Don't forget that the US partnered with Stalin during WW2. That means FDR and the US was responsible for tens of millions of deaths in Soviet controlled territory.
:fp:
Why doesn't the US ever get blamed for Canada?
First of all, what 'millions of deaths' between 1941 and 1945 in Soviet controlled territory are you talking about?
Secondly, what do you mean by 'blamed for Canada'?
I assumed (correct me if I'm wrong Jason P) that he was referencing the Gulag labor camp system. Although tens of millions passed through, roughly 1 million died while there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
It was in jest, but I was actually supporting your opinion that the US strives to be a world economic power. That pretty much ensures that which ever country is vying for being a world leading power is going to be involved and traced back to everything. In WW2 we signed a deal with Stalin to take on Hitler. Which led to the USSR and communist block countries, the cold war, Stalin massacring his citizens, etc.
The Canada reference was to point out there are a good number of countries that have good relations with the US that don't commit genocide on their own people, for whatever reason.
I assumed (correct me if I'm wrong Jason P) that he was referencing the Gulag labor camp system. Although tens of millions passed through, roughly 1 million died while there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
And what relation did Stalin's gulags have with the U.S?
None.
So I fail to see any analogy with direct U.S funding, training, and public support for Latin American dictatorships and death squads during the 1980's.
I assumed (correct me if I'm wrong Jason P) that he was referencing the Gulag labor camp system. Although tens of millions passed through, roughly 1 million died while there http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag
And what relation did Stalin's gulags have with the U.S?
None.
So I fail to see any analogy with direct U.S funding, training, and public support for Latin American dictatorships and death squads during the 1980's.
No, Stalin had no connection with the US, I was just making a guess at what JasonP referenced but he explained what he meant. Obviously my guess was wrong.
Are we getting something out of this all-encompassing trip?
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
No, Stalin had no connection with the US, I was just making a guess at what JasonP referenced but he explained what he meant. Obviously my guess was wrong.
The only connection the U.S had with Stalin was in their combined effort to defeat the Nazis. The deals that were signed with Stalin to take on Hitler did not lead directly to the cold war, or 'Stalin massacring his citizens' (not sure what massacres he's referring to here. Maybe he can enlighten us?).
And I'm pretty sure that the Russians would have fought, and defeated, the Nazis with or without any deal with the Americans.
Either way, the analogy he made with the above and with direct U.S support for Latin American counter-revolutionary movements and death squads, was totally redundant.
Woodrow Wilson has to be up there as one of the worst: WWI, The Federal Reserve and the IRS. George W. was pretty horrible. FDR, despite him reppin' the Hudson Valley of NY is also very low on my list.
Best president in my lifetime: Slick Willy. I still am no fan of him.
No, Stalin had no connection with the US, I was just making a guess at what JasonP referenced but he explained what he meant. Obviously my guess was wrong.
The only connection the U.S had with Stalin was in their combined effort to defeat the Nazis. The deals that were signed with Stalin to take on Hitler did not lead directly to the cold war, or 'Stalin massacring his citizens' (not sure what massacres he's referring to here. Maybe he can enlighten us?).
And I'm pretty sure that the Russians would have fought, and defeated, the Nazis with or without any deal with the Americans.
Either way, the analogy he made with the above and with direct U.S support for Latin American counter-revolutionary movements and death squads, was totally redundant.
Defeating the Nazis may or may not have happened with our help but I think one of the real motivating factors for our deal with the Soviets had to do with defeating Japan and thus securing Asia as a democracy rather than a continuation of communism. American foreign policy has certainly been about fighting against communism and establishing our place at the top of the global power scheme.
Are we getting something out of this all-encompassing trip?
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
We can also debate what lead to U.S. intervention in Latin America. The Sandinista's backed by the Soviets and Cuba was spreading. I am not going to be naive either and say that the government's that were in place before were any better. But the goal of those countries backed by the Soviets in 70's and 80's were put in place to not only diminish the U.S. but the long term goal was to possibly to do away with the U.S. as it was our goal to do away with the Soviets.
