Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
The Good, the Bad, and the Benevolent Interventionist: U.S. Press and Intellectual Distortions...
The Good, the Bad, and the Benevolent Interventionist: U.S. Press and Intellectual Distortions of the Latin American Left
April 20, 2013
By Kevin Young:
U.S. journalists and commentators have helped popularize the image of two distinct Latin American lefts: a “bad” left that is politically authoritarian and economically erratic and a “good” left that is democratic and committed to free-market economics. This binary image oversimplifies the Latin American left in three ways: by overstating the contrast between the two alleged camps, by ignoring complex realities within each camp, and by exaggerating the failings of the so-called bad-left governments. The distinction makes sense, however, as a strategy for countering the rise of independent left-leaning governments in Latin America. Binary characterizations of subordinate peoples reflect a common discursive response to popular resistance on the part of imperial interests, and one with many precedents in the history of U.S.–Latin American relations. Widespread U.S. media adherence to the good-left/bad-left thesis is explicable given this context and given the historic and continuing dependence of the press on state and corporate interests.
Since 1998 Latin America has witnessed the election of roughly a dozen left-leaning presidents of varying ideological inclinations, who have been propelled into power by grassroots citizens’ movements and voters’ disillusionment with the neoliberal policies of previous pro-U.S. leaders. Faced with this tide of protest against the United States and U.S.-allied leaders, the U.S. government has naturally tried to limit its loss of control over the hemisphere. One strategy for doing so has involved promoting what it considers the “good,” responsible left embodied by governments in Brazil, Uruguay, and elsewhere, while seeking to isolate and undermine the “bad” left in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. Dividing the “moderate” from the “radical” left has become an explicit focus of U.S. policy in the past decade. State Department officials have publicly emphasized the need to strengthen the bloc of U.S.-friendly governments to act as a “counterweight to governments like those currently in power in Venezuela and Bolivia which pursue policies which do not serve the interests of their people or the region” (U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, quoted in Weisbrot, 2009a). The Bush and Obama administrations have pursued a parallel strategy within bad-left countries themselves, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to opposition groups under the guise of “democracy promotion.”
...
One example of Chávez’s cynical regional machinations is his support for ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. According to the Washington Post editors (June 30, 2009), the June 2009 military overthrow of Zelaya occurred in part because “the Honduran president had lately fallen under the spell of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez,” who had presumably tricked Zelaya into raising the country’s minimum wage and implementing other measures beneficial to Honduran workers and the poor. News coverage following the coup rarely failed to emphasize Zelaya’s friendly relations with Chávez but usually omitted all discussion of Zelaya’s socioeconomic policies: in just the first two months following the coup, the Washington Post mentioned Zelaya’s close relationship to Chávez 13 times and published several pieces that focused primarily on that relationship. The other dominant emphasis in press coverage of Zelaya was his alleged attempt to extend presidential term limits—a disingenuous charge but one that helped to further define the bad left as authoritarian (Young, 2010a).
...
Liberal media coverage in the wake of the June 2009 military coup in Honduras followed a similar pattern. In the two months following the coup, only 10 percent of the news reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post mentioned the coup regime’s killings of protesters (Young, 2010a). Editorial policy at the Post offered vocal support for the coup and advocated strong U.S. action to thwart “the faction, led by Mr. Zelaya’s mentor, Hugo Chávez, that is attempting to overthrow democratic institutions across the region.” Chávez, the Post editors warned, “dreams of a putsch in Tegucigalpa that would produce another lawless autocracy like his own.” But soon the paper’s editors and columnists began applauding the Obama administration’s response. U.S. participation in the post-coup mediation efforts had “become an opportunity to deal a defeat to the populist authoritarianism that Mr. Chávez and Mr. Zelaya represent,” thereby safeguarding the good, innocent Latins against the threats of decent health care, education, and greater political power. Two weeks after the coup, Obama and Clinton were “on the verge of achieving their own coup in Honduras and advancing American interests with a deftness not seen from Washington in many years.” This last statement at first seems like a surprisingly candid admission that the United States acts upon self-serving motives, but there is in fact no contradiction: within U.S. imperial logic, “American interests” naturally equate to “support(ing) democracy”; democracy is whatever the U.S. government supports (Washington Post editorials, June 30 and July 9, 2009; Schumacher-Matos, 2009a). The word “empire” appears only in irony quotes, as an example of the hyperbolic rhetoric of paranoid anti-American observers (e.g., Romero, 2011). “Anti-American,” the label applied to those who oppose U.S. policies, is understood as synonymous with “antidemocratic,” and vice versa: U.S. policy is by definition a force for democracy, and one cannot oppose that policy and still qualify as a democrat (thus, reporters and commentators contrast “democratic Brazil” with the “anti-American” bad left <Forero, 2009>.
