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Former U.S.-Backed Military Dictator Efrain Rios Montt Found Guilty of Genocide in Guatemala

Efraín Ríos Montt held to account for abuses in campaign that killed an estimated 200,000 and led to 45,000 disappearances

The former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide on Friday after a court found him guilty of crimes against humanity for his role in the slaughter of 1,771 Mayan Ixils in the 1980s. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

It is the first time a former head of state has been found guilty of genocide in their own country.

“We are convinced that the acts the Ixil suffered constitute the crime of genocide,” said Judge Yazmin Barrios, adding that Ríos Montt “had knowledge of what was happening and did nothing to stop it”.

The trial was the first time a former head of government has been held to account in Guatemala for the abuses carried out during a 36-year conflict that killed an estimated 200,000 people and led to 45,000 other “disappearances”.

The vast majority of the victims were members of indigenous groups that make up about half of the population.

The verdict was hailed by victims’ groups and human rights organisations as a step towards healing the psychological wounds from one of Latin America’s bloodiest civil wars.

His co-defendant, former intelligence chief José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, was cleared by the court.

“This is healthy for Guatemala because it helps us free our demons,” said Helen Mack, a businesswoman and prominent human rights activist whose sister, an anthropologist, was killed by the Guatemalan army in 1990.

Pascal Paradis, director of Lawyers Without Borders Canada, which has advised the victims’ lawyers throughout the case, said the fact the trial happened at all was a big achievement.

“It was quite a feat to get past the amnesty law that was passed when Guatemala signed a peace deal in 1996 to end its 36-year war. Impunity is no longer the rule,” he said.

Others said the jailing of the 86-year-old was not enough, given the suffering of the victims.

“What I want is for Ríos to feel the pain we felt,” said Elena de Paz Santiago, who was 12 when she and her mother fled a massacre in their village in 1982.

They hid in the mountains and survived by eating roots and wild plants for months, before being caught and taken to an army outpost to cook and clean for the soldiers. Her mother died while they were both being gang-raped and was later buried in a mass grave.

“He [Rios Montt] will go to jail but he will have food. We nearly starved hiding out in the mountains,” she said in an interview outside the courtroom.

The legal battle is also far from over and Ríos Montt is expected to appeal.

“We still have a long way to go,” said Edwin Canil, a legal adviser to the victims who helped build the case against Rios Montt and is himself a survivor of a massacre in 1982.

The defence team challenged the validity of the trial throughout the three weeks of hearings.

Zury Rios, the former dictator’s daughter, complained of the “legal mismanagement” of the trial by the three-judge panel and what she called the “arbitrary form” in which it was conducted.

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Categories Government, Guatemala, History, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Racism, Reactionary Watch, Statements, U.S. Military, U.S. News, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

The Rise and Fall of Third Worldism – Part 1

1 Jan

PART ONE: “Two, Three, many Vietnams”: National Liberation and the Rise of the Third World (1945 – 1991)

Asia, Africa and Latin America in the Early Years of the Century

With the exception of Latin America, and several noteworthy cases in Africa and Asia, the pre-1945 history of what came to be known as the “Third World” is overwhelmed by the fact of imperialism. Native voices were silenced and native cultures nearly eradicated.

In Asia, Japan was the only country to industrialize, and thus the only country to emerge as a major player in world affairs. Although at first resistant to Western influences; by the middle of the 19th century Japan had embarked on a major modernization program. Building upon traditional values, Japan built an army and navy powerful enough to challenge Russia over Korea at the turn of the last century; and strong enough to join the British, French, Germans, and Americans in carving out a sphere of influence in China. A hybrid of feudal/warrior institutions and modern technology would characterize Japan throughout most of the 20th century. Some argue that this mixture would enable Japanese economic success.

China, the most populous nation on earth, with a culture going back some 5,000 years, was weak and felt herself victimized by the Great Powers. Unlike Japan, China had not modernized. Chinese institutions had frozen. The Manchu dynasty which had ruled China for some 300 years seemed more interested in maintaining itself in power than in bettering the lot of its people; the majority of whom lived in conditions of appalling poverty. Although there was a strong feeling against foreign domination, which periodically erupted into mass uprisings such as the Boxer Rebellion; China had been effectively divided up amongst the Great Powers, who controlled large areas known as ‘concessions’ where they enjoyed trade monopolies. The corrupt and infirm Manchu dynasty fell underneath its own weight in 1911. The collapse of Manchu rule created a power vacuum which was filled by ambitions local strongmen, the ‘warlords,’ who became a law unto themselves in China’s vast outlying regions and frustrated any attempt at national unification.

Only two nations in Africa escaped colonial rule: Liberia and Ethiopia. Liberia, created by American abolitionists in 1825 as place to which future freed slaves could be “repatriated,” existed as a small anomaly to the general imperialist trend. Ethiopia, the ancient kingdom of Abyssinia, continued as a feudal monarchy surrounded by European protectorates and outright colonies.

Latin America was the great exception. By 1821, most of the old Spanish and Portuguese colonies had become independent states. Most of the 19th Century, in Latin America was consumed by a fierce struggle between traditional elites who favored a continuation of the old colonial plantation system and modernizers who wished to institute capitalist economics and bring in contemporary technologies and ideas. This conflict was further complicated by the beginning of the 20th Century by the active involvement of the United States in the region. Going back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1825, the United States had seen Latin America as its “back yard”; and American investments and interests in Latin America grew exponentially.

In Central America and the Caribbean, the battle between Conservatives (traditionalists) and Liberals (modernizers) lasted, in some case up to the 1930s. The ever increasing US presence stunted indigenous development and encouraged the rise of military dictatorships which maintained a precarious balance between repressing domestic dissent and ensuring continued US support. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, Spanish colonial rule was replaced, in the first instance by an apparent independence masking the reality of outside control, and in the second case, by direct US annexation.

Different scenarios were played out north and south of Central America. To the north, Mexico, which had, shortly after independence, lost much of its territory to the United States in the Mexican-American War of 1842, developed a strong, albeit contradictory state. In 1911, the Mexican Revolution overthrew the 40-year military dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz and inaugurated a period of titanic political/economic/social struggle. Populist radical leaders such as Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata vied with conservatives such as Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregon as ad hoc revolutionary armies fought against whom ever happened to constitute the government at the time and each other. Eventually, the radicals were either marginalized or destroyed, and power settled into the hands of a conservative, modernizing elite composed of political strongmen and their followers. This elite held power through the mechanism of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The PRI oversaw the secularization and modernization of Mexican society. By 1945, Mexico was a contradictory mixture of large cities with modern industries, and a poor, backward countryside; a strong national sense of self, and control by a coterie of politicians and businessmen; an independent foreign policy, and a sharp awareness of the presence of the United States. In one way or another, this pattern would come to characterize not only Mexico, but much of Latin America.

In the south, Brazil and Argentina were becoming industrial power houses – albeit conflicted ones. Brazil seemed to follow the pre-established Mexican pattern: large, sprawling urban areas surrounded by impoverished rural zones. Brazil’s industries were concentrated in the north and along the coast; the wealth of the interior was only sporadically exploited. Argentina, with its large immigrant population (mainly Italian and Eastern European) provided something of a contrast. Heavy industry had appeared at the dawn of the century; the immense volume of European immigrant coming to work in those industries. The immigrants brought with them European ideas and social relations; both of which conflicted with traditional values. By 1945 the dictatorship of Juan Peron which combined a fascist core with modernizing elements initiated a period of military rule which would, by and large, characterize Argentina until the 1980s.

Imperialism and Colonialism Revisited

The decisions of the Versailles Conference of 1919 dismantled the Turkish, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but kept the British and French Empires intact. Not only that, but the Portuguese continued to rule Angola and Mozambique in Africa; the Belgians continued to rule the Congo; and the Dutch continued to govern Indonesia. The Middle East was divided between British French spheres of influence and protectorates. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand did become independent commonwealths – and Ireland did fight her way to a disunited independence – but, by and large, imperialism remained intact after World War I.

It wouldn’t be until after World War II that powerful drives towards independence and de-colonization would shatter the old European empires and create the modern states of Asia and Africa. The Second World War, with its anti-fascist and democratic aspirations, would impel the peoples of the colonial world to demand the same.

National Independence Struggles

In some cases, indigenous forces had played a major role in the defeat of the Axis powers. In Vietnam and Indonesia, Ho Chi Minh and Sukarno (respectively) emerged from the war as venerated national leaders. After the war, the French attempted to restore their rule in South East Asia. This misguided attempt came to an end in 1954 when, at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnamese forces under the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh which had previously defeated the Japanese; now prevented the French from returning. When the Americans tried to supplant the French, they too came to grief. A similar situation unfolded in Indonesia when the Dutch tried to restore the pre-war order. A similar outcome resulted: Sukarno, who had led resistance to the Japanese, now oversaw the independence of Indonesia.

The British came out of World War II in no condition to hold their empire together. In India, the Congress Party, under the leadership of Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mohammed Ali Jinnah had been the focus of the independence movement there for decades. Their moment arrived in 1948 when the British pulled out and Indian independence was declared. But independence brought crisis. Perhaps with British encouragement, Jinnah led a faction which demanded that a separate Muslim state be created. In multi-religious, polyglot India, this demand led to massive disruption, forced resettlement of huge amounts of people, and a great amount of ethnic and sectarian bloodshed. In the end, India (Hindu) and Pakistan (Muslim) were created as two separate – and mutually hostile – states.

In Africa, decolonization quite often led to extended periods of instability. Independence leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Julius Nyere (Tanzania), and Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) strove to modernize their countries by following a socialist model of development. In the Congo, Patrice Lumumba failed to establish a fully independent state, at the cost of his life. In many parts of Africa, the pull out of the colonial powers created confusion, chaos, and ethnic strife. Often this was caused by old imperial states themselves, as they continued to try to exert influence in their former possessions by sponsoring ethnic and political rivalries. Portugal refused to divest itself of its colonies, with the result that it took nationalist guerrilla movements until the 1970s to establish the independent nations of Mozambique and Angola. In the former British colonies of Rhodesia and South Africa, the white settler population refused to yield to demands for civil equality for the native Africans. Fighting lasted until 1975 when Rhodesia became the majority-African governed Zimbabwe (under Robert Mugabe); and until 1989 when the racist apartheid system was destroyed in South Africa (under Nelson Mandela).

In the Middle East, the Algerian Revolution of 1956 forced the French out of that country. In Egypt, Gamel Abdel Nasser came to power with a promise to encourage “Arab unity” and “Arab Socialism.” Nasser’s ideas spread to Syria and Iraq, where a movement claiming to champion Arab Socialism, but in fact more reminiscent of Italian Fascism took hold, Baathism. In many cases, interference by Western powers led to the displacement of radical, modernizing regimes with repressive conservative governments. The neutralization of the Left and the bankruptcy of the Right led many to see radical Islam as a viable political alternative.

