America the banana republic
I covered South America for The Washington Post from 1988 to 1992, a time when nations such as Argentina, Brazil and Peru were struggling to reestablish democratic norms after the long, dark night of military dictatorship. One of the biggest challenges was implanting something we take for granted in this country: public confidence that justice, for the most part, is blind and engages in an honest search for truth.
I never thought I’d be living in a country like that again. But thanks to President Trump and the inexcusable damage he is doing to our justice system, South America’s past has become America’s present.
There has been considerable hyperventilation, some perhaps by me, about the grave harm Trump is doing to our democratic institutions. I am not hyperventilating now. Public faith in justice is a delicate, precious thing. Once squandered, it is incredibly hard to regain.
That’s the kind of damage Trump is threatening with his outrageous and un-American attacks on the Justice Department and the federal judiciary for finding his cronies - including longtime political adviser Roger Stone, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and campaign manager Paul Manafort guilty of crimes and deserving of punishment. I know what the impact of this behavior is, because I’ve seen how it plays out before.
I lived in Argentina, where the president for much of my time there, Carlos Menem, was a populist norm-breaker who nepotistically involved his family in running the government and was widely viewed as corrupt. In 1991, Menem’s sister-in-law and appointments secretary, Amira Yoma, was indicted on moneylaundering charges that involved suitcases full of cash allegedly being smuggled in and out of the country. Yoma’s ex-husband was head of the customs service at Ezeiza international airport outside Buenos Aires, where he allegedly facilitated the cash-smuggling.
Menem was accused of secretly meeting with the prosecuting judge in charge of the Yoma case. The president initially denied having had such a meeting but ultimately admitted it, claiming it was about some unrelated matter. The judge’s secretary alleged that the judge went to the presidential residence, where she showed Menem secret prosecution documents about the Yoma case.
That judge was suddenly taken off the case, which was assigned to a different judge, and Yoma was eventually cleared of all charges. It is safe to say that few Argentines were surprised.
There simply was very little confidence in the ability of the justice system to discern truth from falsehood or to punish the powerful and well-connected. There was an understanding, moreover, that prosecutors and the court system could and sometimes would be used as political tools.
Years after leaving office, Menem was convicted on unrelated charges involving weapons smuggling and embezzlement. He maintained his innocence, claiming he was being persecuted by his political enemies.
In those fragile democracies I covered years ago, seeing justice be warped by politics had a corrosive effect on the larger society. A lack of confidence that court proceedings could - or even were intended to - arrive at truth encouraged the propagation and spread of conspiracy theories. Argentina still struggles to escape the widespread belief that unseen forces control events from deep in the shadows.
This is not the sort of path I ever thought the United States could possibly take. Our justice system obviously has flaws, starting with the way it disproportionately punishes people of color. But it has not been naïve, at least in my lifetime, to believe that federal prosecutors and judges tried their very best not to let politics influence their decisions - and that they generally succeeded because they took their responsibilities seriously.
When four assistant U.S. attorneys asked to be taken off the Stone case, they were sounding an alarm. We must all pay attention.
Their recommendation that Stone serve seven to nine years in prison for his crimes was tough, but federal prosecutors tend to be tough. Stone was duly convicted in a court of law, and U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson will decide his punishment. But when higher-ups in Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department overrule the prosecutors who handled the case on Stone’s recommended sentence; when Trump tries to delegitimize those prosecutors as “Angry Democrats” because they worked for former special counsel Robert Mueller III; and when Trump goes so far as to try to intimidate Jackson, a highly respected veteran federal judge when such things happen, I have to wonder whether I’m back in Carlos Menem’s Argentina.
Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.