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Law, Not Crime, Has Come from South of the Border
Not so much criminals as the foundations of the rule of law — that is what has infiltrated the United States from Latin America. That seems to be a major thread running through Greg Grandin’s wonderful new history of the hemisphere, America, América: A New History of the New World. It’s a book you can dive back into repeatedly, not to mention fantasize about someone compacting it into a short slideshow for the benefit of the President of the United States.
British settler colonists in North America had their preachers and writers, but those individuals had a tendency to pretend Native Americans were not real, did not exist, perhaps never had existed, or simply didn’t count for much on empty land, or didn’t count because they were to be pushed out or eliminated rather than lived with. Spain, in contrast, generated a tremendous raging debate between supporters and denouncers of its killing, robbery, theft, enslavement, and terrorizing of indigenous people. Spain broke new ground, according to Grandin, in producing criticism of its own atrocities as it conquered South America.
In very rough terms, this is similar to the contrast between U.S. media noncoverage of the genocide in Gaza and Israeli media’s inclusion of denunciations of the same. It’s one thing to live where you can’t escape drunk country musicians singing about being free, and perhaps something else to live where you can hear voices saying some of the things that most need saying. In both cases, the brutal atrocities go on, but in one, there are seeds of some future change planted.
Voices like those of Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas laid the foundations for modern international law, but did so very differently from Dutch and English writers. The Spanish tradition is at least as tied up in religion as the English, and has certainly needed to evolve during these past four or five hundred years. But Grandin identifies a basis for a future pluralistic society, even in the belief that populations were diverse yet all descended from Adam and Eve. One can also, I think, see in the tradition of public confessions something of a precursor of truth and reconciliation commissions. In Latin America, unlike the North, dying conquistadores in the sixteenth century commonly confessed their part in the Conquest and paid restitution. NB: They did not admit to having strayed from proper conquest behavior into illicit atrocities. Rather, they admitted to participation in a Conquest understood to have been wrong and evil in its totality.
Seen from a perspective that includes Latin America, Las Casas — who went beyond Erasmus, Moore, or anybody else — begins to look like the father of international legal standards applied equally to all of humanity, not to mention of self-determination and governance by the consent of the governed. He got there first. He drew the logical conclusions, such as the abolition of slavery. And he acted on those conclusions to as great an extent and for as long as perhaps any other person who has lived.
The world was not, even in the seventeenth century, strictly separated into different legal traditions. The English read Las Casas, but they often read him with an eye to understanding how evil the Spanish were, in contrast to the English, or to get ideas for how to be more evil toward the Irish themselves. Perhaps they could have read him more in order to do as Las Casas recommended, more in order to outgrow dehumanization and division. Defining certain people as not really people was a skill that increased in English culture as colonization and slavery expanded.
Hugo Grotius read Vitoria, but — like Aquinas before him and like all “just war” theory — Grotius was after excuses for wars. War might be regulated, but not banned. John Locke drew heavily on Spanish writers like Juan de Mariana and José de Acosta, but he reached his own conclusions, including that land could be taken from anyone not farming it. For a great many years, Spanish writers denounced war and slavery as parts of the Conquest, whereas Locke, Smith, Hume, et alia, at best wrote rules to regulate such evils as war and slavery, leaving us to this day with a culture that hardly murmurs about the crime of war but chatters endlessly about “possible war crimes” — almost always only mysteriously “possible,” never verified.
Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816) and Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) sought a confederacy of independent nations in Latin America. The United States served as a partial inspiration but was not of much actual help. Thomas Jefferson’s house, just down the road from mine, had numerous books by Las Casas and other Spanish writers in it, yet he flipped their views upside down, declaring that “white” nations had the right to control non-white peoples in lands they claimed and to deny access to other “white” nations. He called this “a kind of international law for America.” The United States has sought its own unique “international law” from that day to this.
The Doctrine of Discovery — the idea that a European nation can claim any land not yet claimed by other European nations, regardless of what people already live there — dates back to the fifteenth century and the Catholic church, but it was put into U.S. law in 1823, the same year as Monroe’s fateful “Doctrine” speech. It was put there by Monroe’s lifelong friend, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. The United States considered itself, perhaps alone outside of Europe, as possessing the same discovery privileges as European nations. Perhaps coincidentally, in December 2022, almost every nation on Earth signed an agreement to set aside 30% of the Earth’s land and sea for wildlife by the year 2030. The exceptions were only the United States and the Vatican, not the nations of Latin America.
