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In the Name of Democracy: U.S. Policy Toward Latin America in the Reagan Years
This is the first comprehensive, even-handed examination of U.S. policy in Latin America during the Reagan era. Drawing on interviews with United States officials and his own perspective as a former State Department lawyer, Carothers sheds new light on the much-discussed U.S. involvements in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Panama, and turns up varied and often unexpected findings in less-studied countries such as Bolivia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, and Chile.
- GenresHistoryPolitical Science
322 pages, Paperback
First published July 23, 1991
148 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Carothers
27 books8 followersThomas Carothers is an American lawyer and international relations scholar. His research focuses on international democracy support, democratization, and U.S. foreign policy. He is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he founded and currently co-directs the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program. He has also taught at several universities in the United States and Europe, including Central European University, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Nuffield College, Oxford.
Carothers has served in various senior management positions at the Carnegie Endowment, including as the interim president of the Endowment in 2021, and as senior vice president for studies for many years.
Carothers has served in various senior management positions at the Carnegie Endowment, including as the interim president of the Endowment in 2021, and as senior vice president for studies for many years.
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November 20, 2024
During the 1980s, several projects were pursued under the auspices of the U.S. government with the stated aim of “promoting democracy” in Latin America, with a special focus on Central America. The officials who worked on these projects, we are told, were perfectly “sincere” in their belief that they were engaged in the goal of promoting democracy. Upon hearing this claim, a sound instinctive reaction might be to laugh. To mention a somewhat analogous case, in the early 2000:s, the Putin government in Russia employed under its auspices a Human Rights Ombudsman for Chechnya. This office was even headed by an ethnic Chechen, Abdul-Khakim Sultygov. If you were to ask Sultygov, or his staff, they would undoubtedly profess to have been driven by a perfectly sincere desire to advance the cause of human rights in Chechnya. In the West, this would be dismissed as a joke. The whole enterprise would be seen as a pathetic attempt at a propagandistic veneer behind which Russia's monstrously brutal counterinsurgency war could be more effectively waged. A sane person ought to react no differently upon hearing about U.S. “democracy promotion” projects in Central America.
Let us, nevertheless, suspend disbelief and take the farce seriously.
Thomas Carothers provides us with a highly informed, lucidly argued, thoughtful, and judicious account of these projects, in which he himself participated, as a low level Reagan Administration official. Carothers insists that the democracy promotion enterprise was perfectly sincere in intent, and he assesses its degree of success or failure in a series of illuminating case studies. One factor he emphasizes is that the Reagan foreign policy team was non-monolithic, in the sense that it was made up of different factions. There were the “hardliners” who scorned humanitarian sentimentality in ruthless pursuit of a military-security oriented agenda, to be contrasted with the “moderates”, who shared the commitment to said agenda but believed it could not be achieved unless it involved a humanistic—specifically, a democracy-enhancing—component.
The military-security agenda to which the Reagan Administration was committed in Latin America, was, of course, to prevent the emergence of leftist governments. Such governments were deemed unacceptable by the U.S., according to Carothers, because they were perceived as instruments in the Soviet Union's campaign to conquer the world. I think he much too uncritically accepts the notion that U.S. officials actually were driven by this alleged belief. He does not discuss facts that would serve to call this into question, for example, the Reagan administration going to great lengths to prevent leftist Nicaragua from diversifying its foreign relations, instead preferring its dependency on the Evil Empire. An alternative hypothesis is that the U.S. opposed leftist governments in Latin America, not because of any realistic concern about Soviet expansionism, but because such governments might might precipitate political evolution threatening to the entrenched, and flagrantly unequal, socio-economic order which the U.S. consistently sought to preserve, a fact Carothers repeatedly notes. (His repeated unironic use of the phrase “internal aggression” perhaps indicates an unwitting confirmation of this hypothesis). This is, incidentally, an enterprise in which the Reagan administration, and its local collaborators, appear to have succeeded quite brilliantly, which would seem to belie Carothers' stated conclusion that the U.S. did not play “a significant negative role […] in the political evolution” of Latin American countries (assuming that this outcome should be viewed negatively).
