Archive for diciembre 2020

El imperio invisible

Posted in Bases militares, Colonialismo, Expansión económica, Guerra de Irak, Guerra de Vietnam, Imperialismo norteamericano, tagged Daniel Immerwahr, estandarización, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, Juan Arellano on 21 diciembre 2020| 1 Comment »

In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr pulls back the curtain on American imperialism. | History | Chicago Reader

Para quienes han sido víctimas directas o indirectas del imperialismo estadounidense, hablar de su insivibilidad podría ser un chiste de mal gusto. Demasiados muertos, demasiada sangre. Sin embargo, es necesario reconocer que durante gran parte de su historia, el imperialismo estadounidense ha sido invisible -no existente- para la mayoría de los estadounidenses y sus líderes. La amnesia imperial estadounidense es una enfermedad crónica. Muchos son los ejemplos, por lo que solo mencionaré uno. Tras completar la invasión de Iraq, el entonces Secretario de Defensa de los Estados Unidos Donald Rumsfeld, realizó una especie de gira triunfal por varios países del Golfo Pérsico. El 28 de abril de 2003, Rumsfeld y el comandante en jefe de las fuerzas estadounidense en la región el General Tommy Frank, llevaron a cabo una conferencia de prensa en la ciudad de Doha, Qatar. Durante esa conferencia de prensa un periodista de la cadena noticiosa Al Jazeera preguntó a Rumsfeld si el gobierno estadounidense estaba inclinado a la creación de un imperio en la zona. Visiblemente molesto el secretario respondió: «No buscamos un imperio. No somos imperialistas. Nunca los hemos sido. Ni siquiera puedo imaginar por qué me hace esa pregunta.»* Rumsfeld, uno de los principales responsables del peor error en la historia de la política exterior en la historia de Estados Unidos y quien se ofendía ante la insinuación de un imperio estadounidense, era entonces el «administrador» de las más de 600 bases militares estadounidenses alrededor del globo.

How to Hide an Empire' Shines Light on America's Expansionist Side - The New York Times

Daniel Immerwahr

En los últimos veinte años, la historiografía estadounidense se ha encargado en visibilizar al imperialismo estadounidense. Me refiero a los trabajos de Amy Kaplan (QEPD), Alfred W. McCoy, Donald Pease, Lany Thompson, Courtney Johnson, Anne L. Foster, Paul A. Kramer, Kristin Hoganson, Jeremi Suri, Jorge Rodríguez Beruff, Francisco Scarano y Mariola Espinosa, entre otros. Acabo de leerme un libro que sigue esta línea historiográfica enfocando al imperialismo estadounidense a niveles que no había visto en otras obras. Se trata de la obra de Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). El Dr. Immerwhar es profesor en el Departamento de Historia de Northwestern University en el estado de Illinois. Immerwhar es también autor de Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

Debo reconocer que me acerque a este texto con dudas, pues me preguntaba qué más se podía añadir a la historiografía del imperialismo estadounidense, y, en especial, de su «invisivilidad». Mayor fue mi sorpresa a encontrarme con una obra que además de hilvanar una historia fascinante, hace una aportación sustantiva a lo que sabemos sobre las prácticas, ideas e instituciones del imperialismo yanqui. No por nada ha ganado múltiples premios, entre ellos, el Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize, de la Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, el Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2019 y el National Public Radio, Best Books of 2019.

Por la naturaleza de esta bitácora y el tañamo de este libro, me limitaré a hacer algunos comentarios generales. Lo primero que quiero comentar es cómo esta escrito este libro, pues me parece uno de sus principales activos. Immerwahr hilvana una historia fascinante, muy bien escrita y documentada, superando las limitaciones típicas de los trabajos tradicionales sobre la política exterior estadounidense.

El autor construye una historia integral del imperio estadounidense a través del análisis cronológico de su evolución con énfasis en cómo éste ha sido escondido accidental e intencionalmente. Comienza en el periodo colonial y termina en el siglo actual. Entre los eventos que destaca no necesariamente enfocados por otros autores destacan la adquisición de islas guaneras, el desarrollo de una arquitectura colonial en las Filipinas producto del trabajo de Juan Arellano, la imposición de un gobierno militar y opresivo en Hawai durante la segunda guerra mundial y los abusos cometidos contra los pobladores de la islas aleutianas durante ese conflcito.

File:US claimed atlantic guano islands.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

Islas guaneras «estadounidenses»

La segunda parte del libro -a partir del fin de la segunda guerra mundial- es la que me resulta más innovadora por cuatro puntos. El primero, la idea de que el desarrollo de toda una industria de productos sintéticos durante el conflicto contra los Nazis liberó a Estados Unidos de la dependencia en ciertas materias primas como el caucho, la quinina, etc. Esto liberó a los estadounidenses de poseer un imperio territorial, a pesar de que al termino del conflicto, controlaban una gran extensión de territorios en Asia y Europa.

