Jimmy Carter or the time of the righteous men

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 01/01/2025

Jimmy Carter started out with the same simplicity with which he came into this world. The son of a farming family whose livelihood depended on the sale of peanuts, his early years were marked by the daily effort to create value. Because agriculture is a task that demands time, precision and effort. In the furrows of his beloved Georgia he was able to realize how cruel, useless and wasteful the segregationist system that prevailed in the south of the United States was. In the fields there was no difference between black and white hands when it came to preparing the land, sowing, watering and harvesting the crops. And from that environment he took the personal austerity that would accompany him throughout his life.

As a politician, he was part of the good side of history. He supported President Johnson in the fight for the establishment of civil rights for the segregated population.

As a president on the world stage, he had to pay the bills of his predecessors. Iran attacked the United States when the White House was home to one of the few Western political leaders who placed immense value on dialogue as a way of reaching understandings. But for Iran, the United States was and is the Great Satan of intervention and support for totalitarian regimes. After several decades, it seems that Iran has not only become the Great Satan of the Middle East, but has created mercenary armies to support disastrous regimes such as Assad's. I imagine that those who shared responsibilities for world order with Jimmy Carter are now pondering the terrible weight of their decision on the fate of the Middle East by not supporting Carter while leaning towards Ruhollah Khomeini. In the area of domestic economic policy, the problems that led to economic paralysis and inflation were hatched during the administration of Richard Nixon, who not only suspended the convertibility of the dollar into gold but also imposed price controls and froze wages. Ronald Reagan had to come to impose order by placing Paul Volker at the head of the Federal Reserve.

"I have one life and one chance to make it count for something," Carter said in an interview when he established the Center that bears his name at Emory University. And he devoted the rest of his life to it.

And it did so well. From Latin America to the borders of Asia and Africa, the Center has strived to convey to peoples the notion that sovereignty resides within them and that they must therefore elect their leaders in transparent, free and fair elections. Since its founding in 1982, the Carter Center has designed and implemented the best electoral observation program in the world. With more than two hundred elections observed, the Center has become the safeguard of the sovereignty of many peoples. Its most recent performance, carried out by one of Jimmy Carter's most outstanding students, Jennie Lincoln, provided irrefutable and reliable evidence of Nicolas Maduro's electoral defeat on July 28 of this year. Years before, its work in Venezuela was criticized, in my view, unfairly, since the opposition of those days never provided evidence of the fraud perpetrated by the regime, preferring to make pacts in order to continue having access to sinecures. Maria Corina Machado had to take the reins of the opposition so that the work of the Carter Center would bear fruit

For the homeless, Carter put his reputation behind the Habitat for Humanity program, which builds low-cost prefabricated homes using a variety of professional workers who volunteer to build one or more homes.

Curiously, it begins at a time when it seems that the world could fall prisoner to what is called INC Totalitarianism, which is a totalitarian system of government that makes a pact with transnational organized crime to create an opprobrious system that, in addition to confiscating sovereignty and repressing, raids the state treasury and puts the country's resources at the disposal of criminal organizations. However, recent events in Syria and Venezuela seemed to prove Carter right when, in a private conversation in Port au Prince on the eve of the first democratic election after Duvalier's departure, he told me, "When a people truly understands that sovereignty is the path to freedom, nothing and no one can stop it."

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