was the route that the empire took.
And the Monroe Doctrine then was revived as, well, the base of it all is the Western Hemisphere.
And Cuba would become a naval base, Puerto Rico would become a naval base, and the United States would announce its entrance, really, as a world player.
And that's exactly what happened.
And the Monroe Doctrine became, if you like, an axiom in Washington.
It was assumed that obedience was now the order of the day for the rest of the hemisphere.
Well, you know, just when you bring up the name good neighbor policy, the contempt dripping off of that sarcastic label for, you know, open brutality, I think just kind of reveals the American character of empire there.
They had their own little, you know, proto-Madison Avenue PR firms cranking out the propaganda even way back then.
Well, the United States had placed in Nicaragua, for example, in 1933, a U.S. Army-trained sergeant named Anastasio Somoza had become president of Nicaragua.
He was literally a U.S. puppet, and he ruled the country as if it was his family's estate.
Indeed, they ruled for many years the Somoza family.
And in his trip to Washington in the late 1930s, he had an official visit with President Roosevelt.
And one of Roosevelt's aides, a rather liberal fellow, said, well, my God, why are you throwing out the red carpet?
This man's a son of a bitch.
And Roosevelt said, yes, that's of course true, but he's our son of a bitch.
And that basically, and that's what the president said.
And there was the policy.
They had trained this army sergeant, Somoza, in Nicaragua, and he and his sons then took the country and ruled it until the Sandinista Revolution of 1979.
In Cuba, they trained an army sergeant named Fulgencio Batista, and he was elected president in 1940 and then staged a coup in 1952 and was overthrown by Fidel Castro and his revolutionaries.
And in Haiti, the other place, the United States essentially trained a corps of thugs called the Tuntun Makut, and basically they ruled Haiti under a variety of dictators for several decades.
Well, now, that was Baby Doc and his father, I forget, the Duvaliers.
Yes, they ruled with the Tuntun Makut.
Those were their personal Praetorian guards, if you like.
And it seems like there's a regime change in Haiti just every once in a while, like you could set your calendar by it somehow.
Every couple of years or so, there's some kind of...
And it seems like they can never make up their mind on who they want to be the puppet dictator of Haiti either.
Well, nobody really succeeds well in any of these countries because the social system that's essentially been implanted through the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt corollary has been an unjust social system.
If one looks today, and this is why we say it's time to bury the Monroe Doctrine, but burying it means we really need a big funeral.
In Washington, we should have a huge funeral, as we should in every capital city of Latin America, and indeed even in the small towns.
Funerals are for the purpose of acknowledging a death.
This doctrine is dead now.
Finally, throughout the hemisphere, with very few exceptions now, the voters of Latin America, the citizens, have simply said, No, we're not going to obey your rules anymore.
These rules have not worked out well for us.
They have created an enormous gap of wealth, an enormous poverty that has allowed for exploitation on a gigantic scale.
You are the beneficiaries, the American companies.
We, the people of Latin America, haven't benefited at all from this relationship.
Your economic system is imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank.
It hasn't benefited us.
We don't want your neoliberal, neo-freedom, free-market economic system.
It doesn't work well for us.
They have voted them out of office.
Well, it seems like maybe something has changed, too, in America.
I don't know why, because the average guy seems as belligerent as ever on most of these things.
Really, we kind of skipped a step there from just outright military right-wing dictatorships and guys with a bunch of bogus medals all over their chests and stuff to a system where there's been nominal democracy, and yet, especially during the Clinton era, and I guess in the 1980s as well, as you say, the IMF system, in a way, I guess, closing out the Cold War, they kind of had to back off supporting just outright dictators and go more for this steal-your-resources-buy-bribery-and-trickery-and-call-it-loans and all this kind of economic gangsterism rather than outright colonialism.
And so now that, I guess, they don't have all the death squads in place to go and shut everybody up, and the people actually do have a say in things a bit, especially with the Bush era and the quite justified cynicism that people all over Central and South America had toward the Republicans in this last era, it's kind of been the nail in the coffin, hasn't it, for American influence and dominance in that part of the world?
They don't have to put up with it anymore.
Well, and they're not.
I think if you want to look back 50 years ago, the Cuban Revolution triumph that was in January of 1959, and Fidel Castro, who, by the way, I think merits a place in the Guinness Book of Records for disobedience, he said, no, we're not going to play the game anymore.
We're not going to do what you want.
We're going to do what we want.
And immediately, as Cubans began to do what they wanted to do, the United States organized a CIA invasion of the island.
Within two years plus, there was a 1,500-man exile force landing at the Bay of Pigs, and they got defeated.
