RfD with Aviva Chomsky - How the Monroe Doctrine still functions to this day

Despite being over 200 years old, the Monroe Doctrine never disappeared. It just changed appearance.

In collaboration with Jakob Beller

Exploring the interdependence of the Americas under the direction of Washington, Room for Discussion held an interview with Aviva Chomsky this Tuesday, March 10th. As an American author, historian, and activist, Chomsky has been a long-standing advocate for Latin American solidarity and immigrants’ rights. Her books discuss the political and economic scene of the Americas, an interest which comes from her experiences working for a farmworkers’ labour union. In this interview, she explored the ways the Monroe Doctrine has been present throughout the centuries in various areas of the globe.

Aviva Chomsky ©"MX MM AVIVA CHOMSKYMIGRACION" by Secretaría de Cultura de la Ciudad de México, CC BY-SA 2.0

Politics of forgetting

The Interview began with a focus on the tragic death of the Chilean President Salvador Allende. His death is a gateway to understanding how civilisation has a limit to offering its sympathy and attention to a cause. Allende's death (regardless of whether you think he was assassinated or killed himself) happened in the onslaught and coup of the Chilean system, resulting in the rise of the Pinochet dictatorship. It quickly became overshadowed by new political atrocities and wars. While Allende and his successor, Pinochet’s appointment, should have reminded us of the need to define political memory, instead, attention shifted to a world that continues to remain unstable. 

Chomsky used this event to argue that these isolated tragedies have become a coordinated system for ensuring dominance and power structures. In the atrocities we see unfold today, there is a limit to how far civilisation can follow an event and give its support. In Chomsky’s opinion, the Washington system has adopted this as a method of governing and indirectly justifying to its voters the implications of their actions. In a time of constant news cycles and social media echo chambers, viewers and readers with limited attention spans for the news are swamped by endless global events.

How US foreign policy historically loves dictators

To understand US interventionism and its paradoxical love for dictatorship, Chomsky looked back at the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. Created during a period of revolutions in the Americas, it served as a warning for European nations against further colonisation and as protection for newly independent Latin American countries. While it was only a presidential statement, with the later attachment of ‘doctrine’, it has been used as the golden ticket for US intervention ever since. 

The Monroe Doctrine itself gives no grounds for why the US has allowed or even helped install dictators in Latin American countries. The question at hand is: What does a dictatorship offer that democracy doesn’t? In the interview, Chomsky paints a nuanced picture by observing how Guatemala’s “10 years of spring” - a decade of democracy from 1944 to 1954 - played out and was ultimately ended by US intervention. 

She highlights how democratic governments respond to the needs of their citizens, placing them above those of foreign investors. In Guatemala, this resulted in calls for labour and land reforms to balance profits between investors and workers. In the country, many US corporations depended on access to an extremely impoverished population, enabled by a legal regime that allowed them to pay workers unlivable wages. When faced with the threat of a shrinking profit margin, the local elite and foreign corporations had incentives to prefer a dictatorship. This contributed to the 1954 coup, which put an end to democracy in Guatemala.

The events in Guatemala did not happen in isolation, but were part of a bigger trend within the Americas. Democratisation in the mid-20th century failed in Guatemala but succeeded in Cuba. One might ask: Is Cuba still paying the price for it today? A decades-long embargo is still in place, and US foreign policy still considers Cuba a hostile nation. The many attempts at intervention pushed Cuba into reliance on the USSR. Chomsky points out how Fidel Castro declared himself a socialist only after the US’s 1961 attempt at overthrowing the government. Cuba fell prey to the Cold War interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, and it was used as a deterrent example that economic redistribution is ineffective.

Framing immigrants as scapegoats

The historical appetite for cheap labour is present in today’s immigration battles. In her book, Undocumented Chomsky talks about how the idea of an “illegal” being should be discarded, yet in current-day America, this term only seems to be getting more and more prominence. 

Chomsky says that the law, its “enforcers” such as ICE, and anti-immigrant sentiment have a symbiotic relationship. The government uses the law to fuel this sentiment, then uses the same anti-immigrant sentiment to justify the laws themselves. By using the criminal label on a specific group, the public becomes fearful. Politicians often exploit this fear to pass harsher laws on immigration, broadening the range of “criminals” and sustaining anti-immigrant sentiment. This view further advances the interests of the US corporate interests. Immigrants’ fear of losing legal status often leads to offering their labour for cheaper, turning large profits in many sectors of the economy.

In relation to her book, Chomsky asks us to look past the “billiard ball model” where countries are viewed as sovereign nations. Instead, she argues that modern migrant flows are a result of centuries of colonialism, where immigrants follow the resources that were once taken from colonies. According to her view, this looting still persists today, through foreign debt and trade agreements, leaving people on islands of poverty and some on islands of privilege.

The convergence of policy and spectacle

According to Chomsky, today's crises are part of an interconnected web. Recent events are not just dominoes falling in random order, but a coherent effort to reshape the Middle East. This is the modern appearance of the Monroe Doctrine. The golden ticket for US intervention did not disappear, but it gained a broader context. With advances in technology, location is no longer the question; only economic and geopolitical incentives remain.

The war in Gaza that started in 2023 shows an interesting parallel. Chomsky highlights that only the narrative changes depending on who is in the Oval Office. Regardless of the method of communication, the government's ultimate support remains constant. 

Chomsky rounded up her interview with Room for Discussion with a powerful statement: We must not only warn against endless historical interventions, but also the numbness of the public that chooses to allow it to continue. The concentration of modern-day journalism and media in the hands of a few enables this cycle. It is a system that chooses when it pleases to bring voices into the spotlight, while retaining the ultimate power to shut down opinions entirely.

This flaw, in itself, allows the structures connecting these atrocities to remain invisible.