Five months later, in November 2009, the United States was virtually the only country in the hemisphere that accepted the legitimacy of the election that brought Honduran rancher Porfirio Lobo to the presidency. The election was held amidst the large-scale and violent repression of dissent (continuing in the present), including a physical assault on opposition presidential candidate Carlos Reyes, who withdrew his candidacy to avoid legitimizing the results (Corcoran, 2010; Young, 2010a). The United States was able to overlook these petty concerns, though, endorsing the election and thus “leading the support for the democratic option,” according to the Post editors. Although the editors expressed support for multilateralism in principle, “the lesson of the Honduran crisis is that the United States cannot always pursue such multilateralism and also support democracy” (Washington Post editorial, November 29, 2009). The Post was hardly the only press outlet to applaud the benevolent motives of the U.S. government: the New York Times editors (November 7, 2009), for example, argued that “the Obama administration has worked hard, if somewhat episodically, to try to resolve the political crisis in Honduras.” Consideration of the actual record of U.S. support for the repressive post-coup regimes of Roberto Micheletti and Porfirio Lobo might compel different conclusions (Weisbrot, 2009b; Young, 2010a), but facts are again irrelevant when they conflict with doctrinal precepts.
...
http://www.nytexaminer.com/2013/04/the-good-the-bad-and-the-benevolent-interventionist-u-s-press-and-intellectual-distortions-of-the-latin-american-left/
April 20, 2013
By Kevin Young:
U.S. journalists and commentators have helped popularize the image of two distinct Latin American lefts: a “bad” left that is politically authoritarian and economically erratic and a “good” left that is democratic and committed to free-market economics. This binary image oversimplifies the Latin American left in three ways: by overstating the contrast between the two alleged camps, by ignoring complex realities within each camp, and by exaggerating the failings of the so-called bad-left governments. The distinction makes sense, however, as a strategy for countering the rise of independent left-leaning governments in Latin America. Binary characterizations of subordinate peoples reflect a common discursive response to popular resistance on the part of imperial interests, and one with many precedents in the history of U.S.–Latin American relations. Widespread U.S. media adherence to the good-left/bad-left thesis is explicable given this context and given the historic and continuing dependence of the press on state and corporate interests.
Since 1998 Latin America has witnessed the election of roughly a dozen left-leaning presidents of varying ideological inclinations, who have been propelled into power by grassroots citizens’ movements and voters’ disillusionment with the neoliberal policies of previous pro-U.S. leaders. Faced with this tide of protest against the United States and U.S.-allied leaders, the U.S. government has naturally tried to limit its loss of control over the hemisphere. One strategy for doing so has involved promoting what it considers the “good,” responsible left embodied by governments in Brazil, Uruguay, and elsewhere, while seeking to isolate and undermine the “bad” left in countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, and Cuba. Dividing the “moderate” from the “radical” left has become an explicit focus of U.S. policy in the past decade. State Department officials have publicly emphasized the need to strengthen the bloc of U.S.-friendly governments to act as a “counterweight to governments like those currently in power in Venezuela and Bolivia which pursue policies which do not serve the interests of their people or the region” (U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, quoted in Weisbrot, 2009a). The Bush and Obama administrations have pursued a parallel strategy within bad-left countries themselves, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to opposition groups under the guise of “democracy promotion.”
...