Otra idea interesante tiene que ver con el siginificado imperial que el autor le asigna al desarrollo después de la guerra a la estandarización económica dominada por los estadounidense. Tras la guerra el poderío económico estadounidense hizo imposible -a países ricos y pobres- retar o rechazar los estandares definidos por Estados Unidos, lo que constituyó otra herramienta imperial.

El tercer punto que subraya el autor es el predominio del idioma inglés en la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Immerwahr analiza cómo una lengua minoritaría como el inglés se impuso como el idioma dominante a nivel académico, técnico, científico, diplomático y hasta cibernético.

Bases militares de Estados Unidos.

El cuarto y último punto tiene que ver con lo que Immerwahr denomina como «Baselandia». Tras acabada la segunda guerra mundial, los Estados Unidos no renunciaron ni abandonaron su proyecto imperial, sino que lo rehicieron a través de la estableciemiento de unas 800 bases militares a nivel global. Según el autor, éstas son, además de herramientas imperiales, el imperio estadounidense. Las bases han servido para ejercer el poder imperial de diversas formas, desde bombardear Vietnam o Irak, hasta impulsar costumbres, modos de consumo, valores, estilos musicales, etc.

Termina el autor comentando cómo diversos países lograron dominar la estandirazación, el idioma y la zona de contacto que significaban las bases, para alcanzar e inclusive superar a Estados Unidos.

Debo terminar señalando que este libro es lectura obligada para aquellos interesados en el desarrollo del imperialismo estadounidense y, en especial, para quienes combatimos su «invisibilidad».

*Eric Schmitt, Aftereffects: Military Presence; Rumsfeld Says US Will Cut Forces in the Gulf”, New York Times, April 30, 2003. Disponible en: http://query.nytimes. com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01EEDE103DF93AA15757C0A9659C8B63&sec=&s pon =& pagewanted=2. eeerrtyip

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We Are Not Done With Abolition

Posted in Congreso Estados Unidos, Enmienda 13, Esclavitud, Imperialismo norteamericano, Racismo, tagged 13th, Ava DuVernay, Eric Foner on 16 diciembre 2020| Leave a Comment »

En 1865, el Congreso estadounidense aprobó una enmienda a la constitución de los Estados Unidos aboliendo la esclavitud. Esta enmienda, la número trece, fue ratificada por todos los estados de la Unión (los estados sureños rebeldes no participaron). Aunque histórica, la enmienda 13 no acabó, realmente, con la esclavitud en Estados Unidos, sino que dejó las puertas abiertas a la injusticia y al abuso. En su primera sección, la enmienda establece que «ni en los Estados Unidos ni en ningún lugar sujeto a su jurisdicción habrá esclavitud ni trabajo forzado, excepto como castigo de un delito del que el responsable haya quedado debidamente convicto.» En los ciento cincuenta y cinco años de su existencia, esta sección ha sido utilizada para esclavizar a miles de personas, la mayoría de ellos negros. Acusados y convictos, en muchos casos por acusaciones frívolas o inventadas, negros, blancos pobres, latinos e imigrantes terminaron trabajando como esclavos en granjas estatales en el Sur, apagando fuegos forestales en el Oeste, etc.

En esta artículo publicado en The New York Times, el gran historiador estadounidense Eric Foner aborda este tema con la claridad que ha caracterizado su trabajo académico. Quienes estén intersados en este asunto podrían complementar la lectura del trabajo de Foner con el excelente documental 13th (2016) de la directora Ava DuVernay.

We Are Not Done With Abolition

Eric Foner

New York Times December 16, 2020

Credit…Lomax Collection, via Library of Congress

Early this month, a group of Democratic members of Congress introduced an Abolition Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Why, in the year 2020, does the Constitution need an amendment dealing with the abolition of slavery? Wasn’t that accomplished over a century and a half ago?

The problem is that the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, which prohibits slavery throughout the country, allows for “involuntary servitude” as a “punishment for crime.” This loophole made possible the establishment of a giant, extremely profitable, system of convict labor, mainly affecting African-Americans, in the Jim Crow South. That system no longer exists but its legacy remains in the widespread forced labor of prisoners, who are paid far below the minimum wage. The Abolition Amendment would eliminate the Thirteenth Amendment’s “criminal exemption” by adding these words to the Constitution: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude may be imposed as a punishment for a crime.”

When enacted, the Thirteenth Amendment was recognized as a turning point in the history of the United States, indeed the entire world. When the House of Representatives approved it as the Civil War drew to a close, wild scenes of celebration followed. Members threw their hats in the air and embraced one another. Passage, wrote one newspaper, was “the crowning event of the war, indeed of the century.”

The Amendment’s wording, including the criminal exemption, was based on Thomas Jefferson’s proposed but never enacted Land Ordinance of 1784, which would have barred slavery in all the new nation’s territories. From there, it migrated to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in territories north of the Ohio River. Scholars have not explained why Jefferson devised this language. Perhaps he thought that labor was good for the character and would aid in the rehabilitation of prisoners. But the coupling of a ban on slavery with an exemption for convicted criminals quickly became embedded in American law. By the time of the Civil War, it could be found in the constitutions of a large majority of the free states. Such language survives in nearly half the state constitutions.

