Gral. golpista Medina Gómez sigue respirando por la herida: "generaré reacciones en Washington" Por: Panorama / I.G. Publicado el Domingo, 15/06/03 08:25am				imprímelo mándaselo a tus panas

Jim Lobe
IPS

Diputado D'angelo desmiente rumores: Mayoria parlamentaria del Bloque del Cambio está más sólida que nunca Por: AM / IG Publicado el Domingo, 15/06/03 07:47am				imprímelo mándaselo a tus panas

Néstor Kohan
Madres de Plaza de Mayo

El Che, después del diluvio neoliberal

Fue asesinado hace 36 años. Sigue incomodando. Después del neoliberalismo salvaje, el Che Guevara retorna. Con su sonrisa irónica, típicamente argentina, mira desde lejos a quienes pretendieron olvidarlo con el supuesto "fin de la historia".

Ernesto Guevara, tironeado entre quienes lo admiran como un teórico de la revolución y quienes lo venden como un objeto de consumo, continúa asombrándonos.

Cuando ya nada quedaba por saber sobre él (existen numerosas biografías de casi 1.000 páginas cada una) aparecen nuevos escritos, hasta ahora desconocidos e inéditos. Su pensamiento irreverente vuelve a encender pasiones encontradas.

Miles de jóvenes, hastiados de la vieja política, hartos del sistema capitalista, a la búsqueda de una nueva alternativa de vida, enarbolan en estadios de fútbol, en plazas, en parques, en recitales y en movilizaciones políticas, casi fanáticamente, la bandera del Che.

No sólo en Argentina. En varias de las rebeliones contra el capitalismo globalizado (Seattle, Génova, Florencia, Barcelona, etc.) muchedumbres de jóvenes, de todas las tribus, de todos los colores, comienzan a identificarse con él. Su figura, estrechamente vinculada a la revolución cubana, vuelve a proyectarse -como en los '60- hacia todas las latitudes, donde hoy se persigue la utopía de "otro mundo posible".

Las completas… no eran completas

En 1997 -a 30 años de su asesinato- todos los kioscos y librerías se abarrotaron de videos, posters, biografías y folletos. Aparecieron varias ediciones de sus Obras Completas. Allí estaba todo lo que escribió y dijo.

Sin embargo, gracias al Centro de Estudios Che Guevara (ubicado en la antigua casa del Che en La Habana y presidido por Aleida March) hoy nos enteramos que aquellas obras… no eran completas.

Además de todos sus manuscritos y textos originales, en ese mismo Centro se encuentra la biblioteca personal del Che. Los volúmenes que él, pacientemente, leía y anotaba. Desde las obras de Hegel y Marx hasta las de Lenin, Trotsky, Deutscher, Stalin o Mao Tse Tung, pasando por aquel famoso texto de Louis Althusser (Pour Marx) donde el filósofo francés arremetía contra los marxistas humanistas…Un texto que el Che anota críticamente en sus márgenes.

Dirigido por la socióloga María del Carmen Ariet, el Centro Che Guevara de La Habana ha roto definitivamente el silencio. Mediante un proyecto conjunto con la editorial Ocean Press (con filiales en Nueva York, Londres y Melbourne) ha comenzado a editar todo lo que quedaba inédito del Che, que es mucho más de lo que se conoce.

La tarea del archivo tiene como meta recuperar, sistematizar y publicar toda la obra de Guevara. En dicha institución también se impulsan y asesoran Cátedras Libres Che Guevara, dedicadas a estudiar su vida y su obra.

La iniciativa de publicación no es ajena a Fidel Castro, quien incluso revisó personalmente el diario del Che -inédito hasta 1999- Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo. Fue el mismo Fidel Castro quien, en 1987, sugirió públicamente dejar atrás la bibliografía de factura fundamentalmente soviética (que predominó en las instituciones educativas cubanas a partir de 1971) para volver al pensamiento del Che. En aquel famoso discurso de 1987, el principal dirigente político de Cuba reclamó estudiar minuciosamente las formulaciones teóricas que Guevara elaboró durante la década del '60.

Incluso Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, uno de los principales cuadros históricos del comunismo cubano (polemista contra el Che en los '60) reconoció en ese mismo 1987, a partir de las intervenciones públicas de Fidel Castro, que Guevara había pronosticado el fracaso de las políticas soviéticas en el terreno económico.