The creation, by UN mandate, of the state of Israel in 1948 exacerbated the crises endemic to the area. The flow of immigrants to the new Jewish state led to the displacement of much of the native Palestinian population. The new Israel developed into a thoroughly militarized state, eventually going to war with the surrounding Arab states in 1967 and 1973.

The movement for de-colonization was strongly affected by the Cold War. Many independence movements had adopted one or another variety of socialism as its ideology, and many post-independence regimes sought Soviet aid. Other, more conservative post-independence governments became allies of the United States. Some changed sides. Thus, movements such as the National Liberation Front of Vietnam, Frelimo in Mozambique, and the MPLA in Angola saw themselves as Marxist; Israel, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia were in the US camp; while governments in Algeria, Egypt, and the Congo (Zaire) switched from Soviet to American sponsorship. The proxy conflict between the US and USSR was played out in the post-colonial world. Soon, two other forces, China and Cuba, would enter the fray.

The Chinese Revolution

China has seen a century of revolution – and some would say that it’s far from over. Revolution overthrew the decrepit Manchu dynasty in 1911. The newly created Chinese Republic, under the leadership of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and his Nationalist Party (Kuomintang), wanted to create a united, modern, and democratic China. The first step in achieving this would be the cancellation of foreign concessions and the bringing to heel of the regional warlords. It was ‘simple’ enough to ask the British, French, etc. to leave; the second part of that equation was more difficult to achieve. The warlords were ensconced in remote areas, unseating them would require a trained, professional army. In order to raise an officer class capable of leading such an army, the Whampoa military academy was established in 1920. The Whampoa academy attracted many young, patriotic Chinese of all political persuasions. Many of China’s future leaders would come out of the Whampoa Academy. At the head of the academy, as director, was Sun yat-Sen’s protégé, Chiang Kai-Shek. By the end of the 1920s, the “Northern Expedition,” as the anti-warlord campaign was termed, was largely successful. By that time, however, a new conflict had developed.

The new China was alone in the world. The former imperial powers, who had just been asked to leave, weren’t about to render any aid. Desperate for support, China turned to another nation just then going through a revolution of their own, the Soviet Union. The Soviets agreed to provide political and military aid to China, but at a price: that the Kuomintang bring into the government, as partners, the newly-created Communist Party of China. Sun Yat-Sen agreed, and the Communists were essential to victory in the Northern Expedition. However, Sun Yat-Sen’s lieutenant Chiang Kai-shek vehemently disagreed with any cooperation with the Communists. After Sun’s death in 1925, he was succeeded by Chiang who jettisoned any pretense of democracy, making himself military dictator. Chiang also wanted to get rid of the Communists at the first available opportunity.

In November of 1927, Chiang struck. Nationalist troops unexpectedly turned on their Communist fellows. In all of China’s major cities, Communists and their sympathizers were massacred in the streets. Overnight, the Chinese Communist Party was almost exterminated. In a state of confusion and disarray, the surviving Communists, made their way to the southern province of Jianxi where, a local Communist leader, an ex-librarian named Mao Tse-tung, had managed to hold the party together.

Organizing Communist guerrilla forces into a Red Army, Mao managed to hold off the Nationalists long enough to force an escape out of Jianxi. Known as the “Long March,” the Communists embarked on a 6,000 mile trek over rivers, mountains, and deserts, fighting Nationalists troops all the way. Finally, the Communists found sanctuary in the area of Yenan in China’s northern mountains. This, then, became their base. The Long March solidified Mao as the unquestioned leader of the Communist Party. From Yenan, Mao’s Communists engaged Chiang’s Nationalists in guerrilla warfare, and extended the Communist-controlled zone.

The full-scale Japanese invasion of China brought a temporary truce between the Communists and Nationalists, as they agreed to join forces against the foreign occupiers. Overall, as American advisers during World War II pointed out, the Communists were the more effective fighters against the Japanese. Chiang seemed to be more afraid of the Chinese Communists than he was of the invading Japanese; and American aid sent to Chiang often ended up in the pockets of Nationalist politicians. The end of the war and the defeat of Japan signaled a resumption of hostilities between the Nationalists and Communists. After an intense four-year civil war, Communist forces gained the upper hand. Chiang’s Nationalists were forced to flee the mainland; establishing themselves, as the republic of China, on the island of Taiwan – where they have remained to this very day. On October 10, 1949, from Beijing, Mao proclaimed the creation of the new, communist, Peoples Republic of China.

Communist China became a new and powerful ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In fact, Chinese troops entered the Korean War against the United States. Domestically, the Communists embarked on numerous developmental and modernization campaigns. Campaigns to eliminate infectious disease and illiteracy, as well as campaigns to ensure the equality of women were, in great part, successful. Attempts to industrialize China’s economy were less so. The best known of these, the “Great Leap Forward” (1959), which tried to jump start China’s development through mass participation in the form of things such as encouraging the building of backyard blast furnaces to produce steel, was a failure.

Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union and his policy of Peaceful Coexistence with the West met with disapproval in Beijing. Mao felt that the new Soviet leaders were abandoning revolutionary principles and bowing to the US. Tensions within the Communist camp came to the breaking point in 1961 when, at a meeting of Communist parties in Moscow, the Chinese and Albanian delegations denounced the Soviets and their supporters and walked out. The Sino-Soviet split divided the world Communist movement and led to the creation of new, more militant Communist groups dedicated to the Chinese position. China felt itself to be the new center of the world revolutionary movement and, as such, supported and encouraged revolutionary parties and guerrilla groups in the Third World. The Cold War was developing into a three-cornered fight.

Within the Communist Party of China itself, Mao feared that elements similar to those represented by Khrushchev in the USSR would derail his revolutionary vision. Starting in 1964, Mao moved to isolate “conservative” and “pragmatic” elements in the Party. His attempt at a mass mobilization to reinvigorate revolutionary enthusiasm resulted in the upheaval known as the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” The Cultural Revolution consumed China in chaos as radical and moderate forces, through the medium of youth organizations known as “Red Guards,” jostled each other for power and influence. Reaching a crescendo in 1966 – 1967, the Cultural Revolution involved pitched armed battles between rival Red Guard units. Mao called a halt to the anarchy in 1969, castigating some of the excesses of the more extreme radicals. However, tension and conflict between the more radical and the more pragmatic members of Mao’s inner circle remained.

The same year, 1969, that Mao rolled back the Cultural Revolution saw an intensification of the Sino-Soviet crisis as the Chinese and Soviets came to blows over a border dispute. This event seems to have convinced Mao that the Soviet Union was a greater threat to China than the United States. China offered the United States an opportunity to begin a normalization of relations; an opportunity the American President Richard Nixon took advantage of. In 1972, Nixon traveled to China, met with Mao and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai, and the thaw in the Chinese- American Cold War began.

Chou En-lai’s, a protector of the moderates in Mao’s circle, death in 1976, followed by Mao’s own passing later that year renewed the conflict between radicals and moderates within ruling Party circles. After a brief and intense power struggle, the radicals were defeated. Deng Xiaoping, who had been exiled as a “capitalist roader” during the Cultural Revolution emerged as China’s new leader. Deng’s policies not only reversed the Cultural Revolution, but effectively dismantle communism itself. Throughout the 1980s, China more and more embraced a pro-market orientation, encouraging foreign investment and development of key industries. By the 1990s, China had emerged as a major economic force, exporting goods across the globe. Although the People’s Republic of China is still ruled by the Communist Party, it has, in fact, become a modern capitalist power.

The Cuban Revolution

Although conducted on a much smaller scale than the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution of 1959 would send even stronger shock waves throughout the Third World. On New Year’s Eve of 1959, guerrilla forces led by Fidel Castro overthrew the long-standing government of dictator Fulgencio Batista. Batista had been supported by the United States since 1933; and, under his leadership, the island had become a haven for US interests which virtually managed the Cuban economy.

Castro’s victory signaled major reform, including land redistribution, literacy and public health campaigns, and the nationalization of major utilities and industries. These latter reforms incurred the ire of American corporations which lost their investments in Cuba. The United States’ severing of diplomatic relations followed by the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion and an economic embargo against Cuba caused the Castro government to fully enter the Soviet orbit. However, the relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union was far from smooth. Having come to power in through a guerrilla movement in a peasant society, Cuba had much in common with China. Both China and the USSR courted Cuba to support them in their struggle with each other. Cuba was, for a time, caught between the feuding Communist powers. Instead, Cuba developed a unique image and presented itself as a model for Third World nations to follow. This pleased neither China nor the Soviet Union. Adding to the conflict with the Soviets was Cuba’s support for armed guerrilla movements, especially in Latin America, which threatened Soviet attempts at a rapprochement with the US.

In the wake of the Cuban Revolution guerrilla and national liberation movements emerged, aiming at spreading the Cuban example in Latin America. Castro’s right-hand-man, the Argentine born Ernesto “Che” Guevara, was central to this endeavor. Guevara personally led Cuban-trained guerrillas in Africa; and, in an attempt to foment revolution in South America, died while organizing a guerrilla force in Bolivia, becoming a revolutionary icon in the process. Although most of the guerrilla organizations spawned in the 1960s failed, they had the unexpected consequence of producing a severe reaction in the form of repressive military regimes devoted to their destruction. Thus, in Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Argentina, extremely violent military dictatorships characterized those nations in the 1970s. In Chile, the election and subsequent overthrow of a Socialist president, Salvador Allende, produced a similar phenomenon. Cuban advisers trained guerrillas in other parts of the world, as well, namely Angola and South Africa.

Cuban attempts at developing an independent, diversified, modern economy met with failure. By the 1970s, Cuba had abandoned overtly encouraging armed struggle and integrated itself into the Soviet system. This would continue until the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

In the 1950s, Indian Prime Minister Nehru stated that the modern world was divided into “Three Worlds.” The “First World” consisted of the United States and the advanced capitalist countries of Western Europe; the “Second World” was the Soviet Union and its Communist Bloc allies; the “Third World” was the poor, underdeveloped nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Fought over by both the First and Second Worlds, Nehru urged the Third World to develop an independent stance, find its own voice, and put forward its own demands and aspirations. Thus, the “Non-Aligned Movement” came into being.

Led by India’s Nehru, Yugoslavia’s Tito, and Egypt’s Nasser, Non-Alignment did not mean neutrality. India leaned to the West, Cuba (who later joined the Non-Aligned Movement), leaned towards the Soviets; instead, Non-Alignment meant that the Third World countries recognized that they shared a commonality of interests. Indeed, many of the Non-Aligned nations were bitter rivals; India and Pakistan readily come to mind. However, despite sometimes serious differences, the Non-Aligned nations managed to bring questions of development and industrialization, debt and poverty, national independence and self-determination to the world’s attention.

