Steyn Demonstrates His Cluelessness on Latin America

I really don't understand the appeal that some on the right feel for Mark Steyn. You can be tendentious without being clueless (witness the exchange between myself and Tacitus in the comments to this post).

Xavier Basora clued me in to this article by Steyn and while he brings up some interesting issues that I think merit attention (to wit he is dead right about the implementation of Reagan's anti-communism and the WTO's impact on trade issues), I have to object even more vociferously about Steyn's appalling ignorance concerning what took place in Latin America post WWII. Here goes:

Guatemala

As Xavier noted in his post, Steyn glosses over Reagan's support for Efraín Rios Montt who Reagan said was getting a "bad rap" on his human rights record. Enough said here.

As for what happened in Guatemala in 1954, Steyn should really read this post by David Holliday. Here's a brief excerpt:

What would have ensued if the U.S. had decided to leave the Arbenz government in place?

Guatemala's moderate, capitalist land reform could have served to stabilize the country by bringing its dispossessed majority into the economy. Not only Guatemala but all of Central America might have experienced a nonviolent modernization process -- and avoided the wars of the 1980s -- if the Guatemalan example had been permitted to survive, even to spread in Central America.

-- Susanne Jonas, professor of Latin American & Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Note to red-meat anticommunists: If you really want to fight communism, create a society in which capitalism is capable of encompassing and providing opportunity for as much of society as possible as opposed to enriching a corrupt group of oligarchs.

El Salvador

The Massacre at El Mozote. It happened. Reports reported on it and the Reagan administration sought to discredit the reporters and the facts. One of the more unpleasant facts: of the 767 men, women and children killed by the Salvadoran military, 178 of them were children under the age of five, some as young as three days old. In case you doubt me, read Mark Danner's book. The truth was stifled while so that the flow of American tax dollars could continue going to the Salvadoran military. If the massacre at El Mozote had been confirmed at the time, I could not imagine congress letting another dime go El Salvador's military.

Central America in General

Peace finally came to Central America, but not through Reagan. It came through the enlightened leadership of Central Americans like Oscar Arias Sánchez as I mentioned here.

The Falklands War

Just wondering if Steyn ever reads some of the papers that carry his column:

It took weeks of determined diplomacy by Sir Nicholas Henderson, our ambassador in Washington, before the White House was prepared to declare itself on the side of the British. Moreover, it did so, I suspect, only because Congress and American public opinion had come down heavily on our side. By doing so, it destroyed the support of the South American dictators for Reagan's anti-communist crusade in Central America.

As the Falklands conflict developed, America stopped arms sales to Argentina, but was unwilling to take more effective economic measures. Nicholas Henderson reported that the Americans were not prepared to "tilt" too heavily against Argentina; to do so, they said, would deprive them of their influence in Buenos Aires.

They did not want the Argentine dictator General Leopoldi Galtieri to fall - whereas we saw him as an outright fascist and aggressor. For the Americans, he was a central pillar of resistance to communism in South and Central America - and all the efforts of Reagan and the State Department were concentrated on the crisis in El Salvador.

The United States, it seemed, did not wish to choose between Britain and their interests in Latin America. Indeed, apart from Weinberger and the Pentagon, the Americans were very, very far from being on our side.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso

Here's what I reported on in my blogspot blog in December 2002:

Despite budget restrictions, imposed to meet deficit targets demanded by the International Monetary Fund, Mr. Cardoso's government has invested extensively in education. High school enrollments in this nation of 175 million have expanded by more than a third, the number of students entering college each year has doubled, and the number of Brazilian children not attending school at all has dropped to 3 percent, compared with about 20 percent a decade ago.

Similar gains have been recorded in health statistics. Although residents of urban areas complain that medical care is still inadequate, the Cardoso administration made the poorest rural areas its priority, opening clinics, training doctors and nurses and making more drugs available at lower prices.

The result has been a 25 percent decrease in infant mortality rates. In addition, deaths from AIDS have been reduced by two-thirds, the United Nations noted in its citation for Mr. Cardoso, because of extensive preventive campaigns and free medicine distribution that resulted from a confrontation in which Brazil threatened to break patents on expensive drugs and manufacture its own generic versions.

While Cardoso was not the Cardoso of old, he knew that government could play an important role in improving its citizen's lives, including bringing health care to the poor.

Mark Steyn - clueless as always.