Desde allí en adelante comenzaron a ver la luz pública muchos materiales que permanecían sin editar.

En 1997, la revista cubana Contracorriente publicó una carta inédita de Guevara a Armando Hart Dávalos (el responsable de la alfabetización en Cuba) escrita en Tanzania en diciembre 1965. Allí el Che se queja de "los ladrillos soviéticos" (alusión a los manuales de filosofía oficiales en la Europa del Este) y propone reemplazarlos por una nueva manera de estudiar la filosofía, más histórica y menos metafísica. Para ello le acerca a Armando Hart un plan tentativo con unidades y nombres de autores.

Poco después, en 1999, apareció publicado el diario del Congo, donde Guevara analiza su participación personal en la ayuda cubana a los revolucionarios africanos que luchaban contra el colonialismo europeo. El diario incluye una carta inédita de Fidel al Che donde le pide que regrese a Cuba para prepararse antes de ir a Bolivia.

En 2000 apareció, también por iniciativa de este Centro, Otra vez (El diario inédito del segundo viaje por América Latina 1953-1956). Un texto fundamental para comprender el impacto que produjo en el joven Guevara el proceso político de Guatemala en tiempos de Árbens y la intervención de Estados Unidos para derrocarlo en 1954.

En 2001 Orlando Borrego, uno de los antiguos y más estrechos colaboradores del Che en el Ministerio de Industrias, publicó una pequeña selección de las Notas críticas al Manual de economía política de la Academia de Ciencias de la URSS como apéndice a su excelente libro Che, el camino del fuego. Estas notas son imprescindibles para comprender cuán lejos había llegado Guevara en el análisis crítico de la Unión Soviética y sus países aliados de Europa. En ese texto, el Che polemiza con los que pronosticaban en aquel tiempo una caída inminente del imperialismo norteamericano por su estancamiento, sus crisis de sobreproducción y su caída de la tasa de ganancia. Mientras le asigna al imperialismo gran vitalidad, sostiene que en la URSS "se está regresando al capitalismo". Esas líneas premonitorias fueron escritas más de dos décadas antes de la Perestroika de Gorvachov.

Toda la obra del Che constituye una crítica implacable tanto al imperialismo capitalista occidental como al stalinismo soviético, que terminó reemplazando el rojo encendido de la bandera del socialismo por el gris opaco de la burocracia y la mediocridad.

Coronando esas primeras tentativas, en esta nueva iniciativa editorial de Ocean Press y del Centro Che Guevara, aparecerán textos inéditos que, seguramente, generarán nuevos debates y polémicas.

Lo más sugerente del nuevo material reside en el acceso al laboratorio mental donde Guevara iba ensayando nuevas aproximaciones a la filosofía y al marxismo, a partir de un pobladísimo abanico de lecturas autodidactas. Esas libretas y cuadernos hasta ahora inéditos permiten apreciar cómo el Che aprovechaba cada momento libre para estudiar y para formarse teóricamente. Ya sea encima de su motocicleta de mochilero, en un campamento guerrillero en la Sierra Maestra, en su despacho del Ministerio de Industrias, en su escondite clandestino en Praga, o en la propia selva sudamericana donde fue asesinado por agentes de la CIA y el ejército boliviano.

En todos esos lugares repite una misma obsesión por la lectura. Siempre la idea fija: anotar, registrar y pensar en voz alta, proponiendo permanentemente planes de estudio teóricos y formación política.

El médico revolucionario y la filosofía

Uno de los materiales, hasta ahora desconocido, es su libro inconcluso La función social del médico en América Latina (1954-1956). Analizando el papel del "médico revolucionario en lucha contra el capital", este texto que nunca terminó, bosqueja la necesaria inserción política del profesional en el conflicto de clases.

Otro de los textos que verán la luz, gira en torno a una pasión que jamás lo abandonó, desde su primera juventud hasta su muerte en Bolivia: la filosofía.

A los 17 años comenzó a elaborar en varios cuadernos escolares un Diccionario de filosofía, que continuó reescribiendo hasta que se incorporó al Movimiento 26 de julio. Después de tomar el poder en 1959, no continuó su redacción, pero sí mantuvo el proyecto de alentar la escritura de manuales propios, latinoamericanos, para estudiar a los clásicos del pensamiento. La carta a Armando Hart de 1965 marca la continuidad de esa preocupación que comenzó a desarrollar desde los 17 años (en 1945).

