Year 501 by Noam Chomsky Page A

dismiss these demands as absurd, considering the Sandinista FSLN to be a “solidly structured [party] with a significant political weight,” the only large popular-based party in the country (Detlev Nolte, head of Germany’s Institute of Ibero-American Studies). They object to the US policy of “again polarizing the situation,” another German Latin American specialist adds. When the congressional hold on aid was dropped, the Bush Administration held it back anyway, in line with its deep commitment to bar even a minimal show of independence. 47
    As we gaze on what we have accomplished and envision the glorious future that awaits, we can take pride in “having served as an inspiration for the triumph of democracy in our time,” as the New Republic exulted after the elections had been won by “the right side” in Nicaragua, a “level playing field” having been established by Washington’s stern warning that any other outcome would be followed by continued economic strangulation and terror. We can, in short, join the editors in their praise for Washington’s terror and violence, giving “Reagan & Co. good marks” for the gratifying mounds of mutilated corpses and hordes of starving children in Central America, recognizing, as they advised, that we must send military aid to “Latin-style fascists... regardless of how many are murdered” because “there are higher American priorities than Salvadoran human rights.” 48
    Recall that in accord with official convention, the economic catastrophe of the past years in Latin America is the result of statism, populism, Marxism, and other evils, now to be cured by the newly discovered virtues of monetarism and the free market. This picture is “a complete fabrication,” James Petras and Steve Vieux point out. The highly-touted new discoveries are just those that have led to catastrophe in the past—with no little aid from US-sponsored terror and economic warfare. Furthermore, neoliberal dogma has ruled for years in these US-run “testing areas.” Social expenditures dropped sharply from 1980, leading to public health disaster and educational collapse, except for the rich; growth stagnated or declined. There was one area of progress: privatization, providing great advantages to wealthy sectors at home and abroad, and diminishing public revenues still further when “efficiently run, surplus-producing operations” were sold off, as in Chile. “The brutal austerity programs of the 1980s were obviously the work of doctrinaire neoliberals,” they point out, and the “dismal results” are directly traceable to their ideological fervor. The huge debt accumulated through the partnership of domestic military-economic elites and foreign banks awash with petrodollars is to be paid by the poor. “Wage earners sacrificed the most in making available the surplus needed to make payments on the external debt,” the UN World Economic Survey 1990 observed.
    â€œMore than any geographic area in the world,” correspondent Marc Cooper writes, “Latin America over the past decade took seriously the promise of the Reagan revolution”—not quite by choice. The decade was marked by privatization, deregulation, “free trade,” destruction of unions and popular organizations, opening of resources (including national parks and reserves) to foreign investors, and all the rest of the package. The effects have been disastrous, predictably. 49
    The celebration in the doctrinal institutions is also entirely predictable. Blame for past catastrophes has to be shifted to the shoulders of others. Any role that the US masters have played is, by definition, marginal at most, to be attributed to Cold War imperatives. And as the old doctrines produce new “economic miracles,” there is every reason for the ideologues of privilege to applaud, as they always have, and as