AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The remains of President Jimmy Carter arrive in Washington, D.C., today, where he’ll be honored by a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol before lying in state through Thursday morning. The casket carrying the 39th American president will leave the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta, where thousands of mourners paid their respects over the weekend, and travel to Dobbins Air Reserve Base north of Atlanta before arriving at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, with a motorcade into Washington, D.C. His casket will be carried into the Capitol Rotunda for an afternoon service with members of Congress, after which the public can pay respects. President Carter’s state funeral will take place at the National Cathedral in Washington Thursday, which President Biden has declared a national day of mourning. President Carter died December 29th at the age of 100.

We interviewed him a number of times on Democracy Now! This is a short clip of an interview I did with him when I went down to Atlanta to the Carter Center in 2007. These views are much less often being referred to as President Carter is being talked about and eulogized. We were talking about his book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

JIMMY CARTER: Americans don’t want to know and many Israelis don’t want to know what is going on inside Palestine. It’s a terrible human rights persecution that far transcends what any outsider would imagine. And there are powerful political forces in America that prevent any objective analysis of the problem in the Holy Land.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the late president on Palestine. For the full interview and our other interviews with President Carter, you can go to democracynow.org.

Today we look at President Jimmy Carter’s legacy in Latin America with Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, professor of history at Yale University. His forthcoming book, America, América: A New History of the New World, which will be out in April.

If you can first, before we get into Panama, because it was under President Carter that Panama Canal was returned to Panama, the oversight of it, and before we talk about Salvador and Nicaragua, overall, President Carter’s legacy in Latin America?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, I think it was mixed, and it was confused. I mean, Carter was in many ways a transitional president that came to power having to deal with the combined disasters of both Vietnam and Watergate and rebuild trust and rebuild the kind of moral foundation on which the United States justified its exercise of power. And in many ways, Latin America was the place to do that.

And just to set the stage a little bit, set the scene, Carter comes to power, and he’s inaugurated in 1977. Pretty much all of South America is run by anti-communist dictatorships that were installed or supported by the United States — the Nixon Doctrine, coups under Lyndon B. Johnson, coups under Kennedy. They brought to power one anti-communist dictatorship after another, largely in response to the Cuban Revolution, backing up even further. In Central America, there weren’t dictatorships, but there were insurgencies, revolutionary insurgencies, and anti-communist states fighting those insurgencies. And domestically, you had a very anti-imperialist Congress elected after Watergate and after Vietnam, that insisted that the United States start pulling back some of its support for dictatorships, for more of its unsavory allies. And Latin America seemed the place to do it.

And they did. They cut aid to Uruguay. They cut aid to — they limited aid to Chile. They cut aid to Brazil, all the military to Argentina. And, of course, that became a kind of shining example of what the United States should be in terms of its foreign policy. The reality was actually more complicated. It was also the place where the United States started putting conditionalities on military aid. And obviously, we see that under Gaza, how that’s played out, but that the United States would — you know, there would be certain markers or certain checkmarks that countries had to meet in terms of human rights monitoring before military aid was released. In many ways, it was more symbolic than real. In a country like Guatemala, for instance, where the United States did cut off military aid, it didn’t cut off military aid that was already in the pipeline, so that continued to flow. Now, in Central America, where you had insurgencies, these were kind of like a stress test for this new foreign policy, this new moralism that Jimmy Carter represented. And he didn’t at first cut aid off to Nicaragua, and he didn’t cut off aid to El Salvador.

AMY GOODMAN: Meaning, in Nicaragua, to Somoza.

GREG GRANDIN: To Somoza or to the junta in El Salvador.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, let’s talk about El Salvador — 

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — because you have Archbishop Óscar Romero, who has been canonized a saint by the Vatican, who was assassinated on March 24th, 1980. He appealed to President Carter, weeks before his assassination, to stop the flow of aid.

GREG GRANDIN: Directly, in a very impassioned letter that was — I teach that letter. And Carter didn’t respond. He left it to Cyrus Vance to respond. He didn’t respond. And they didn’t cut off aid. And even prior to that — Cyrus Vance was Carter’s secretary of state. Brzeziński, Zbigniew Brzeziński, was his national security adviser. And in many ways, you can think of them as two sides. Like, Vance was considered more dovish, and Brzeziński more hawkish — a little more complicated than that. But Brzeziński was complaining to the Vatican about Óscar Romero, that he had been moved too far to the left. This was before the letter. So, you see that, you know, it’s not just Jimmy Carter; it’s the administration he presides over. It’s much more —

AMY GOODMAN: And he — when Óscar Romero was giving his homily, that was broadcast throughout El Salvador, when he was gunned down, he was appealing to the soldiers of El Salvador, to the paramilitaries. He said, “I beseech you, I urge you, I plead” —

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — “with you to put down your arms.”

