Politics & Power Quote by John Negroponte

There’s a practiced calm in Negroponte’s sentence, the kind that turns a messy decade into a tidy résumé line. The intent is defensive and prophylactic: to pre-empt criticism of U.S. policy in Central America by framing it as principled support for “the democratic process” under difficult conditions. The key move is credentialing. “Those of us who actually were working in the region” draws a hard boundary between insiders and armchair critics, implying that proximity confers moral clarity. It’s an appeal to authority masquerading as humility.

The subtext lives in the phrase “in spite of the fact.” War isn’t treated as a consequence of policy, or even as a political reality with perpetrators and victims; it’s weather. Something unfortunate that happened to be going on while the United States encouraged elections. That grammatical choice launders responsibility and narrows the moral frame to procedure. Elections become the proof of virtue, not necessarily the measure of freedom, legitimacy, or human rights.

Context sharpens the stakes. Negroponte’s career is tangled up with the Reagan-era push to contain leftist movements in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, a period marked by proxy warfare, death squads, and U.S. support for anti-communist forces whose “stability” often meant terror. In that landscape, “supporting democracy” could function less as an outcome than as a narrative: a way to claim the high ground even when the ground was soaked in covert operations and civilian blood. The line doesn’t argue; it inoculates. It asks you to admire commitment while quietly asking you not to ask what that commitment enabled.