65 Years Ago Today

“I need not tell you, gentlemen, that the world situation is very serious. That must be apparent to all intelligent people. I think one difficulty is that the problem is one of such enormous complexity that the very mass of facts presented to the public by press and radio make it exceedingly difficult for the man in the street to reach a clear appraisement of the situation. Furthermore, the people of this country are distant from the troubled areas of the earth and it is hard for them to comprehend the plight and consequent reactions of the long-suffering peoples, and the effect of those reactions on their governments in connection with our efforts to promote peace in the world.”

With these words, General George Marshall, United States secretary of state, began his speech before an audience at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. This speech launched the Marshall Plan; that being the United States’ plans to rebuild a devastated Europe after World War II. Just three months before, that country’s president, Harry Truman, had announced its policy of containment of Communism and support for free peoples.

On March 31, 1948 the U.S. Congress approved the Marshall Plan and the participating countries received, for a period of four years, $13 billion—this number does not require an adjustment to account for inflation as the number is representative of value for its time—and technical assistance. Of course, so as not to be accused of a lack of courtesy, the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe were also invited to receive help, on the condition of submitting their internal economic situation to external controls and integrating into a European market, a seemingly impossible situation.

As a continent was being strategically supported to rebuild, with the goal of containing any communist attempts from the Soviet Union, another was preparing to put the dead in a context of destruction and the Cold War. It was our very own Latin America, and in it, our Guatemala. The sight of the arms industry, mainly that of the U.S., focused on new territories of geopolitical interest, such as Latin America and Korea, in line with the intentions ,underlying or obvious, with the foreign policy of the “Great North.”

Let us pause here a minute. The Guatemalan president has proposed that the region’s presidents meet to discuss the decriminalization of drugs—which is not the same as legalizing them. The Guatemalan president reacted yesterday to the statements of El Salvador’s president, who did not attend the event where this would be discussed, stating, “The boycott of the event was not by the Salvadoran president. It was because of the fear that arose in the United States that this could unify the region around the decriminalization and cause a block to the Summit of the Americas.”

Without wanting to devote too much time to the subject, but still considering this was probably a godsend to U.S. foreign policy, I present it only with the intent to ask: what would happen to the U.S. economy and the arms industry of that country if we decriminalized drugs in our region?

I return to the Marshall Plan. From the most diverse ways of thinking, criticism of the initiative was tallied. According to some, the Marshall Plan was the beginning of a series of disastrous foreign aid programs, aimed at increasing government corruption and promoting the establishment of multinationals. Others, like Noam Chomsky, noted that the amount of money given to France and the Netherlands at that time was equal to the funds they allocated to finance their armies in Southeast Asia. The question, after all those “efforts to promote peace in the world is,” is what peace are we talking about?