Although the Non-Aligned movement seems to have greatly dissipated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the appearance of a unipolar world dominated by the United States, non-alignment did shift world politics from the East vs. West emphasis of the Cold War to the North vs. South conflict that persists to this very day.

FORTHCOMING:

PART TWO: “The coming of the new international:” Third Worldist Theory in the 1950s – 1970s.

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Author The Red Phoenix

Is the US Poised to Regain Control of Latin America with Regional Proxy Wars Through Colombia?

21 Jun

The Summit of the Americas, Drug Legalization, ‘Asymmetric’ Relations & Security Cooperation

by ANNIE BIRD

The Summits of the Americas began in 1994 as forums to promote free trade. In 2009 the Summit’s focus shifted to demands for the inclusion of Cuba in regional political bodies and the end of the U.S. economic embargo, a debate which continued in this month’s Sixth Summit in Cartagena.

But a new topic made its way into the news from the April 14 and 15 Summit in Cartagena, the call to discuss ‘decriminalization’ of drugs. Strangely, the call was launched by precisely the presidents which have most embraced militarization under the guise of the drug war. Though spearheaded by Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, reportedly a former CIA asset and former general accused of carrying out crimes against humanity, Perez Molina claims he thought of the proposal together with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes on April 15, Presidents Obama and Santos signed the U.S. – Colombia Action Plan for Regional Security Cooperation, an agreement for security cooperation throughout the hemisphere and in West Africa, whose stated objective is to respond to increased insecurity generated by organized crime.

The call for debate on such an important and sensitive topic by Washington’s military allies, while the U.S. launches with them a new regional ‘security’ project is confusing. But it also occurs as the U.S. attempts to challenge a set of popular South American leaders intent on forging an independent Latin America.

U.S. dominance is a sensitive subject in Latin America, and there is very little political capital to be gained from pandering to Washington. To the contrary, those that challenge the U.S. have become extremely popular, which leads to the suspicion that the call from the drug warriors for a debate on “decriminalization” could be a red herring to garner popularity for a new set of U.S. friendly Latin American presidents.

Colombian Host Helps US Retake Center Stage at the Summit

As South American leaders focus on building up a Latin American economic and political block with independence from its northern, English speaking neighbors, the Summits have been the sites of diplomatic tensions.

In 2009, during the last Summit in Trinidad and Tobago, US press reports focused on Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega’s “rant” against U.S. imperialism and reported on Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s gift to Obama of the book “The Open Veins of Latin America” as an affront.

Whatever deference to Obama may have been missing in Trinidad and Tobago was more than made up for in Colombia where it was reported that in the ceremonial dinner Obama sat on a raised platform well above the other presidents, who could not be served until Obama arrived and was seated, well over an hour after everyone else.

Miami, the unofficial business capital of Latin America and nerve center of the political network that advance the interests of U.S. based corporations in Latin America was also given the opportunity to again flex its muscles in the context of a Summit in a Summit of corporate CEO’s convoked by the Colombian president of the Inter American Development Bank, Luis Alberto Moreno.

Immersed in his battle with cancer, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez did not attend. In the 2005 Summit Chavez pronounced the original summit agenda, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), dead and buried, as Venezuela launched an alternative, the Bolivarian Alliance for Latin America (ALBA).

The only point of North- South tension reported from the Summit was the panel discussion turned debate, facilitated by co-panelist President Santos, between Obama and Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, in which Vanity Fair reports that Rousseff referred to the ‘asymmetric relationship’ between the U.S. and Latin America a dozen times.

April 15, Obama and Santos Announce the U.S. Colombia Action Plan for Regional Security

The diplomatic role Colombia played in restoring the U.S. President’s asymmetric relationship in the Summit was backed up by the signing of a political-military agreement aimed at strengthening the U.S.’s military presence in the region. President Santos, who was Minister of Defense under Alvaro Uribe, and President Obama “on the margins” of the Summit on April 15th signed an agreement to establish the U.S. Colombia Action Plan for Regional Security.

The White House described the agreement as building on, ie. expanding U.S. Colombian security operations from Central America to the whole hemisphere and even Africa. The White House referred to the ‘success,’ without describing specific benchmarks to demonstrate ‘success’, of Operation Martillo, launched last year, partnering the U.S. Joint Interagency Task Force- South (JIATF-S) and the Colombian Navy and Air Forces in Central America.

JIATF-S, a unit under the U.S. military’s Southern Command (SouthCom), left Panama for Miami 19 years ago when the U.S. left the Canal Zone. Last year JIATF-S came back to Panama providing “Operational Support” in a newly reopened U.S. military base which serves as the Center of Operations for the Central American System for Regional Integration’s Regional Security Strategy (SICA-COSR).

COSR will most likely be the regional center for the JIATF-S’s C4I border surveillance program, which creates technology canals of radars and other electronic surveillance equipment linked to Colombian and Mexican border control technology.

The White House also mentions that the Colombian National Police are providing assistance and training through the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) to all of Central America except Nicaragua, Central America’s only ALBA member since the 2009 military coup in Honduras. In December 2011, Panamanian President Martinelli announced that the US and Colombia were partnering in creating a border control school for the region’s police and military in Panama.

CARSI is being implemented through SICA’s Regional Security Strategy, which is promoted by a ‘group of friends,’ spearheaded by the United States and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington, DC, but which also includes, among others, Colombia, Chile, Brazil and Germany. SICA- ESCA is expected to have an annual budget of over US$1 billion, provided by the Group of Friends, mostly in the form of 22 loans from the IADB.

From Central America to the Hemisphere: Biden’s Lunch with Central American Presidents While General Fraser Explained SouthComs Agenda to Congress

In preparation for the 6th Summit of the Americas, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Mexico and Central America on March 4, 5 and 6. He began in Mexico where the State Department’s Merida Initiative partnered with President Felipe Calderon’s drug war in 2006, and has resulted in an estimated 50,000 deaths.

On Tuesday March 6, Biden lunched in Tegucigalpa with all the presidents of Central America mainly to discuss CARSI, the Central American version of the Merida Initiative. The same day the Commander of the US Southern Command, General Fraser, presented his annual address to the Armed Services Committee in the House of Representatives, focusing strongly on Central America.

In the context of Biden’s visit, the US ambassador to Honduras, Lisa Kubiske, commented that the diminishing engagement of the US in the Middle East means that US Armed Forces can increase their commitments in Central America, a scenario that is already taking shape.

Fraser explained that the US agenda in the hemisphere is stability, and spoke extensively about Central American crime gangs as a threat to stability in the region, which he claimed require a military response and assistance from the State Department in training and funding police forces. Another threat to stability he described were alleged protests and unrest in certain ALBA nations, while he expressed concern about overtures from the Iranian government to Venezuela.

He also asserted that “criminal activities extend into the Venezuelan government,” ironic given Biden’s presence in Honduras where deep implications of government officials and security forces in organized crime, including gangs, have been completely overlooked by the U.S.

The politically charged discourse behind the ‘drug war’ underscores the fact that since 2006 the U.S. has established a massive military presence from Mexico to Colombia, in what looks like a move to insure that the independent governments of South America don’t spread north, and now, apparently, the U.S. and Colombian security agenda is throughout the Hemisphere.

At the 5th Summit of the Americas, the Left Controlled Central America

In 2009 Biden also visited Central America to prepare for the Summit, but the cards were stacked very differently. Left leaning governments, many affiliated with former revolutionary movements, had taken control of Central America through elections.

Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinista movement, was president of Nicaragua, firmly staked out in office with a large base of support and a political pact with the opposition. Mauricio Funes of the FMLN political party, born from the revolutionary movement, had just been elected president of El Salvador. Guatemala’s president, Alvaro Colom, who had undertaken his first presidential bid in 1999 as the candidate for another revolutionary movement turned political party, the URNG, brought some URNG associated political figures into his administration.

In Honduras, Manuel Zelaya had led his nation into joining ALBA, and consolidated an overwhelming base of support. Panama was ruled by Martin Torrijos, son of the “leftist” de facto military leader Omar Torrijos (1968-1981) whose 1981 death in a plane crash is widely speculated to have been the work of the CIA. A year before the 5th Summit of the Americas Torrijos had met with Raul Castro in Cuba to discuss signing an energy agreement. Oscar Arias, then President of Costa Rica, though a firm US ally is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and many consider him a moderate.

Central America Turns to the Right, with a Big Push from the North

Just three months after the 2009 Summit, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was deposed in a coup broadly understood in Honduras to have been backed by the U.S. government. Guatemala’s Alvaro Colom was succeeded by Otto Perez Molina, a retired general and a firm US ally. Mauricio Funes, an outsider in the FMLN political party, has made many concessions to US interests, particularly in relation to security matters recently sweeping all FLMN aligned appointees from top security positions and replacing them with former military.

Panama’s Torrijos was succeeded by the right wing Ricardo Martinelli, who comes from one of Panama’s oldest economic and political oligarch families, and in Costa Rica Laura Chinchilla is considered right wing and very pro US. Daniel Ortega remains in office, though his 2011 reelection has been the focus of intense criticism from the State Department, former diplomats, and the media.

Political Opportunism: Drug Legalization Call from Guatemala’s Perez Molina

With three months in office, Perez Molina has leapt into the spotlight by promoting a debate around legalization of drugs, donning the hat of reformer as opposed to his previous fame as a former military intelligence chief implicated in war crimes like torture and genocide. Even before Perez Molina assumed office, in December 2010, he surprised all by advancing a call for dialog about the possibility of “depenalization,” ie. legalization, of drugs.

The strangeness of Perez Molina’s position stems from his wholehearted embrace of militarization in the framework of the war on drugs. During the first two months of his presidency his new appointees on repeated occasions have criminalized social protest, stating that those who block highways are backed by organized crime and drug traffickers.

On February 14, 2012 Guatemala’s Vice Minister for Security, former colonel Julio Rivera Clavería, referred to the leaders of the Sasiguan, Cunen indigenous community, which opposes the construction of a hydroelectric dam on their lands by the Italian energy company ENEL, as drug traffickers. On February 14 Sasiguan residents caught three police officers leaving the scene after the destruction of over 50 acres of crops, the latest in a series of actions harassing and intimidating the community. The three were detained and taken to the community’s traditional indigenous leaders. Rivera led a force of 600 soldiers to “rescue” three security guards, accusing community leaders of being drug traffickers.

Perez Molina has also enthusiastically promoted use of the Guatemalan military’s special forces unit, the Kaibiles, in anti-drug policing, while placing Kaibiles in the highest three command positions in the military. On April 6, 2011 Guatemalan Vice Minister of Security Mario Castaneda reported that current and former Kaibles were training members of the Zeta drug gang and participating in drug smuggling, while noting that a series of weapons robberies from military bases in Guatemala and Honduras had benefited Zetas.

