A Note about “Our Backyard”: Advice that Thomas Shannon Might Give to Mike Pompeo

Mark Weisbrot, therealnews.com

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Excerpt:

Before he resigned in June, Thomas Shannon was the third-ranking official in the US State Department, and most influential regarding relations with Latin America and the Caribbean. In a 33-year career at State, Shannon acquired a reputation as a highly effective diplomat and skilled negotiator. Under the Bush administration, Shannon served as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs (the top State Department official for Latin America and the Caribbean).

He was appointed ambassador to Brazil by President Obama before he was finally made Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in 2016. In these positions under both Republican and Democratic administrations, Shannon was involved in highly contentious episodes including the US role in Honduras’ 2009 military coup, as well as “parliamentary coups” that removed sitting presidents in Brazil and Paraguay. Shannon was also involved in the tumultuous relationship with Venezuela, which followed a long, downward trajectory after the US supported the short-lived coup d’etat against President Hugo Chávez in 2002. (Shannon was Director of Andean Affairs in 2001 to 2002.)

Shannon’s resignation was part of a wave of departures from the State Department during the Trump administration that has left it depleted and weakened. In what follows, Mark Weisbrot imagines the advice and counsel that Ambassador Shannon might offer to the new secretary of state Mike Pompeo, based particularly Shannon’s leading role in US policy in this hemisphere in the twenty-first century.

The letter illustrates the continuities between the two previous US administrations’ hemispheric policy regimes and that of the Trump administration; at the same time it documents the differences in style between the skilled diplomatic maneuvering represented by officials like Shannon, and the “gloves off” intervention, and lack of concern for public perception, of the Trump team. While the letter is fictional, the events and facts described therein are well documented, quite real, and ongoing. ...

We suffered a bit of a public relations nightmare from the 2016 assassination of environmental activist Berta Cáceres. With her winning the Goldman Prize just a year before, and all of her international support, it naturally became more of a news item than the hundreds of environmental and other dissident activists and leaders that have been murdered, with impunity, since the coup. And then four of the nine people arrested for the crime were tied to the military, in which we are very heavily invested. This included the arrest in March of the first person who is alleged to be an “intellectual author” of the crime, who unfortunately was a former military intelligence officer who was friendly with our embassy. There have been a number of letters from many members of Congress, as well as proposed legislation, but thanks to our public diplomacy [JB emphasis], the damage has been minimal and we are still in control. To paraphrase FDR, Hernández may be a SOB, but he’s our SOB, and Honduras is still ours, just as it was in the 1980s, when it was used as a base of operations for our wars to keep Nicaragua and El Salvador within our orbit. ...

There is much that I could tell you about Venezuela, but I will try to keep this part short. As you may know, for almost all of the twenty-first century it has been America’s number one or two target in the world for regime change (outranked by Iraq or Iran at various times). They were clearly the main instigator of the Latin American rebellion, although Chávez mostly shouted from the mountaintops what all the other left presidents, and even some of the not-so-left ones, were thinking and feeling. And he was sitting on 500 billion barrels of oil, the largest petroleum reserves in the world. When we tried to get rid of him in the 2002 military coup, a lot of people thought that it was because we wanted the oil, but of course they were wrong. In fact Chevron and Exxon-Mobil ― our two biggest oil companies ― had good relations with Chávez for most of his presidency, and wanted us to leave him alone. They were heavily invested there and still making good profits even after Chávez increased his government’s take ― as everyone else in the world did when oil prices took off after 2002.

But we look at things geo-strategically, and any country with that much oil is going to be a regional power and possess a certain independence as well, and so it is very important to have a leadership that is on our team. And so we poured money into the opposition, which for the first four years of his presidency had what one of their more intellectual leaders called “a strategy of military overthrow.” Fortunately the US and international media were completely on our side, and so for more than a decade and a half our involvement in that coup has been treated as a mere allegation by a discredited source, namely Chávez, or his even more discredited successor, Maduro. Of course all the reporters in Caracas knew it was true, but they did not report it. Even when our own State Department acknowledged that the US government “provided training, institution building, and other support to individuals and organizations understood to be actively involved in the military coup.” Or when CIA documents were released, showing that we had advance knowledge of the coup, but tried to help it succeed with false statements during the events. This is just one of thousands of examples of how the media helped us in this long effort, but I think it shows more clearly than others how important our public diplomacy can be, even though the coup itself failed due to bad planning. Because of these successes, Chávez was always portrayed as the aggressor when he denounced US intervention, even as we poured in tens of millions of dollars to opposition groups (counting only the money that was a matter of public record) and worked constantly to try and isolate his regime internationally. ...

I opposed the Trump administration’s financial embargo on Venezuela before it was announced on August 24th last year. It’s not because I don’t share your objective of getting rid of this curse ― we have pursued this goal fastidiously for nearly two decades. But the financial embargo isn’t necessary at this point, and Maduro can point to it as worsening the shortages there, which it obviously does. Because they cannot borrow, they had to pay off in principal on their bonds in 2017. They cannot restructure their debt. Many kinds of credits are cut off ― even those that are not specifically prohibited by Trump’s executive order ― and this contributes to the collapse of oil production, as well as shortages of medicines and food.

All this is overkill. This intervention lends credibility, among a minority sector of the Venezuelan population, to the government’s claim of a status of victimhood. And it doesn’t look good to many people in the world who see the embargo as worsening a humanitarian crisis. Fortunately, thanks to our years of patient public diplomacy, the media has ignored the impact of our financial embargo, much as it ignored our years of previous intervention. And it is the media that determines what most people believe, especially if it is about something that they do not directly experience. But the embargo is completely unnecessary, since the economy continues to spiral downward on its own. ...

We have left you with a Latin America that is mostly controlled by loyal allies of the United States: In Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, and more. We have 13 Latin American countries (the Lima Group) that have called for financial sanctions against Venezuela; just a few years ago this would have been unimaginable. Even after the 2009 military coup in Honduras, which infuriated leaders across the political spectrum, there was not even talk sanctions ― so strong is the Latin American tradition of non-interference in the affairs of other states. ...

All this is even more remarkable in light of the cards we were dealt in the first decade of this century. If you take a snapshot of the current landscape, it may appear as though this is the natural order of things. But I hope you can see that it is not necessarily so. It was cultivated like a delicate garden with patient diplomacy ― including the public diplomacy involved in getting our message and our explanations of almost all the myriad conflicts to dominate the mass media, sometimes with remarkable uniformity. As you can see we were not afraid to support or even sponsor political action by other means when appropriate: the parliamentary coups in Brazil and Paraguay; or the military coups and other interventions in Venezuela, Honduras, and Haiti. We have used our financial power as well. And we spend tens of millions of dollars annually through the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy to support pro-US political organizations. (I can tell you much more about other things that we did in a classified briefing.) But none of these cannot be our primary means of influencing the politics of the region. Diplomacy, including public diplomacy, must always come first. ...

Mark Weisbrot is Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and the president of Just Foreign Policy. He is also the author of “Failed: What the ‘Experts’ Got Wrong About the Global Economy” (2015, Oxford University Press). ...