Death, High-Tech and Low

by Oscar Arias, Former President of Costa Rica and 1987 Nobel Peace Prize Winner

The Defense Department recently advised the Clinton Administration to lift the ban on exporting high-technology weapons to Latin America. How disheartening that, despite the tremendous efforts being made to reduce military expenditures in the Southern Hemisphere, manufacturers of sophisticated arms are still striving to use the U.S. government as a weapons sales agent.

Within Latin America, this initiative is both disillusioning and disconcerting. We now risk losing our modest yet significant foothold in the demilitarization and democratization of our countries. To date, two nations in our hemisphere, Panama and Haiti, have joined Costa Rica in eliminating their armed forces. Many other countries have begun to follow these examples by substantially downsizing their armies. But now, high-ranking officials of the country most compelled to help maintain Latin America's peace are about to instigate a new arms race in the region.

The damage that will be inflicted on the democracies and peoples of Latin America if this initiative becomes a reality is not quantifiable. In the first place, it will reignite Latin America's historic conflict between civilian authority and military power over the allocation of budget expenditures. Civilian governments consistently attempt to direct resources toward the improvement of their countries' infrastructure and to satisfy their social obligations in health and education. Militaries are always seeking a larger percentage of the national budget for their own purposes; buying conventional weapons already represents an excessive burden on national budgets, but high-technology weapons will demand a much larger sacrifice.

Perhaps most disappointing is that although world military expenditures have plummeted in the years after the cold war, "peace dividends" have not materialized to help reduce the rampant poverty. According to the World Bank, in the next several years both Latin America and the Caribbean will need to invest approximately $60 billion annually in their infrastructures. This exorbitant cost is beyond the reach of most governments. Latin America's only hope is to stimulate both domestic and foreign private investment. However, in order to attract investors, democratic stability must be guaranteed throughout the region. This, in turn, is contingent upon both the effective subordination of militaries to civilian authorities and the ability of governments to maintain low poverty rates. An arms race such as the one that would be stimulated by Defense Secretary William Perry would render those conditions impossible.

Among the arguments made in favor of the sale of high-technology weapons to Latin America, two merit strong ethical responses -- even though some may argue that politics should be pragmatic and kept apart from moral reasoning. It is said that increased high-tech weapons sales will translate into more jobs in the United States. Furthermore, it is argued that if the United States does not sell the weapons, other countries will do so instead. It seems an immoral and unbalanced equation to justify a few thousand jobs in the United States through placement of more weapons in the developing world. If we were to accept such reasoning, some Colombians or Bolivians could argue that exporting mind-altering drugs to the United States is justified because the production of cocaine and marijuana creates jobs in their own agricultural, industrial and commercial sectors. Moreover, it could be claimed that, if these drugs were not exported from Colombia or Bolivia, they would simply be supplied by other countries.

For many, this comparison will seem drastic; however, there is no doubt that both types of sales export death and misery. That selling arms is legal while selling drugs is not does not automatically make the first transaction morally defensible. It should be noted that the buying and selling of arms is one of the largest sources of corruption -- to which several scandals in both industrialized and developing countries can attest. If we are frightened by the extent of drug trafficking originating from the South and directed toward the North, we must then also be scandalized by the scope and magnitude of indiscriminate arms sales from the North to the South.

It is embarrassing that the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are responsible for the largest quantity of arms sales to the developing world. The very countries that should be maintaining world peace and security are the ones most responsible for promoting war and insecurity by producing and selling weapons.

Note: This article appeared in the October 7, 1996 issue of The Nation. Copyright information:

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