The Mexico–Guatemala- Colombia Axis: Creating Latin America’s “Independent” Block Favoring Northern Businesses Interests

With his forceful yet polished personality, Perez Molina is quickly projecting regional leadership advancing statements that appear to confront US policy, like that Guatemalan troops are capable of fighting the drug war and that he did not intend to ask for US troop support. Strong words for a man who visited SouthCom together with his vice president and three highest ministerial appointees in November, even before taking office, to pave way for cooperation. In 1994 he was reported by an investigative journalist to have been a CIA asset, and he has been extremely close to the US embassy as his frequent appearances in Wikileaks documents attest.

Perez Molina is an adept politician and there is a lot of political capital to be garnered from appearing to challenge the US in Latin America, especially on drug policy. It is not lost on Latin Americans that the US is the main supplier of weapons to the region’s drug cartels, that it is US and Canadian consumption that drives the drug trade, and that most of the casualties in the US’s drug war are Latin Americans, and their democracies.

The first acting president in Latin America to clearly call for legalization was Colombian President Santos in November 2011, though in August 2011 Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon stated that if the US could not curb consumption it must implement ‘market based solutions’ to the importation of drugs to the States, solutions not involving illegal border crossings.

The Drug War Must End, But Is there a Hidden Agenda?

On February 23, 2009 the Wall Street Journal launched the current legalization debate, publishing a powerful op-ed by former presidents Fernando Cardoso, Cesar Gaviria and Ernesto Zedillo of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico respectively, asserting that “Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalization of consumption simply haven’t worked,” and calling for a review of US led drug war policies, noting that the “alarming power of the drug cartels is leading to a criminalization of politics and a politicization of crime. And the corruption of the judicial and political system is undermining the foundations of democracy in several Latin American countries.”

The US’s drug war in Latin America is criminal and must end. But the call to ‘debate’ drug policy is being advanced by the same US aligned political figures that have most embraced the militarization of the region in the name of the drug war.

The US’s agenda in Latin America is regaining hegemony. But US allies have been lacking political personalities capable of garnering strong support in their home countries. Openness to dialog or even limited reform on drug policy, which appears to challenge Uncle Sam’s agenda, could go a long way in gaining popular support, generating an apparently ‘independent’ block of right leaning political figures to challenge the South American lineup, while continuing security operations to impose transnational business interests through repression and criminalization.

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Categories Chile, Colombia, Colonialism, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, History, Honduras, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Mexico, Nicaragua, U.S. News, United States History, Venezuela, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

Guatemalan ex-soldier jailed for 6,060 years over Dos Erres massacre

26 Mar

Former Guatemalan special forces soldier Pedro Pimentel Rios at his trial for his role in the Dos Erres massacre. Photograph: Moises Castillo/AP

Pedro Pimentel Rios is fifth member of elite military force to be imprisoned for role in killings of 201 people in 1982

Agencies in Guatemala City

A former Guatemalan special forces soldier has been sentenced to 6,060 years in prison for his role in the killings of 201 people in a 1982 massacre.

Pedro Pimentel Rios was the fifth member of the elite military force to be sentenced to 6,060 years or more for what became known as the Dos Erres massacre after the killings in the northern Guatemala village during the 1960-96 civil war.

The sentence handed down by a three-judge panel is largely symbolic since under Guatemalan law the maximum time a prisoner can serve is 50 years. It specified 30 years for each of the 201 deaths, plus 30 years for crimes against humanity.

Pimentel Rios, 54, is a former instructor at a training school for the military force known as the Kaibiles. He lived in Santa Ana, California, and worked in a clothing factory for years until being detained by immigration authorities in May 2010. He was extradited to Guatemala last year.

The civil war claimed at least 200,000 lives, with the country’s US-backed army being responsible for most of the deaths, according to the findings of a truth commission.

In December 1982, several dozen soldiers stormed Dos Erres, searched homes for missing weapons and systematically killed men, women and children. Soldiers bludgeoned villagers with a sledgehammer, threw them down a well, and raped women and girls before killing them, according to court papers filed in a case brought by US prosecutors against another former kaibil.

Pimentel denied being present at the massacre, saying he left the area in November 1982 to prepare enrolment papers for the US military training centre at the School of the Americas in Panama.

Guatemala opened an investigation into the killings in 1994 and unearthed 162 skeletons. Several years later, authorities issued arrest warrants for 17 kaibiles but the cases languished.

In August 2011, a Guatemalan court sentenced each of three other former special forces soldiers to 6,060 years in prison for the massacre, and sentenced a former army second lieutenant to 6,066 years.

The ruling comes as Guatemala seeks to clean up atrocities from the civil war in which nearly a quarter of a million people died or went missing.

In January, courts opened a trial against the former dictator Efrain Rios Montt who ruled the country for 17 months during the war’s bloodiest period from 1982-1983.

Montt, denied amnesty by a judge last month, faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. He is accused of ordering the killings of at least 1,700 innocent Mayan people during a government crackdown on leftist insurgents. Montt appealed the amnesty decision to Guatemala’s constitutional court and is awaiting a verdict.

His defence lawyers have said the 85-year-old did not control battlefield operations and that commanders were responsible for making decisions in their own posts.

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Categories Guatemala, History, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Revolutionary History, United States History
Author The Red Phoenix

Reagan’s Hand in Guatemala’s Genocide

3 Feb

Ronald Reagan and Guatemalan General Efraín Ríos Montt

By Robert Parry

Guatemala is taking steps to hold an ex-dictator accountable for genocide committed against Maya-Ixil Indians in the 1980s, even as the United States continues to honor the American president — Ronald Reagan — who helped make that genocide possible.

A Guatemalan judge ordered Efraín Ríos Montt to appear in court on Thursday in what could be the start of a process for trying the former military dictator on genocide charges for authorizing scorched-earth campaigns against Maya-Ixil villages suspected of sympathizing with leftist guerrillas.

In the late 1990s, a United Nations truth commission investigated the slaughters, which involved the killing of men, women and children, and labeled the massacres carried out during Ríos Montt’s 17-month reign in 1982 and 1983 as “genocide.” Two of Ríos Montt’s generals were arrested on war crimes and genocide charges last year.

However, while Guatemala, though beset by many serious problems including widespread poverty, takes politically difficult steps to impose some accountability on these war criminals, the U.S. politician most associated with Ríos Montt and his genocide, remains the subject of endless adoration.

The mere mention of Ronald Reagan’s name at Republican presidential debates is a sure-fire applause line; the American people are reminded over and over how the former actor made them “feel good”; he’s credited with “winning” the Cold War though he actually may have prolonged it; his centennial birthday in 2011 was celebrated with lavish speeches and fawning documentaries; and a new Reagan statue was recently unveiled at Washington’s airport, which has been renamed in his honor.

If there is one consensus in the mainstream U.S. news media, it seems to be that not a discouraging word can be spoken about Ronald Reagan. On those rare occasions when major U.S. news outlets do make mention of the Guatemalan genocide of the 1980s, they circumspectly reframe the story to avoid mentioning Reagan’s role.

Yet, it was Reagan’s Cold War obsessions that emboldened right-wing “death squads” to slaughter tens of thousands of their own people across many parts of the Third World but no place more so than in the desperately poor countries of Central America.

Guatemala's former dictator Efrain Rios Montt is seen outside the court in Guatemala City.

An Ardent Defender

In the 1970s and 1980s, as Latin American security forces were sharpening themselves into finely honed killing machines, Reagan was there as an ardent defender, making excuses for the atrocities, and sending money and equipment to make the forces even more lethal.

For instance, in the late 1970s, when Argentina’s dictators were inventing a new state-terror program called “disappearances” – the unacknowledged murders of dissidents – Reagan was making himself useful as a columnist deflecting the human rights complaints coming from the Carter administration.

At the time, Argentina’s security forces were rounding up tens of thousands of political opponents who became subjects of ingenious torture techniques often followed by mass killings, including a favorite method that involved shackling naked prisoners together, loading them onto a plane, piloting the plane out to sea and shoving them through the plane’s door, like sausage links.

However, since Argentina’s rightists were devout Catholics, they had a special twist when the prisoners were pregnant women. The expectant mothers would be kept alive until they reached full term and then were subjected to either induced labor or Caesarian sections.

The babies were handed out to military families and the new mothers were loaded aboard the death planes to be dumped out over the sea to drown. The children were sometimes raised by their mothers’ murderers. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Argentina’s Dapper State Terrorist” or “Baby-Snatching: Argentina’s Dirty War Secret.”]

As ghastly as Argentina’s “dirty war” was, it had an ardent defender in Ronald Reagan, who used his newspaper column to chide President Jimmy Carter’s human rights coordinator, Patricia Derian, for berating the Argentine junta. Reagan joshed that Derian should “walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. [For details, see Martin Edwin Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]

Efraín Ríos Montt headed a military regime in Guatemala from 1982–1983 that exterminated hundreds of thousands of Maya villagers.

Sympathizing with Torturers

So, there was good reason for the right-wing oligarchs and their security services to celebrate when Reagan was elected president in November 1980. They knew they would enjoy a new era of impunity as they tortured, raped and murdered their political opponents.

Even before Reagan took office, four American churchwomen in El Salvador were kidnapped by elements of the right-wing Salvadoran military. Because the women were suspected of harboring leftist sympathies, they were raped and executed with high-powered bullets to their brains, before their bodies were stuffed into shallow graves.

The incoming Reagan administration was soon making excuses for the Salvadoran killers, including comments from Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Secretary of State Alexander Haig. The brutal Argentine generals also got a royal welcome when they visited Washington. Kirkpatrick feted them at an elegant state dinner.

More substantively, Reagan authorized CIA collaboration with the Argentine intelligence service for training and arming the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel force created to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. The Contras were soon implicated in human rights atrocities of their own.

Torture was also on the Reagan’s administration’s menu for political enemies. Years later, a 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report which examined the CIA’s “war on terror” interrogations noted the spy agency’s “resurgence in interest” in teaching harsh interrogation techniques in the early 1980s “to foster foreign liaison relationships.”

The report said, “because of political sensitivities,” the CIA’s top brass in the 1980s “forbade Agency officers from using the word ‘interrogation” and substituted the phrase “human resources exploitation” in training programs for allied intelligence agencies.

Euphemisms aside, the CIA Inspector General cited a 1984 investigation of alleged “misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in interrogations and the death of one individual.” In 1984, the CIA also was faced with a scandal over an “assassination manual” prepared by agency personnel for the Nicaraguan Contras.

While the IG report’s references to this earlier era were brief – and the abuses are little-remembered features of Ronald Reagan’s glorified presidency – there have been other glimpses into how Reagan unleashed this earlier “dark side” on the peasants, workers and students of Central America. Arguably, the worst of these “dirty wars” was inflicted on the people of Guatemala.

Indigenous Maya survivors of the Guatemalan civil war stand with photos of their loved ones, killed or disappeared during the conflict.