They were opposed to the U.S using the region as their own backyard sweatshop.
Are you honestly suggesting that the survival of the U.S was under threat from these popular resistance movements?
Do you have any evidence that the goal of the popular Nationalist governments in Latin America was to 'do away with the U.S'? Or is that just a convenient invention you use to excuse the genocide carried out in the region?
And let's not forget what our foreign policy goals have been since after the Civil War. We have done everything in our power to become a global power. We were too late to imperialize Africa so we claimed we needed to "protect" Latin America - that it was our sphere. This just eventually led to our involvement in other areas of the world and we kept shifting our foreign policy to allow us to continue to do that. TR continued the policy in Latin America, WIlson did it to make the world safe for democracy (justification for WWI), FDR did it, then every president who fought the cold war did it as well. Our war on terrorism is the same today as Cold War policy; only now we are fighting an enemy we helped create because of our foreign policy during the Cold War. Global political and economic power has been our goal for a very long time!
I agree with you our policy towards Afghanistan in after the Soviets were kicked out left a vacum and created both Al-Queda and the Taliban.
Byrnzie it was threat. When your enemy backs another country in your own back yard your going to react.
Byrnzie it was threat. When your enemy backs another country in your own back yard your going to react.
Except it doesn't even have to be in your 'backyard' - Vietnam.
And there doesn't even have to be any threat - Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, e.t.c.
But the U.S government will take any excuse it can get, especially when it's global hegemony is at stake.
Byrnzie it was threat. When your enemy backs another country in your own back yard your going to react.
Except it doesn't even have to be in your 'backyard' - Vietnam.
And there doesn't even have to be any threat - Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, e.t.c.
But the U.S government will take any excuse it can get, especially when it's global hegemony is at stake.
Vietnam was a total mess. The S. Vietnamese government was corrupt. But then again we went thier because the Soviets were backing N. Vietnam. Same thing with Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada. You had communist governments being established. The Soviets tried to influence countires as mush as we did. Like I said before its not like the government before was any better. But like the saying goes the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Iraq was another total mess that I was totally against. The only thing Iraq did was give more power to Iran. As time as gone by I believe more and more that we should go back to isolationism. We are fortuante enough that we can produce and manufacture anything. (At least we use to).
Same thing with Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada. You had communist governments being established.
Let's just say for arguments sake that you're right about this. Let's say that all the leftist, populist governments in Latin America who sought to use their national resources for the benefit of their own people, rather than allowing U.S corporations to siphon off all the wealth and exploit them, were actually just lackeys for the Soviets.
What right did the U.S have to wage war on these people?
Same thing with Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada. You had communist governments being established.
Let's just say for arguments sake that you're right about this. Let's say that all the leftist, populist governments in Latin America who sought to use their national resources for the benefit of their own people, rather than allowing U.S corporations to siphon off all the wealth and exploit them, were actually just lackeys for the Soviets.
What right did the U.S have to wage war on these people?
No country has the right to invade another country. With that being said both the Soviets and the US propped up governments.
Let's just say for arguments sake that you're right about this. Let's say that all the leftist, populist governments in Latin America who sought to use their national resources for the benefit of their own people, rather than allowing U.S corporations to siphon off all the wealth and exploit them, were actually just lackeys for the Soviets.
What right did the U.S have to wage war on these people?
Reagan
Lincoln
Washington
Jefferson
Teddy Roosevelt
Eisenhower
Some of the worst:
FDR - I struggle with this one because their are good things. I put him here because of his number of terms elected, I think if he lived he would have tried to make the USA a monarchy.
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Jackson
Nixon
Lyndon Johnson
I'm inclined to put Carter and GWB on this list....GWB needs more time to be decided, just like Obama.
