In May 1989, the former US president Jimmy Carter walked into the lobby of a hotel in Panama and made it known he was determined to be heard in spite of attempts by the country’s military ruler, Gen Manuel Noriega, to shut him up.
Carter was still widely held in contempt in his own country, where his reputation as a one-term president was crucified in the late 70s by interminable gas lines, Iran’s taunting seizure of American hostages and a general perception that he lacked the mettle to lead the free world.
In time, he won renewed respect through the myriad works of his Carter Center and its considerable efforts to eradicate diseases, mediate conflicts and press brutal regimes to reform. Driven by a deep religious faith and missionary zeal, which others could find grating, he set about doing what he could not as president – changing the world. Part of that was to establish his centre as a credible judge of the fairness of elections as authoritarian regimes crumbled with the end of the cold war. Panama was his first.
Noriega was under indictment in the US for drug trafficking, even though he had long worked for the CIA, and was hoping to ease US pressure with an election that would see his handpicked candidate installed.
Carter, alone among former US presidents, had the standing and credibility with Latin Americans to endorse or reject the results. For a start, he signed the treaties to hand the Panama Canal Zone, sovereign American territory at the time, to Panama in 2000 over the vigorous denunciations of Ronald Reagan, who went on to defeat Carter in the 1980 presidential election, and Republicans in Congress. Donald Trump is now threatening to take the canal back.
Carter met Noriega the evening before the ballot at the dictator’s military headquarters. A Carter Center aide, Jennie Lincoln, was with the former president. “It was surreal. There was President Carter and Mrs Carter took notes. I did the translation of Noriega’s Spanish to English for the president,” she said. “President Carter asked Noriega if he would accept the result if it went against him. Noriega was very arrogant and very confident they would win.”
Noriega miscalculated. His candidate was soundly beaten. The electoral commission was in the dictator’s pocket and made a clumsy attempt to fix the result. Carter confronted its top officials.
“Are you honest people or are you thieves?” he asked them. The former president tried to see Noriega again but failed so he decided to go public. The electoral commission blocked a press conference at its media centre so Carter walked across the road and gave an impromptu address to reporters in the lobby of the Marriott hotel.
As Noriega’s soldiers swirled around outside, Carter’s Secret Service bodyguards set up two exit routes just in case. “The government is taking the election by fraud,’’ Carter said. “It’s robbing the people of Panama of their legitimate rights.” The election was annulled and by the end of the year the US had invaded and overthrown Noriega, although that is not what Carter had wanted.
It’s difficult to imagine another former US president having the credibility to carry out such a role in a Latin American country. Carter’s record as president in the region was far from unblemished but his administration initiated an annual report on human rights practices by foreign governments which led to the end of military aid to five rightwing Latin American dictatorships for the rest of his term.
He also pulled the plug on longstanding US support for the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, helping to bring about its downfall at the hands of the Sandinistas in 1979, although he did keep up aid to the government in El Salvador despite appalling human rights abuses.
Opinion divided on the impact of Carter’s policies, compromised as they were by cold war tensions and the long history of the US’s imperial behavior in Latin America. But ordinary Latin Americans noted that Carter offered an interlude from the usual US swagger in their region in sharp contrast with those elected before and after him.
Panama was just a beginning. The one-term president who left office widely ridiculed as weak and incompetent proved to be rather more steely and effective out of the White House.
His Carter Center played a major role in the near eradication of Guinea worm disease and in combating other diseases that blight so many lives among, as Carter put it, “some of the poorest and neglected people on earth”. Carter had a hand in resolving conflicts from Haiti and North Korea to Sudan. His organisation has monitored about 100 elections since the first in Panama.
He used the residual authority of being an ex-US president, who could get the White House on the phone, to confront authoritarian leaders of various stripes, from Ethiopia’s dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, to Liberia’s notorious warlord and former president Charles Taylor, now serving a 50-year prison sentence after being convicted by an international court of terrorism, murder, rape and war crimes. He pressed human rights issues in Haiti and Cuba. A Quinnipiac university poll in November 2015 revealed that American voters regarded Carter as having done the best work of any president since leaving office.
