As the administration of President George W Bush ramps up its global anti-terrorism campaign, it risks repeating the mistakes Washington made in Latin America during the Cold War, says a long-time critic of US policy in Latin America.

''We keep having a nagging feeling that we've been here before,'' says Joy Olson, director of the Latin American Working Group (LAWG), which yesterday released a report arguing that as in Latin America, human rights already are being given a lower priority as Washington strikes new alliances with authoritarian governments and provides stepped up training and weapons to their armed forces.

''It also doesn't give us confidence that some of the same players are in place in this administration as in the government which committed clear mistakes during the Cold War,'' Olson adds, referring to policymakers who also served in senior posts in the administration of former President Ronald Reagan. ''We have more confidence in Congress.''

The new report, entitled We will be Known by the Company We Keep, presents eight lessons that Washington should have learned from its Cold War experience in Latin America and could now apply to the anti-terrorist war.

Most important is to avoid support for repressive governments. ''People keep asking why the United States is hated abroad,'' the report says. ''Part of the answer lies in the company it has kept.''

Paradigm shift

LAWG is not the first to have noted the similarities between Washington's Cold War alliances and the six-month-old, anti-terrorist effort that Bush says will define his administration's ties with other countries. ''Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,'' he said in the first days of the campaign.

''What we've seen is a real paradigm shift in foreign policy in which the central organising principle will be the effort against terrorism,'' says Thomas Donilon, then chief of staff to former Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

In addition to fighting a military campaign in Afghanistan, since Sept 11 Washington has dispatched some 650 troops and military advisors to the Philippines and will soon send hundreds more to Yemen and Georgia.

New military training programmes have been launched or expanded for armies in Djibouti, Oman, Eritrea and Ethiopia, while the Pentagon has provided new military equipment and other support to several Central Asian states and Pakistan.

It is also considering new requests from Algeria and India, among others, to buy weapons and from Nepal to help its government in a long-standing civil war with self-described Maoist rebels.

The rush of new commitments has created nervousness in some quarters, including among human rights groups like Human Rights Watch, which have warned against forging close ties with abusive states.

In an echo of LAWG's argument, the libertarian think tank Cato Institute warned of similar dangers. '

'If the United States has the same kind of tunnel vision about terrorism that it had about the fight against communism during the Cold War, it could be blindsided by disastrous unintended consequences," wrote Cato's senior defence policy analyst, Charles Pena, last December. "Alliances with corrupt and repressive governments could do more to breed terrorism than to prevent it.''

Hugh Byrne, author of the LAWG report, agrees. ''What we learned from the US experience in Latin America during the Cold War was, ''when there is one overriding goal, dangerous foreign-policy tunnel vision can develop.''

The result in Latin America, he says, was that Washington resisted ''all democratic movements for change as a Trojan Horse for communism.''

The report includes case studies of Washington's policy toward Guatemala and Chile, where Washington helped install military governments which had ousted democratically elected, reformist governments; El Salvador, where it provided massive aid to an abusive military to forestall a guerrilla victory; and Nicaragua, where it engaged in a covert war to remove the Sandinista government.

''What can be said is that US policies had a substantial cost,'' states the report. ''They identified this country with dictatorship and repression, with corrupt regimes, and massive human rights violations.''

''Training military and police forces that would carry out massacres and death squad killings and organising the intelligence services that would co-ordinate this violence contributed to enormous suffering; hundreds of thousands of lives were lost; people lived for decades under despotic regimes, with an unquantifiable human cost in freedom denied to millions of people,'' the report says.

Similar policies were applied outside Latin America, particularly in Africa, during the same period, it adds.

Key lessons

To avoid similar results, the report suggests Washington should be guided by key lessons from the Latin American experience. It should:

  • Avoid close ties to unsavoury regimes lest it come ''to be viewed as an ally of dictators".

  • Put human rights at the core of relations with U.S. allies, ''since the creation of open societies where rights are respected is the best antidote to the appeal of extremist movements''.

  • Maintain strong and strict congressional oversight of the administration's activities. Do not give the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ''carte blanche'' to support or recruit human rights abuse or those who commit them.

  • ''Be careful what we leave behind'', to ensure that weapons and training provided by Washington will not be used in ways which do not coincide with US policy goals.

  • Protect and respect domestic dissent against administration policy.

  • ''Don't be 'penny wise, pound foolish' with peace.'' Supporting reconstruction and development in Afghanistan, as in other war-torn countries, can make the difference between securing peace in a post-war environment and leaving disillusioned people ready for the next conflict''.

  • Address the root causes of terrorism, such as poverty, lack of social and economic development and undemocratic and repressive regimes.

    • Thus far, according to Olson, only some of these lessons  and then only partially  appear to have been heeded by Congress and the administration. (IPS)