While the U.S. had broken free of British rule and thereby rid itself of a mother country that was moving rapidly toward the abolition of slavery, movements for independence from Spain in South America generally sought freedom from slavery as well as from foreign empire. The U.S. tradition of slave-owners like Patrick Henry making speeches about being metaphorically enslaved was a northern hypocrisy where revolution was a rich man’s game. Moves for independence in the South were, to some extent, more of a popular revolt. They were, at the very least, not a revolt to maintain slavery or to expand empire, and not to combine numerous colonies into one, at least not immediately. Rather, Bolivarianism amounted to a push to create simultaneously several free and independent nations, some through violence and some without it. By the early nineteenth century, there were nine of them, newly independent, or 10 counting Haiti.
Latin America was not yet called Latin America and was not some sort of flawless paradise. Wealth extremes (greater than in the U.S. of that day, though not greater than the U.S. of this day) and all kinds of cruelty persisted. But, not only was slavery being abolished, but something else of great potential was being created. Numerous new nations jointly developed means of nonviolently and legally arbitrating boundary disputes, dealing with each other as equals and not enemies.
Bolivar proposed a Congress in Panama among sister nations that would
- agree to mutual defense,
- condemn Spain for the suffering it had caused in the New World (has the U.S. done that yet with regard to England?),
- promote the independence of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands, and the Philippines (the U.S. was supporting Spanish rule over Cuba as more likely to lead to later U.S. rule over Cuba),
- repudiate the doctrines of discovery and conquest,
- abolish slavery,
- recognize Haiti, and
- legalize agreed-upon borders.
Here we see an early version of the League of Nations or the United Nations just beginning to come into being.
Slavery had already been ended — and without a horrific U.S.-style Civil War — in Chile, Bolivia, and parts of Mexico. Central America ended it in 1824. Colombia and Venezuela were ending it, but it persisted in Peru and Brazil.
In taking up such matters of domestic policy at an international gathering like the Panama Congress of 1826, something else — another grave evil in the world, one that afflicts the United States — was being prevented from ever being born in Latin America. This evil is the passionate aversion to anyone outside a nation having any say over what that nation does. When you read the Constitutions of various European nations today that describe transferring power to international institutions, you can just feel the veins bursting in the faces of outraged U.S. politicians. In 1826, vicious fury burst forth at the very idea that the United States would send anyone to a Congress in Panama to sit with potentially non-white people to decide anything about the sacred U.S. right to enslave human beings. In the words of Grandin, this “jolted the Age of Jackson into existence.” It hasn’t let up much since. The U.S. would later reject the League of Nations as one among equals and only join the United Nations over which it held a veto.
By 1844, Latin American statesmen had been working on theories and plans for international law for decades, and Juan Bautista Alberdi gave the name “American International Law” to a set of principles that included rejection of the doctrines of discovery and conquest, equality of nations despite their size, non-intervention, usi possidetis, and impartial arbitration. Alberdi also wrote a book in 1870, available online for free in English, titled The Crime of War. This is a book filled with hundreds of pages arguing almost the identical arguments that war abolitionists use today. It’s an outlawry book a half century before the movement to outlaw war. It’s a book making the case for neutrality (see page 262), perhaps a century before the power of neutrality was widely appreciated and 150 years before it disastrously ceased to be. Latin American nations continued to push such a vision on the United States for years.
At the Hague Peace Conference of 1907, 18 of the 44 nations represented were from Latin America, and it was there that Latin American ideas of multilateralism and sovereignty are thought to have really taken hold.
Woodrow Wilson (U.S. president, 1913-1921) may look in retrospect like mostly a talk and not much action, a promising savior who didn’t save us, a warrior to end war who gave us more war, a Barack Obama of his day. But early Wilson, before World War I, had some substance, and some of the talk was well worth hearing, and a lot of it came from south of the U.S. border. Wilson was outraged by and sought to reverse his predecessor’s interference in Mexico. He also apologized to Colombia for the U.S. role in removing Panama from it, and paid Colombia $25 million for the loss. Wilson was unable to resolve crises in Mexico but did not make the usual U.S. move of reaching for larger weapons. Instead, he accepted a proposal from Chile for Argentina, Brazil, and Chile to meet with the U.S. and Mexico and work out a solution. They met for two months on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The United States then joined Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Colombia, and Costa Rica in announcing a new joint policy toward Mexico. (Can you hear the Muricafirsters screaming in outrage?) When World War I got going, Latin American governments favored neutrality. The President of Mexico proposed a collective trade embargo on the belligerents. Wilson wasn’t wise enough to listen.
