From Promoting Political Polyarchy to Defeating Participatory Democracy: U.S. Foreign Policy towards the Far Left in Latin America

Timothy M Gill

doi:10.5195/jwsr.2018.750

Abstract

During the 1980s, the United States initiated an explicit policy of democracy promotion throughout the world. William Robinson (1996) more accurately described this initiative as “promoting polyarchy,” whereby the United States supported moderate elite actors that promoted neoliberal economic policies to displace both right-wing and communist despots, such as General Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Soviet rulers in Eastern Europe. While much of Latin America remained characterized by polyarchies throughout the late 20th Century, Latin American citizens began to reject these political arrangements and to elect anti-neoliberal candidates that promoted participatory democracy by the turn of the 21st Century, particularly in Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. How has the United States changed its democracy promotion strategies to respond to these new dynamics? The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the U.S. government, through agencies such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID, has altered the main thrust of its foreign policy in Latin America, from promoting polyarchy and displacing despotic leaders, to supporting opposition actors to unseat democratically-elected far leftist leaders that promote participatory democracy. This paper deploys a case study method involving recent U.S. foreign policy in Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and it utilizes both U.S. diplomatic cables and interviews with U.S. state elites to illustrate this shift.

Highlights

Social scientists, journalists, and politicians all recognize the contemporary existence of the U.S Empire (Bacevich 2002; Go 2011; Mann 2013; Nye 2015; Steinmetz 2005)
These four leaders most enthusiastically pursued participatory democratic reforms, socialist economic policies, and a rejection of U.S hegemony around the region.3. These four leaders are understood as the far left in Latin America, in comparison with other progressive leaders. Given that these far leftist Latin American leaders directly challenged the United States by criticizing both U.S economic and security policies, how did the U.S government respond to these leaders, through its democracy promoting agencies? The remainder of this paper addresses this question by examining U.S foreign policy, U.S democracy promotion strategies, in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua
The data for each of these case studies comes from un-redacted U.S diplomatic cables drafted by U.S state elites, and, in the case study involving Venezuela, interviews that I conducted with U.S state elites who directly dealt with issues involving foreign policy towards Venezuela under Chávez

Summary

Introduction

Journalists, and politicians all recognize the contemporary existence of the U.S Empire (Bacevich 2002; Go 2011; Mann 2013; Nye 2015; Steinmetz 2005) They recognize, first and foremost, that while the U.S Empire does not currently pursue territorial forms of empire such. The basic conjecture that the United States commands a global empire, does not elicit much controversy among social scientists.1 They generally draw attention to a host of dimensions wherein the United States maintains a disproportionate amount of power in comparison with its nearest international competitors. U.S President Dwight Eisenhower permitted CIA forces to work alongside dissident Guatemalan military officers to overthrow of the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and President

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Conclusion