“Trigger Happy”: Britain’s Forgotten Role in the US-led Wars of Central America

This article is a modified excerpt from my latest book, Privatized Planet: “Free Trade” as a Weapon Against Democracy, Healthcare and the Environment (2019, New Internationalist).

So-called free trade agreements are all about the economic capture of resources, including labour and material wealth, for the benefit of large corporations. They take two major forms: bilateral (or one-to-one) and multilateral. US corporate planners tend to write “free trade” deals from the bottom-up as bilateral texts, before absorbing nations into multilateral trade and investment blocs. Governments fear a public backlash against hostile takeovers by multinational corporations, so they are reluctant to sign onto such deals. As a result, the US has—with British help—softened countries up militarily, often via actions and support for proxy forces, in preparation for hostile corporate takeovers by the US.

THE IRON FIST
Traditionally, US policy has been to use military force, including support for genocide in some cases, to soften countries up for hostile corporate takeovers. Under President George W. Bush (2001-2009), the US signed the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), a North American Free Trade Agreement-type deal in order to maximize US corporate profits. But the region had endured decades of war, assassinations, sanctions, and in genocide, all of which was sponsored by the US. With the exception of Costa Rica, the US has intervened and/or supported military dictatorships in each of the CAFTA member states.

In the year 2000, the International Monetary Fund called the 1980s “a lost decade” for Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. All but one were victims of US proxy aggression. It went on to note that “[c]ontributing factors included the armed conflicts in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua (which also had adverse effects on the economies of Costa Rica and Honduras).” In most cases, the civil wars and use of death squads, often trained and armed by the US, caused a long-term decline in socioeconomic indicators.

COVERT ACTION
The broader aim of covert action is to stop the spread and power of working people’s movements and the potential election of responsive political representatives to high office. Consequently, the US and its allies, like Britain, whose elites share similar goals, tend to work with the ruling classes of each client-state in opposition to the working classes.

“From the Second World War until 1972, Central American countries had remarkably stable currencies,” says a scholarly study of the region (Flora and Torres-Rivas, Central America, London: Macmillan, p. 77). “A complementary explanation was the presence of repressive dictatorships in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. In all three countries,” the study continues, “the incomes of the peasantry and urban poor people and workers did not keep up with per capita growth.” The situation became really dire in the 1970s, with most Central American economies experiencing a decline in wages and employment and a rise in overcrowding, as peasant farmers fled conflict areas to city slums. These conditions and the ensuing “counterinsurgency” wars (read: counter-political left) made it easier for the US to impose its “free trade” agenda on the region.

Less well-known is the small but significant role that America’s ally, the UK, played in the regional wars of the ‘80s. The interests of Britain’s ruling classes in these so-called low-intensity conflicts include: demonstrating geopolitical subservience to the US so that British corporations could continue to profit from the US-led global system; preventing the contagion of socialistic ideas in poorer nations, which might spread to nations over which Britain has more direct influence; and enjoying the benefits of access to US-led markets forged after cover operations.

CASE STUDIES
El Salvador. In the 1980s, the country was plagued by death squads bent on crushing social progress which might lead to the kind of dangerous “economic nationalism” feared by post-war US business planners. The overwhelming majority of aid, military equipment, and training for the death squads was provided by the US. But Britain also played a role. In November 1977, a “decision was made” by the UK government “to sell armoured vehicles and other military equipment to the Government of El Salvador.” In 1985, it was revealed in Parliament that Britain “offered places for one or two suitably qualified Salvadorean [sic] officers to attend Staff college courses [at military academies] in Britain.” In 1987, Islington North MP (and future leader of the British Labour Party), Jeremy Corbyn, revealed that: “In addition to offering bilateral aid to the El Salvadorean Government, the British Government are also undertaking the training of one El Salvadorean officer at the British military academy.”

Guatemala. Between 1982 and 1983 alone, President Montt murdered 1,771 indigenous Maya people. Britain’s military base in the region is in neighbouring Belize. A British intelligence report from the period states: “there has been a certain amount of official involvement in murder and political violence. ‘Death Squads’ have been part of the Guatemalan way of life for many years.” Despite acknowledging this appalling human rights environment, Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dispatched British troops stationed in Belize to Guatemala to assist Montt in his war against peasant land reformers. British paratrooper Gus Hales recalls: “We were a bit trigger-happy and, pumped up, and looking for something to come up.” Commander of the British Forces in Belize, Brigadier Pollard, held secret meetings with Guatemalan military officers, including Colonel Tobar Martínez, who had allegedly massacred 251 villagers in Las Dos Erres. At the base in Belize, a British police officer, Alan Jenkins, ran the special branch, which placed alleged guerrilla suspects under surveillance.

Nicaragua. The left-wing Sandinistas overthrew the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979. Counter-revolutionary (Contra) forces, backed by the US, committed shocking war crimes in the fighting that followed. US policy on the small country was condemned by the World Court in 1986, despite efforts by Britain and Japan to block the Court’s ruling. Historian Mark Curtis notes that the majority of British media were on the side of the Somoza dictatorship. Nicaragua’s brief transition from dictatorship to subsistence and wealth redistribution was described by Oxfam in 1989 as The Threat of a Good Example?

CONSEQUENCES
The effect of these wars included fundamental changes to the economies of the affected nations. It was easier for the US to work with client regimes to impose “free trade” on the afflicted nations than to use diplomacy and win target populations over with argument and pro-“free trade” propaganda. In addition to demonstrating obedience to the US, Britain’s interest in regional “free trade” deals, to which the UK is not presently party, is to use such deals as a means of accessing foreign markets via trade and investment with the US. For instance, the British government’s website on doing business with Mexico explains that British investors can access Mexican markets through the US-led North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), to which Britain is not directly party: “NAFTA enables British companies to use Mexico as a low-cost manufacturing base with direct, duty free access to the United States.” This model generalizes.

Although President Bill Clinton signed the US-Jordan Free Trade Agreement in 2000, the Bush II years saw the emergence of most US bilateral Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). In 2004, a year before signing up to CAFTA, the US signed bilateral FTAs with future CAFTA members, just as it had signed bilateral FTAs with Mexico and Canada before the multilateral NAFTA came into force. In 2004, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua each signed FTAs with the US. It is also worth noting that despite progress in the form of the so-called “pink tide” (a wave of leftish, democratic reforms that swept the region and the South in the late-1990s to mid-2000s), the region never recovered from the US-British-backed brutality of the previous decades.

CONCLUSION
The CAFTA legislation reads much like the NAFTA text, which so harmed both US and Mexican working people, and the Canadian environment. Along with the usual vague provisos about protecting workers’ rights and the environment, CAFTA seeks to “[enhance] the competitiveness of [signatories’] firms in global markets,” with the aim of “establishing the Free Trade Area of the Americas.” Local markets had been largely impaired, if not devastated, in the preceding war years. CAFTA allows US corporations to take their wealth, power, government subsidies, and expertise to poor countries and use the labor of those poor countries to their advantage.

The bilateral FTA model, which eventually morphs into multilateral agreements, is the weapon of choice for US corporations, as Britons will soon learn if they Brexit and elect a hard-right Tory government. But, in poor countries, these “free trade” deals can’t succeed without the iron fist of militarism to back them.

Dr. T.J. Coles is an Associate Researcher at the Organisation for Propaganda Studies, a columnist for Axis of Logic, and the author of several books.

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