But let us put that qualm aside as well, and accept the premise that the Reagan administration was actually driven by a policy that was “anticommunist” in the sense of seeking to thwart Soviet expansion. It is the relationship between this anticommunist policy and democracy promotion that constitutes a primary theme for Carothers' case studies.
In El Salvador, the U.S. pursued an anticommunist policy in the form of providing massive levels of military assistance to the government, effectively controlled by the military, so that a victory by the leftist guerrilla movement would be prevented. In the early Reagan years, the “hardliners” dominated El Salvador policy, and democracy considerations were thus an utter irrelevance, as Carothers points out. As time went by, and the leftist threat began to appear less menacing, the “moderates” started gaining more influence, with the result that a new emphasis began to be placed on the theme of democracy promotion (conceived of as a facet of the military campaign). The manner in which the democracy promotion theme manifested itself was the large amounts of support given to the elections held in the country in 1982 and 1984. As Carothers emphasizes, however, these elections in no way resulted in the weakening of the de facto rule exercised over the country by the violently anti-democratic security apparatus. I think he understates the degree to which these elections were farcical. He notes that “the left” were excluded from participation, but not the destruction of the independent press and murder of opposition politicians by agents of the U.S.-backed military regime, but he still conveys the basic picture of the decidedly non-democratic nature of El Salvador that persisted in spite of these elections.
In the case of Honduras, the Reagan administration consistently supported civilian rule, but this was, again, a purely nominal affair, as Carothers makes clear, with the Honduran military firmly remaining the country's effective rulers, a phenomenon that was even exacerbated by the Reagan policy of using Honduras as a base for the contra war in Nicaragua, which had the effect of compromising the country's sovereignty to U.S. power, to a historically unprecedented extent. In the case of Guatemala, Carothers alleges that U.S. policy had only a marginal effect, since, according to his account, the U.S. gave no significant military aid to that country's de facto military rulers (notorious for their nearly limitless brutality). Again, I think he understates the case here, in that he ignores the substantial aid given to the Honduran military by the U.S. client state of Israel, surely with the patron's approval. Given its limited role in Guatemala, the U.S. can not be significantly credited with the tenuous movement toward civilian rule that eventually started under Cerezo, Carothers relates. In the case of Costa Rica, Carothers maintains that the U.S. played a positive role through providing economic aid. Here he possibly overstates the case by failing to examine any deleterious consequences for Costa Ricans from the forced austerity component that, as he himself notes, was a major part of this aid package.
As Carothers persuasively shows, there was no significant democracy enhancing effects involved in Reagan's notorious policies towards Nicaragua and Grenada.
So much for Central America, the primary area of concern. What about the rest of Latin America? As Reagan entered office, much of the continent was under the rule of military dictatorships—Brazil, Argentina, and Chile the most notorious. The U.S. quickly moved to strengthen relations with these regimes, in a reversal of the ostensible Carter policy of adopting a critical stance toward these regimes (Carothers uncritically accepts the alleged substance of said policy). One exception was Bolivia, where Reagan was consistent in opposing the military's coup plots, according to his account. By the mid-1980s, due to a number of factors internal to the Latin American countries, not least of all a severe economic crisis, caused these dictatorships to give way to elected civilian governments. Apart from some weak rhetorical support, the U.S. played no role in this democratic transition, which didn't stop the likes of Elliot Abrams from falsely taking credit for the achievement, as quoted by Carothers.
Towards the end of the decade, there were only four remaining non-left dictatorships in the hemisphere: Paraguay, Chile, Haiti, and Panama. As the long-term non-feasibility of maintaining these governments became more and more evident, the U.S. (at least the by then ascendant “moderate” faction) did in fact begin to push for a transition to elected civilian rule, with mixed results. U.S. influence in these cases too was quite limited, Carothers emphasizes.
The book then features an informative presentation of the various “political assistance projects” in Latin America that were inaugurated during the Reagan years. These ranged from programs aimed at providing technical assistance in the carrying out of electoral procedures in such places as El Salvador (on the merit of these elections, see above), to others oriented towards strengthening the judicial system of Latin American countries. The Reagan era also saw the birth of the by now infamous National Endowment for Democracy. It was quite fascinating to learn the intricate workings of this organism. Of the four parts that make up this organism, one is headed by the private business community in the U.S., a second by the Republican party. Both of these entities are in fact not devoted to promoting democracy at all, but rather to blatant partisan interference in Latin American politics (promoting “free market” policies).