En esas páginas adolescentes que ahora ven la luz, el joven Guevara escribe en forma manuscrita pequeñas biografías de grandes pensadores (las modifica y las mecanografía en la década del '50). Les dedica un espacio central a Carlos Marx y a Federico Engels (donde los contrasta con la descripción de "la doctrina judía del marxismo" que hace Hitler en Mi lucha), al marxismo de Lenin, pero también a Sigmund Freud, a José Ingenieros, a Arturo Shopenhauer y a Platón. Llama poderosamente la atención este cruce inesperado de intereses teóricos donde el marxismo convive con el psicoanálisis. Una conjunción explosiva -ajena a la izquierda tradicional de aquellos años- que también se encuentra en los escritos de Deodoro Roca (el redactor del célebre Manifiesto Liminar de la Reforma Universitaria de 1918, en cuya biblioteca cordobesa incursionó extensamente el joven Ernesto Guevara, amigo de su hijo Gustavo Roca) o también en José Carlos Mariátegui, para citar tan sólo dos nombres emblemáticos de la cultura política latinoamericana.

Ya en esta época temprana Ernesto Guevara comienza a confeccionar un índice de libros, tarea que continuará hasta los últimos momentos de la selva boliviana.

Los cuadernos de lectura, entre Sarmiento y el Martín Fierro

En los Apuntes de lecturas (redactados en México entre 1954 y 1956), el Che escribe críticas bibliográficas. Entre otros encontramos allí una nota sobre Sarmiento y otra sobre José Hernández, además de varios textos sobre el Perú de los incas, el México de los mayas y aztecas, el Chile de los araucanos, y la obra poética de Pablo Neruda que tanto lo sedujo.

Cuando analiza el Facundo de Sarmiento, Ernesto Guevara intenta romper amarras tanto con el liberalismo mitrista que sólo tiene ojos para su tarea de educador como con el nacional-populismo rosista, que únicamente lo dibuja como un asesino de gauchos. El intento de lectura de Guevara sobre Sarmiento, distante de esa dicotomía, se dirige por un camino muy similar al que propondrá David Viñas en Literatura argentina y realidad política, una década más tarde (en 1964) . En esos tempranos Apuntes de lecturas Guevara afirma que: "De su obra histórica habrá que recordar su amor por la educación popular; de su obra política, la entrega de la Argentina a la voracidad imperialista de los ferrocarriles; de su obra literaria, la que hará que su nombre sobreviviera aun cuando toda lo demás quedara olvidado, el Facundo".

Algo análogo sucede en sus apuntes sobre el Martin Fierro. Guevara - quien seguramente debe haber leído a Ezequiel Martínez Estrada- destaca cómo en la segunda parte del poema José Hernández ha envejecido y su personaje Fierro olvida "el grito de angustiosa rebelión". En ese sentido, agrega que para entender la segunda parte del Martin Fierro hay que recordar que "se acercaba la bárbara campaña de Roca y todos los preparativos debían hacerse". Además de caracterizar al viejo Vizcacha como "el Sancho Panza argentino" (es conocida la admiración del Che por la obra Don Quijote) y de sostener que es el personaje mejor logrado del libro, Guevara cierra su escrito afirmando que a pesar de que "Los consejos son el final de su claudicación de lucha", todo el Martin Fierro constituye "el instrumento artístico de protesta, por el que una clase derrotada hace su intencionada defensa".

Este abigarrado conjunto de materiales inéditos permite observar el índice de lecturas que el Che redactó entre marzo de 1965 y su muerte. Allí nos encontramos con una nutrida biblioteca de marxismo: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Mehring, Plejanov, John Reed, Malcolm X, Mondolfo, Lukács, Althusser y Wright Mills. Junto a ellos, textos clásicos de Clausewitz, Hegel, José Gaos, Maquiavelo, Giordano Bruno, Erasmo y Lucrecio, así como también Martí, Homero, Goytisolo, Shakespeare, Goethe, García Lorca, una biografía de Túpac Amaru de Boleslao Lewin y Todos los fuegos, el fuego de Julio Cortázar, entre muchísimos otros. Las notas del Che se detienen en Bolivia con un último libro: Fuerzas secretas de Federico Nietzsche.

