The Arms Trade

The military alliance between the United States and certain Third World countries, for example, has a relatively stable tradition. Since World War II a few Western countries have trained well over half a million military personnel from the Third World. The United States alone has trained almost four hundred thousand, of whom two-thirds were officers; 80 percent of these were trained within the United States itself or in its Canal Zone possession. In addition, the United States has given advanced training to ten thousand foreign policemen at its International Police Academy in Washington and has provided training to over one million policemen in the Third World through its "public safety advisers" in forty countries. Because of repeated scandal, the police training programs were canceled by Congress in 1973 and 1974. Yet many of these same activities and related supply programs (of military and police equipment) continue under the overseas operation of the "Drug Enforcement Administration," whose expenditures now match those of the discontinued training programs. The military and police programs of the United States have political and ideological objectives. In countless testimonials it is declared that they are designed to "win friends and influence people" destined one day to be in positions of power or poised to take power in their respective countries. The ideological direction of these programs has been to inculcate participants with negative images of "communism, neutralism, leftist revolution, forces of disruption, revolutionary ideas, political dissidents, insurgents, extremists, radicals, ultranationalists, and political instability in general". Third World military personnel have also been trained and supplied in or by the socialist countries, with a different ideological direction, of course. But this has not prevented many of them -for example, in Egypt and Syria -- from putting their expertise at the service of local and international reaction. In some cases the socialist countries have sent military missions to support outright reactionary regimes that openly collaborate with the West and international capital, such as those in Pakistan and India. The socialist countries have even supported rulers who were placed in power by and remain subservient to the U.S. CIA, like Mobutu in Zaire. In exceptional circumstances, U.S. and other Western military training programs have also backfired in that a dominant sector of the armed forces, as in Peru, has turned moderately "nationalist" against the imperial power and individual trainees have become nationalists or even revolutionaries. By and large, though, Western and particularly U.S. military training and "assistance" programs have been eminently successful in introducing an armed fifth column to defend "Western values" into the societies of the Third World.