Genocide in Guatemala

After taking office in 1981, Reagan pushed to overturn an arms embargo that Carter had imposed on Guatemala for its wretched human rights record. Yet even as Reagan moved to loosen up the military aid ban, U.S. intelligence agencies were confirming new Guatemalan government massacres.

In April 1981, a secret CIA cable described a massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory. On April 17, 1981, government troops attacked the area believed to support leftist guerrillas, the cable said.

According to a CIA source, “the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas” and “the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved.” The CIA cable added that “the Guatemalan authorities admitted that ‘many civilians’ were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants.”

Despite the CIA account and other similar reports, Reagan permitted Guatemala’s army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June 1981. To permit the sale, Reagan removed the vehicles from a list of military equipment that was covered by the human rights embargo.

Confident of Reagan’s sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its political repression without apology.According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, Guatemalan leaders met with Reagan’s roving ambassador, retired Gen. Vernon Walters, and left no doubt about their plans. Guatemala’s military leader, Gen. Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, “made clear that his government will continue as before – that the repression will continue.”

Human rights groups saw the same grisly picture. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for “thousands of illegal executions.” [Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1981]

But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the ugly scene. A State Department “white paper,” released in December 1981, blamed the violence on leftist “extremist groups” and their “terrorist methods,” inspired and supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

More Massacres

Yet, even as these rationalizations were pitched to the American people, U.S. intelligence agencies in Guatemala continued to learn of government-sponsored massacres. One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province.

“The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [known as the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance,” the report stated. “Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed.”

The CIA report explained the army’s modus operandi: “When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed.” When the army encountered an empty village, it was “assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to. …

“The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike.”

In March 1982, Gen. Efrain Ríos Montt seized power in a coup d’etat. An avowed fundamentalist Christian, he immediately impressed Official Washington with his piety. Reagan hailed Ríos Montt as “a man of great personal integrity.”

By July 1982, however, Ríos Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called “rifles and beans.” The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get “beans,” while all others could expect to be the target of army “rifles.” In October 1982, Ríos Montt secretly gave carte blanche to the feared “Archivos” intelligence unit to expand “death squad” operations, internal U.S. government cables revealed.

Defending Ríos Montt

Despite the widespread evidence of Guatemalan government atrocities cited in the internal U.S. government cables, political operatives for the Reagan administration sought to conceal the crimes. On Oct. 22, 1982, for instance, the U.S. Embassy claimed the Guatemalan government was the victim of a communist-inspired “disinformation campaign.”

Reagan personally took that position in December 1982 when he met with Ríos Montt and claimed that his regime was getting a “bum rap” on human rights.

On Jan. 7, 1983, Reagan lifted the ban on military aid to Guatemala, authorizing the sale of $6 million in military hardware, including spare parts for UH-1H helicopters and A-37 aircraft used in counterinsurgency operations. State Department spokesman John Hughes said the sales were justified because political violence in the cities had “declined dramatically” and that rural conditions had improved, too.

In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in “suspect right-wing violence” with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to Ríos Montt’s order to the “Archivos” the previous October to “apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit.”

Despite these ugly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey sugarcoated the facts for the American public and praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala. “The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year” 1982, the report stated.

A different picture – far closer to the secret information held by the U.S. government – was coming from independent human rights investigators. On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch representatives condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population.

New York attorney Stephen L. Kass cited proof that the government carried out “virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents.”

Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass said. Children were “thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed.” [AP, March 17, 1983]

‘Positive Changes’

Publicly, however, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face. On June 12, 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised “positive changes” in Ríos Montt’s government. But Ríos Montt’s vengeful Christian fundamentalism was hurtling out of control, even by Guatemalan standards. In August 1983, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores seized power in another coup.

Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to kill anyone deemed a subversive or a terrorist. When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin suspected that “Archivos” hit squads were sending a message to the United States to back off even the mild pressure for human rights.

In late November 1983, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month, however, Reagan sent the spare parts anyway. In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too, in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the Guatemalan army.

By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army’s stubborn brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named Alberto Piedra, who was all for increased military assistance to Guatemala. In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan’s State Department “is apparently more concerned with improving Guatemala’s image than in improving its human rights.”

Other examples of Guatemala’s “death squad” strategy came to light later. For example, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cable in 1994 reported that the Guatemalan military had used an air base in Retalhuleu during the mid-1980s as a center for coordinating the counterinsurgency campaign in southwest Guatemala – and for torturing and disposing of prisoners.

At the base, pits were filled with water to hold captured suspects. “Reportedly there were cages over the pits and the water level was such that the individuals held within them were forced to hold on to the bars in order to keep their heads above water and avoid drowning,” the DIA report stated.

The Guatemalan military used the Pacific Ocean as another dumping spot for political victims, according to the DIA report. Bodies of insurgents tortured to death and live prisoners marked for “disappearance” were loaded onto planes that flew out over the ocean where the soldiers would shove the victims into the water to drown, a page taken from the Argentine military’s playbook.

‘Perception Management’

Guatemala, of course, was not the only Central American country where Reagan and his administration supported brutal counterinsurgency and paramilitary operations — and then sought to cover up the bloody facts.

Deception of the American public – a strategy that the administration called “perception management” – was as much a part of Reagan’s Central American activities as the Bush administration’s lies and distortions about weapons of mass destruction were to the lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003.

Reagan’s falsification of the historical record became a hallmark of the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala. In one case, Reagan personally lashed out at a human rights investigator named Reed Brody, a New York lawyer who had collected affidavits from more than 100 witnesses to atrocities carried out by the U.S.-supported Contras in Nicaragua.

Angered by the revelations about his beloved Contras, Reagan denounced Brody in a speech on April 15, 1985, calling him “one of dictator [Daniel] Ortega’s supporters, a sympathizer who has openly embraced Sandinismo.”

Privately, Reagan had a far more accurate understanding of the true nature of the Contras. At one point in the Contra war, Reagan turned to CIA official Duane Clarridge and demanded that the Contras be used to destroy some Soviet-supplied helicopters that had arrived in Nicaragua. Clarridge recalled that “President Reagan pulled me aside and asked, ‘Dewey, can’t you get those vandals of yours to do this job.’” [See Clarridge's A Spy for All Seasons.]

On Feb. 25, 1999, a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that Reagan and his administration had aided, abetted and concealed. The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the Guatemalan conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s.

Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved. The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages.

“The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages … are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala’s history,” the commission concluded.The army “completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops,” the report said. In the northern highlands, the report termed the slaughter “genocide.”

Torture and Rape

Besides carrying out murder and “disappearances,” the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. “The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice” by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found.

The report added that the “government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations.” The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed “acts of genocide” against the Mayans.

“Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals,” said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.

“Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people,” Tomuschat said.

During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala. “For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake,” Clinton said.

Though Clinton admitted that U.S. policy in Guatemala was “wrong” — and the new evidence of a U.S.-backed “genocide” might have been considered startling — the U.S. news media mostly treated the story as a one-day event. U.S. complicity in genocide prompted no panel discussions on the cable news shows, which then were obsessed with Clinton’s personal life.

But there was another factor in the disinterest. By the late 1990s, Ronald Reagan had been transformed into a national icon, with the Republican-controlled Congress attaching his name to public buildings around the country and to National Airport in Washington.

Democrats mostly reacted to this deification of Reagan as if It were harmless, an easy concession to the Republicans in the name of bipartisanship. Many Democrats even have cited Reagan as supportive of some of their positions as a way to deflect attacks from the Right. To this day, when defending some policy, “even Ronald Reagan” is a favorite phrase of left-of-center pundits and Democrats, including President Barack Obama.

This Democratic appeasement, however, had many negative consequences. With Reagan and his brutal policies shielded from serious scrutiny, the path was left open for President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to return to Reagan’s “dark side” after the 9/11 attacks, authorizing torture and extrajudicial killings of their own — and expecting to avoid accountability.

So, even as Guatemala struggles to address the grim chapters of its recent history, the United States continues to lavish love on the Gipper, the president who made Americans “feel good” about themselves even as he did evil in their name.

[Many of the declassified Guatemalan documents have been posted on the Internet by the National Security Archive.]

[For more on related topics, see Robert Parry’s Lost History, Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a three-book set for the discount price of only $29. For details, click here.]

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.

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Categories El Salvador, Government, Guatemala, History, Imperialism, International, Racism, U.S. News, United States History, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

Former U.S.-Backed Guatemalan Dictator Faces Genocide Trial

27 Jan

Guatemala's former dictator Efrain Rios Montt is seen outside the court in Guatemala City on Thursday.

By Mariano Castillo, CNN

(CNN) – A Guatemalan judge has ordered the country’s former dictator to stand trial on charges that he was responsible for atrocities committed during his rule.

Efrain Rios Montt will remain under house arrest while prosecutors work to gather evidence that would link him to genocide and human rights abuses.

After hearing prosecutors’ initial arguments Wednesday, judge Patricia Flores agreed there was enough evidence to keep the former leader confined.

“These crimes are horrendous and it was established that within the military structure you — Rios Montt — found yourself in the command structure,” the judge said, according to the Prensa Libre newspaper.

Rios Montt ruled Guatemala from 1982 to 1983.

He came to power in a coup and led a military junta at a time that Guatemala was in a bloody civil war between the army and leftist guerrillas. The war did not end until 1996. It left more than 200,000 people dead and 1 million as refugees.

Prosecutors argued that Rios Montt was aware of the repressive strategies that the military was using against anyone suspected of being a guerrilla, such as killings, forced disappearances and kidnappings, the state-run AGN news agency reported.

The human rights abuse and genocide allegations against him come from his “scorched earth” campaign to root out insurgents in provinces heavily populated by indigenous populations.

During his rule, there were massacres in these provinces in which, according to the Guatemalan truth commission, between 70% and 90% of some villages were razed. The commission found that during this and other periods of the civil war, there were reported cases of rape, especially of Mayan women.

Rios Montt did not address the court. His attorneys argued that the former dictator has cooperated with prosecutors and that the chain of command at that time was set up so that he didn’t know about the abuses. The regional commanders had the final say in what strategies they used, his lawyers said, according to AGN.

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Categories Guatemala, History, Imperialism, International, United States History, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

The Real Reagan

22 Jun

The centennial of Ronald Reagan has just gone by. The former President is highly praised in the media, but in reality there is much evidence that Ronald Wilson Reagan did far more to harm the people of this country and this world than to better their conditions. Both at home and abroad, his legacy is one of gross economic injustice and interventionist foreign policy that led to widespread human rights abuses and mass murder. Reagan’s indifference to and the aiding and abetting of foreign atrocities committed in the name of anti-communism place a shadow of doubt on his “democratic” character as well as the methods he used to supposedly win the Cold War. During the presidency of Ronald Reagan, United States support for anti-democratic regimes abroad reached an all-time high, culminating in massacres and even genocide.