El plan de edición

Este ambicioso proyecto de edición del Centro Che Guevara se propone publicar nueve volúmenes: Justicia global: Liberación y socialismo; El gran debate: sobre la economía en Cuba; Notas de viaje; América Latina: despertar de un continente; Notas críticas sobre la economía política; Punta del Este: proyecto alternativo de desarrollo para América Latina; Los dejo ahora conmigo mismo: el que fui; Che Guevara: Antología mínima y Che en la memoria de Fidel Castro.

Quizás después de leer todos sus papeles, incluyendo ahora los inéditos, pueda llegar a explicarse porqué, 36 años después de su asesinato, los jóvenes de cualquier parte del mundo siguen identificándose, de manera tan insistente, terca y obstinada, con su figura y con su ejemplo.

Call to Overthrow Chávez Cost Venezuelan a U.S. Visa

OGOTÁ, Colombia, June 13 — A former Venezuelan general whose visa was revoked by the Bush administration had been advocating the overthrow of President Hugo Chávez, American officials said today. The United States has publicly opposed the president's overthrow, urging that his fate be settled by democratic means.

The visa of the former general, Enrique Medina, was rescinded by the State Department in May on the recommendation of the American Embassy in Venezuela, a State Department official said by phone from Washington. Mr. Medina, a former attaché in the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, led a group of dissident generals who have for months gathered in a Caracas neighborhood opposed to Mr. Chávez and loudly called for his ouster.

"A lot of people looked at what this guy was engaged in and it was clearly inconsistent with U.S. law and democratic principles," said an American official in Washington who is familiar with State Department policy on the matter. In rescinding Mr. Medina's visa, American authorities invoked regulations barring foreigners who endorse "terrorist activity."

Political experts on Venezuela said the decision, first reported in The Miami Herald on Wednesday, signaled that the United States rejected radical elements in Venezuela's opposition that favored an anything-goes approach to deposing Mr. Chávez. The opposition has so far led a failed coup in April 2002 and four national strikes, which have devastated the economy.

Although the Bush administration holds a dim view of the left-leaning president, the United States has publicly endorsed a referendum on Mr. Chávez's rule as the solution to the political tumult in the nation. Last month, the Organization of American States brokered an agreement that may lead to a referendum later in the year.

"The U.S is trying to say to folks that any talk, any harboring of notions that you could follow a nondemocratic solution to the crisis will not be condoned," said Miguel Diaz, who tracks American policy in Venezuela for the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think this is a way for the U.S. government to add its imprimatur to the referendum process."

In the latest outbreak of violence, seven people were wounded today, four by gunfire, as an opposition march unfolded in a poor neighborhood of Caracas traditionally supportive of the president, Reuters reported.

The police and national guard troops clashed with angry supporters of the president who threatened to attack the opposition rally, firing tear gas to break up the protesters.

Mr. Medina has not been officially charged with taking part in the coup. But he is closely linked with officers who took over when Mr. Chávez was briefly overthrown, and he later became the ringleader of dissident military officers who camped out in Plaza Altamira, the public square that became the center of antigovernment activities.

While their positions resonate with many Venezuelans, the American Embassy and some leading opposition figures have distanced themselves from the generals.

Mr. Medina could not be reached for comment today. But in an article in a Venezuelan newspaper this week, he accused the American government of allowing itself to be manipulated by the Chávez government.

WHEN General Jay Garner landed in Iraq and arrived in bombed and looted Baghdad he declared: "This is a great day." As if his presence miraculously ended the thousand and one problems afflicting ancient Mesopotamia. What is astonishing is not the obscenity of the statement but the resignation and apathy with which the media covered the installation of the man who should really be called the proconsul of the United States. As if there were no longer international law. As if we had gone back to the days of the mandates (1). As if it were now normal for Washington to designate a retired officer of the US armed forces to govern a sovereign state.

This decision to name a senior officer to run a defeated country, without even consulting the phantom members of the "coalition", is alarmingly reminiscent of the old practices of colonialism - Clive in India, Kitchener in the Sudan and Lyautey in Morocco. To think we had imagined such abuses to have been banned for ever because of political morality and the lessons of history.