'...At the end of the 19th century Guatemala came under the rule of a dictator who put his country on the economic map by encouraging landowners to buy and run coffee plantations. The Roman Catholic church was deprived of its lands for the purpose, and within 30 years Americans were the major investors. A powerful army and police force were set up to protect the wealthy landowners and their flourishing businesses. The Indians, with the status of peasants and labourers, saw nothing of the wealth being generated under a series of grasping dictators.
But in 1944 the current dictator was overthrown, and a new, enlightened government introduced reforms which put the interests of the native people first. Indians in both town and country were given consideration, social security, and education. Labourers could now set up workers' unions, and this gave them political strength as well.
However, attempts at land reform brought Guatemala's 'Ten Years of Spring' to an end. When the Guatemalan government planned a programme of compulsory purchase of land so that it would come under State ownership, the USA, its business interests threatened, set up a scare: 'hostile communists were at work'. America organised and trained a corps of eager Guatemalan exiles, then launched an invasion to bring down the government. In and after this blood-stained encounter - in which thousands died - workers' unions and political parties were suppressed, other reforms cancelled, and dissidents hunted down for assassination. Many appalled liberals fled into exile (including the young doctor 'Che' Guevara). A military dictator was helped to take over the government, followed by a string of right-wing military leaders dedicated to eliminating the left wing. In 1962 their policies resulted in a civil war that was to last over 35 years.
The oppressed people did their best. Despite the civil war, church leaders helped peasants to reclaim unwanted marshland, build co-operative villages and sustain both their traditional culture and new left-wing politics. Work was done to teach and maintain literacy and good health practices. A quiet, non-violent opposition movement for civil rights began to grow.
...The Guatemalan government, using the Guatemalan Army and its counter-insurgency force (whose members defined themselves as 'killing machines'), began a systematic campaign of repressions and suppression against the Mayan Indians, whom they claimed were working towards a communist coup.
Their 2-year series of atrocities is sometimes called 'The Silent Holocaust'.
In the words of the 1999 UN-sponsored report on the civil war: 'The Army's perception of Mayan communities as natural allies of the guerrillas contributed to increasing and aggravating the human rights violations perpetrated against them, demonstrating an aggressive racist component of extreme cruelty that led to extermination en masse of defenceless Mayan communities, including children, women and the elderly, through methods whose cruelty has outraged the moral conscience of the civilised world.'
Working methodically across the Mayan region, the army and its paramilitary teams, including 'civil patrols' of forcibly conscripted local men, attacked 626 villages. Each community was rounded up, or seized when gathered already for a celebration or a market day. The villagers, if they didn't escape to become hunted refugees, were then brutally murdered; others were forced to watch, and sometimes to take part. Buildings were vandalised and demolished, and a 'scorched earth' policy applied: the killers destroyed crops, slaughtered livestock, fouled water supplies, and violated sacred places and cultural symbols.
Children were often beaten against walls, or thrown alive into pits where the bodies of adults were later thrown; they were also tortured and raped. Victims of all ages often had their limbs amputated, or were impaled and left to die slowly. Others were doused in petrol and set alight, or disembowelled while still alive. Yet others were shot repeatedly, or tortured and shut up alone to die in pain. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open. Women were routinely raped while being tortured. Women - now widows - who lived could scarcely survive the trauma: 'the presence of sexual violence in the social memory of the communities has become a source of collective shame'.
Covert operations were also carried out by military units called Commandos, backed up by the army and military intelligence. They carried out planned executions and forced 'disappearances'. Death squads (some of which in time came under the army's umbrella), largely made up of criminals, murdered suspected 'subversives' or their allies; under dramatic names, such as 'The White Hand' or 'Eye for an Eye', they terrorised the country and contributed to the deliberate strategy of psychological warfare and intimidation.
URNG's guerrillas could not provide assistance to the Mayan Indians: there were too few of them. There were certainly too few to be a real threat to the State, whose massive and brutal campaign was largely driven by long-term racist prejudice against the Mayan majority. Of the human rights violations recorded, the State and the Army were responsible for 93%, the guerrillas for 3%.
