Winning hearts, minds in Latin America

PUERTO CABEZAS, Nicaragua | From the time he was 4 years old, Ches Lacollo, 11, suffered from an abnormal growth on the inside of his right eyelid. The mass obstructed his vision, made reading impossible and so deformed his appearance that, he said, his friends and family avoided looking directly at him.

Removing the growth required only a fairly simple surgery. But in Puerto Cabezas, on Nicaragua’s impoverished eastern coast, there are few doctors and only basic health facilities. Most surgeries require that the patients fly hundreds of miles across the country to the capital of Managua. But the $100 for the twice-daily flights out of Puerto Cabezas’ sole airstrip is more than most local residents can afford.

So for seven years, Ches suffered and hoped for a miracle.

That miracle arrived in perhaps the strangest possible form. On Aug. 11, the hulking gray shape of the USS Kearsarge, an 840-foot U.S. Navy amphibious assault ship, appeared in the ocean haze a few miles from Puerto Cabezas’ sun-scorched, seaweed-strewn beaches. Four days later, Ches found himself on a bed in Kearsarge’s air-conditioned medical ward, being prepped for a quick surgery to remove the growth at no cost to his family.

“Even though it’s a simple surgery, it will have a big impact on this child’s life,” said Cmdr. Brian Alexander, an optometrist normally assigned to the Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia.

Mere hours later, Lt. Brian Barber began unwrapping the bandages from Ches’ head to give him his first view of the world through “new” eyes.

Ches had many people to thank, but none more than Adm. James Stavridis, the charismatic boss of U.S. Southern Command, based a thousand miles away in Miami.

Despite the distance, Adm. Stavridis was a constant presence in Kearsarge’s gray corridors, in her chilly operating rooms and in Puerto Cabezas’ sweltering streets, which for two weeks in August hosted some 300 medical specialists fromthe amphibious ship.

For Adm. Stavridis, a prominent former destroyer captain and the author of four books, is one of the masterminds of a radical, but largely unheralded, new strategy for protecting American interests without ever firing a shot.

With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gobbling up most U.S. military resources and monopolizing the attention of the nation’s top policy-makers, Adm. Stavridis and like-minded senior officers, with the blessing of Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates, are using leftover people and weapon systems, plus the freedom that comes from being mostly ignored by the public, to invade some of the world’s most desperate and volatile countries with free medical care and education and economic assistance.

In military speak, it’s called “soft power,” and it’s all the rage in the Pentagon’s concrete halls.

Soft power

The basic theory is simple: It’s easier and in the long run cheaper to win over people with friendship and gifts than it is to fight them into submission when a crisis flares.

At the cost of a few thousand dollars plus a couple hours of labor, someone like Ches becomes a lifelong ally of the United States, and so too his friends and family. Multiply that by a hundred thousand, and you’ve “conquered” a country without anyone dying - and the allegiances, presumably, are stronger than they’d ever be from a defeated enemy.

This is a theory underscored by the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which have proved the difficulty of winning hearts and minds in the midst of daily fighting using heavy weapons systems that often claim the lives of innocent bystanders.

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