The US tells us that this is different , and that the transitional regime in Iraq should be compared to General Douglas MacArthur's regime in Japan after 1945. But that is even more alarming. It took the atomic destruction of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 - almost an apocalypse - for the US to name a general as administrator of a defeated power , at a time when the United Nations was not yet functioning.

Now the UN does exist, at least in theory (2). And the invasion of Iraq by US forces and their British auxiliaries wasn't the conclusion of a world war (unless President Bush and his entourage regard the attacks of 11 September 2001 as the equivalent of world war).

General Garner has indicated that his occupation will not be for ever. "We will be here as long as it takes. We will leave fairly rapidly". (3) But history teaches us that "as long as it takes" can be a very long time indeed. When the US invaded the Philippines and Puerto Rico in 1898 on the altruistic pretext of "liberating" them and their peoples from the Spanish colonial yoke, the US soon ended up replacing the former power. In the Philippines it put down nationalist resistance and then did not leave until 1946, and continued to interfere in the country's affairs thereafter. In each subsequent national election the US supported its preferred candidate, including the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, in power from 1965 to 1986. And the US is still occupying Puerto Rico. Even in Japan and Germany, the presence of US armed forces remains massive 58 years after the end of the second world war.

So when General Garner arrived in Baghdad with his team of 450 administrators it was hard to avoid the thought that the US, in this phase of neo-imperialism, is shouldering what Rudyard Kipling called "the white man's burden". Or what the great powers saw in 1918 as their sacred mission of civilising people seen as incapable of running their lives in the difficult conditions of the modern world.

The neo-imperialism of the US revives the Roman concept of moral domination, based on the conviction that free trade, globalisation and the diffusion of Western civilisation are good for the world. But it is also a military and media domination exercised over peoples considered inferior (5).

After the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's appalling dictatorship, the US promised that it would establish in Iraq an exemplary democracy, under the wing of the new empire, the influence of which would trigger the fall of all autocratic regimes in the region - including, we were told by James Woolsey, former director of the CIA and a confidant of Bush, those of Saudi Arabia and Egypt (6).

Is such a promise credible? Obviously not. The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, hastened to point out that even if it was the desire of the majority of Iraqis as expressed at the ballot box, the US would not accept an Islamic regime in Iraq: "That isn't going to happen," he said (7). This is a very old law of history: empires impose their law on the vanquished. But there is also another law: those that live by empire die by it.

(1) Invented at the end of the 1914-18 war, the idea of the mandate regime replaced that of the protectorate, which US president Woodrow Wilson considered too colonialist.

(2) Even if more fanatical US hawks, such as Richard Perle, are already predicting its downfall. See Le Figaro, 11 April 2003.

(3) The Guardian, London, 21 April 2003.

(4) See Yves Lacoste, Dictionnaire de géopolitique, Flammarion, Paris, 1993.

(5) French and German opposition to the war against Iraq made it possible for this war not to be seen in Arab eyes as the expression of a "clash of civilisations".

(6) International Herald Tribune, Paris, 8 April 2003.

(7) International Herald Tribune, Paris, 26 April 2003.

http://mondediplo.com/2003/05/01ramonet 

MYRON HERRICK, the United States ambassador in Paris, threw a diplomatic banquet on George Washington's birthday anniversary in 1927 for representatives of Latin American member states of the Pan-American Union. He told them that the US was not greedy for land and had no need or desire for new territory. It had constantly and deliberately turned away frequent and easy opportunities to extend its domain. Those who accused the US of imperialist designs did not know the facts or were insincere (1).

Perhaps Herrick's memory was impaired by his residence in Paris, for he had forgotten about the dismemberment of Mexico, the enslavement of Cuba, the subjugation of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the wrenching of Panama from Colombia, the invasion of Nicaragua and the annexation of the Philippines.

In his December 1823 message to Congress, US president James Monroe had launched the doctrine that would bear his name. As the Spanish empire collapsed, enticing the British to fill the void, he defied European intervention in the affairs of the Americas. It would have been of benefit to all had the US not, under the guise of fighting against external colonialism, focused its foreign policy on constituting a continental block that the US itself hoped to dominate.

