The Devil V.S. John Perkins

By: Todd Moffett | August 01, 2008 | Politics Profile

Why do you think America has such misconceptions about Latin America?

Once again, the American mainstream media have actively misled the American public.  One obvious reason is that most of our journalists either don’t go to Latin America at all, or in the rare instances that they do, journalists only talk to English-speaking people because they don’t speak Spanish themselves. The problem there is that nine times out of 10, the Latinos who speak English are wealthy and wealthy Latinos generally don’t like these new presidents because they have been heavily taxed, which is something that has never been done down there. For the first time in the history of South America, the governments are actually taxing the wealthy and using that money for education and health care reform to help the poor people. As a result, the people who speak English generally don’t like what’s going on politically and they are the ones reporters are talking to.  Consequently, American media are reporting that presidents like Chavez are hated by the masses when, in fact, they are overwhelmingly popular. The truth, however, is that all over South America you find a tremendous amount of people wearing Chavez T-shirts, and Castro and Che Guevara T-shirts. The people are selling plaques of Chavez on the streets.

In your latest, book you talk about former Panamanian President Manuel Noriega.  Can you tell me about Noriega and the connection between the U.S. invasion of Panama and Contadora, the “anything goes” island off the coast of Panama?

I really liked former Panamanian President Omar Torrijos. He is a hero to me in many respects. His successor, Manuel Noriega, is a pretty creepy guy, but the fact of the matter is that he was a CIA agent; we know that now. It’s on the record that the CIA paid him to take down the drug cartels in Colombia, but then he did something that really pissed us off. The popular reason given was that he didn’t allow the U.S. to renegotiate the Canal Treaty and he didn’t allow the School of the Americas to re-enter the Canal Zone. None of that made sense to me. You don’t send an army and kill 2,000 to 6,000 innocent civilians and wipe out a huge section of the city to take out a president because he is doing a few things you don’t like. There are a lot of other ways to take out a president. You don’t have to destroy a country in the process. Why did we do that? The U.S. military went directly in there and destroyed a very large section of a Third World country with no standing army. It was puzzling to me.

Then I started to hear some very strange rumors. Apparently Noriega had photographs of Contadora Island, a place I used to take members of Congress, businesspeople, international politicians, etc. It was one of those places where “what happens on Contadora stays in Contadora.” There were a lot of prostitutes, there was a lot of booze, a lot of drugs and gambling — anything went. It was the place you took people to win them over. You gave them whatever they wanted and their families never had to know. I kept hearing these rumors that president George H. W. Bush’s son, George Walker Bush, had been photographed on Contadora doing very elicit things including drugs and women and so on. Noriega had these photographs and he was showing them around trying to leverage them against the U.S. administration while keeping the negatives in this discrete building in Panama City. The U.S. politicians had had enough of Noriega (plus they had big plans for George W.). Within days, America — the world’s only superpower — unilaterally and without provocation attacked a defenseless country. Remember, Panama had no military at the time. They had a preliminary national guard, but they were in no way posing a threat. So, we bombed the city and set huge fires to annihilate this building that had photographs of a young George W. Bush with a bunch of prostitutes and drugs? I’ve talked to people in Panama who said that after that building went down, elite U.S. forces went in with blowtorches and searched the rubble to make sure everything was destroyed. Again, I can’t prove the any of this, but I’ve heard the same story from a number of unconnected people. Regardless of the intent, what we did in Panama is extremely disturbing. Noriega has been in a U.S. prison rotting away in solitary confinement, and that’s a terribly discouraging thing for other world leaders. After seeing what happened to Noriega, leaders from all over the world had to seriously think twice before opposing the United States.

And all this time, I was under the impression Noriega was simply a drug-dealing murderer.

And he probably was a drug-dealing murderer, but you don’t have to take out 2,000 to 6,000 civilians and firebomb a major portion of a city to take out a drug-dealing murderer. It just doesn’t make any sense at all. We took out Pablo Escobar in Colombia. We shot him on a rooftop, but we didn’t destroy Bogotá in the process.

Can you tell me a story about a developing country that was directly affected by your work as an EHM?

