Redecorated colonialism. Snapshots of the American empire - Vijay Prashad
American support of some of the most violent regimes on earth has been in collusion with the Church (both Catholic and Protestant). And the US history of violence overseas is not limited to the early 20th Century or South America. These extracts from Vijay Prashad’s Washington Bullets give one a small taste of a history most of us were never taught.
Extract by Vijay Prashad, courtesy of Inkani Books
Be a patriot, kill a priest
On 5 March 1971, Nixon assembled his closest advisors to the Oval Office. They were talking about Latin America. Nixon pointed out that the single most important event in the past ten years was the “deterioration of the attitude of the Catholic Church”.
“[T]hey’re about one-third Marxists and the other third are in the center, and the other third are Catholics… In the old days,” he said, “you could count on the Catholic Church for many things to play an effective role.”
Not anymore, nor after the Second Vatican Council of 1962 and the emergence of liberation theology. Several key Catholic priests had come to the understanding that Jesus was a revolutionary, and so they should stand with the peasants and workers against the oligarchs and the armies. Since the Church had provided the ideological and cultural scaffolding to prevent the growth of radical ideas, the drift of some priests towards the left raised serious concerns not only amongst the oligarchies and the militaries, but also in the Vatican’s upper echelon and in the United States government.
The CIA had close ties with the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, whose members run across the Catholic fraternity and who have a strong hold on churches across the world. When the Nazi leadership fled Europe in 1945, the Vatican’s Bishop Alois Hudal worked closely with this Order to smuggle them to South America. Klaus Barbie went on this passage to Bolivia where he became a senior intelligence asset for General Hugo Banzer.
In 1948, the Order honoured Reinhard Gehlen, the CIA’s Nazi who later became the head of West German intelligence. The CIA funded Catholic Action, a lay group with ties to the Order but even more with the far-right fascistic elements who helped prevent the Communist election victory in Italy and who would provide intelligence against any left-leaning priest. The infrastructure for the weaponisation of religion against the left was produced in the aftermath of the Second World War with an unsavoury group of far-right fascists, actual Nazis, CIA agents, oligarchs who wanted no change to their wealth, and sections of the Church.
Bolivia
In 1975, not long after Nixon’s ruminations about Catholicism, Bolivia’s [dictator] Hugo Banzer, with advice from his Nazi security chief Klaus Barbie, urged his Interior Ministry to draw up a plan against liberation theology.
Banzer’s Interior Ministry was stuffed with fascists from Bolivia’s Falange movement; for several years, before he attempted a coup against Banzer, the Ministry was run by the fascistic Colonel Andres Selich Chop, whose unit executed Che Guevara in 1967. In 1975, the Ministry was run by Juan Pereda Asbún, who would follow Banzer onto the dictator’s chair. Pereda worked closely with the CIA to draw up what would be known as the “Banzer Plan”, which was a direct attack on liberation theology.
Bolivian intelligence, joined by the CIA and by the intelligence services of ten other Latin American countries, began to compile dossiers on liberation theologists, to plant Communist literature in the churches to shut down any progressive Church publication, and to arrest and expel foreign priests and nuns who believed in liberation theology. On 16 July 1975, the Bolivian intelligence services arrested three Spanish nuns in the town of Oruro accused them of conspiring with labour unions to hold a strike, and then deported them.
El Salvador
Such arrests and deportation became commonplace; the Vatican did nothing to defend its priests and nuns. The CIA financed fascistic religious groups that would then bomb churches and assault priests and nuns affiliated with liberation theology. The violence would escalate to murder. In El Salvador, where priests and nuns took up residence in the slums, religious paramilitaries circulated a simple call: haz patria, mata un cura (‘be the fascistic a patriot, kill a priest’). Rutilio Grande, a Jesuit priest, was murdered by the Salvadoran security forces in 1977 in a spate of murders which would culminate in the killing by a far-right death squad of the Archbishop of San Salvador Oscar Romero in March 1980. In December of 1980, four nuns from the United States were abducted, raped, and murdered by members of El Salvador’s National Guard. It would not end there.
Colombia
In 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter were brutally killed by a Salvadoran army battalion that had been trained by the United States. Cardinal Alfonso López Trujillo, as general secretary of the Latin American Episcopal Conference would leave his church and go into the forests of Colombia with the paramilitaries; he was known to point out radical priests and nuns, who would be executed. López Trujillo would later head the Vatican’s campaign against homosexuality. In 1979, he organised a conference of Latin American Bishops, where Pope John Paul II said that the “idea of Christ as a political figure, a revolutionary, as the subversive of Nazareth, does not tally with the Church’s catechesis”.
The Vatican/Nicaragua
Within a decade, Nixon’s worries about liberation theology morphed into two documents prepared for Ronald Reagan’s administration; these documents, created by a group that called itself the Council for Inter-American Security, are known as the Santa Fe Document 1 (1980) and 2 (1984). They suggested that war, not peace, is the norm in world affairs; they said that the main battlefields for the war against communism were to be in South America and Southeast Asia. The main point was that the United States must protect “the independent nations of Latin America from communist conquest” and “preserve the Hispanic American culture from sterilised communist conquest”. The first document said that priests affiliated with liberation theology “use the church as a political arm against private property and productive capitalism”. The next document noted that the US government must make closer ties with the Catholic hierarchy to crush liberation theology. In 1983, Pope John Paul II went to Nicaragua, in the throes of its revolution, to attack priests and the flock for their attraction to liberation theology.