Without worrying about credible justification, the US intervened militarily in Puerto Rico (1824), Mexico (1845 and 1847), Nicaragua (1857 and 1860) and in the province of Panama (1860). Alarmed, the governments of Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, New Grenada (Colombia) and Peru met in Lima in 1847 to examine this interventionism. The outbreak of war against Mexico in 1848 justified their concern: from Texas to California, the US annexed half Mexico's territory. After its own Civil War, the US became aware of its huge power. From 1880, having conquered the West, it turned its attention to the South. During General Grant's presidency (1869-77), the theory of "manifest destiny" made clear US ambitions: to control the contin ent. The US spoke about the "defence of demo cracy" softly, and sent in the marines by way of a big stick. Besides the occasional military intervention, there were invasions followed by establishment of protectorates.

Cuba had remained under Spanish domination while other Spanish colonies won independence. José Marti led a second war of independence from 1895, and Cuba rebelled. On 15 February 1898, the US battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbour in mysterious circumstances. President McKinley used this as a pretext to start the Spanish-American war. After defeating the Spanish troops without too much trouble in a "wonderful little war" (as Teddy Roosevelt called it) US forces took over Puerto Rico (2). By the Treaty of Paris of 10 December 1898, Spain also gave up Cuba, the Philippines and Guam.

Under pressure from the occupation, "free" Cuba was forced to accept an annexe to its constitution, called the Platt amendment, voted by the US Senate in 1901. This required Havana to accept the US right to intervene "for the preservation of Cuban independence" or to maintain a government protecting "life, property and individual liberty".

The amendment states: "To enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defence, the Government of Cuba will sell or lease to the US lands necessary for coaling or naval stations, at certain specified points." One of these is now the base at Guantanamo (3). Cuba lost its independence before ever having won it. Interfering in its internal affairs, institutions, electoral system and taxation, the US intervened militarily in 1906, 1912 and 1917. Cuba was a US protectorate until 1934, ruled thereafter by governments without any real power.

"Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civil ized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the US, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power." This was President Theodore Roosevelt's warning in 1903, a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

So that Latin American states might respect their "international obligations and justice towards foreigners" and to "bring about progress and democracy for backward people", marines landed in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Ecuador. President Taft honestly said in 1912: "The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally."

Without the appearance of territorial conquest, or of declared war, the status of every independ ent Latin republic became less than that of a single state in the US, where federal government intervention was rare and had to be authorised by Congress (4). Defence of national sovereignty was seen as tantamount to rebellion against the US, the power assuming the protectorate of these republics, and it was crushed bloodily, for the benefit of vested interests rather than civilisation.

The United Fruit Company (UFCo), from its first concession from Costa Rica in 1878, created a banana empire along the eastern and northern coasts of Central America, Colombia and Venezuela. Its millions of acres of land were independent kingdoms, their interests to be defended. "Uncle Sam" intervened diplomatic ally and militarily, unchecked and on his own authority, in the internal affairs of republics in which banana lands had been established.

The republics were troubled nations, often living in chronic anarchy and financial disorder. But the US was hardly morally superior, given its own past, with its civil war and its murder and exploitation of Native Americans. The US, besides defending its economic interests, was intent on insuring its possession of the future canal joining the Atlantic and the Pacific. Colombia postponed its consent to US conditions for a 100-year concession to the waterway in its province of Panama, so the US itself secured that province's secession, in 1903.

For a payment of $10m, the Hay-Brunau-Varilla treaty of 18 November gave the US the use of the canal in perpetuity, as well as a five-mile zone on either shore, and sovereignty over it all. A treaty of alliance, concluded in 1926, worsened the servitude. Article 6 granted the US special wartime rights, almost making Panama militarily a new state of the Union.

"Dollar diplomacy" was most imperial in Nicaragua, to insure the possession of the future canal (whose course had not at that time been decided). After a landing in 1853, to "protect the lives and interests of US citizens", marines came back in 1912 to break the resistance of liberals who refused to contract a loan with the US that would have led to US financial control of Nicaragua. Installed as president, Adolfo Diaz contracted the loan by offering customs revenues as collateral, and accepting a US controller-general of customs, nominated by New York bankers with the approval of the State Department. The US garrison in Managua dates from then, and was maintained until 1925. In 1914 the Bryan-Chamorro treaty gave the US exclusive rights to the construction of the canal.

The marines returned to Nicaragua in 1927, after the US's conservative protégé Emiliano Chamorro took power by force. Only after a long and uneven fight with the outlaws of Augusto Cesar Sandino's "crazy little army" were they forced to leave in 1932. During this time the US created a National Guard, whose jefe director (head) was a marine until 1932, before the baton was passed to General Anastasio Somoza.