One example of Chávez’s cynical regional machinations is his support for ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya. According to the Washington Post editors (June 30, 2009), the June 2009 military overthrow of Zelaya occurred in part because “the Honduran president had lately fallen under the spell of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez,” who had presumably tricked Zelaya into raising the country’s minimum wage and implementing other measures beneficial to Honduran workers and the poor. News coverage following the coup rarely failed to emphasize Zelaya’s friendly relations with Chávez but usually omitted all discussion of Zelaya’s socioeconomic policies: in just the first two months following the coup, the Washington Post mentioned Zelaya’s close relationship to Chávez 13 times and published several pieces that focused primarily on that relationship. The other dominant emphasis in press coverage of Zelaya was his alleged attempt to extend presidential term limits—a disingenuous charge but one that helped to further define the bad left as authoritarian (Young, 2010a).
...
Liberal media coverage in the wake of the June 2009 military coup in Honduras followed a similar pattern. In the two months following the coup, only 10 percent of the news reports in the New York Times and the Washington Post mentioned the coup regime’s killings of protesters (Young, 2010a). Editorial policy at the Post offered vocal support for the coup and advocated strong U.S. action to thwart “the faction, led by Mr. Zelaya’s mentor, Hugo Chávez, that is attempting to overthrow democratic institutions across the region.” Chávez, the Post editors warned, “dreams of a putsch in Tegucigalpa that would produce another lawless autocracy like his own.” But soon the paper’s editors and columnists began applauding the Obama administration’s response. U.S. participation in the post-coup mediation efforts had “become an opportunity to deal a defeat to the populist authoritarianism that Mr. Chávez and Mr. Zelaya represent,” thereby safeguarding the good, innocent Latins against the threats of decent health care, education, and greater political power. Two weeks after the coup, Obama and Clinton were “on the verge of achieving their own coup in Honduras and advancing American interests with a deftness not seen from Washington in many years.” This last statement at first seems like a surprisingly candid admission that the United States acts upon self-serving motives, but there is in fact no contradiction: within U.S. imperial logic, “American interests” naturally equate to “support(ing) democracy”; democracy is whatever the U.S. government supports (Washington Post editorials, June 30 and July 9, 2009; Schumacher-Matos, 2009a). The word “empire” appears only in irony quotes, as an example of the hyperbolic rhetoric of paranoid anti-American observers (e.g., Romero, 2011). “Anti-American,” the label applied to those who oppose U.S. policies, is understood as synonymous with “antidemocratic,” and vice versa: U.S. policy is by definition a force for democracy, and one cannot oppose that policy and still qualify as a democrat (thus, reporters and commentators contrast “democratic Brazil” with the “anti-American” bad left <Forero, 2009>.
Five months later, in November 2009, the United States was virtually the only country in the hemisphere that accepted the legitimacy of the election that brought Honduran rancher Porfirio Lobo to the presidency. The election was held amidst the large-scale and violent repression of dissent (continuing in the present), including a physical assault on opposition presidential candidate Carlos Reyes, who withdrew his candidacy to avoid legitimizing the results (Corcoran, 2010; Young, 2010a). The United States was able to overlook these petty concerns, though, endorsing the election and thus “leading the support for the democratic option,” according to the Post editors. Although the editors expressed support for multilateralism in principle, “the lesson of the Honduran crisis is that the United States cannot always pursue such multilateralism and also support democracy” (Washington Post editorial, November 29, 2009). The Post was hardly the only press outlet to applaud the benevolent motives of the U.S. government: the New York Times editors (November 7, 2009), for example, argued that “the Obama administration has worked hard, if somewhat episodically, to try to resolve the political crisis in Honduras.” Consideration of the actual record of U.S. support for the repressive post-coup regimes of Roberto Micheletti and Porfirio Lobo might compel different conclusions (Weisbrot, 2009b; Young, 2010a), but facts are again irrelevant when they conflict with doctrinal precepts.
...
http://www.nytexaminer.com/2013/04/the-good-the-bad-and-the-benevolent-interventionist-u-s-press-and-intellectual-distortions-of-the-latin-american-left/
On the one side are countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, where voters have given much greater power to their populist presidents, partly by allowing them to extend their time in office and sometimes eroding the function of Congress and the Supreme Court, institutions portrayed as allies of the old oligarchy. On the other side are nations of varying ideological hues, including Brazil, Latin America's rising power, where resilient institutions have allowed for more diversity of participants in politics, ruling out the so-called participatory democracy that Mr. Chavez, the Venezuelan president, has been eager to promote in the region.