Throughout the period of the genocide, the USA continued to provide military support to the Guatemalan government, mainly in the form of arms and equipment. The infamous guerrilla training school, the School of the Americas in Georgia USA, continued to train Guatemalan officers notorious for human rights abuses; the CIA worked with Guatemalan intelligence officers, some of whom were on the CIA payroll despite known human rights violations. US involvement was understood to be strategic - or, put another way, indifferent to the fate of a bunch of Indians - in the wider context of the Cold War and anti-Communist action.'
Initially, the U.S. perceived no political or economic threat from the election of President Árbenz Guzmán, because he appeared to have “no real sympathy for the lower classes”...When the successful reforms began to threaten "stability" in neighboring countries where suffering people did not fail to take notice, the Inter-American Affairs Bureau officer Charles R. Burrows, of the U.S. State Department, warned: "Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail." Central America was small, with porous borders, so news traveled fast. "It was impossible to escape the contagion," asserted right wing journalist Clemente Marroquín Rojas as the May 1954 strike paralyzed the north coast of Honduras, while from El Salvador, President Osorio sent a message of fear. His country, he warned, "would be next on the list."[41][42]
However in the geopolitical context of the U.S.–U.S.S.R. Cold War (1945–1991), the secret intelligence agencies of the U.S. deemed such liberal land-reform nationalization as government communism, instigated by the U.S.S.R.
[U.S Aid to Guatemala]
In 1977, the Carter administration announced a suspension of military aid to Guatemala, citing the Guatemalan government as a "gross and consistent human rights violator" while noting that the situation was improving under the administration of president Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García. Despite this prohibition however, covert and overt US support for the Guatemalan army continued. In fiscal years 1978, 1979 and 1980 (the three years for which the Carter administration can be held responsible), the US delivered approximately $8.5 million in direct military assistance to Guatemala, mostly Foreign Military Sales credits, as well as export licensing for commercial arms sales worth $1.8 million, a rate which differs very little from that of the Nixon-Ford Administrations.[56] The CIA also served as a channel for US military support to Guatemala during this period. In 1981, the Reagan administration approved a $2 million covert CIA program for Guatemala.[57] In April 1982 (one month after Efrain Rios Montt took power) CIA operations expanded to $42.5 million.[58]
In fiscal years 1981, 1982 and 1983, overt US military aid deliveries totaled $3.2 million, $4 million and $6.36 million respectively; a combined total of approximately $13.54 million (shipments included vital overhauls for previously acquired Bell UH-1 helicopters and A-37 counterinsurgency aircraft).[59] These official figures on military aid during this period do not take into account the transshipment of aircraft spare parts and other military equipment between the US and Guatemalan militaries. Nor do these figures account for the US$20 million sale of two Lockheed-built C-130 transport planes or the US$25 million delivery of dual-use helicopters to the Guatemalan military between December 1980 and December 1982 (which shared interchangeable parts with previously acquired units), delivered primarily under contracts licensed by the US Department of Commerce.[60] In addition, the United States authorized the provision of American-made equipment through third party sources, mainly Israel and Argentina. General Rodolfo Lobos Zamora, a leading military official during the conflict, mentioned the United States, Israel, and Argentina as countries that "spontaneously" offered military aid to the dictatorship.[61]
Israel, like the United States, was an arms supplier to Guatemala during the civil war in the 1970s, with its first officially acknowledged arms shipments taking place in 1974 and continuing throughout the duration of the conflict.[62] By 1983, the New York Times reported that Israel was not only acting as a surrogate for the United States (in a similar fashion to its actions in Nicaragua), but also working to oppose the Soviet Union and grow the market for Israeli arms.