The primary conclusion of this study is that the democracy promotion activities in Latin America, however sincere their intent may have been, were nevertheless an unqualified failure. “The underlying U.S. goal is maintaining the basic societal orders of particular Latin American countries … ensuring that the economics are not drastically rearranged and that the power relations of the various social sectors are not turned upside down.” The U.S. “works with the existing power structures and tries to teach or persuade them to be democratic rather than working from the bottom up to spread the ideas and principles of a democratic society....” That much at least he demonstrates with highly persuasive analysis and rich documentation.
It is valuable to learn that “democracy promotion” is a phenomenon viewed critically by someone who is surely among the best-informed analysts of the phenomenon, and, furthermore, writes from an insider's perspective. This insight should be kept in mind when one evaluates the claim, advanced by some, that U.S. “democracy promotion” activities have helped to bring about disastrous consequences in recent years, in such places as Ukraine.
Let us, nevertheless, suspend disbelief and take the farce seriously.
Thomas Carothers provides us with a highly informed, lucidly argued, thoughtful, and judicious account of these projects, in which he himself participated, as a low level Reagan Administration official. Carothers insists that the democracy promotion enterprise was perfectly sincere in intent, and he assesses its degree of success or failure in a series of illuminating case studies. One factor he emphasizes is that the Reagan foreign policy team was non-monolithic, in the sense that it was made up of different factions. There were the “hardliners” who scorned humanitarian sentimentality in ruthless pursuit of a military-security oriented agenda, to be contrasted with the “moderates”, who shared the commitment to said agenda but believed it could not be achieved unless it involved a humanistic—specifically, a democracy-enhancing—component.
The military-security agenda to which the Reagan Administration was committed in Latin America, was, of course, to prevent the emergence of leftist governments. Such governments were deemed unacceptable by the U.S., according to Carothers, because they were perceived as instruments in the Soviet Union's campaign to conquer the world. I think he much too uncritically accepts the notion that U.S. officials actually were driven by this alleged belief. He does not discuss facts that would serve to call this into question, for example, the Reagan administration going to great lengths to prevent leftist Nicaragua from diversifying its foreign relations, instead preferring its dependency on the Evil Empire. An alternative hypothesis is that the U.S. opposed leftist governments in Latin America, not because of any realistic concern about Soviet expansionism, but because such governments might might precipitate political evolution threatening to the entrenched, and flagrantly unequal, socio-economic order which the U.S. consistently sought to preserve, a fact Carothers repeatedly notes. (His repeated unironic use of the phrase “internal aggression” perhaps indicates an unwitting confirmation of this hypothesis). This is, incidentally, an enterprise in which the Reagan administration, and its local collaborators, appear to have succeeded quite brilliantly, which would seem to belie Carothers' stated conclusion that the U.S. did not play “a significant negative role […] in the political evolution” of Latin American countries (assuming that this outcome should be viewed negatively).
But let us put that qualm aside as well, and accept the premise that the Reagan administration was actually driven by a policy that was “anticommunist” in the sense of seeking to thwart Soviet expansion. It is the relationship between this anticommunist policy and democracy promotion that constitutes a primary theme for Carothers' case studies.
In El Salvador, the U.S. pursued an anticommunist policy in the form of providing massive levels of military assistance to the government, effectively controlled by the military, so that a victory by the leftist guerrilla movement would be prevented. In the early Reagan years, the “hardliners” dominated El Salvador policy, and democracy considerations were thus an utter irrelevance, as Carothers points out. As time went by, and the leftist threat began to appear less menacing, the “moderates” started gaining more influence, with the result that a new emphasis began to be placed on the theme of democracy promotion (conceived of as a facet of the military campaign). The manner in which the democracy promotion theme manifested itself was the large amounts of support given to the elections held in the country in 1982 and 1984. As Carothers emphasizes, however, these elections in no way resulted in the weakening of the de facto rule exercised over the country by the violently anti-democratic security apparatus. I think he understates the degree to which these elections were farcical. He notes that “the left” were excluded from participation, but not the destruction of the independent press and murder of opposition politicians by agents of the U.S.-backed military regime, but he still conveys the basic picture of the decidedly non-democratic nature of El Salvador that persisted in spite of these elections.