Indonesia is a perfect example. By the time I went to Indonesia in 1971, we knew we were going to lose Vietnam and the domino theory was in full force. If we lost Vietnam, we knew Laos and Cambodia were next, then the Philippines and then one Asian country after another would turn communist. America didn’t want to see that happen. Indonesia had a lot of oil, and at the time it had the largest Muslim population in the world. So, we thought if we could get our hooks into Indonesia then we could solve a lot of our future resource problems. In those days, we were looking at things very myopically — what’s good for the United States is what’s good for us period. And it was good for us to get Indonesia into our fold. We convinced ourselves that it was better for the Indonesian people to stay under the control of a brutal dictator than to become a communist nation. I honestly believed that if we exploited Indonesian oil, it would bolster their economy and inevitably help the country overall. I was wrong. We left their entire ecosystem in ruin, we spoiled resources and left their people completely impoverished.

When I was in the Peace Corps in Ecuador, I remember being told that Texaco was going to develop huge oil fields, projects that were going to bring Ecuador up out of the dark ages and into the 20th century. We were told that developing Ecuador’s resource potential would help Ecuador’s economy. It hasn’t, though. In reality, that project had the opposite effect on its economy, [and it was the] same with Indonesia. I believed that we were helping these countries pull the poor people up by their bootstraps by realizing the potential of their resources. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. It should have happened that way, but it didn’t.

After realizing that you were an instrument in the economic ruin of these developing nations, how could you continue?

Over the 10 years that I was an economic hit man, I saw the results of my work come to fruition all over the world. At the beginning, I believed that investing a lot of money in big infrastructure projects would increase the economic growth of a country, which it did statistically, but what I didn’t understand was that only a few rich families would benefit from the agreement. Statistically, you could see that the projects I worked on and promoted did increase economic growth, but over time I began to realize that a higher gross domestic product was not helping the poor people. In fact, the more we stimulated an economy the greater the gap between the rich and poor became. It took me a while to see these things.

I knew in the back of my mind that America had overthrown governments and assassinated leaders. I knew about Salvador Allende in Chile and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala and Mossadegh in Iran and Lumumba in the Congo and Diem in Vietnam. Years later, I reminded Panama’s President Omar Torrijos, a man I greatly admired, about the U.S. role in Ecuador. Reminding him of our role in the region was basically a threat. When Torrijos and Ecuadorian President Jaime Roldos defied the pressure from the corporatocracy it suddenly became clear that my country was going to do something highly illegal and I was directly involved. Soon thereafter, both leaders were assassinated. I took a vacation; I was sailing in the Virgin Islands. I anchored off St. John and took the dingy into shore and climbed up a little mountain to the ruins of this sugar cane plantation. It was beautiful up there. The sun was setting and I was surrounded by bougainvillea. I was sitting up there and it was very idyllic, then it struck me that this plantation was built on the bones of thousands of slaves, and suddenly I had this wrenching feeling in my gut. It was then I realized that the whole hemisphere is built on the bones of millions of slaves, and I had to admit to myself that I was a slaver — that what I was doing for the last 10 years was equivalent to marching into Africa and pulling slaves out. We weren’t doing it literally with chains, but we were chaining them in other ways. And at that moment, looking out at that old Caribbean sugar cane plantation, I made the decision that I would never do it again. Two days later, I went back to my boss and I quit.

According to your book you relinquished your post as an economic hit man, but it took you quite awhile to gain the courage to expose the system? What took you so long, John?

I started writing Confessions of an Economic Hit Man a couple of times. When I began doing research, I went to other economic hit men and jackals to get their stories, and I was either outright threatened or offered bribes to keep quiet. I had seen firsthand what jackals could do, so I took these threats very seriously. I had a young daughter at the time and I was frightened for her safety. At one point, I was offered a very large bribe by the Boston-based engineering/consulting firm Stone and Webster. They had apparently reviewed my resume and offered me a large amount of money to be a consultant. It was perfectly legal. I didn’t ever have to do anything — I just couldn’t write the book. So, I took the bribes; I took the money and I put my work on hold. In truth, I often put the money to work helping the very same people I had screwed in the past. I used the money to form nonprofit organizations such as Dream Change, which consists of people all over the globe creating new methods for promoting sustainable living, but I didn’t expose the system.