[63] Prominent Israeli arms deliveries to Guatemala consisted of 15,000 Galil automatic rifles (delivered from 1974 to 1977[64]; sources suggest that these were sold at a 300% mark-up[65]), IMI Uzi submachine guns, up to 1,000 FN MAG general purpose machine guns[66], 17 IAI Arava STOL aircraft (delivered from 1976 to 1978)[67], as well as 10 RBY MK 1 armored cars, 3 patrol boats, 5 field kitchens, and large quantities of ammunition. Israel also provided intelligence and operational training. In 1982, Efraín Ríos Montt told ABC News that his success was due to the fact that "our soldiers were trained by Israelis", and in 1981 the chief of staff of the Guatemalan army said that the "Israeli soldier is the model for our soldiers". There was not much outcry in Israel at the time about its involvement in Guatemala, though the support was not a secret.[68] Despite public praise for Israel, Guatemalan officials were critical of Israel. General Hector Gramajo stated in an interview, "Maybe some Israeli's taught us intelligence but for reasons of business...The hawks (Israeli arms merchants) took advantage of us, selling us equipment at triple the price."[69] In late 1981, with explicit authorization from the State Department and the Pentagon, ten American-made M41 Walker Bulldog light tanks were delivered to the Guatemalan Army by Belgium at a cost of US $34 million.[60]
In fiscal year 1979, the U.S. also provided Guatemala with $24 million in economic aid, including $5.3 million in PL 480 funds. The reaction of U.S. policy makers in multilateral lending institutions was at best ambiguous during the Carter administration. The U.S. only voted against 2 of 7 multilateral development bank loans for Guatemala between October 1979 and May 1980. In August 1980, it was reported that the U.S. had reversed its position entirely on multilateral development assistance to Guatemala. At that time, the U.S. refused to veto a $51 million loan from the IDB that was earmarked for government use in the turbulent Quiché area of northern Guatemala.[70]
[Reagan]
Human Rights Watch in 1984 criticized U.S. President Ronald Reagan for his December 1982 visit to Ríos Montt in Honduras, where Reagan dismissed reports of human rights abuses by prominent human rights organizations while insisting that Ríos Montt was receiving a "bum rap". The organization reported that soon after, the Reagan administration announced that it was dropping a five-year prohibition on arms sales and moreover had "approved a sale of $6.36 million worth of military spare parts," to Rios Montt and his forces.[75] Human Rights Watch described the degree of U.S. responsibility thus: "In light of its long record of apologies for the government of Guatemala, and its failure to repudiate publicly those apologies even at a moment of disenchantment, we believe that the Reagan Administration shares in the responsibility for the gross abuses of human rights practiced by the government of Guatemala."
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/23/re ... -genocide/
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 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]
...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.
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.
Central American Peace Accord Goes Into Effect
By JAMES LeMOYNE, Special to the New York Times
Published: November 06, 1987
Central American governments announced a series of measures today to be carried out over the next two months to comply with a new regional peace treaty.
The accord was signed by Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in August. It calls for specific steps to bring greater political freedom, amnesty, cease-fires in guerrilla wars, and a cutoff of outside aid and use of territory to assist rebel groups.
The measures announced tonight by Nicaragua, including a willingness to enter into indirect negotiations with rebel leaders, had been the most eagerly awaited.
In El Salvador, President Jose Napoleon Duarte announced, as expected, a unilateral cease-fire under which, he said, the armed forces will mount no offensive operations, but will defend themselves if attacked. The rebels broke off peace talks with the Government this past week to protest the slaying of a human rights official sympathetic to the guerrillas.
Mr. Duarte also announced a broad amnesty law that is to apply to all political crimes - absolving both rightist gunmen and leftist rebels from punishment, and probably leading to the release of an estimated 500 prisoners accused of being rebels. Some rebel political leaders may return to El Salvador soon under the amnesty, according to diplomats here.
In addition, Mr. Duarte called on all outside states to stop aiding the Marxist-led guerrillas in El Salvador. He specifically charged that Nicaragua, Libya, East Germany, Vietnam, Cuba and the Soviet Union had aided the rebels in the past.
In Guatemala, a small delegation of political exiles returned to the country this week under the peace treaty to review conditions and consider whether it is possible to begin new political activities after years of repression by Government security forces.