Memorial for the 1000 men, women and children killed in the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador, committed by death squads funded by Reagan

The United States government, with President Reagan’s blessing, gave hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to dictatorial and fascist regimes in Latin America. Military governments and death squads received weapons, training and financing for decades even as they committed horrid atrocities.

“The death toll [resulting from US/CIA funding] was staggering — an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political ‘disappearances’ in Honduras and some [200,000] people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala” (Parry).

Member of the feared Kaibil counterinsurgency squad of Guatemala's army. Responsible for genocide, funded by Reagan.

In Guatemala particularly, there was an internationally-recognized genocide of Maya inhabitants, who were seen as collectively subversive supporters of leftist guerrillas. “The one consistent element in these slaughters [in Central America] was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan’s White House” (Parry). All of these movements’ activities were well-known, and yet the Reagan administration’s policy remained unchanged.

The social effects of Reagan’s free market economic policies are rarely discussed in any serious manner in the mainstream media. Praise of the economic miracle that supposedly happened during his presidency is lavish. However, there is much evidence that Reagan’s policies only contributed to the well-being of a small percentage of the population of the United States. “While the richest one percent of the U.S. population saw its financial wealth grow 109 percent from 1983 to 2001, the bottom two-fifths watched as its wealth fell 46 percent” (Smith). In addition, “between 1983 and 1998 the average household net worth of the poorest 40% in the U.S. declined 76%” (Smith). In the eyes of many scholars in economics, Reagan’s presidency was marked by “a mean-spirited, economically unsound, and socially destructive policy agenda” (Miller).

The Nicaraguan Contras, funded by Reagan, committed horrid atrocities.

Many praise Reagan’s tax cuts as creating an economic boom, but in fact “most low-income taxpayers missed out on the Reagan tax cuts […] [f]or the richest 1%, on the other hand, the Reagan tax cuts were pure elixir” (Miller). Any serious study of economic data from the period indicates that “Reaganomics” failed to achieve its stated economic boom. “When mainstream economists, such as Barry Bosworth and Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution, checked out the effects of the 1981 tax cut, they found […] men didn’t work much more at all; although women did work longer hours, their earnings failed to improve” (Miller). While the voodoo economics of the Reagan era certainly helped out those who were already well off, the “economic boom” wasn’t felt so much by working people.

Reagan meeting with the Afghan Mujahideen.

Most will also remember the greatly increased military spending of the Reagan era, including CIA operations worth billions of dollars. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Soon after, “[d]uring the tenure of President Ronald Reagan, military aid to the [Afghan] mujahideen was greatly expanded and included various sophisticated munitions including advanced Stinger anti-aircraft missiles” (Lansford 3). Under the rule of Islamic fundamentalism brought about with Reagan’s help, Afghanistan has seen little improvement since, has legalized rape and supplies 80% of the world’s heroin trade.

This aggressive and interventionist foreign policy was pursued by the Reagan administration from its very beginning—in 1983, the Reagan White House invaded the small country of Grenada, an act which was condemned by the U.N. General Assembly as a violation of international law.

American troops occupy Grenada to overthrow the government.

That same year, the Reagan administration bombed Libya and funneled huge sums of money to the Nicaraguan Contras, anti-communist death squads responsible for well-known atrocities in the Nicaraguan Civil War. Reagan was also a hard-line supporter of Israel and approved of its aggressive war against Lebanon.

Reagan supported Israel's 1982 bombing of Lebanon

Clearly, Reagan’s foreign and domestic policy cannot be reconciled with his media portrayal as a purveyor of human rights, justice and freedom. In fact, “[f]rom his eight years in the White House, [….] there are grounds to regard Reagan as the single worst purveyor of mass atrocity in the western hemisphere during the twentieth century. Very little of this surfaced in the nauseating encomiums to Reagan in the US media following his death in 2004” (Jones 146-147).

Reagan, who was allowed to die peacefully in his bed, could easily be counted as one of the greatest criminals of the 20th century, and certainly did not deserve the mantle of a fighter for democracy.

Works cited

Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. 2nd. Routledge, 2010. 146-147.

Lansford, Tom. A Bitter Harvest: US foreign policy and Afghanistan (Us Foreign Policy and Conflict in the Islamic World). Ashgate Publishing, 2003. 3.

Miller, John. “Ronald Reagan’s Legacy.” Dollars and Sense. July 2004.

Parry, Robert. “Reagan and Guatemala’s Death Files.” Latin American Report. The Consortium, 10 June 1999.

Smith, Sam. “Bottom Line: The True Costs of Reagan and Extreme Capitalism.” Progressive Review Online.

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Categories Afghanistan, Apartheid, Economic Exploitation, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, History, Honduras, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Iran, Israel, Nicaragua, South Africa, Soviet Union (USSR), United States History, World History
Author The Red Phoenix

Cold War Killer File: Ronald Reagan

16 Aug

The Man & the Myth

“I’d like to harness their youthful energy with a strap.”–Concerning student demonstrations in California, 1966

“The entire graduated income tax structure was created by Karl Marx. It has no justification in getting government revenue.”–During the 1966 gubernatorial campaign in California

Ronald Reagan was the 40^th President of the United States, ruling from 1981-1989. The American media portrays him as a great leader and hero who single-handedly won the Cold War, fixed the economy and gave new spirit to the United States. Liberals and conservatives alike line up to sing his praises endlessly, worshipping him as some sort of God of Americanism. Conservatives try their best to imitate his campaign policies and invoke his name, spinning tales about how great the theory of “Reaganomics” worked. We are told over and over that he was the greatest President and world leader to ever walk the halls of the White House. It’s time to separate truth from myth regarding Reagan’s legacy—in this article we will examine Ronald Reagan’s presidency and give our readers the story that few ever hear from the corporate media. The Reality of Reaganism

“We should declare war on North Vietnam. We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it, and still be home by Christmas.”–1966

“Welfare recipients are a faceless mass waiting for a handout.”–1966

During the Reagan era, wages stagnated, worker benefits declined, working hours increased and employers were allowed to crack down violently on labor unions as well as ignore labor laws entirely. Contrary to the preachings of neo-liberals, Reagan’s “trickle-down economics” enriched the few and the privileged. The wealth trickled up and not down. Reagan’s vision of American democracy was that of the true capitalist—a twisted version of “democratic” society run by a small elite stratum of oligarchs over the working classes, women, the poor, the youth and the non-white. Reagan reinforced this dictatorship of the blackest reaction with the most violent foreign and domestic policy seen for decades in US history—Reagan did not hesitate to ally himself with vicious armies of fascist butchers to eliminate his enemies and maintain US hegemony worldwide. At home, his policy was much the same, overseeing massive debt and poverty, police crackdowns and a swell in the prison population. Mindless patriotism, support for the military, surges in religious extremism, 1980s decadence and yuppie culture, rigid reinforcement of traditional gender roles (including chauvinistic and homophobic policies) and “get rich” capitalist culture of the most blatant, dog-eat-dog and cutthroat-to-the-bone variety were promoted.

Ronald Reagan brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in his ceaseless expansion of US Empire, focusing on aggressive expansion by use of force. Reagan’s policies slashed all progressive social programs while at the same time ushering in the new age of the United States military-industrial machine by setting a yearly 1.5 trillion dollar military budget, a number unprecedented in world history. Anything that was opposed to the most merciless free market policies, anything that opposed the domination of the United States, anything that was progressive or even vaguely humanitarian or liberal became a target for the Reaganites. Homelessness, national debt, inflation, unemployment and foreclosures skyrocketed, the brunt of it being born by poor people, Latinos and African-Americans.

Ronald Reagan remains perhaps the most famous “Cold Warrior” for his brutal global policies, which put weapons in the hands of anyone who opposed the Soviet Union. To this end, Reagan recruited vicious legions of right-wing death squads, fascists, drug-running kingpins, killers, religious fanatics and CIA puppets to his cause. Augusto Pinochet, Mobutu Sese Seko, P.W. Botha of apartheid South Africa, Ferdinand Marcos, the Nicaraguan Contras and many other unsavory characters became “champions of democracy” and “freedom fighters.”

Ronald Reagan unleashed armies of genocideres, dictators, gangsters, torturers and spies abroad and had them trained and funded in a manner unforeseen. His Administration targeted countries like Nicaragua, Vietnam, Cuba, Libya, Iran, Cambodia, Angola, Laos, Ethiopia and Afghanistan for military intervention and takeover, regardless of the popularity of democratic or leftist governments or the wishes of the people of those countries.

Strong popular movements of peasants and workers that rose in the Third World in response to massive preventable death from malnutrition, disease such as malaria and lack of human services in their countries were denounced as “communist” and put down with violence. Civilian and military targets alike were annihilated by Reagan’s cronies. In response to strikes in places like the farming plantations in El Salvador where the workers demanded an extra 40 cents a day, or the Coca-Cola plant in Guatemala where they called for a minimum wage, right-wing militias supported by the Reagan Administration would crush these attempts at reform.

In the Court of the Nuclear-Armed Warlord

“The time has come to stop being our brother’s keeper.”–Concerning welfare budget cuts in California, 1967

“If it’s a bloodbath they want, let’s get it over with.”–Concerning student demonstrations, 1970

To this day, the mentality of the Reagan era, of the predatory, corrupt culture of greed and heartless accumulation, of the psychotic faith in the absolute virtue of the free market, continues to poison the globe. Human compassion was cast aside for animal hungers and naked self-interest; ruthless colonialist ambition became the hallmark of American foreign policy. Reagan was a mouthpiece for the wealthy, the lucky, the elite and the power-hungry, an intentionally banal and wise-cracking speaker with a “folksy” crudity and passion for sound bites that managed to pass for logical arguments and sound philosophy. Understanding Reagan’s savagery is important for understanding the nature of the imperial capitalist system we live in.

US Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had left the White House in disgrace, the former for escalating mass murder in Vietnam and the latter for the same activities, plus illegal wiretapping. Both were subjected to the wrath of protesting Americans in the 60s and 70s. Reagan, however, would oversee the end of all that. Reagan was a known to purposefully instigate violent conflicts with student movements who opposed his policies—on May 15, 1969, Reagan sent in police to crush protests in Berkeley Park in a confrontation known as “Bloody Thursday.” 2,200 National Guard troops then occupied the city of Berkeley for two weeks on Reagan’s orders.