Imagine if McKinley had listened when Spain had proposed neutral arbitration to resolve U.S. war lies over the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor!
But Wilson did listen to Latin American advocates for international law, whose work increasingly influenced U.S. scholars. Wilson said that “Pan-Americanism” was what he wanted to model the world on, but only after the war.
When the war had ended and the League of Nations was being planned and negotiated, Wilson had in mind a vision straight out of South America, and he wanted to apply it to the Earth. He had three barriers to face, however, and could not overcome them. One was that he was generally lying in bed, sick.
The second was that he was a serious racist — as were others involved — or at least that he felt obliged to please racists back home. When Japan proposed that the covenant to create the League of Nations support “equality of nations and just treatment of their nationals,” the racists wouldn’t stand for it. As a result, some in Japan concluded that their best path forward was not the rule of law but the creation of an empire, or “an Asian Monroe Doctrine.” This was the same conference that viciously punished Germany, thereby laying the groundwork for the other “theater” of World War II as well, and the same conference at which Wilson refused to meet with Ho Chi Minh, just to pile on the future catastrophes being seeded.
The third problem was U.S. exceptionalism. The U.S. insisted on putting the Monroe Doctrine into the League of Nations, giving itself the power to violate the basic premise of the League at will. This was enough to poison the whole project, but not enough to win support for it in the U.S. Senate.
Latin American nations had pushed for a truly equitable League of Nations, and every last one of them joined it, such as it was. But when the League actively supported imperialism, Costa Rica, in 1925, was the first to leave it. Meanwhile, something was infiltrating Latin America from the north: weapons. The arms profiteers were pushing sales hard and encouraging conflicts to boost them. European debts to Latin America for crops and resources supplied during World War I were paid off in left-over weapons, which strikes me as the opposite of paying off a debt. And the United States was still plying its beloved Monroe Doctrine, but it was now joined by imitators in Japan, Italy, England, and Germany, all declaring their own Monroe Doctrines.
President Franklin Roosevelt improved U.S. treatment of Latin America and took Latin American ideas to lay plans for the United Nations. Grandin sadly and typically switches into war supporter mode when it comes to World War II. The fact that Roosevelt was lying when he claimed to have in his possession Nazi plans to take over South and Central America, is relegated by Grandin to a footnote that itself avoids quite telling the story. The U.S. exploitation of Latin America for World War II is recounted quite positively. And then comes the post-war planning. FDR told Stalin and Churchill that Latin America should be the model. FDR’s advisor Sumner Welles drafted plans for the United Nations based on his experiences in Latin America. At the meeting in San Francisco, Latin American delegations pushed for the UN to ban war and create a court of arbitration, among many other positive steps.
But Latin American nations also demanded something I see as far less helpful than Grandin seems to. They wanted to hold onto a regional alliance as a commitment to defend each other. While others rightly feared that this could break the world up into sections, the final UN Charter nonetheless put into Article 51 that nations could act “collectively.”
This became an excuse for institutions seemingly at odds with the very purpose of the UN Charter, most notably NATO. Grandin quotes John Foster Dulles and Winston Churchill praising Latin America for this, and he argues that without this “compromise,” the United Nations might not have been created. But without Latin America demanding something at odds with the basic project, no compromise would have been needed.
After World War II, the U.S. rebuilt Germany with the Marshall Plan. George Marshall took part in a meeting in Bogotá in 1948 at which the nations of Latin America essentially asked, “Where is our Marshall Plan?” Of course, there was none, but can you imagine if there had been, if nations of the whole globe had been aided instead of armed? The post-war U.S. government wanted little to do with laws, rules, morality, or cooperation. Coups, weapons, bases, and invasions would be the order of the day. Pretty much from that day to this, with the addition of demonization.
And yet Latin America goes on showing the way. More than anywhere else in the world, Latin America is a nuclear-free zone, supports the International Criminal Court, opposes the genocide in Gaza, and refuses to support either side of the war in Ukraine. Wearing North American blinders makes it hard even to recognize that as leadership. I hope that such recognition, and appreciation of past efforts too, sets in before it is too late.
