One of those avenues is through joining Mercosur. How optimistic are you that Mercosur is a viable economic path for Latin America and will the United States allow these countries to pursue their own path to shake off the shackles of recent US imperialism? Chomsky: Well, certainly the United States is not going to allow it easily to happen.
On the other hand, Mercosur has not very bright prospects right now. It might and there are steps towards it.
And there are further steps. Cochabamba is more than a symbolic place. I think Banktel was the company that was involved and was in fact driven out by popular resistance. Can the US stop these developments? Well, you know, things are not the way they used to be. So just go back to the early s. At that time, there was also kind of a popular wave of oppositions spreading around Latin America for independence, for overcoming extraordinary internal conflicts.
And there were attempts to overcome this. At that point, the US did have weapons. John F. It installed the first of the national security states, neo-Nazi-style states that plagued and then spread throughout the continent. Ecuador, Peru, everywhere. Argentina was a particularly hideous one. And it had in fact beat it down with murder, terror, brutal repression.
Kennedy also initiated the counterinsurgency operation, the state terror operations. And that again still goes on, spread through the atmosphere. The last time they tried to support a military coup was in in Venezuela when the US backed a military coup that briefly overthrew the government, dismantled Parliament, threw out the Supreme Court.
Highly praised in the United States, highly praised and in fact supported by Venezuelan media which amazingly were allowed to function after the coup was overthrown. The US had to back off, first of all, because the coup was overthrown from within but also because of extensive protest from most of Latin America. Democracy is taken more seriously than it is here.
But whether they can use that weapon or not is not clear. And also the economic weapon, the other major weapon, has been greatly weakened.
Brazil in a different way did the same. Bolivia will do the same. Probably Ecuador. Country after country has simply been building up reserves, getting rid of the debt, getting rid of the IMF. The IMF is in trouble now. That weapon of control has greatly weakened.
And this time, the steps cannot just be crushed by force. But people in other countries do. Why is that? Chomsky: We cannot expect the media to try to destroy themselves. It would follow from all of this that had our premises about the local situation and our abilities been accurate, had the means been less corrupting and the costs as calculated by us properly balanced, then military intervention would have been legitimate; all of the objections Hoffmann raises would be met.
I have no desire to find conflict where it does not exist, but it is clear that these views do differ in a fundamental way and that only confusion can arise from a failure to consider this distinction carefully. In my letter in the New York Review of February 13 I did not try to justify the counterposed view, though I do accept it; rather I attempted to make clear the distinction, which seems to me an essential and important one.
The matter of Iran and Guatemala illustrates my point fairly well. Professor Hoffmann states that he was opposed to these interventions because they made the international system more immoderate, and for ethical reasons: namely, the means corrupted the ends and the costs were greater than the costs of non-intervention.
Again, I would like to stress the fundamental distinction between these approaches. Professor Hoffmann offers the analogy to Soviet interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Suppose that we were to read a discussion of intervention by a Soviet scholar in which he distinguishes:. This category has been what I would call negative interventions. We did not exactly know what we were for, but we did know what we were against. We intervened essentially against a threat, and we have sometimes been quite successful — Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and what have you.
As for this category of interventions, I would argue that in the future we at least ought to define more rigorously what it is that so threatens us that we feel we have to intervene either by political subversion or by military action. I would read this as a tempered argument for the legitimacy of intervention, where certain conditions of scale and cost are met, particularly in the context of the remarks just quoted.
And I strongly oppose this point of view. Rather, he tries to determine their real objectives on the basis of their behavior in this instance, and in its evolving pattern. The analyst who does not adhere to a double standard will approach American policy in exactly the same way. Furthermore, he is quite mistaken in saying that had I not stopped my quotations where I did, I would have seen that his case is the opposite of what I claimed.
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