I think it's the first military defeat that the United States suffered in its entire history with the southern part of the hemisphere.
So Cuba has stayed defiant for 50 years, and now if you look around the hemisphere, Fidel Castro's, I guess you would call him some of his ideological sons are running countries, certainly in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador.
He has cousins running countries in Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala now, and Honduras, even the Dominican Republic.
The days where the United States dictated every single policy and was able to enforce obedience, those days are over.
Now we have Colombia.
We have to bribe them to the tune of a billion-plus dollars a year to get their obedience.
The Peruvian president is quietly obedient, but he dare not say anything in public.
His rating is already very low.
And if he would make a wildly pro-American statement, his rating would fall into single digits.
Are those the last two countries left?
Well, El Salvador is about to have an election where, again, things look like they're going to change and go to the left.
And Mexico, although the right wing stole yet another election down there, even President Calderón can't say very much good about the United States because of the immigration problem.
He faces a humiliating experience because of the way the United States treats Mexican immigrants or Mexican migrants.
Anyway, that's it.
The obedience is gone.
It was a year ago.
President Bush, everybody will remember him, I hope, or maybe not.
Anyway, he sailed the Fourth Fleet down the coast of South America as a show of force.
Everybody laughed at him.
The editorials of the newspapers and the commentators on radio and television smirked and sneered.
Then to cover it up, he said, well, it's really a humanitarian mission because we have a naval boat along with it that will treat sick people.
I think it had ten beds on it or something.
I didn't even know about that.
I've never even heard of that.
That was when?
That was about eight months ago.
Huh.
I'll have to look that up.
That's a great one.
And so it was all the editorials in the South American newspapers are saying everybody just thought it was a big joke.
Yeah, it's a big joke, and it's a waste of fuel.
He was sailing a whole fleet down.
Here's the thing.
I mean, you're encountering this just in discussing these topics with me.
You mentioned Brazil, by the way, Scott.
I mean, that's the most important country where a fan of Fidel Castro is the president, Lula.
I'm sorry.
I couldn't understand you.
You said where?
Brazil.
Oh, yeah.
Well, see, I don't know anything about that.
I was just going to say, though, that you're dealing kind of with my ignorance just trying to have this conversation with me, and I try to pay attention to these things.
I'm sure you've encountered a lot of historical ignorance on the topic of American imperialism and South American dealing with people.
And I wanted to tell you a little anecdote.
It's a secondhand hearsay kind of thing that I think illustrates the level of resentment and maybe indicates that there's historical reasons why we need to look into this and understand why it is that people would feel this way.
But I had a friend who was in Brazil, and I forget if he was in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, but he was there on September 11th, and he said it was like in the old movies where everybody gathers on the sidewalk to watch the TV in the store window kind of thing, and that nobody was really clapping and celebrating and cheering, but they were all kind of doing that thing where they clenched their fist kind of close to their chest and say to themselves quietly, yeah, take that, you bastards, kind of thing.
And I think that most Americans would be shocked to hear that the average guy on the sidewalk in Brazil was basically siding with the suicide hijackers rather than the civilian victims that day.
And why would they ever do that?
What dictator in Brazil did America ever support?
Why would that country be in the midst of such backlash against the U.S.?
Well, in 1964, the United States actively supported a military coup against the civilian government, the elected president, João Goulart, and the military ruled for a decade in Brazil in which they instituted routine torture of every person suspected of, quote, subversive thoughts or activities.
So the Brazilians still remember the dictatorship.
And today, President Lula, who was a labor organizer, is a response to that.
And when he visited Cuba, he made a point of visiting the ailing Fidel Castro and dropped a billion dollars worth of credit on them, which was an amazing blow to President Bush, who was trying to isolate, starve, and punish Cuba, which is a policy that's failed, but only for 50 years.
You don't want to ditch a policy because it's been a total failure for half a century.
Certainly not.
You just need to double it.
Anyway, I mean, and if you look, you know, when you talk about history, it's very interesting because Americans essentially don't pay much attention to history.
I mean, they tend to adopt Henry Ford's old adage, history is bunk.
But at the same time, you know, somebody said it of the Bourbon kings of France in the middle of the 19th century, these are people who never learn or forget anything.
And it's like that.
I mean, Cuba has been disobedient and Fidel Castro hasn't been punished.
And if you look at all of the legislation that's been adopted over the years to essentially strangle Cuba's economy and isolate it, the justification for all this is we are going to punish Castro.
And having made several films with him, I can personally testify that I don't think he's missed either a meal or a conjugal opportunity as a result.
No, certainly not.
And that's the whole thing is that it hasn't worked.