In the case of Honduras, the Reagan administration consistently supported civilian rule, but this was, again, a purely nominal affair, as Carothers makes clear, with the Honduran military firmly remaining the country's effective rulers, a phenomenon that was even exacerbated by the Reagan policy of using Honduras as a base for the contra war in Nicaragua, which had the effect of compromising the country's sovereignty to U.S. power, to a historically unprecedented extent. In the case of Guatemala, Carothers alleges that U.S. policy had only a marginal effect, since, according to his account, the U.S. gave no significant military aid to that country's de facto military rulers (notorious for their nearly limitless brutality). Again, I think he understates the case here, in that he ignores the substantial aid given to the Honduran military by the U.S. client state of Israel, surely with the patron's approval. Given its limited role in Guatemala, the U.S. can not be significantly credited with the tenuous movement toward civilian rule that eventually started under Cerezo, Carothers relates. In the case of Costa Rica, Carothers maintains that the U.S. played a positive role through providing economic aid. Here he possibly overstates the case by failing to examine any deleterious consequences for Costa Ricans from the forced austerity component that, as he himself notes, was a major part of this aid package.
As Carothers persuasively shows, there was no significant democracy enhancing effects involved in Reagan's notorious policies towards Nicaragua and Grenada.
So much for Central America, the primary area of concern. What about the rest of Latin America? As Reagan entered office, much of the continent was under the rule of military dictatorships—Brazil, Argentina, and Chile the most notorious. The U.S. quickly moved to strengthen relations with these regimes, in a reversal of the ostensible Carter policy of adopting a critical stance toward these regimes (Carothers uncritically accepts the alleged substance of said policy). One exception was Bolivia, where Reagan was consistent in opposing the military's coup plots, according to his account. By the mid-1980s, due to a number of factors internal to the Latin American countries, not least of all a severe economic crisis, caused these dictatorships to give way to elected civilian governments. Apart from some weak rhetorical support, the U.S. played no role in this democratic transition, which didn't stop the likes of Elliot Abrams from falsely taking credit for the achievement, as quoted by Carothers.
Towards the end of the decade, there were only four remaining non-left dictatorships in the hemisphere: Paraguay, Chile, Haiti, and Panama. As the long-term non-feasibility of maintaining these governments became more and more evident, the U.S. (at least the by then ascendant “moderate” faction) did in fact begin to push for a transition to elected civilian rule, with mixed results. U.S. influence in these cases too was quite limited, Carothers emphasizes.
The book then features an informative presentation of the various “political assistance projects” in Latin America that were inaugurated during the Reagan years. These ranged from programs aimed at providing technical assistance in the carrying out of electoral procedures in such places as El Salvador (on the merit of these elections, see above), to others oriented towards strengthening the judicial system of Latin American countries. The Reagan era also saw the birth of the by now infamous National Endowment for Democracy. It was quite fascinating to learn the intricate workings of this organism. Of the four parts that make up this organism, one is headed by the private business community in the U.S., a second by the Republican party. Both of these entities are in fact not devoted to promoting democracy at all, but rather to blatant partisan interference in Latin American politics (promoting “free market” policies).
The primary conclusion of this study is that the democracy promotion activities in Latin America, however sincere their intent may have been, were nevertheless an unqualified failure. “The underlying U.S. goal is maintaining the basic societal orders of particular Latin American countries … ensuring that the economics are not drastically rearranged and that the power relations of the various social sectors are not turned upside down.” The U.S. “works with the existing power structures and tries to teach or persuade them to be democratic rather than working from the bottom up to spread the ideas and principles of a democratic society....” That much at least he demonstrates with highly persuasive analysis and rich documentation.