In addition, the Government has announced an amnesty for political prisoners, a law that will have limited effect because the Guatemalan army has killed most people it captured in recent years, according to human rights organizations and Guatemalan Government officials.
Since a meeting last month with rebel officials, the Guatemalan Government has failed to find the means to achieve a cease-fire in the rebel war. Fighting was reported to be continuing in northern Guatemala this week.
In addition, the countryside remains highly militarized, with most adult men serving in Government-run civil defense forces. Few of the estimated 100,000 Guatemalan refugees from past repression have returned, even though the new peace treaty calls for the return of refugees and exiles.
In Honduras, the Government appears to have paid little attention to the peace treaty. It announced the formation of a National Reconciliation Commission, as mandated in the accord, and also is discussing amnesty for a handful of prisoners.
But the National Reconciliation Commission has failed so far to raise the obvious and highly sensitive issue of the presence of Nicaraguan rebels in Honduras or the issue of the denial of political rights to leftists. Resistance on Aid
Most political prisoners in Honduras were released in an amnesty last year.
Honduras has resisted complying with the treaty's demand for a complete cutoff of outside aid and use of territory for rebel groups. The American-backed Nicaraguan rebels have long used Honduras to supply themselves.
Honduran officials argue that Nicaragua must first negotiate a cease-fire with the rebels and offer them a broad political amnesty before the rebels can be expected to lay down their guns and leave Honduras. Costa Rica has supported the Honduran position.
Costa Rica, the only fully functioning democracy in the region, already complies with the peace treaty.
In addition, Mr. Duarte called on all outside states to stop aiding the Marxist-led guerrillas in El Salvador. He specifically charged that Nicaragua, Libya, East Germany, Vietnam, Cuba and the Soviet Union had aided the rebels in the past.
So what?
Did the rebel groups under attack from U.S sponsored death squads in these countries not have a right to defend themselves?
Incredible that people on this message board will go out of their way to try and defend and excuse the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, including children and babies, and the systematic rape of thousands of women.
Because we can't let old Ronnie - The Gipper - look bad now, can we?
In addition, Mr. Duarte called on all outside states to stop aiding the Marxist-led guerrillas in El Salvador. He specifically charged that Nicaragua, Libya, East Germany, Vietnam, Cuba and the Soviet Union had aided the rebels in the past.
So what?
Did the rebel groups under attack from U.S sponsored death squads in these countries not have a right to defend themselves?
Incredible that people on this message board will go out of their way to try and defend and excuse the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, including children and babies, and the systematic rape of thousands of women.
Because we can't let old Ronnie - The Gipper - look bad now, can we?
So then it was ok for the Soviet backed rebels to massacre people and take every possession they owned? It was ok for the Sandinistas to torture and murder...but then when the U.S. intervened we are the murderers? I have alot of Nicaraguans friends whose family was raped and murdered for speaking against the government.
Who's against everything in life? Me?
Does drawing attention to certain inconvenient facts mean I'm against everything in life? That's some weird logic you have there.
Who's against everything in life? Me?
Does drawing attention to certain inconvenient facts mean I'm against everything in life? That's some weird logic you have there.
Byrnzie if you want to say that both sides commited atrocities I will 100% agree with you. But to completly blame the United States is being short sighted.
So then it was ok for the Soviet backed rebels to massacre people and take every possession they owned? It was ok for the Sandinistas to torture and murder...but then when the U.S. intervened we are the murderers? I have alot of Nicaraguans friends whose family was raped and murdered for speaking against the government.
http://www.ppu.org.uk/genocide/g_guatemala.html 'Of the human rights violations recorded, the State and the Army were responsible for 93%, the guerrillas for 3%. Four percent were listed as unresolved.'
Then again, why am I arguing with you two? Maybe I should just agree with you in saying that genocide in the name of U.S business interests is a good thing, and anything connected with Communism - either directly or indirectly - deserves to be wiped off the face of the Earth, including men, women, children, and babies. And if mass rape is also involved, then let's defend that too.