—Simon Romero in the New York Times, June 2009
Good Left, Bad Left
Compliance and Defiance in US Press Coverage of Latin America
By Kevin Young
Saturday, July 17, 2010
In the past decade Latin America has witnessed the election of roughly a dozen left-leaning presidents of varying ideological inclinations and leadership styles, who have been propelled into power by some combination of grassroots citizens’ movements and deep popular disillusion with the neoliberal policies of previous pro-US leaders. Faced with this tide of protest against the US and US-allied leaders, the US government has tried to limit its loss of control over the hemisphere. One strategy for doing so has involved promoting what it considers the “good,” responsible Left and isolating the anti-democratic, “bad” Left. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the difference during a visit to Brazil this past March, when she criticized Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez for undermining democracy and called on him “to restore private property” and “return to a free market economy.” Clinton contrasted Venezuela with the good Left, saying that “we wish Venezuela were looking more to its south and looking at Brazil and looking at Chile” <2>.
The major press organs in the US, including the more liberal ones, have echoed this characterization, often drawing the contrast even more sharply. News articles and editorials in the New York Times have distinguished between those who “aggressively push a leftist agenda” and “Brazil’s more moderate, leftist approach,” while insisting on the need for a “counterweight” to “Chavez <sic> and his protégé, the Bolivian president, Evo Morales” <3>. The Washington Post has contrasted the region’s “fervently anti-American leaders” with “democratic Brazil” <4>. The Christian Science Monitor has implicitly pitted “the region’s hard-left, Chavez-led bloc, which also includes Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Cuba,” against Brazil, Argentina, and others <5>. The New York Daily News recently expressed outrage that democratic Brazil had joined “Venezuela’s revolutionary strongman and narcoterrorist Hugo Chavez” and “Bolivian dictator-in-the-making Evo Morales” in pursuing diplomatic and commercial relations with Iran (efforts which, in their manifest common sense and efficacy in promoting peace, stand in bold contrast to most Western politicians’ saber-rattling over Iran’s nuclear program)<6>.
The aggressive, authoritarian Left is embodied by Hugo Chávez, who is held responsible for the entire region’s leftward shift; the election of left-leaning leaders has nothing to do with the fact that Latin America is the most unequal region in the world, that it has long been dominated by the US and domestic oligarchies, and that most Latin Americans disagree with the neoliberal economic policies promoted by Washington and the international financial institutions. With the help of a few “poodles” like Evo Morales, Chávez has duped tens of millions of people into supporting his agenda by “buying support” among irrational populations who are “largely blind to results,” while sending anyone who disagrees with him to the Gulag <7>. The June 2009 military overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya occurred in part because “the Honduran president had lately fallen under the spell of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez,” who presumably tricked Zelaya into raising the country’s minimum wage and implementing other measures beneficial to Honduran workers and the poor <8>. News coverage following the coup rarely failed to emphasize Zelaya’s friendly relations with Chávez, but usually omitted all discussion of Zelaya’s socioeconomic policies <9>.
...
The same distinctions apparent in the US press are also apparent in the rhetoric of many present-day Latin American elites. For example, in recent decades a phenomenon that some scholars have called “neoliberal multiculturalism” has swept Latin America. Most Latin American governments have by now embraced some form of recognition of their countries’ non-white, non-European cultures and histories. But in most cases this recognition has included an implicit distinction between what Charles Hale calls el indio permitido—the acceptable Indian—and the unacceptable Indian or Other. The acceptable Indian politely asks his or her government for cultural and linguistic recognition, while the bad Indian demands socioeconomic resources and political power in addition to token state recognition of his or her culture and language <17>. In 1994, for example, the government that had just declared Mexico a “pluricultural” nation immediately denounced the Zapatista uprising, saying that “we are not dealing with an indigenous uprising,” but with an “armed aggressor group,” and took rapid steps to exterminate the rebels before massive international and domestic pressure limited its ability to do so <18>. The Colombian government of Alvaro Uribe, meanwhile, has talked explicitly of trying to divide the country’s indigenous movement by bribing the good Indians so that indigenous people “end up betraying each other,” and “the delinquents” who demand land and other resources “end up broken” <19>.