In Honduras, the US intervened in 1903, 1905, 1919 and 1924 to re-establish order (mainly UFCo order, and that of other companies exploiting the land, mines and forests). In 1915 the US similarly strangled the small republic of Haiti, when Admiral William Caperton, landing at the head of a force in Port-au-Prince, imposed an agreement on the government. On the surface this was legal and freely agreed, but it delivered civil and military administration, finances, customs and the state bank (replaced by the National City Bank) into US hands. To break resistance, Caperton proclaimed martial law. Martial law was also declared in the Dominican Republic, whose convention of 8 February 1907 allowed the invaders to administrate customs and redistribute its revenues to foreign creditors.

In 1934 US President Franklin D Roosevelt replaced this big stick policy with that of "good neighbours". The Inter-American conference for the maintenance of peace (Buenos Aires, 1936) and the eighth conference of American states (Lima, 1938) reaffirmed each country's absolute sovereignty. But during the protectorate phase, the US managed to organise stable authoritarian regimes, devoted to US interests, and supported by local armed forces. Good neighbourliness in fact meant supporting dictators: Rafael Léonidas Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela, Jorge Ubico in Guatemala, Tiburcio Carias in Honduras, Fulgencio Batista in Cuba, and the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua.

(1) See Louis Guilaine, L'Amérique latine et l'impérialisme américain, Armand Colin, Paris, 1928.

(2) The island is subject to a vague autonomous regime under the authority of a US governor. In 1917, after several years of protests to Congress by Puerto Rican leaders, US citizenship was granted to all Puerto Ricans who wanted it. In 1952 it attained the status of Estado libre asociado (free associated state), still in force.

(3) The US received the bases of Guantanamo and Bahia Honda, but the latter was restored to Cuba in 1912 in exchange for an extension to Guantanamo.

(4) Louis Guilaine, op cit.

Translated by Jeremiah Cullinane

IN 1941-42 the United States intended that France, together with soon-to-be defeated Italy, Germany and Japan, was to be part of a protectorate run by the Allied Military Government of the Occupied Territories (Amgot). According to the agreement of November 1942 between Admiral Jean-François Darlan and US General Mark Clark, which secured France's commitment to the Allied cause, Amgot would have abolished its national sovereignty, including its right to issue currency.

Some US historians believe this plan stemmed from President Franklin D Roosevelt's antipathy towards Charles de Gaulle. Roosevelt saw him as a dictator-in-training and sought to prevent him from ruling post-Pétain. (Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain led the pro-Nazi government of unoccupied France at Vichy,1940-44.) The argument that Roosevelt intended to establish universal democracy is compelling but wrong (1).

The US was concerned that France, although weakened by its 1940 defeat, might reject the plan, especially if its presidency went to De Gaulle, who had vowed to restore French sovereignty. It feared France might use its nuisance capacity as it had when it opposed pro-German US policies after the first world war. France would not have wanted to relinquish its empire, rich in raw materials and strategic bases. The US had long called for an open door policy for goods and investments in all colonial empires (2). The US relied on twin strategies: ignoring De Gaulle, and dealing with Pétain's regime with a combin ation of accommodation and toughness. It realised that Vichy, like the Latin American regimes dear to its heart, was more malleable than a government with broad popular support.

The US plan for a "Vichy-sans-Vichy" took shape. French elites supported the idea: they clung to the Vichy regime, which had restored privileges taken away by the pre-war republican government, and were eager to make a painless transition from German rule to the pax americana.

After December 1940 the US prepared to send troops to North Africa, with Robert Murphy, Roosevelt's personal envoy. It attempted to cap italise on a symbol of French defeat: General Maxime Weygand, commander-in-chief during the German invasion and Vichy's delegate- general to French Africa until November 1941. When this failed, it turned to General Henri Giraud. Soon after, US forces landed in Morocco and Algeria on 8 November 1942. The next to be wooed was Admiral Jean-François Darlan, stationed in Algiers, a collaborator who served as Pétain's vice-premier and foreign minister from 1941-42. He remained at Pétain's side when Pierre Laval returned to power in 1942-44 (3).

