US media miss Rumsfeld’s ‘dirty
wars’ talk
Analysis by Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Nov. 23 (IPS)— If three, five, or 10 years
from now, Latin America returns to the military dictatorships and “dirty
wars” of its all-too-recent past, analysts may point to the past
week’s conference in Quito of the hemisphere’s defence ministers
— and particularly Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld’s role in
it — as a milestone in that journey.
If they did, however, their assessment would surely draw a blank among
the readers of US newspapers or viewers of its television. For the vast
majority of them, the conference was the equivalent of the proverbial
tree toppling unheard and unseen in some vast, unobserved forest.
While the major media were filled with speculation about Rumsfeld’s
future in President George W. Bush’s second term, his contribution
to the meeting was entirely ignored by the electronic media and major
newspapers with just a handful of exceptions.
That was unfortunate because, in many ways, the Quito meeting confirmed
an evolution in US policy that has been underway since Bush declared
his “war on terrorism” after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist
attacks on New York and the Pentagon itself. Indeed, the purpose of
the gathering was to erect a “new architecture” for continental
security in which the armed forces, in Washington’s view, would
play a central role.
For almost two decades, the United States has urged Latin American militaries
to move away from the Cold War “national security” doctrines
that resulted in so many abuses in the region. But last week Rumsfeld
appeared to be preaching the virtues of reviving such an approach, perhaps
under a new name, like “national sovereignty.”
Indeed, in remarks to his fellow defense ministers, Rumsfeld even suggested
that, given the challenges posed by 21st century threats, it was time
to re-think the separation of the armed forces from the police —
a major reform pursued by US and Latin American human-rights organizations
as a way of asserting civilian control over the military and reducing
abuses.
“Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have had to conduct an essential re-examination
of the relationships between our military and our law enforcement responsibilities
in the US,” asserted Rumsfeld, who never let the phrase “human
rights” pass his lips. “The complex challenges of this new
era and the asymmetric threats we face require that all elements of
state and society work together.”
Indeed, the Pentagon chief included under the rubric of “enemies”
faced by the region’s armed forces a number of actors who normally
would come under the jurisdiction of the civilian authorities. “Terrorists,
drug traffickers, hostage takers, and criminal gangs form an anti-social
combination that increasingly seeks to destabilize civil societies,”
he declared, further blurring the line between the roles of the military
and the police.
And during the drafting of the final communiqué, Rumsfeld’s
delegation resisted a Canadian move, backed by Brazil and Chile, to
balance its anti-terrorism provisions with explicit references to international
human rights and humanitarian law, according to Gaston Chillier, an
Argentine lawyer from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA)
who observed the conference.
“They were essentially saying, ‘terrorism is the priority
for the region, and international human rights law is not a requirement
in combating terrorism,’ ” he told IPS. “This is exactly
the wrong message in a region where militaries used this philosophy
during the dirty wars to commit gross human rights violations.”
In another update of the national security doctrine of the 1960s and
1970s, Rumsfeld also pushed for greater co-operation among the region’s
militaries, particularly in border regions where “enemies often
find shelter.”
“Strengthening sovereignty, and ensuring effective sovereignty
over our national territories must be a fundamental goal,” he said.
“There is no one nation that can meet these challenges by itself;
it is simply not going to be possible,” he added twice for emphasis.
Despite the obvious implications of Rumsfeld’s remarks for Latin
America and the future of US-Latin American relations, however, the
mainstream US media did not see fit to give them — or the strong
resistance to them on the part of most of the defence secretary’s
Latin American counterparts — much attention.
Although the major wire services, Associated Press and Reuters, carried
some reports from Quito, only a few newspapers published them, usually
in a much-abbreviated form.
The conference was ignored by the Washington Post and noted in a relatively
brief item in the New York Times that focused on Rumsfeld’s contention
that routes used by smugglers to move undocumented foreigners into the
United States could be used as easily by terrorist organizations.
Longer articles appeared only in The Miami Herald, the Denver Post,
the Akron [Ohio] Beacon Journal, the San Jose Mercury News, and the
Los Angeles Times. But in almost all of these accounts, Rumsfeld and
senior officials are virtually the only quoted sources, according to
a search of the Nexis-Lexis database.
Virtually the only instances when Latin American officials were quoted
were in relation to the badly lagging deployment of troops to the Brazilian-led
United Nations peacekeeping operation in Haiti and to the willingness
of the region’s military to co-operate more closely against drug
trafficking. Latin American troops make up by far the largest component
of the peacekeeping force in Haiti.
Of the newspapers that covered the conference, only the Miami Herald
stressed Rumsfeld’s recommendations on expanding the role of the
military in dealing with the region’s security problems and quoted
Jose Pampurro, the Argentine defense minister, and his Brazilian counterpart,
Jose Alencar, on the subject.
An article published in both the Denver and Akron newspapers was the
only one that did not quote Rumsfeld at length and that stressed that
Latin Americans saw the question of security in a much different light
than the one cast by the Pentagon chief.
Written by Denver Post correspondent Bruce Finley and entitled Latin
America Wary of Calls for Help in Anti-Terror Effort, it was also the
only one that cited non-governmental sources, including several people
who had participated in a rally near the conference site to call attention
to the plight of children in Latin America.
It also quoted retired Gen. Rene Vargas, the former head of Ecuador’s
military, as raising questions about US intentions in his country and
the disconnect between US strategy and Latin American priorities.
“In Latin America, there are no terrorists — only hunger and
unemployment and delinquents who turn to crime,” he was quoted
as saying. “What are we going to do, hit you with a banana?”
The same article quoted Brazil’s Alencar as calling for global
disarmament, and insisting, “the cause of terrorism is not just
fundamentalism, but misery and hunger.”