... http://mobile.zcommunications.org/good-left-bad-left-by-kevin-young Links to notes at site
.:
Compliance and Defiance in US Press Coverage of Latin America
By Kevin Young
Saturday, July 17, 2010
In the past decade Latin America has witnessed the election of roughly a dozen left-leaning presidents of varying ideological inclinations and leadership styles, who have been propelled into power by some combination of grassroots citizens’ movements and deep popular disillusion with the neoliberal policies of previous pro-US leaders. Faced with this tide of protest against the US and US-allied leaders, the US government has tried to limit its loss of control over the hemisphere. One strategy for doing so has involved promoting what it considers the “good,” responsible Left and isolating the anti-democratic, “bad” Left. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained the difference during a visit to Brazil this past March, when she criticized Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez for undermining democracy and called on him “to restore private property” and “return to a free market economy.” Clinton contrasted Venezuela with the good Left, saying that “we wish Venezuela were looking more to its south and looking at Brazil and looking at Chile” <2>.
The major press organs in the US, including the more liberal ones, have echoed this characterization, often drawing the contrast even more sharply. News articles and editorials in the New York Times have distinguished between those who “aggressively push a leftist agenda” and “Brazil’s more moderate, leftist approach,” while insisting on the need for a “counterweight” to “Chavez <sic> and his protégé, the Bolivian president, Evo Morales” <3>. The Washington Post has contrasted the region’s “fervently anti-American leaders” with “democratic Brazil” <4>. The Christian Science Monitor has implicitly pitted “the region’s hard-left, Chavez-led bloc, which also includes Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Cuba,” against Brazil, Argentina, and others <5>. The New York Daily News recently expressed outrage that democratic Brazil had joined “Venezuela’s revolutionary strongman and narcoterrorist Hugo Chavez” and “Bolivian dictator-in-the-making Evo Morales” in pursuing diplomatic and commercial relations with Iran (efforts which, in their manifest common sense and efficacy in promoting peace, stand in bold contrast to most Western politicians’ saber-rattling over Iran’s nuclear program)<6>.
The aggressive, authoritarian Left is embodied by Hugo Chávez, who is held responsible for the entire region’s leftward shift; the election of left-leaning leaders has nothing to do with the fact that Latin America is the most unequal region in the world, that it has long been dominated by the US and domestic oligarchies, and that most Latin Americans disagree with the neoliberal economic policies promoted by Washington and the international financial institutions. With the help of a few “poodles” like Evo Morales, Chávez has duped tens of millions of people into supporting his agenda by “buying support” among irrational populations who are “largely blind to results,” while sending anyone who disagrees with him to the Gulag <7>. The June 2009 military overthrow of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya occurred in part because “the Honduran president had lately fallen under the spell of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez,” who presumably tricked Zelaya into raising the country’s minimum wage and implementing other measures beneficial to Honduran workers and the poor <8>. News coverage following the coup rarely failed to emphasize Zelaya’s friendly relations with Chávez, but usually omitted all discussion of Zelaya’s socioeconomic policies <9>.
...
The same distinctions apparent in the US press are also apparent in the rhetoric of many present-day Latin American elites. For example, in recent decades a phenomenon that some scholars have called “neoliberal multiculturalism” has swept Latin America. Most Latin American governments have by now embraced some form of recognition of their countries’ non-white, non-European cultures and histories. But in most cases this recognition has included an implicit distinction between what Charles Hale calls el indio permitido—the acceptable Indian—and the unacceptable Indian or Other. The acceptable Indian politely asks his or her government for cultural and linguistic recognition, while the bad Indian demands socioeconomic resources and political power in addition to token state recognition of his or her culture and language <17>. In 1994, for example, the government that had just declared Mexico a “pluricultural” nation immediately denounced the Zapatista uprising, saying that “we are not dealing with an indigenous uprising,” but with an “armed aggressor group,” and took rapid steps to exterminate the rebels before massive international and domestic pressure limited its ability to do so <18>. The Colombian government of Alvaro Uribe, meanwhile, has talked explicitly of trying to divide the country’s indigenous movement by bribing the good Indians so that indigenous people “end up betraying each other,” and “the delinquents” who demand land and other resources “end up broken” <19>.
... http://mobile.zcommunications.org/good-left-bad-left-by-kevin-young Links to notes at site
.:
4 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