Reagan signed NSD 52, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Guard to round up hundreds of thousands of people and place them into military concentration camps. With help from Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who would later become infamous due to the Iran-Contra Scandal, Reagan organized an operation entitled “Rex 84 Bravo.” This contingency plan contained blueprints and authorization for the federal government to declare martial law in the United States, abolish the Constitution, place the military in charge of state and local governments and give them unlimited power to move and execute citizens and imprison Americans viewed as security threats. When the air traffic controllers’ labor union, known as Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO), organized a strike in 1981, Reagan ordered the 11,345 striking controllers fired. For years after the first cases of AIDS were documented, Reagan refused to use state resources or social mobilization to help contain the virus which primarily affected homosexuals. By the time he acknowledged its existence, 30,000 people had died of the disease, the epidemic of which still plagues the United States.

Due to draconian cuts in social programs, a proposed directive by the United States Department of Agriculture in Reagan’s Administration tried to have ketchup reclassified as a vegetable, which would have allowed public schools to cut out servings of vegetables for school lunches. The Office of Management and Budget reported eliminating nutritional requirements for subsidized meals for low-income students netted a potential $1 billion a year.

Some statistics regarding the era of Ronald Reagan are also relevant for analyzing his policies:

- The top one percent’s share of household wealth had dropped from 1929 to 1981 from 44% to 27%. By 1998 it was back up to 39%.

- “The Congressional Budget Office says the income gap in the United States is now the widest in 75 years. While the richest one percent of the U.S. population saw its financial wealth grow 109 percent from 1983 to 2001, the bottom two-fifths watched as its wealth fell 46 percent” – CBS

- Meanwhile, for households of all ages, between 1983 and 1998 the average household net worth of the poorest 40% in the U.S. declined 76%.

- “The biggest indicator of a healthy society – average life expectancy – dropped. People in the U.S. now don’t live even as long as people in Costa Rica. Meanwhile the U.S. infant mortality rate has risen […]” – CBS

- In 1983, 50 corporations controlled most of the news media in America. By 2002, six corporations did.

- The number of Americans without health insurance climbed 33 percent during the 1990′s, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

- Farmers in 1999 were getting 36% less for their products in real dollars than in 1984.

- In 1980 there were less than 500,000 people in prison in the U.S. By 2000 there were two million. In 1980, 8% of the prisoners were there for drug offenses; by 1998, 28% were.

- Ninety percent of young white male workers are now doing worse than they would have 20 years ago. Adjusted for inflation, the income of a recent male high school graduate declined 28% between 1973 and 1997.

- Wages for the bottom 10% of all wage earners fell by 9.3% between 1979 and 1999

- Median student-loan debt, 1977: $2,000. 1997: $15,000

- Ratio of executive pay to that of a factory worker in 1980: 42 to 1. Ratio of executive pay to that of a factory worker in 1998: 419 to 1. Annual pay of a factory worker if it had kept pace with executive salaries: $110,000

- In 1977, the disclosed wealth of the top ten senators was $133 million. In 2001 it was $1.83 billion.

- In 1982, U.S. foreign debt was less than 5% of GDP; by 2002 it was almost 25%

- Between 1973 and 2001, the incomes of the poorest 20% went up 14%, that of the 20% in the middle went up 19%, but the richest 5% went up 87%.

- The real value of the minimum wage peaked in 1969 at over $7 an hour. Its real value is now at $5 an hour.

- Eighty-six percent of stock market gains between 1989 and 1997 flowed to the top ten percent of households while 42 percent went to the most well-to-do one percent.

- In 1998 the top-earning one percent had as much income as the 100 million Americans with the lowest earnings.

- Two-thirds of American households headed by a person between the ages of 47 and 64 in 1998 had the same pension wealth or less in real dollars than they did in 1983. Almost 20% of all near-retiree households could expect to retire in poverty.

- By the turn of the century poor black families were working 190 hours more a year – and poor white families 22 hours more — than in 1979 for roughly the same pay.

Since Ronald Reagan:

- The two richest men in America — Bill Gates and Warren Buffet — own more assets than the bottom 45% of the country.

- Anti-trust laws, once considered the great mediator of commercial excess, have been steadily eroded.

- Organized labor has become a mere shadow of its former self [...].

- Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. per capita spending on schools increased 32%. The per capita spending on prisons grew 189%

- California built 21 prisons between 1980 and 1998; it built just one college.

- From the inauguration of a full-scale war on drugs in 1985 to 1998, the number of deaths per 100,000 for drug-induced causes almost doubled. In other words, having a drug war proved twice as deadly as not having one.

- There has been a massive shift towards the language of capitalism in all aspects of our conversation and speech, making our words more clichéd, less meaningful, less enjoyable, and less human. To an extraordinary degree we now speak to each as salesmen rather than as fellow citizens. This makes for a pretty seedy culture, full of insincerity and deceit while short on cooperation, individual creativity and shared goals.

- The age of Social Security coverage is rising as the public is being taught not to expect that either Social Security or Medicare will continue to serve as they do at present.

- There has been a dramatic increase in homelessness.

- Efforts to control individual rebellions against the banal and life-draining culture of extreme capitalism have produced increasingly authoritarian, militaristic and punitive tactics such as the war on drugs, zero tolerance, and the conversion of public schools into quasi-detention centers [...].

- Advertising has invaded every aspect of our life, making existence increasingly one long commercial.

- Our environment has steadily and dangerously deteriorated [...].

- Medicine has been converted from a public service to a corporate exploitive enterprise.

- [The United States] increasingly use corporatized prisons without adequate public supervision and prison slave labor to serve corporate interests.

- [V]oting turnout has declined.

- Corruption, both corporate and political, has increased to the point that it is no longer deviation but an assumed part of our culture. We all live in a Mafia neighborhood now.

Source: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/Reagan\’sExtremeCapitalism.html

A Dark Legacy

“Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders.”–California Governor Ronald Reagan, in the Sacramento Bee, April 28, 1966

“It’s just too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.”–In response to the Hearst family’s free food giveaway to the poor as partial ransom for their daughter Patricia (kidnapped by the SLA) 1974

The “Reagan Doctrine” was akin to the “Bush Doctrine” in saying that Washington had the right to attack and destroy any state, government or movement that interfered with US corporate or state interests. In the 1980s, the United States under Reagan supported forces and governments that committed widespread atrocities.

The most famous example were the Contras in Nicaragua, who fought against the leftist policies of the Sandinistas. The Contras murdered, tortured, and terrorized the population. Human Rights groups reported “murder, rape, torture, maiming children, cutting off arms, cutting out tongues, gouging out eyes, castration, bayoneting pregnant women in the stomach, and amputating genitals.” The CIA provided the Contras with a manual instructing them how to perform sabotage and terrorism. Tens of thousands of civilians died, many of them elderly and children. The Contras routinely raped women before executing them. These actions were widely reported by human rights organizations, church groups, Latin American scholars and many others.

Reagan’s administration claimed the Nicaraguan Sandinistas wanted to conquer the world because they once used the phrase “revolution without borders.” What Nicaragua really wanted was to inspire other countries with their accomplishments. Since that was against US hegemony, they had to go. The World Court and many members of the international community condemned the crimes Reagan was committing in Nicaragua, but he ignored this. When Nicaragua took its case to the World Court, the Court ruled against the US and condemned its use of international terrorism. They said the Reagan administration’s actions were illegal.

Under Reagan, the CIA used the funds from global drug trafficking for arms purchases, flying United States planes full of cocaine from Central America into military bases on the mainland and flying back with arms. The spreading of cocaine helped to create the epidemic of crack-cocaine in the ghettos of America. This if course, happened while Reagan’s wife pushed her “Just Say No!” campaign and the expression “War On Drugs” began to be a household phrase.

In 1981, Reagan sent a United States aircraft carrier into waters in oil-rich Libya’s territory where they shot down two Libyan planes, an open declaration of war. Later, in 1986, Reagan would bomb the home of Libya’s leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi in an attempt to assassinate him in his bed. The attempt on Qaddafi’s life failed, but claimed the lives of 30 people, including Qaddafi’s infant daughter.

In 1982, Reagan supported the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon, which killed over 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinian people. It was during this war that the Israeli massacres and mass rapes in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps were committed. Reagan unleashed “Operation Urgent Fury” against Grenada, occupying the country with 2,000 troops. In the Persian Gulf, Reagan backed the government of Saddam Hussein, funneling billions in funds, arms and chemical weapons.

Conclusion

Now Reagan is finally dead. For a monster with the blood of so many on his hands, Reagan, like Francisco Franco in Spain, would die safely in his bed many years later, unpunished for his innumerable crimes. The tragedy of history is that he is remembered a hero and not the tyrant he truly was.

For More Information:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/RonaldReagan_page.html

Invasion of Grenada:

http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/155/25966.html

Thoughts of Central Americans:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29546-2004Jun9.html

Massacre at El Mozote:

http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Danner/1993/truthelmoz01.html

“On Reagan’s Legacy”:

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20040607.htm

Reagan and Saddam:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0609-01.htm

Reagan and South African apartheid:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0609-03.htm

Tags: 1980s, Afghanistan, AIDS, Angola, Augusto Pinochet, Berkeley Park. Berkeley Park Reagan, Bloody Thursday, Cambodia, capitalism, CIA drugs trafficking, Class struggle, cocaine, Cold War, Cold War Killer, Cold War Killer file, Cold Warrior, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, communism workers struggle, Contra, Contras, Contras atrocities, crack epidemic, crack explosion, Cuba, Ethiopia, Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, Ferdinand Marcos, Grenada, Imperialism, Iran, Iran hostages, Iran-Contra scandal, Just Say No, ketchup as a vegetable, Killer file, Laos, Lebanon, Libya, Mobutu Sese Seko, Nancy Reagan, Nicaragua, Nicaraguan Civil War, NSD 52, Oliver North, P.W. Botha, PATCO, Pinochet, politics, Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, Qaddafi, Reagan, Reagan AIDS virus, Reagan Doctrine, Reagan Israel, Reaganism, Reaganomics, Ronald Reagan, Sabra and Shatila, Sabra massacre, Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein gas attack, Saddam Hussein Reagan, Sandinistas, Shatila massacre, South Africa, Soviet Union, trickle down economics, US imperialism, Vietnam

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Categories Afghanistan, Angola, Anti-War, Apartheid, Cambodia, Chile, Cold War Killer File, Colonialism, Economic Exploitation, Economics, Economy, El Salvador, Elections, Government, Guatemala, Health Care, History, Immigration, Imperialism, Imperialist War, International, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Labor, Libya, Nicaragua, Prisons, Racism, South Africa, Soviet Union (USSR), U.S. News, United States History, Vietnam, Women's Rights, Workers Struggle, Zionism
Author The Red Phoenix

On the Day of American Independence

4 Jul

Today is the 4th of July, a holiday celebrated all over the nation as the date of American Independence from the British crown. I was considering burning an American flag to protest US foreign policy, imperial aggression, indigenous holocaust, sponsorship of terrorism, slavery and discrimination of minorities, etc., and promptly began wondering if flag-burning on public property is considered to be a fire hazard. Today is a holiday that is spent trying to spread patriotic feelings among our people, and thus in effect to try and goad them into flag-waving, chauvinism, jingoism and xenophobia. Patriotism, the way the imperialists see it, means love for their government and love for their class of oppressors. It means love for the police, the prison complex, the courts, the army and the ruling class dictatorship. It means love for the exploitive system of capitalism and the settler-fascists that have run it from the start.