It is valuable to learn that “democracy promotion” is a phenomenon viewed critically by someone who is surely among the best-informed analysts of the phenomenon, and, furthermore, writes from an insider's perspective. This insight should be kept in mind when one evaluates the claim, advanced by some, that U.S. “democracy promotion” activities have helped to bring about disastrous consequences in recent years, in such places as Ukraine.
June 23, 2018
This book appeared at the tail end of the cold war, its theme the "democracy promotion" aims of the Reagan '80s in Latin America. While seemingly a matter of history and of narrow regional focus, I found the theme immediately relevant to the "democratization" process the US undertook globally - virtually as soon as Carothers' book left the press. His main contention is that the United States has a self-serving view of democracy, reflecting its own history and traditions; and its geo-political interests of the moment. Instead, Latin America needs democracy that actually empowers local populations, not a legislature of career lawyers serving as public retainers for wealthy backers.
In outlining North/Central/South American strategy from Washington, Carothers - a legal adviser at the Council on Foreign Relations - outlines the mixed successes and failures throughout the lower half of the hemisphere. The Reagan regime was divided - sometimes sharply so - between militant anti-Communist hardliners who adopted democracy themes as a fig leaf for military action, who could speak of "fledgling democracies" in countries where death squads filled body dumps. And on the other side, with moderate-cum-"liberals" who insisted that the reality should at least approach the rhetoric; that the unwashed masses should be given something tangible to keep them from turning to leftists, nationalists, Castroites, and other anti-US alternatives. Both failed to appreciate that in the skewered economic and political order of Latin America, democracy is itself revolutionary and hard to square with business as usual.
The same theme echoes today in the new cold war in the Middle East, of democracy promotion vs. militant Islam; or in "humanitarian interventions" in the Balkans. Yet in the Reagan years the Vietnam legacy was still strong: with the exception of tiny Grenada, Reagan wanted no US boots on Latin American soil. The charge of "Yankee imperialism" was still a sensitive one at home, and no more so abroad than in Latin America with its history of Marine occupations. It was only after Reagan, and the unraveling of the other power bloc, that North American hands were unbound to undertake more aggressive actions; first with Panama, then the former Yugoslavia, then Iraq and beyond, with NATO expansion flowing into the very heart of its 1980s adversary.
But Carothers' warnings of US attitudes remain more valid than even at his time of writing. The US still equates democracy with "free elections" in the most technical sense, not with any content in the choices offered the voting public, or who even constitutes this roster, except in ensuring the "good guys" win. In this sense the US promoted democracy in Sandinista Nicaragua, and here I'll disagree with Carothers: US efforts did effect the outcome. The opposition UNO was heavily funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and its affiliates, and these sources were not blocked and hamstrung as Carothers suggests. And no matter how discredited the contras in Congress, they remained a viable destabilizing force at home. UNO's candidates were not subtle in their hints of further war if the elections did not go their way; thus a vote for UNO became a practical vote for peace, surprising the Sandinistas who thought their local peace accords had sowed it up for them. With Nicaragua as precedent the US has since launched "color-coded" democratization movements whose goal is not just promoting the forms of democracy, but open regime change against "unfriendly" governments, sanctified by a gamed but technically "free" electoral process, with the biggest warchest winning - just like back home.
The recent results of the United States' latest national elections should warn us that democracy promotion - like other virtues - thus begin best at home.
In outlining North/Central/South American strategy from Washington, Carothers - a legal adviser at the Council on Foreign Relations - outlines the mixed successes and failures throughout the lower half of the hemisphere. The Reagan regime was divided - sometimes sharply so - between militant anti-Communist hardliners who adopted democracy themes as a fig leaf for military action, who could speak of "fledgling democracies" in countries where death squads filled body dumps. And on the other side, with moderate-cum-"liberals" who insisted that the reality should at least approach the rhetoric; that the unwashed masses should be given something tangible to keep them from turning to leftists, nationalists, Castroites, and other anti-US alternatives. Both failed to appreciate that in the skewered economic and political order of Latin America, democracy is itself revolutionary and hard to square with business as usual.