Not only had the Vatican been seized by the threat from liberation theology, but Catholics seemed to drift off towards evangelical churches – many of them financed by US evangelical projects, especially Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network. The larger evangelical churches – especially many of the neo-Pentecostal churches – had been immune to the drift leftwards. They were as reliable as the Opus Dei and Catholic Action tendencies.
Guatemala
General Efrain Rios Montt of Guatemala despised Catholic priests who went into the slums and consorted with communists. Protestant sects, particularly those with US roots, he felt preached the Gospel of individual enterprise not social justice. That is why Rios Montt left the Catholics and joined the Gospel Outreach Church of Eureka (California). When Rios Montt came to power in a military coup in 1982, Pat Robertson dashed down to Guatemala City to interview him for The 700 Club; Robertson portrayed Ríos Montt to his more than three million viewers as having ‘a deep faith in Jesus Christ. This is Rios Montt, who not only let loose his army to conduct a genocide of his own people, but who said, “[I]f you are with us, we’ll feed you; if not, we’ll kill you.”
Chile
A decade before, leaders of 32 Pentecostal churches in Chile welcomed Pinochet’s coup. They said that the overthrow of Allende “was God’s answer to the prayers of all the believers who recognised that Marxism was the expression of a satanic power of darkness. We, the evangelicals, recognise as the higher authority of our country the military junta who in answer to our prayers freed us from Marxism”.
Religion, as Don Price of the Ford Foundation wrote from Burma, was the bulwark against communism.
Only one member of the permanent security council – the United States
When he was the president of the UN General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua used to talk about “redecorated colonialism”. Western countries, notably the United States, had lost their legitimacy with the illegal war against Iraq of 2003 and with the financial crisis of 2007. It was to ‘redecorate’ colonialism that they pushed for a new doctrine – Responsibility to Protect (R2P) – to continue to justify the massive Western military apparatus that encircled the world and to justify the Western military interventions from West Asia to Central America. It was this ‘redecorated’ colonialism that enabled the Western powers to refurbish the ‘liberal’ international order and its economic instruments. It is this ‘redecorated’ colonialism that has cannily been able to reinsert itself as the humanitarian bloc in international affairs.
A romance of the imperialist bourgeoisie asserted itself – US President Barack Obama playing a key role here as the ‘cool’ face of the brutal war machine. Trump’s boorishness did not result in wishing for an end to the imperialist project, but – for the liberals in the West – a return to the sophistication of Obama.
It is ideological suffocation that allows people to believe that the US-led bloc acts with high-minded intentions when it bombards places such as Iraq and Libya, and when it suffocates countries like Iran and Venezuela; even more so, it is this myopia that allows the view that the US-led bloc seeks to protect civilians and to offer development aid to lift the weight of misery off the world’s hungry.
Libya
In 2011, the United States and France whipped the world into a frenzy about Muammar Qaddafi and the possibility of genocide in Libya. There was no evidence of any such danger; Saudi news outlets became the source for the Western press. It was this frenzy that allowed the United States and France to attack Libya, which they did immediately.
Part of the resolution demanded a post-conflict study of the war. Once the dust settled by 2012 – although the Libya war still continues by other means – the UN set up a Commission of Inquiry to study NATO’s actions in its bombing of Libya. This was a fairly straightforward action, with no ulterior motive behind the investigation. The Commission was tasked to look at the actions of all parties in the conflict that led to the decimation of Libya. NATO refused to co-operate with the inquiry. NATO’s legal advisor Peter Olson wrote to the UN that these “NATO incidents” are not crimes of any kind. “We would accordingly request,” he noted in his letter, “That in the event that the Commission elects to include a discussion of NATO actions in Libya, its report clearly states that NATO did not deliberately target civilians and did not commit war crimes in Libya.” In other words, that NATO get a free pass for its form of warfare. There was no liberal outrage at NATO’s refusal to co-operate, no howls from the establishment’s humanitarian champions. They simply assume that the imperialist bloc is innocent of any malevolent motive and that it cannot be seen to have deliberately targeted civilians or destroyed a nation. Even an investigation into such actions was not tolerable. This is the extent of the redecoration of colonialism.
John Bolton, who would go on to become Trump’s National Security Advisor, said in 2000, “If I were redoing the Security Council today, I’d have one permanent member because that’s the real reflection of the distribution of power in the world.” Who would that member be? “The United States,” Bolton replied. He was right. There is no other way, for example, to explain the behaviour of the Israeli state against the Palestinian people than to acknowledge the way the United States mobilises its full power through the United Nations on behalf of the Israelis.
Vijay Prashad is the Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter, and Chief Editor at LeftWord Books. These excerpts are reprinted in Shibboleth with the permission of Inkani Books. Buy their edition of Washington Bullets here.