On this celebrated day of the creation of the American state, it is time to take a look back at our long, star-crossed history, and it is time to present a challenge to ourselves—what has American really been about all this time? As Frederick Douglass famously said about this particular holiday in 1852:

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

He continues,

“Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.”

There are those who might say that Douglass’s words no longer ring true because of the Obama presidency, and then there are those who know that a change in the ruler’s skin color does not abolish racism and oppression overnight. In addition, Major General Smedley Butler from the US Marines speaks about what real role the US military has been playing over the years:

“I spent 33 years and 4 months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force – the Marine Corps… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect money in. I helped in the raping of a half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street… I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped get Honduras “right” for American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.”

These revelations are by no means new, since they have been given by many anti-imperialist and anti-colonialists since the beginning of the domination of American imperialism, which started after World War II and strengthened itself through the selling-out of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and the collapse of socialist Albania.

To give a more detailed or complete account of American foreign policy, which has always been driven by nothing more and nothing less than the capitalist system’s desire for global hegemony under American leadership, would take many pages and several lifetimes of research into the history of the modern-day Roman Empire. But this 4th of July, and keeping with our challenge to ourselves, a few examples taken from the recent history of the United States alone should serve to give an idea of what this class dictatorship has really been about since the beginnings of its foundation.

A History Lesson
In 1945, the US invades the Korean peninsula and declares a “temporary” partition of Korea. America installs an illegitimate American-friendly regime in the South, backed by a force of 50,000 troops. After 2,617 troop incursions in the Northern Pro-Soviet half, sometimes with as many as a few thousand troops, a war ensues when North Korea finally invades South Korea in response. A three-year war takes place and millions are killed. Thousands of American troops remain in South Korea to this day.

In 1966, a US-backed coup ousted President Sukarno of Indonesia and replaced him with the fascist butcher Suharto. Over a million people were hunted down and killed, including thousands of popular leftist leaders, whose names were given to the military by the American Embassy. Suharto would go on to rule Indonesia with an iron fist for two decades. Newly-liberated East Timor was then invaded by Suharto’s Indonesia the day after President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (both butchers of the Vietnam War) gave them permission. By 1989, over one-third of East Timor’s 700,000 people had been killed. Indonesia had US backing, including armaments, throughout its 24-year occupation.

In 1967, a US-backed military coup took place to prevent Greek politician George Papandreou being elected Prime Minister. The colonels declared martial law, implemented torture, beatings, arrests, leaving 8,000 dead in the first month. The coup leaders were fiercely anti-communist and pro-American, working closely with the CIA. The colonels held power until 1974.

In 1970, Marxist reformist Salvador Allende was elected as President of Chile. He nationalized the giant US companies. Soon, the right-wing, backed by the CIA and US foreign policy, engineered a 1973 coup lead by the infamous General Augusto Pinochet. Allende was overthrown and replaced by a fascist military dictatorship that used mass executions and torture. Thousands were murdered and disappeared. Chile became an economic experiment that led to economic growth for the richest while leaving many homeless and greatly decreasing economic equality.

In 1978 in Nicaragua, the popular and progressive Sandinista movement overthrows the US-backed dictator Anastasio Samoza. The US then launches a military occupation in order to prevent “another Cuba.” A program of terrorism and economic sabotage is begun, which leads to the US support of the infamous Contra death squads. The Contras prove to be one of the most brutal fighting forces Latin America has ever seen, infamous for burning down schools, churches and hospitals as well as using mass murder, rape and torture. The Contras massacre whole villages though to be sympathetic to the Sandinistas. Over 60,000 die. President Reagan labels them as “freedom fighters.”

Summation
From these examples alone—Korea, Indonesia, East Timor, Greece, Chile and Nicaragua, which are merely the most prominent of many dozens more ready-made examples including the Vietnam War—we can see that United States foreign policy has never been driven by a devotion to any kind of morality, nor by any kind of longing for freedom or democracy. From the start, the United States has been driven by the necessity to make the world safe for investment by capitalism, to enrich US armaments who contribute generously to Congress members, to prevent the development of any society which becomes an example of an independent alternative to the capitalist model and to extend its political and economic control over as much of the globe as possible.
Everyone alive today remembers the media immediately after the events of 9/11. “Why Do They Hate Us So Much?” the newspapers asked. Gee, I don’t know. Perhaps dropping bombs really pisses some “less civilized” people off. This is a simple list of the nations bombed since World War II:

China 1945-46, Korea 1950-53, China 1950-53, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1958, Cuba 1959-60, Guatemala 1960, Congo 1964, Peru 1965, Laos 1965-73, Vietnam 1961-73. Cambodia 1969-70, Guatemala 1967-69, Grenada 1983, Libya 1986, El Salvador 1980s, Nicaragua 1980s, Panama 1989, Iraq 1991-2002, Sudan 1998, Afghanistan 1998, Yugoslavia 1999, Afghanistan 2001 and Iraq 2003 (1).

It is worth noting that violence and exploitation are also not limited to outside the US borders, either. Of all western nations, the US has the greatest income inequality. 40% of the wealth is controlled by 1% of the population. The US has the greatest discrepancy in the world between the wealthy and the poor when it comes to health care, and also when it comes to life expectancy.

Finally, the Land of the Free has the highest number of its population in prison than any other state in the world (2). And all this is without mentioning the minute details of the oppressive structure of the class society as it exists for us every day. These sorts of atrocities will continue until this capitalist system is done away with through struggle and revolution in the US.

On the day of American Independence, among all other days, this is a fact for all of us to remember.

(1) Taken from Australian Options Quarterly No. 31, Summer 2002.
(2) From Scientific American, Dec. 2005

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Categories Afghanistan, Chile, China, Colonialism, Congo, Cuba, El Salvador, Former Eastern Bloc, Government, Greece, Guatemala, History, Imperialism, Indonesia, International, Iraq, Labor, Media & Culture, Nicaragua, Racism, Revolutionary History, Statements, Sudan, Theory, U.S. News, United States History, Vietnam, Yugoslavia
Author The Red Phoenix

US Strategy in Latin America was Wrong

15 May

Three years ago I wrote an article arguing that the political changes sweeping across Latin America were epoch-making and probably irreversible, and that they would fundamentally alter the relationship between the region and the United States. Some of the most important economic causes of the region’s shift to the left – including the unprecedented long-term growth failure since 1980 – were unrecognised then and remain mostly unacknowledged to this day.

At the time, Washington’s stated strategy was to isolate Venezuela from its neighbours. This was before the election of additional left governments in Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Paraguay and El Salvador. I argued that this strategy was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what was happening in the region, and that it would only succeed in isolating the United States from its southern neighbours.

All this has come to pass, but more interestingly, for the first time we have an acknowledgement of this failure from the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. At a press conference last Friday, she said in response to a question about Venezuela:

“When we look around the world, actually, we see a number of countries and leaders – Chávez is one of them but not the only one – who, over the last eight years, has become more and more negative and oppositional to the United States. … The prior administration tried to isolate them, tried to support opposition to them, tried to … turn them into international pariahs. It didn’t work.”

This is a remarkable confession, and it didn’t get a fraction of the attention it deserved. Clinton did not name the countries, but in Latin America, Bolivia would have to be included as a country where Washington has incurred resentment by supporting opposition movements against President Evo Morales. And of course there is the 47-year failure of the embargo against Cuba:

“We’re facing an almost united front against the United States regarding Cuba. Every country, even those with whom we are closest, is just saying you’ve got to change.”

She didn’t mention that they are also saying that Washington must change its policy toward Venezuela. President Lula da Silva of Brazil, who has consistently defended Hugo Chávez, has told Barack Obama as much and reportedly counselled him at the Summit of the Americas not to listen to his advisers – most of whom have appeared to seek continued hostility toward Venezuela and possibly Bolivia.

It is remarkable that pressure for a reality-based view of the world has had to come from the south, and says a lot about the state of civil society in the US. How is it that nobody from our leading foreign policy institutions could have figured this out years ago? On Cuba, there has been dissent – partly because there are powerful business interests that want access to the island, and partly because 47 years of failure is a long time even for slow learners.

But on Venezuela, the primary focus of US foreign policy in the hemisphere for the past seven years, there has been an overwhelming consensus of fantasy and hype. Chávez is the only democratically elected leader in the world, facing a media that is still overwhelmingly controlled by his political opposition, to be successfully maligned as a “dictator”. And a threat to the US – what exactly has he done to the US, anyway, other than provide a $100m annual subsidy to poor people here for heating oil?

The sad reality is that while the US has at least some civil society organisations that can present an independent view to the public on domestic issues, on foreign policy issues we are much more like Russia. The vast majority of expert opinion on foreign policy that is allowed access to major media in the US consists of government officials, former government officials or people who or are otherwise influenced by the government. This is one reason why it was so easy to invade Iraq and so difficult to get out of there or out of Afghanistan – in spite of the American public’s long-standing lack of enthusiasm for sending combat troops overseas.

Hillary Clinton also took note that Russia, Iran and China are gaining economic and political influence in Latin America, and recognised that we are operating in “a multi-polar world.” This is also obvious – China has recently invested billions in Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba and Ecuador, and agreed to a $10bn currency swap arrangement with Argentina. This week China also passed the US as the number one recipient of Brazilian exports. But Clinton’s recognition of a “multi-polar world” is unusual and probably unprecedented for a US secretary of state.

The signals from Washington remain mixed. The state department last week took another gratuitous swipe at Venezuela, listing the country as a “terrorist safe haven”, among other unsubstantiated allegations. (A few days later, Venezuela deported five Colombian guerillas to their home country). Obama’s top economic adviser Larry Summers recently made a point of saying that Argentina would not qualify for the IMF’s flexible credit line, from which Mexico had just received a $47bn commitment.

Washington is the IMF’s principal overseer. Mexico and Brazil also each have access to a $30bn currency swap arrangement with the US Federal Reserve. These are large commitments, and a reminder that Washington is still using its clout in a time of crisis to play political favourites, rather than contributing to regional balance of payments support.

But Clinton’s unprecedented reality-based remarks are an indication that she and Obama may have taken home some important lessons from their conversations with other presidents at the Summit of the Americas on 22 April. Such new thinking would be long overdue.

Source: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/07-10

Tags: American Imperialism, Latin America, Red Phoenix

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Categories Anti-War, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Economic Exploitation, Ecuador, El Salvador, Government, Guatemala, Haiti, History, Imperialism, International, Mexico, Puerto Rico, United States History, Venezuela
Author The Red Phoenix

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