The Return of Violent Anti-Americanism in Latin America

On September 20, a mob supporting Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, armed with sticks and machetes, took the streets of León to prevent a peaceful anti-government rally. They stopped traffic, searched buses and cars, and clashed with anti-riot police. A week later, another Ortega mob attacked students chanting “We don’t want violence.” They kicked them and whipped them with belts.

A yanqui opposition?

The media mostly noticed that Ortega, former Sandinista leader, was turning against several of his leftist allies, now organized as the Sandinista Renovation Movement. Also clear was his use of state institutions, namely the media, to slander his opposition. What few noted, however, was that Ortega had labeled the opposition “puppets of the yanqui empire.” While the motivations of the Nicaraguan government were clearly domestic, the rhetoric invoked the shopworn bogeyman of all-encompassing U.S. power.

Was this scapegoating? Ortega certainly never explained how men like Ernesto Cardenal and Sergio Ramírez, true black-and-red Sandinistas targeted by the Reagan administration’s contras in the 1980s and still committed progressives, could be “neoliberal oppressors,” as one Ortega supporter called the opposition.

What is clear is that anti-U.S. rhetoric has become so prevalent among leaders in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, that it now prompts the use of violence. For too long, the international community seems to have assumed that rhetoric like that of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez was just that, rhetorical. The assumption was that Chávez mostly called President Bush “the devil” at the United Nations in 2006 or ranted to crowds last month that “yanquis de mierda” should “go to hell” to score domestic political points without intending any violence to his targets. To be sure, Chávez’s has never called for violence against “the empire.”

But anti-Americanism, like any other predisposition, can turn from criticism to distrust to outright hatred in the blink of an eye, especially with the blessing of a fiery leader. And not just for Americans but for those perceived to be associated with them.

This violence-by-association is at work also in Bolivia. There, President Evo Morales, a strong Chávez ally, is in a diplomatic tussle with Washington since expelling its ambassador, Philip Goldberg, in September. More seriously, in September his supporters clashed violently with those of four provinces in rebellion against Morales’s new constitution. The result: 15 dead, mostly peasant followers of the president.

Morales’s encouragement of violence is partly to blame. In June Morales directly praised 20,000 protesters who marched to the U.S. embassy in La Paz and clashed with anti-riot police. And the long-time slogan of his party, “Long Live Coca! Death to the Yanquis!” cannot help but inflame passions.

We have witnessed this before, and it did not work. In the first third of the century, Latin Americans under U.S. occupation resisted violently, and thousands were killed. Worse, their violence produced nothing; it was peaceful protest that threw the Marines out.

In the second third, Cuba’s Fidel Castro encouraged copycats throughout the hemisphere. None succeeded.

In the third third, violence raged in Central America—to be sure, often in response to Reagan/contra attacks—and it also ended in failure. By the early 1990s all revolutionary anti-U.S. groups either capitulated or lost the trust of the people in elections.

To defend sovereignty, to fight over resources, even to smear political opponents—all these can be legitimate political means to an end. But anti-U.S. violence is wrong on moral and practical levels. It is especially deplorable when the victims of that violence are one’s own countrymen, even more so when they aren’t even allied with Washington.

This is in no way a call for the United States to counter what are still relatively minor incidents of violence with its own brand, which is usually far more destructive. The days of U.S.-sponsored coups in Latin America are over. Rather, Washington can help diffuse tensions by pointing to the divisive nature and bloody consequences of anti-U.S. rhetoric.