By Admin1 (admin) (pool-151-196-178-137.balt.east.verizon.net - 151.196.178.137) on Sunday, April 04, 2004 - 9:23 pm: Edit Post |
Jack Vaughn writes: Inbred Deer in the Fudge Factory
"Dear Mr. President and Friend:The balance of the letter highlighted the least acceptable features of those all-American models that the State Department was trying to impose: the Alliance for Progress reforms. Virtually all Latin governmental agencies and structures had become targets. Of these, judicial reform turned out to be the most ignored; agrarian reform the most catastrophic, and it is not difficult to see why. Based as it was on a kind of theoretical model of the medium-sized American family farm-multi-crop, balanced, self-sufficient, mechanized, and run by well-educated farmers with ready access to agriculture extension agents, this twentieth century University of Wisconsin model bombed throughout the Hemisphere. And in fact, several countries have yet to recover from bungled agrarian reform efforts perpetrated under the Alliance.
Not since the first Texan and Oklahoman roustabouts landed in my country to steal our oil have the people of Venezuela encountered the degree of arrogance and insensitivity displayed by your State Department economists whose latest mission is to instruct us on how we must manage our society and, more pointedly, reform our sovereign institutions to mirror Anglo-Saxon models."
"The Alliance's architects were among the most able people in the U.S. government. Yet for all their experience, competence, and technical expertise in their respective fields, they lacked the most important prerequisite for success: detailed knowledge of Latin America. They knew history, economics, and development theory, but they did not understand how programs that sounded wonderful on paper would actually work or be received in Latin America.The Alliance for Progress, spawned in the Bag of Pigs, never worked. It never possessed the necessary mutual ingredients for working. It was essentially what President Betancourt and Howard Wiarda had said it was. But, beyond arrogance, it stressed very unrealistic strategies and goals. Hastily assembled in Washington to "reform" Latin America before Castro got there, it ended up with only one surrogate success: it was able to extend and piggyback on the masterpiece of Nelson Rockefeller begun in 1942 as part of FDR's Good Neighbor Policy.
"Their abstract, theoretical, developmentalist scheme was largely irrelevant to countries whose politics were essentially personalistic, not institutionalized, and dominated by family and patronage ties and by clique and clan rivalries that defied neat ideological categories. This gap between general theory and Latin American reality proved to be the Alliance's fatal weakness.
"The arrogance at the base of the Alliance also manifested itself in the presumption that the United States knew what was best for Latin America. This belief stemmed partly from the myth of Latin American incompetence. It also derived from the missionary, proselytical tradition in U.S. history and from the axioms contained in the new literature on development, which seemed to provide an intellectual cachet to the reformist impulses of American academics and policy-makers."