Then, right after 9/11, I stood looking down into that smoldering pit and knew I had to write the book and expose the system. I understood that the American public just didn’t understand what was going on. Why are there so many people out there who hate the United States? I had to talk about what I had done and educate the American people about the subterfuge that our leaders are involved in. This time, I decided I wouldn’t tell anybody what I was doing. My wife and daughter knew I was working on it, but they didn’t really know what it was until I had the manuscript done and in the hands of my literary agent in New York. He sent it out to major publishing houses, and at that point the book became my insurance policy because every jackal knew that if anything dire happened to me now, the book would fly off the shelves and that’s the last thing they want to have happen. What they want to do at that point is just ignore it, which is what they have pretty much done.

It’s troubling to me that of all the things you have done and been a witness to, and the places you have been to, that your biggest fear is that your own people would turn on you. Have you ever been terrified for your own safety?

Yeah, and I’ve had some fairly scary incidents. One time, in South America, I was attacked by bad guys with knives. Most of those [attacks] are pretty quick and they’re over before you know it. The scariest thing for me was when these guys came up to me and warned me about exposing the system. I had several visitations from jackals and lots of phone calls and reminders. That’s a terrifying thing to go through because it has nothing to do with adrenaline, it’s not a fight-or-flight kind of thing. It causes real, deep stress. And you’re right: The worst aspects, the scariest things that happened, have come from people in my own country, individuals who are supposed to be there to protect democracy and encourage me to speak out if my country is doing illegal things around the world or if my country is doing things that don’t meet with the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. These people should be encouraging me to talk, but the fact of the matter is they do exactly the opposite.

On the other side of the spectrum, imagine being one of the nine indigenous South American presidents. One day, someone who speaks Spanish, someone you have seen around the presidential palace a lot, walks into your office and says, “Congratulations Mr. President. I’m here to remind you that I can make you and your family very rich if you play our game, but if you decide to keep your campaign promises, well, you remember what happened with Allende, Arbenz, Lumumba, Roldos, and Torrijos and Noriega, don’t you?” Each one of the South American presidents had had a very similar conversation with the economic hit men. Some are alive today and others are not.

Did you do that?

Yeah, I did that with Roldos and Torrijos

Well, Jesus, John! In that case, what’s the difference between you and the jackals? Maybe it’s because I watch a lot of movies, but in my eyes you were basically threatening someone’s life in those meetings.

Let me be clear: The EHMs are not overtly threatening or doing anything illegal. We’d just talk about it the same way I’m talking to you. But if you’re the president of the country and I start reminding you about what happened to Arbenz or Allende, you’d immediately get the picture. When you approach those situations the way the economic hit men do, instead of threats you say, “Mr. President, if you sign off on this loan from the World Bank, a big American company is going to get the contract, but your brother owns the John Deer franchise here and we’ll see to it that the corporation rents the equipment from your brother.” You also make it very clear that the American firm will pay $2 million to rent $1 million worth of equipment. So, there is a million dollars on the table and the president knows he’s going to get his share. Oftentimes, we’d see to it that the president’s children and a bunch of other affluent kids got scholarships to the best colleges in the United States, and we will hire them as interns at our company once they graduate. At my company, [Boston strategic-consulting firm Chas. T. Main] we had 50 interns from places like Iran, Ecuador, Indonesia, Panama, etc.

In your books you often speak of “the geishas” — women employed by the corporatocracy who use sex to coerce and blackmail politicians and corporate executives. Can you tell me about your experience with the geishas?

The use of sex, in my experience, was very prevalent. In the business world and in the diplomatic world, using women is a very effective tool and in most cases it is, strictly speaking, not illegal. The majority of the time it is women seducing men, but I was trained by Claudine to look at possible ways of getting information from women in high positions. If you need important information and you know that some diplomat has access to that information, chances are his wife does, too. And if you can get through to her, you can usually get the information you need. Claudine taught me that the first step of seduction is generally successful if a man can convince a woman that he loves her, whereas when a woman is seducing a man, “love” is usually not a prerequisite. If you aren’t able to get through to a woman using love then, believe it or not, the next course of action (for men) is crying. Women really respond to tears, and if you say, “Jesus! I’m going to lose my job if don’t figure this out,” she will usually give it to you. If that doesn’t work, then the third time around you blackmail her. You say, “I’m going to expose our relationship and your marriage will be destroyed, and your husband’s career as a diplomat is over.” Regardless of the method, we always get the information we need and there is nothing illegal about the approach.