The same theme echoes today in the new cold war in the Middle East, of democracy promotion vs. militant Islam; or in "humanitarian interventions" in the Balkans. Yet in the Reagan years the Vietnam legacy was still strong: with the exception of tiny Grenada, Reagan wanted no US boots on Latin American soil. The charge of "Yankee imperialism" was still a sensitive one at home, and no more so abroad than in Latin America with its history of Marine occupations. It was only after Reagan, and the unraveling of the other power bloc, that North American hands were unbound to undertake more aggressive actions; first with Panama, then the former Yugoslavia, then Iraq and beyond, with NATO expansion flowing into the very heart of its 1980s adversary.
But Carothers' warnings of US attitudes remain more valid than even at his time of writing. The US still equates democracy with "free elections" in the most technical sense, not with any content in the choices offered the voting public, or who even constitutes this roster, except in ensuring the "good guys" win. In this sense the US promoted democracy in Sandinista Nicaragua, and here I'll disagree with Carothers: US efforts did effect the outcome. The opposition UNO was heavily funded by the National Endowment for Democracy and its affiliates, and these sources were not blocked and hamstrung as Carothers suggests. And no matter how discredited the contras in Congress, they remained a viable destabilizing force at home. UNO's candidates were not subtle in their hints of further war if the elections did not go their way; thus a vote for UNO became a practical vote for peace, surprising the Sandinistas who thought their local peace accords had sowed it up for them. With Nicaragua as precedent the US has since launched "color-coded" democratization movements whose goal is not just promoting the forms of democracy, but open regime change against "unfriendly" governments, sanctified by a gamed but technically "free" electoral process, with the biggest warchest winning - just like back home.
The recent results of the United States' latest national elections should warn us that democracy promotion - like other virtues - thus begin best at home.
November 14, 2025
Good. Carothers writes about the foreign policy of Reagan towards Latin America, concluding that while the U.S. has often prioritized 'stability' or anticommunism in the region over sincere attempts at democracy promotion, in some cases, perhaps inadvertently, dictatorships were pressured to democratize. In Chile, the Reagan administration did successfully pressure Pinochet to accept a plebiscite. However, the failure of democratization can be blamed on U.S. policymakers bias towards "U.S.-like" systems of government as the only acceptable form of democracy, the influence of right-wing groups in influencing democracy aid, and lack of coordination between different actors in pro-democracy NGOs, and above all, lack of understanding of local political institutions and systems in Latin America from the U.S. perspective.
October 2, 2012
Carothers interviewed a lot of people who worked for the Reagan adminstration and uses his research to give a country-by-country account of the administration's policies. He especially traces the theme of the promotion of democracy and charts the competition between hard-line anti-communists and moderates in the policymaking process.
He finds that the moderates gained influence as time went on. They usually paid more attention to advocating democracy, except in Nicaragua where the hard-liners adopted it as a tactic to undermine and, they hoped, destroy the Marxist-influenced Sandinista regime there. He believes that democracy rhetoric was generally genuine but also shallow and not particularly effective.
I would recommend it for those who are interested in the topic. I read it for a research paper on Reagan's Latin America policy.
He finds that the moderates gained influence as time went on. They usually paid more attention to advocating democracy, except in Nicaragua where the hard-liners adopted it as a tactic to undermine and, they hoped, destroy the Marxist-influenced Sandinista regime there. He believes that democracy rhetoric was generally genuine but also shallow and not particularly effective.
I would recommend it for those who are interested in the topic. I read it for a research paper on Reagan's Latin America policy.
January 10, 2016
Excellent summary of what Bolaño called the Vietnam that was Central America.
From chapter 3: "By far the most important effect of the Reagan policy was the tremendous destruction it wreaked on Nicaragua..... Approximately 30,000 Nicaraguans were killed and tens of thousands others were wounded, a death toll higher in per capita terms than those suffered by the United States in the Civil War, World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. A generation of young Nicaraguans was devastated."
From chapter 3: "By far the most important effect of the Reagan policy was the tremendous destruction it wreaked on Nicaragua..... Approximately 30,000 Nicaraguans were killed and tens of thousands others were wounded, a death toll higher in per capita terms than those suffered by the United States in the Civil War, World War One, World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. A generation of young Nicaraguans was devastated."
May 3, 2012
Ridiculously repetitive, but informative.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews