Iraq and the Middle East continues to dominate the media's attention on US foreign policy. However, to any seasoned Latin America watcher the parallels between current US foreign policy in the Middle East today with that in Latin America, and in particular Central America, in the 1980's are striking. Arguably, not since the Iran Contra scandal has this link been so apparent.

Every now and then there are very symbolic moments that cut through the black out and hint at this equivalence. I remember one such poignant moment hearing the reporting of one of the first US casualties in the Iraq war: Jose Gutierrez. Jose had lost his parents in the 36-year civil war in Guatemala. He survived life on the streets in Guatemala City, and later arrived in the US after a two-thousand-mile trek through Mexico, joining the US military. The irony that one of the first US victims in Iraq was Central American, was entirely lost on the vast majority of Western media.

When George W. Bush was elected in 2000, it gradually dawned on me that a number of key US administration's officials and advisers were veterans of Ronald Reagan's Central American policy in the 1980's. Every now and again a John Negroponte would pop up on the news here and an Otto Reich there. These were people with more than a passing interest in the patronage of anti-Communist governments in El Salvador and Guatemala and anti-Communist insurgents in Nicaragua (see box).

According to Greg Grandin, New York University Professor of Latin American history, the links between the current Bush administration's revolution in foreign policy and Reagan's hard line in Central America are even more profound than the simple recycling of personnel.

"It was Central America, and Latin America more broadly, where an insurgent New Right coalesced, as conservative activists used the region to respond to the crisis of the 1970's, a crisis provoked not only by America's defeat in Vietnam but by a deep economic recession and a culture of sceptical antimilitarism and political dissent that spread in the war's wake. Indeed, Reagan's Central American wars can best be understood as a dress rehearsal for what is going on now in the Middle East."

Grandin continues: "It was in these wars where the coalition made up of neo-conservatives, Christian evangelicals, free marketeers, and nationalists that today stands behind George W. Bush's expansive foreign policy first came together. There they had near free rein to bring the full power of the United States against a much weaker enemy in order to exorcise the ghost of Vietnam- and in so doing, begin the transformation of US foreign policy and domestic culture."1

Specific echoes between Latin America and the Middle East are numerous. They include how the US has: supported for dictatorial regimes implicated in genocide (compare Saddam Hussein with Efrain Rios Montt); used the 'War on Terror' (illicit drugs, arms, immigration and organised crime) as the pretext for US military intervention on a grand scale (e.g Plan Mayan Jaguar [Guatemala], Plan Colombia, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom [Afghanistan]); introduced neoliberal economics to the benefit of key US economic interests (CAFTA, Iraq, Afghanistan).

US experience in Central America seems to be increasingly seized on by desperate US officials and advisers as Iraq unravels. US Vice President Dick Cheney told the US electorate in the campaign for reelection in 2004 that El Salvador, with 50 percent of its population below the poverty level, was a model for what his administration hoped to achieve in Iraq. William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, appeared on TV to hail Central America as an "amazing success story" for US foreign policy. Pentagon officials have reportedly turned to the "Salvador option," (reported in Newsweek in January 2005, see also Craig Murray blog), which meant relying on local paramilitaries to impose order. As journalist Robert Kaplan put it recently: "Fifty-five Special Forces trainers in El Salvador accomplished more than did 550,000 soldiers in Vietnam."

When Senator Trent Lott argued in favour of the 1998 "Iraqi Liberation Act," which made the removal of Saddam Hussein official US policy (passed unanimously by the Senate), he reminded his colleagues of the success of the Reagan Doctrine and US patronage of the Nicaraguan Contras. "We supported freedom fighters in Latin America willing to fight and die for a democratic future". With Daniel Ortega's recent election in Nicaragua the comparisons between US foreign past and present, have started to make the headlines. Now more than ever, Central Americans with first hand experience of the US imperial workshop, as Grandin puts it, should be heeded.

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1. "Empire's Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the rise of the new imperialism" by Greg Grandin is published by is published by Metropolitan Books.

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The Revolving Door

-Elliott Abrams, Bush's current deputy national security adviser in charge of promoting democracy throughout the world;
-John Negroponte, former UN ambassador, envoy to Iraq, and now intelligence czar;
-Otto Reich, secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere during Bush's first term;
-John Poindexter, convicted of lying to Congress, conspiracy, and destroying evidence in the Iran Contra scandal during his tenure as Reagan's national security adviser, was appointed by Rumsfeld to oversee the Pentagon's stillborn Total Information Awareness programme.
-John Bolton, ambassador to the United Nations and an arch-unilateralist, served as Reagan's point man in the Justice Department to stonewall investigations into Iran-Contra.

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US Military Support For Guatemala

For the first time since military aid to Guatemala was suspended in 1990, $3.2 million in non-lethal military aid resumed flowing in March 2005. The administration released aid that had been frozen “in the pipeline” since 1990 over the Guatemalan military’s involvement in human rights abuses, including the murder of U.S. innkeeper Michael Devine (John J. Lumpkin, “U.S. Resumes Military Aid to Guatemala,” Associated Press, March 24, 2005).

The House of Representatives went a step further, lifting the ban on regular IMET (training in combat, tactics, war fighting strategy, and technical skills), maintaining in place only the ban on FMF (Foreign Military Financing, which generally pays for weapons and equipment).

Guatemala and Indonesia had been the only two countries specifically restricted from receiving IMET; the House also loosened restrictions on Indonesia (Expanded-IMET courses on non-combat subjects including civil military relations had been permitted for Guatemala since the Peace Accords were signed in 1996). However, the Senate disagreed, and the final version of the bill maintained the bans on regular IMET and FMF for Guatemala. [Source: Washington Office on Latin America]