These geishas aren’t your typical run-of-the-mill street urchins are they? They sound more like assassins or spies.

More like information-gathering instruments. The geishas are not just beautiful women who are persuasive; in fact they are intellects, highly trained and incredibly effective.  These women are not prostitutes. It’s interesting, I was recently talking to a guy who fought in WWII, and he was telling me that the trouble with today’s military is that they’re all mercenaries; it’s not just the Blackwaters that we know are mercenaries. The majority of men and women who go off to war these days enlist because they need the money, and in that respect they are essentially mercenaries. You could say the same thing about these women. Are they prostitutes or are they professionals getting paid to do a job that happens to use sex to achieve its objective?

How do you think our forefathers would feel about America’s approach toward foreign policy? Is this what they had in mind when they wrote the Constitution?

Terrible. I often think about that and how our forefathers stood up against the most powerful empire in the history of the world at the time. George Washington was probably the wealthiest man in the colony — well, Hancock and Jefferson were very wealthy, too — but these guys risked everything. When they signed those documents, when they took a stand, they were considered traitors and terrorists. If we had lost the Revolution, our forefathers would have all been hanged for treason because they believed in a higher principle and they believed in creating a better world for our children and our grandchildren. Sadly, I think if they’re looking down now they are saying, “What the hell have you guys done?” This empire today is run by what I call “the corporatocracy,” which if you haven’t figured out by now, is essentially the heads of big multinational corporations. The corporatocracy basically controls our politicians directly through their companies or through their major stockholders. They have tremendous influence through their lobbyists, and they either outright own the mainstream press or they manipulate it through advertising. This isn’t a conspiracy. They don’t need to conspire to do this and they aren’t doing anything illegal. They are simply driven by one goal: to maximize profits regardless of the social and environmental costs. Through subterfuge, the corporatocracy has undermined the fundamental principle of this great nation — a government of, for and by the people. They’ve circumvented that principle. Today, we have a government for and by the lobbyists and the special-interest groups. But we can change this, Jordan. The corporatocracy is a group with a common goal of maximizing profits, and in that regard and they are completely dependant on all of us, on all of your readers. All the goods and services they produce must be purchased by us. As a result, we have the power to put an end to this system. The consumer decides which corporations will make it and which ones won’t. Take General Motors, for example: GM is shutting down four of its largest plants due to the high demand for energy-efficient automobiles. GM was producing gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs that the consumers didn’t want anymore. If none of us ever buys a shirt made in a sweatshop again there will be no more sweatshops. Or better yet, the current sweatshops will be turned into legitimate factories where the laborers get a fair wage and retirement plans.

What can we do?

There is a lot we can do. What if a percentage of the military budget was allocated to the corporatocracy to develop new ways to help the starving people around the world feed and educate themselves? With a moderate reallocation of funds we could create a brand-new economy, but we need to move out of this adolescent human viewpoint that says we must colonize, that we must exploit others in order for us to get ahead. If we continue on this path, it will be a hell of a world — a nasty world — but if we dedicate ourselves to using American resources to change this new geopolitical environment, to innovate, we will see a great deal of improvement. We, the consumers, have caused tremendous change in the corporate world. We have forced corporations to clean up terribly polluted rivers, to get rid of aerosol cans that were destroying the ozone layer and to fix their policies in terms of hiring minorities and women. Now, we need to take it up a notch and go after the very premise that directs these corporations so that they can move from a position of maximizing profits regardless of the environmental and social cost to an enlightened goal based on maximized profits while being environmentally and socially responsible.

Why do you think it’s taken so long for everyone to come around and demand change be made?