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah. Actually, that was a day before he was assassinated. He was assassinated in a smaller church. It was a smaller Mass in a smaller parish in San Salvador. He was shot through the heart. But yes —

AMY GOODMAN: By? By?

GREG GRANDIN: By a death squad that was trained by the United States and led by Roberto D’Aubuisson.

AMY GOODMAN: Who would later become president.

GREG GRANDIN: He would later become — he would later become the head of the ARENA party. I don’t believe he was president, but, no, he became the head of the party that ruled El Salvador, the ARENA party. But he became a very influential politician, Roberto D’Aubuisson.

AMY GOODMAN: Right. He was a member of the Legislative Assembly.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, yeah. And he was a favorite of the far right. So, Jimmy Carter, in many ways, was a foil for the rising right in the United States, and his policies in Latin America kind of captured the contradictions — and I would use the word “contradiction” rather than “confusion” — of Carter’s foreign policy. You know, he came to power — he came to power promising to end the United States’s inordinate fear of communism. He gave a speech in Notre Dame that was considered a kind of a new kind of doctrine, that the United States was moving away from both the ideological excess and the support for dictatorships that led to wars like Vietnam or coups in Chile.

But he fairly — pretty quickly, events got ahead of him, in many ways. In Central America, the rise of the Sandinistas and insurgencies led to contradictory policies. In El Salvador, he, for instance, continued supporting the military regime and its death squads. In Nicaragua, he cut off economic aid, but he continued military aid as he tried to kind of guide, you know, force Somoza out and lead to more democratic elections when the Sandinistas had the momentum. There was the Iranian Revolution in the Persian Gulf, which led to the Carter Doctrine, which was written by Brzeziński and basically asserted that the United States would respond with military force to anything that they perceived as a threat to U.S. interests.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to play a clip of President Carter’s commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame in 1977.

PRESIDENT JIMMY CARTER: Democracy’s great recent success in India, Portugal, Spain, Greece show that our confidence in this system is not misplaced. Being confident of our own future, we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism, which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that was President Carter. The significance of what he was saying there when it relates to, for example, Latin America?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, that he was saying that he was going to deal with Third World nationalism on its own terms, not as just a front for geopolitical Cold War politics, meaning the Soviet Union. But that gives way very quickly. I mean, we only have a few minutes, but we have to say that it was under Carter that the CIA began its operation in Afghanistan, began supporting the mujahideen. It was the Carter administration in July 1979, urged by Brzeziński to begin providing nonlethal aid to what becomes the mujahideen. All of these things led to what — the end of détente and the pulling of the Soviet Union deeper into Afghanistan and the weaponization of Islam as a geopolitical tool in the United States, that we’re still living with the consequences today. And for all of his decency and humanity, especially compared to orgastic — the wealth and the clown circus that we’re living under now, we have to kind of look at how Carter — some of the more unfortunate legacies of Carter’s administration.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, President Carter did sign an agreement in 1977 to gradually return control of the Panama Canal to Panama. This came after mass protests in Panama, wanting the return of their canal. Talk about the significance of this deal. And now we go full circle as President Trump threatens to —

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — take it back. And the flags will fly at half-staff during the inauguration — something President Trump has decried, saying it’s the first time — because Biden has called for flags to fly at half-staff for the 30 days after Carter’s death.

GREG GRANDIN: Yes, the return of Panama was a huge symbolic and material correction of an injustice. Panama was a province of Colombia. The United States, Teddy Roosevelt teamed up with J.P. Morgan to basically, you know, coax a revolution there, an insurgency, and declared — recognized the independence of Panama, and then built a canal, that the United States controlled, the Panama Canal Zone. And Carter’s return of it was —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 15 seconds.

GREG GRANDIN: — very symbolic.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to have to leave it there, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, professor of history at Yale University, Greg Grandin.

And finally today, our deepest condolences to Democracy Now!’s Juan González on the passing of his mother, Florinda Guillén. She was 97 years old.

That does it for our show. Democracy Now! is produced with Renée Feltz, Mike Burke, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Anjali Kamat, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud and Hana Elias. Our executive director is Julie Crosby. Special thanks to Becca Staley. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.