The Nobel committee recognised it a few years earlier in awarding the 2002 peace prize to this most unusual of ex-presidents who was to be found nailing together houses for the poor in Vietnam with Habitat for Humanity, in which he played a leading role, when he wasn’t denouncing torture at the US prison at Guantánamo Bay, Barack Obama’s drone strikes or Tony Blair’s support for the Iraq invasion as “abominable”.
The same moral code or self-righteousness, depending on who is doing the describing, that as president cost him support in Congress for his far-sighted policies on the environment and energy because he refused to sign off on pork barrel politics led him in more recent times to speak his mind more frankly than most former presidents.
Carter said that a large part of the intense animosity toward the first African American president was because of his race. He warned that big money was now so pervasive in American politics that the US was “no longer a functioning democracy” because of “unlimited political bribery”. He accused “weak-kneed politicians” of bowing to the pressure of the National Rifle Association on gun control and railed against the death penalty.
But nothing ran Carter into so much trouble as his willingness to call it as he saw it on Israel.
In 2006, he drew a torrent of criticism and abuse with a book critical of Israel’s failure to make peace and end the occupation. The title – Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid – lit the fuse by suggesting Israel pursues a racist policy against the Palestinians.
A rightwing pro-Israel pressure group took out full-page adverts in the New York Times to demand the publishers correct supposed errors which were not errors at all. Others denounced the president who engineered the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, which has held for nearly four decades, as an antisemite and Israel hater.
Alan Dershowitz, the prominent constitutional lawyer who describes himself as liberal but has advocated the destruction of entire villages as collective punishment for Palestinian attacks, accused Carter of having “a long, long history of theological antisemitism coupled with virulent anti-Israelism”.
Carter infuriated his critics further by standing his ground and ramping up the criticism. He said that balanced debate about US policy on Israel is “practically non-existent” in Congress or in presidential races, and accused America’s political leadership of being “in the pocket” of the Jewish state.
“We cannot be peacemakers if American government leaders are seen as knee-jerk supporters of every action or policy of whatever Israeli government happens to be in power at the moment. That is the essential fact that must be faced,” he wrote.
Carter even took on the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) lobby group, which few American politicians dare cross, accusing it of “domineering influence” over US policy. In August 2015, he created a fresh stir by telling the British magazine Prospect that Israel’s then and future prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, intended for his country to go on ruling the Palestinians without giving them equal rights.
Carter was proved right with Netanyahu, who has recently been indicted by the international criminal court for war crimes in Gaza, going on to openly oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state.
There’s no doubt that Carter’s views on Israel were rooted in his deep Christianity. Some accused him of antisemitic tropes. Whatever was driving him, he was not afraid to make his views known long before he became president. He first visited Israel in 1973 when he was governor of Georgia.
At a meeting with the legendary prime minister Golda Meir, he decided to give the firmly secular Israeli leader a religious scolding. “With some hesitation, I said that I had long taught lessons from the Hebrew Scriptures and that a common historical pattern was that Israel was punished whenever the leaders turned away from devout worship of God,” Carter recounted in his book. “I asked if she was concerned about the secular nature of her Labor government.” The chain-smoking Meir lit another cigarette and said she was not.
It seemed a natural fit then when Nelson Mandela asked Carter to become a founder member of the Elders in 2007.
The former South African president said the organisation of former leaders would use “almost 1,000 years of collective experience” and their political independence – they didn’t have to worry about the voters or their legislatures – to tackle problems that those in power and organisations such as the United Nations were unable to, from the climate crisis to HIV/Aids but particularly some of the world’s most enduring conflicts. Carter joined Elders delegations to Egypt to press then president Mohamed Morsi for “an inclusive, democratic transition”.
The former US leader travelled to Burma, Cyprus, the Korean peninsula and Sudan. But, notably, he was not part of an Elders delegation to Iran. He campaigned for equality for women and girls. Then he was back building houses, giving more interviews critical of Israel and, even after his diagnosis of cancer, promising that he would not stop until he was unable to continue any more. Carter was true to his word.