During the 1850s, Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, popularized the claim that the Northwest Ordinance demonstrated that their new party was following the intentions of the founding fathers when it sought to bar slavery from the western territories. When it came time during the Civil War to write an amendment abolishing slavery, Charles Sumner, the abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts, proposed wording based on the 1791 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. His colleague Jacob Howard of Michigan rejected the idea of using a French model. “Good old Anglo-Saxon language” was adequate, he declared, and Congress gravitated to the wording of Jefferson’s ordinance.

Because of its very familiarity, the text of the Thirteenth Amendment did not undergo necessary scrutiny. The criminal exemption was almost never mentioned in congressional debates, contemporary newspapers or at antislavery conventions that endorsed the proposed amendment.

Petition · amend the 13th amendment · Change.org

But the clause did not go unnoticed by white Southerners. The all-white governments established in the South by President Andrew Johnson after the war’s end enacted laws known as the Black Codes, which sought to use the courts to consign African-Americans to involuntary labor. Black Americans who failed to sign a contract to work for a white employer could be convicted of vagrancy, fined and, if unable to pay, sold at public auction.

“Cunning rebels,” one congressman complained in 1866, were using “the exceptional clause” to reduce freed persons to slavery. In 1867, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, an abolitionist journal published in New York City, called for the passage of a new amendment eliminating the words “except as a punishment for crime.” Today’s abolition amendment seeks to accomplish the same result by other means.

Also in 1867, a Republican congressman from Iowa, John A. Kasson, introduced a resolution clarifying the “true intent” of the 13th Amendment. It was not meant, he insisted, to authorize the “sale or other disposition” of people convicted of crime. If prisoners were required to labor, this should be under the supervision of public authorities, not private individuals or companies. The resolution passed the House, but did not come to a vote in the Senate.

By this time, Congress had enacted, over Johnson’s veto, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which mandated racial equality in judicial punishments, and had approved the 14th Amendment, requiring states to provide to all people the “equal protection of the laws.” These, senators thought, would prevent the use of the courts to victimize African-Americans, rendering Kasson’s resolution unnecessary. Time would prove them tragically wrong.

During Radical Reconstruction, when hundreds of thousands of African-Americans voted for the first time and large numbers held public office, racial bias in the criminal justice system and the forced labor of those convicted of crime remained minor problems. There were hardly any prisons or prisoners in the South. But with the overthrow of Reconstruction and the imposition of the comprehensive system of white supremacy known as Jim Crow, the prison population expanded rapidly.

Southern states filled their jails with African-Americans, often former slaves convicted of minor crimes. They then rented them out as labor for the owners of railroads, plantations and factories, or required them to work on chain gangs building roads and other public projects, or inside prison walls for private businesses.

The labor of prisoners became a significant source of revenue for Southern states. The system also took hold, but in a much smaller way, in the North.

Without violating the 13th Amendment, Republicans in post-Reconstruction Texas complained, “the courts of law are employed to re-enslave the colored race.” Plantations, they added, “are worked, as of old, by slaves, under the name of convicts.”

Conditions were barbarous and the supply of convicts seemingly endless. “One dies, get another,” became a popular refrain among those who profited from the labor of prisoners.

Credit…William Widmer for The New York Times

To this day, many convicts are required to work while incarcerated. As janitors, plumbers and the like they help make prisons function. They produce goods like furniture for government offices. This year, prisoners have been making hand sanitizer to help combat the pandemic and fighting California wildfires.

With the expansion of private prisons, more and more inmates work for private contractors, sometimes in factory settings within prison walls. In recent years, many companies have used or benefited from the labor of prisoners.

As late as the 1980s, the Department of Justice concluded that the 13th Amendment attaches “some of the characteristics of slavery” to prisoners, including exemption from minimum-wage laws. Indeed, courts have ruled that inmates working in prisons have no constitutional right to payment at all.

A few years ago, the documentary film “13th” linked the origin of today’s racially biased mass incarceration to the criminal exemption clause. But the members of Congress who voted on the 13th Amendment did not anticipate the later emergence of a new system of involuntary servitude in the South.

We hear a great deal in judicial circles about the “original intent” or “original meaning” of constitutional provisions. But the 13th Amendment shows that unanticipated consequences can be as significant as intended ones. The amendment, which destroyed the largest slave system the modern world has known, was deservedly an occasion for celebration. Especially given our heightened awareness of the inequities of our criminal justice system, it is high time the criminal exemption was eliminated, as the abolition amendment proposes.

Like any change in the Constitution, the abolition amendment would need the approval of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states, a daunting requirement. It is certain to encounter resistance from those who profit from prison labor, now a multibillion-dollar industry, as well as those who deem unpaid labor a just punishment.

But approval would recognize the basic human rights of those convicted of crime. Reinforcing the idea that all people who work should be paid for their labor, it would be a major step in bringing to fruition the “new birth of freedom” promised by the Civil War.

Eric Foner is an emeritus professor of history at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of The Second Founding : How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.