General Clark had Darlan sign an agreement on 22 November 1942 placing North Africa at the disposal of the US and making France a "vassal" state, subject to "capitulations" (4). The US assumed unprecedented rights over French territorial extensions in Africa, including overseeing troop movements; ports, airfields, military defences and munitions, communications networks and the merchant navy. The agreement also provided for US requisitions of goods and services; tax exemptions; extraterritorial rights; and US-determined military zones. Joint commissions would be responsible for law and order, current administration, censorship and economic policy.

Laval had sealed his fate by hoping for "a German victory" . Assisted by his son-in-law, René de Chambrun, a collaborationist corporate lawyer with dual US/French citizenship, Laval believed the US pledge that he would play a key role after a separate peace agreement, pitting Germany, Britain and the US against the Soviets, was reached. But US support for Laval was not compatible with French internal power struggles, and the separate peace proposal failed to take into account the Red Army's key role in crushing Hitler's Wehrmacht.

Darlan was assassinated by an anti-Vichyite with Gaullist connections on 24 December 1942. The US turned to General Giraud, who briefly served with De Gaulle as co-president of the French National Liberation Committee (CFLN), founded in 1943. After the battle of Stalingrad which marked the end of the German advance, Giraud was supported by senior Vichy officials, including Maurice Couve de Murville, overseas finance minister, who defected to the Allies in 1943. His supporters included industrialists such as Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil, a former member of the pro-fascist Cagoule group, who headed Lesieur oils and the Printemps department stores. Also onside were collaborationist bankers such as Alfred Pose, chief executive officer for the National Bank of Commerce and Industry.

Pierre Pucheu was the next Vichy official to embrace the US option, joining Giraud in Algiers. No one personified the Vichy regime better than Pucheu. In 1941 he became Darlan's industry minister and then interior minister. He had served as a fundraiser for the fascist French People's Party . He also championed economic collaboration with Germany and anti-communist repression, working on behalf of the Nazi occupation (including selecting communist prisoners executed in 1941 in retaliation for the assassin ation of German officers, and establishing special sections - anti-communist tribunals).

Spurned by Giraud, Pucheu was imprisoned in May 1943 and sentenced to death; he was executed in Algiers in March 1944. This appeased the communists, whom Pucheu had martyred; but de Gaulle was also warning the US and Britain, and frightening those who expected US saviours to supplant the Vichy regime. In 1943 a police officer joked: "The French bourgeoisie always presumed that US or British soldiers would fight on its behalf if the Bolsheviks won" (5).

The US depicted De Gaulle as a rightwing dictator and a puppet of French communists and the USSR. But it had to abandon plans to impose the dollar in liberated territories. On 23 October 1944 the Allies officially recognised De Gaulle as head of the French government: the USSR had recognised France's true government two and a half years before. On 10 December 1944 France signed a treaty of alliance and mutual security with Moscow, to offset US power. De Gaulle described it in glowing terms (6).

Excluded from the Yalta conference in 1945 and dependent on the US, France became a key part of the US sphere of influence. But only vigorous resistance, internal and external, had saved it from becoming a US protectorate.

*Annie Lacroix-Riz is a professor of contemporary history at Paris-VII University. Her writings include Le Choix de Marianne: Les relations franco-américaines de 1944 à 1948 (Editions sociales, Paris, 1986) and Les Protectorats du Maghreb entre la France et Washington du débarquement à l'indépendance 1942-1956 (L'Harmattan, Paris, 1988)

(1) See Frank Costigliola, France and the United States: The Cold Alliance since World War II, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1992.

(2) See William A Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Dell Publishing, New York, 1972 (first edition, 1959).

(3) Laval was prime minister 1931-32 and 1935-36. See Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, Columbia University Press, New York, 2001.

(4) See Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, L'Abîme 1939-1945, Imprimerie nationale, Paris, 1982, and Annie Lacroix-Riz, Industriels et banquiers français sous l'Occupation, Armand Colin, Paris, 1999.

(5) See letter no 740 by the police commissioner (Melun prefect), 13 February 1943, F7 14904, French National Archives. See also Richard Vinen, The Politics of French Business 1936-1945, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991.

(6) See the memo by the assistant director of political affairs, Paris, 25 October 1944, and the text of the treaty in Europe-URSS 1944-1948, vol 51, French foreign affairs ministry archives.

Translated by Luke Sandford