Today, we have very high fuel prices and suddenly everyone is saying, “Well, geez! I’ll take the train instead of driving a car.” But the fact of the matter is that a year ago it was just as important to take the train instead of a car because we were just as dependent on oil and just as dependent on countries that produce oil, but we are suddenly acting now because it’s finally hitting our wallets. It should have been hitting our consciousness a year ago. We all do things that we know in our hearts we shouldn’t do, but that’s part of the message here: We need to look deeper; we need to become more conscious, more aware of the impact of everything we do. So, I was an economic hit man, and I have to live with that. I am not trying to justify it or rationalize it, but at the time, it was an easy thing to do. I was patted on the back by Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank and a scholar from Harvard and other prestigious schools. We talked exactly about what I did and how it wasn’t considered illegal. In fact, it was considered a good thing even though in my heart I knew it wasn’t a good thing. At the beginning I could easily justify it, but over the 10 years I did it, each year it became harder and I began to see more and more what a bad thing it was, and at the end I got out.

How do you feel about the current state of American politics and specifically about the 2008 presidential election?

We are in an election year, and it’s important for us to understand that no matter who the next president is, he’s not going to be able to do much unless we really push him. The president himself is going to be beholden to some of these corporate interests, and we need to send a very strong message to the corporations as well as to the politicians that we want a sustainable, peaceful and just world. 

This is an exciting presidential campaign. We have some very different viewpoints coming in from these two candidates, and while I think it’s a pivotal moment for American politics, we must be aware that whoever wins the U.S. presidential election will invariably be beholden to Congress, the mainstream media and, to a large degree, the corporatocracy. I am often struck by the fact that Richard Nixon, a president who came across as a hardcore conservative and staunch anti-environmentalist, got us out of Vietnam, passed the Clean Air Act and a number of other crucial environmental laws. I didn’t personally like Nixon, but he did some progressive things because he was pushed by the will of the American people. The hippie movement was strong, the environmental movement was growing rapidly, the anti-war movement was culturally explosive —we pushed, pushed, pushed and we forced a conservative president to address some non-conservative issues. Whoever the next president is, whether it’s McCain or Obama, we need push him our absolute hardest to make sure that he leads the way toward a socially and environmentally responsible world, one the future generations of America will be proud to inherit. 

How do you feel the Internet has affected the way people get information and consume news?

The Internet has revolutionized the way we consume news. There has always been a strong craving for real news, but the national news programs on NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN — it’s inaccurate, heavily manipulated and completely repetitive. These channels don’t accurately report what’s going on in the world, and I think the American people really want to know the truth. That’s why books like mine do so well and movies like Blood Diamond, Hotel Rwanda, Syriana and Al Gore’s film are getting such widespread attention. People are craving this type of information and the Internet is providing a great opportunity to get unfiltered news that’s being updated 24 hours a day by real people with no corporate ties.

Do you read the blogs?

Yeah. Periodically, I do. There is a lot of great stuff out there. I mean youtube.com? My God, technology is helping us reach around the world. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is translated in more than 30 languages now. Lately, I’ve been doing interviews in China, Indonesia and the Philippines by phone and I often ask them where they get their news. Time and time again I hear http://www.democracynow.org. The world is truly united by these common crises: climate change, increasing food and oil prices, terrorism, poverty and health care. It used to be that Southern California would be impacted by fires or drought, but people in New England would be like, “OK, it’s happening again.” And   people in New England would impacted by that giant snowstorm, and California would be like, “OK, it’s happening again,” but it didn’t really impact them, so it certainly didn’t impact people in South Africa. But today, we are one global community brought together by a medium that allows us to share information freely. The Internet and cell phones are making it so easy for people to communicate all over the world.

What is your next book going to be about?

It’s practically written, and it’s more like Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in that it’s written more in that narrative style. This is really a trilogy, so you get the two bookends and then in the middle you’ve got Secrets of the American Empire, which is more of a thesis about what’s really going on. I don’t want to specifically talk about the new book because I get a little bit superstitious about that, but of the three, it’s my favorite and it talks a lot about my own transition and how a lot of the indigenous cultures impacted my own personal struggles. And it talks about a very exciting episode that the economic hit men and the jackals were involved in. It’s an exciting book and I’m very excited about it, but it will be awhile before it comes out. I am not rushing this one. 

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