It's only solidified his power and he can blame any problem on the CIA or just America in general.
And he'd probably have a point, you know, more than half the time.
Well, they only tried to assassinate him 600 something times.
Yeah, well, so now the Brazil thing.
Go into who's this new guy and what's changed as far as their relationship with the United States?
Well, Brazil is now an emerging power.
It is a major industrial center with a huge land expanse, almost as large as the United States, huge amounts of resources and a very large population.
And they are becoming a power.
And the president of the United States can't tell the president of Brazil what to do anymore.
And he can't organize a military coup anymore either.
And so, in a sense, the days of that doctrine are clearly over.
And if you can't control Brazil or Argentina, where there's also an anti-American regime, in Chile they have a socialist president, Michel Bachelet, in Uruguay.
So if you look throughout the hemisphere, the voters have answered, we don't want your neoliberal model, we don't want the IMF, and we don't want you telling us what to do, and we certainly don't want you intervening in our affairs, either with your army or your CIA.
So that's it.
That's the message.
The doctrine's dead.
We're in a new age now.
And that age calls for partnership.
We can't treat these people as if they are our lackeys anymore, or people whose resources and labor we're simply going to exploit.
And this is the challenge that President Obama now has to face.
And I think he's got to do it creatively, and we will soon see whether he rises to the occasion.
How widespread do you think this understanding is within the foreign policy establishment?
Well, I think some sectors of the foreign policy establishment have finally gotten the message.
Hugo Chavez in Venezuela attacks the United States regularly, and he gets elected each time.
President Evo Morales in Bolivia has just tossed the DEA out, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and said, get out and stay out.
We don't want you, we don't need you.
The President of Ecuador is kicking the butt of the American oil companies down there, and he's getting away with it.
And this is a very... if people don't hear this message, or they think, well, hey, we can still do something with our CIA and with our other resources down there and turn this around, they're utterly mistaken.
I think some people are getting this message.
Their excuse after the fall of the Soviet Union and dangerous leftist influence and Soviet beachhead in El Salvador and those kinds of things, sort of the stand-in for trying to come up with a new policy was the war against cocaine traffickers, and that's been the excuse for a lot of intervention.
That's probably the only excuse there ever was for having a U.S. base in Ecuador in the first place, right?
And so, to what degree have the South American and Central American countries already, and to what degree might they continue to completely just reject the doctrine of the American drug war and refuse to cooperate in enforcing it?
Well, I think everybody who has studied this at all understands that the drug war is a fraud.
It is 100% phony.
In 105 years of drug war, the amount of drug use, that is the percentage of people who are addicted to dangerous drugs, has not fallen one-tenth of 1%.
It remains exactly the same.
The numbers, of course, have greatly increased because the population has increased.
So, 105 years of a drug war and no progress.
Indeed, you have created a vast criminal apparatus throughout this hemisphere that shoots the hell out of each other, and the police, and innocent bystanders, and whoever else happens to be around.
Mexico is now basically, in parts of it, simply no man's land.
Nobody can govern.
In Tijuana, in Juarez, people are shot down in the street, kidnapped at will.
And all of this is a result of, quote, the drug war.
So these drug gangs have emerged as monstrously large, powerful, and wealthy business operations, but they're business operations that are illegal.
And they have their counterparts.
That is, in the number of narco-policemen, assistant district attorneys, and U.S. attorneys, urine testing, people who work in urine testing, and all of the other, and of course banking, all of the jobs that go with the illegal drug industry.
Concrete and steel bars.
It's a vast, vast, and it's spread throughout.
So on both sides, on the criminal side, the criminal business side, and on the job side, you have institutionalized an idiotic war.
And the people of Latin America, I think, are pretty well aware of that.
You know, the heavy cocaine use and the heavy crack use is here in the United States, not down there.
And if God would somehow say, okay, we can eradicate all of the coca plants in Latin America, American ingenuity would prevail, and in the garage laboratories throughout the United States, we would have an equivalent within months.
Right, well, and you already do.
I mean, that's why there's a meth epidemic in this country, is because cocaine is artificially high-priced because it's illegal.
And, in fact, that's where crack came from, too.
That's the only way poor people can afford to use quantities of cocaine that get them high enough to be satisfied or whatever.
So there you go.
Rock it up.
That's where it came from.
Well, we're number one.
Yeah, we're number one.
All right.
Hey, this has been a very interesting interview.
We appreciate your time on the show today.
Thank you very much for calling.
All right, everybody, that's Saul Landau.
He is an emeritus professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, award-winning documentary filmmaker, and author, writes weekly at Counterpunch, commentator for Pacifica Radio.
Latest book is called Bush and Botox World.
