US Militarism is Anti-Democratic
The Democracy and Media Lab —
Introduction
Seth Donnelly and Angela Marino April 15th, 2023
Throughout the 20th century, scholars have pointed to US intervention by way of funding and training of security forces in the Global South and gross human rights violations perpetrated by these forces. The greater the US funding and training, the greater the human rights abuses including torture and extrajudicial killings. Although US officials frequently denied the existence of this correlation, they did justify US support for repressive military regimes in the Global South during the Cold War as part of the imperative to “contain” the spread of “communism”. Extensive scholarship demonstrated that this Cold War justification was, in fact, a pretext for the US neo-colonial agenda of resource extraction and labor exploitation in the Global South. For example, in their path breaking book The Washington Connection to Third World Fascism: the Political Economy of Human Rights vol.I (1979), Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman effectively showed that the correlation was a causation; the US increased funding to repressive security forces in order to maintain the exclusion of the impoverished majority from meaningful, democratic power, thereby reproducing a “favorable investment climate” for US corporations.
Mothers holding the signs of their children who were tortured and disappeared by state officials closely tied to US militarism under the Peña Nieto regime in 2014. Mexico City.
Additionally, U.S. funding of foreign security forces, along with arms sales to these forces, is not a deterrent; it is an investment in a for-profit economy made up by U.S. businesses in arms sales, chemical manufacturing, as well as military, surveillance, and carceral technologies. While policy think tanks persuade politicians that there is a public good for ‘security interests,’ the entire premise of deterrence is false.
The “Militarism is Anti-Democratic” research team of UC Berkeley’s Democracy and Media Project sought to investigate whether or not this correlation holds true in the first two decades of the 21st Century. In particular, the team focused on US funding/ training of security forces in four countries in the Americas with proven records of contemporary, massive human rights violations such as extrajudicial executions: Haiti, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico. In each country, covered in its own chapter below, the team’s research found that an ongoing correlation exists between high levels of US security “assistance” and gross human rights violations.
In these case studies, the correlation reveals the same causal relationship that Chomsky and Herman exposed. The U.S. government has increased funding and weaponization of security forces in these 4 countries, bolstering repressive regimes that have maintained a “favorable investment climate” for U.S. corporations while excluding the impoverished majority from meaningful, democratic power.
Undoubtedly, other countries in the Americas, such as Honduras following the US-backed coup in 2009 and Peru following the US-backed coup in 2022, yield the same essential findings. Given that these countries are not included here, it should be kept in mind that this report only begins to shed light on the correlation in the 21st century. Further research by others is needed to develop a comprehensive, hemispheric report, a task all the more relevant on this 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine.
The U.S. strategy of increasing military aid and security force funding to enforce a set of global economic relationships is increasingly being challenged by a growing number of progressive governments in Latin America propelled to electoral victories by popular, Indigenous-led social movements. These governments– through the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)-- are seeking to build a “zone of peace” based on respect for multipolarism, and for the sovereignty of peoples within and across nations. Such sovereignty affirms the values of “buen vivir”, mutual aid, community decision-making and control over resources, and genuine democracy. These values provide a path forward to move beyond the U.S.-imposed patterns of exploitation and violence detailed in this report.
