US meddling in other countries' elections comes in all shapes and sizes

Observing the 2004 election in Berlin

Scott Shane wrote in Sunday's New York Times about the United States' history of interfering in other countries' elections in Russia Isn’t the Only One Meddling in Elections. We Do It, Too. We shouldn't be surprised that Russia intervened in the 2016 election. However, we should be more angry that President Obama, Congress and others were unable to prevent the interference and that President Trump and today's Republicans in Congress feel little sense of urgency in preventing a repeat scenario in 2018.

Shane's article obviously is peppered with examples of US intervention in Latin American during the Cold War: Guatemala. Chile. Nicaragua. Some interventions were more covert than others. However, the US has continued to insert itself into Latin America's democratic elections in the post-Cold War period.

Tim Gill from University of North Carolina at Wilmington looks at US meddling in Latin American elections during the George W. Bush years in the Monkey Cage with Americans shouldn’t be shocked by Russian interference in the election. The U.S. does it, too. Gill argues that U.S. democracy promotion efforts carried out by "the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the International Republican Institute (IRI) play an immense role in influencing political outcomes throughout the world."

Three contemporary cases of U.S. “democracy promotion” expose that this practice is little more than outright interference in other countries’ elections, aimed not at ensuring functional democracies, but rather at installing governments friendly to U.S. interests. Rather than seeking to perpetuate democracy across the globe like a global superpower, the U.S. behaves like an imperial power that attempts to cultivate governments supporting U.S. economic and security interests, regardless of their democratic credentials.

Gill relies on U.S. evidence from elections in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. While Shane uses cases where U.S. intervention "succeeded," Gill's cases are of U.S. interventions that failed to achieve their goals - the electoral defeat of leftist political alternatives.

The U.S. has also intervened in post-Cold War Latin America through less systematic means, such as the 2004 presidential elections in El Salvador. That election pitted ARENA's Tony Saca against the FMLN's Schafik Handal. Members of the Bush administration, veterans of the Cold War, and Republican congressman all spoke out against Handal and the FMLN.

George Bush's brother Florida Governor Jeb Bush and other officials met with ARENA leaders in late 2003 and early 2004 to demonstrate who the US supported. The message was loud and clear in the Salvadoran press.

However, US support for the ARENA candidate did not stop at "we prefer that party because of its pro-capitalist and pro-democracy stances" (whatever), and its support for the US invasion of Iraq. US officials threatened to punish El Salvador by limiting remittances if they voted for the wrong candidate and party, Handal and the FMLN.

In a recent Research and Policy article, Roy Germano tries to estimate how threatening to cut off remittances affects voter preferences. He's interested in Trump's threats against Mexico, but he uses the 2004 election in El Salvador to approach the question.

What at first sounded like an observation turned into a threat on March 17, 2004 – four days before the presidential election – when US Representatives Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA),. Dan Burton (R-IN), and Tom Tancredo (R-CO) declared on the floor of the House of Representatives that an FMLN victory “could mean a radical change in United States policy as it pertains to the essentially free flow of remittances from Salvadorans living in the United States to El Salvador” (Burton, 2004; Rohrabacher, 2004; Tancredo, 2004).

Comparing the FMLN to a terrorist organization, Tancredo argued that if Handal were to win the presidency, “it may be necessary for the United States authorities to examine closely and possibly apply special controls to the flow of $2 billion in remittances from the United States to El Salvador.” This, as Tancredo put it, would be “to the detriment of many people living in El Salvador” (Tancredo, 2004).

In the end, Germano has a hard time finding evidence that the threats "changed the outcome" of the election or "remittance recipients to vote differently than non-recipients." In all likelihood, Saca was going to win anyway and remittance recipients were more likely to vote for the more conservative candidate anyway.