We Should not Content Ourselves with a Sham

Jorrit van den Berk has a really interesting article in the Journal of Latin American Studies entitled 'We Should not Content Ourselves with a Sham': The US Foreign Service and the Central American Elections of the Early 1930s. I appreciate the archival work in which van den Berk investigates what Foreign Service Officers were saying and doing to promote US interests in Central America nearly one hundred years ago and the explicitly comparative framework (Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua).

There is no real paradox here, no clash between naïve Wilsonianism and cynical Realpolitik. Diplomats were guided by a consistent worldview that combined US promotion of limited democracy with social conservatism. Foreign Service elitism ensured a narrow conception of local politics that only included such actors as were thought to represent the capital's ‘society’. By extension, US ministers believed that democracy was safe as long as the ruling classes went through the motions of elections under legation supervision; at no point did they seek the expansion of political participation or political rights. Likewise, conservative solutions for political, social or economic problems were preferred over fundamental reforms. So even if neither Washington nor its legations foresaw the dictatorships of Ubico, Carías and many similarly inclined leaders of the Caribbean, it is difficult or even impossible to imagine that non-elite Central Americans would have been better off if US diplomats had continued to interfere in their politics throughout the 1930s. The final result would have been very similar: deeply conservative financial and social policy combined with an elitist political culture.

But surely, allowance must be made for the ways in which Central Americans themselves shaped their nations' destinies, even if the results are unattractive. After the Roosevelt administration shelved the 1923 Treaty and denounced intervention, Ubico and Carías and Araujo's successor Martínez openly did away with elections. Coming to the aid of a struggling liberal oligarchy, they built governments and societies that were not just conservative and elitist, but deeply militarised, autocratic and violent. The ultimate conclusion should be clear, though: during the early 1930s, US diplomats attempted to impose their own, highly paternalistic, vision of good government upon Central American politicians, but proved unable to maintain that position as policy-makers reined in intervention and local actors unfolded their own plans of good government. Thus, the ambitions and limits of US foreign policy must be understood as a dynamic interplay between several layers of the US policy apparatus and the ambitions of foreign actors.

The US supported the election of civilian elites in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The nascent democratic systems collapsed under the weight of the Great Depression, the US abandonment of interventionist policies beginning in the early-to-mid 1930s, and the political aspirations of regional leaders to prolong their terms in office,