Byrnzie if you want to say that both sides committed atrocities I will 100% agree with you. But to completely blame the United States is being short sighted.
Sure, those pesky Commies got what they deserved, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan ... hts_abuses
The CEH stated that at no time during the internal armed confrontation did the guerrilla groups have the military potential necessary to pose an imminent threat to the State. The number of insurgent combatants was too small to be able to compete in the military arena with the Army, which had more troops and superior weaponry, as well as better training and co-ordination. The State and the Army were well aware that the insurgents’ military capacity did not represent a real threat to Guatemala’s political order. The CEH concludes that the State deliberately magnified the military threat of the insurgency, a practice justified by the concept of the internal enemy. The inclusion of all opponents under one banner, democratic or otherwise, pacifist or guerrilla, legal or illegal, communist or non-communist, served to justify numerous and serious crimes. Faced with widespread political, socio-economic and cultural opposition, the State resorted to military operations directed towards the physical annihilation or absolute intimidation of this opposition, through a plan of repression carried out mainly by the Army and national security forces. On this basis the CEH explains why the vast majority of the victims of the acts committed by the State were not combatants in guerrilla groups, but civilians.[5]
For more than two decades Human Rights Watch has reported on Guatemala.[24] A report from 1984 discussed “the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror.[25] HRW have described extraordinarily cruel actions by the armed forces, mostly against unarmed civilians.[24] One example given is the massacre of over 160 civilians by government soldiers in the village of Las Dos Erres in 1982. The abuses included “burying some alive in the village well, killing infants by slamming their heads against walls, keeping young women alive to be raped over the course of three days. This was not an isolated incident. Rather it was one of over 400 massacres documented by the truth commission – some of which, according to the commission, constituted "acts of genocide."[24]
Guatemalan Armed Forces' documents show that Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt layed the foundation for the military plans Victoria 82, Firmeza 83, and Plan Sofia in which the military used counterinsurgency operations to "exterminate the subversive elements in the area - Quiché"[26] for which the UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification determined were "acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people." Mostly the elderly, woman and children.'
Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt, who Reagan publicly supported, defended, and funded.
So then it was ok for the Soviet backed rebels to massacre people and take every possession they owned? It was ok for the Sandinistas to torture and murder...but then when the U.S. intervened we are the murderers? I have alot of Nicaraguans friends whose family was raped and murdered for speaking against the government.
http://www.ppu.org.uk/genocide/g_guatemala.html 'Of the human rights violations recorded, the State and the Army were responsible for 93%, the guerrillas for 3%. Four percent were listed as unresolved.'
Then again, why am I arguing with you two? Maybe I should just agree with you in saying that genocide in the name of U.S business interests is a good thing, and anything connected with Communism - either directly or indirectly - deserves to be wiped off the face of the Earth, including men, women, children, and babies. And if mass rape is also involved, then let's defend that too.
I dont know what your experiance with Communism is but I would let you know what mine is. My family fled Communism and my grandfather died in Communist prison because he refused to give up his business to the government. My godfather lost his son and wife. They were executed because he didnt support the Communist movement. So I would never advocate for a system that imprisons or enslaves people to one strict ideology.
Comments
The Canada reference was to point out there are a good number of countries that have good relations with the US that don't commit genocide on their own people, for whatever reason.
And what relation did Stalin's gulags have with the U.S?
None.
So I fail to see any analogy with direct U.S funding, training, and public support for Latin American dictatorships and death squads during the 1980's.
No, Stalin had no connection with the US, I was just making a guess at what JasonP referenced but he explained what he meant. Obviously my guess was wrong.
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
I AM MINE
The only connection the U.S had with Stalin was in their combined effort to defeat the Nazis. The deals that were signed with Stalin to take on Hitler did not lead directly to the cold war, or 'Stalin massacring his citizens' (not sure what massacres he's referring to here. Maybe he can enlighten us?).
And I'm pretty sure that the Russians would have fought, and defeated, the Nazis with or without any deal with the Americans.
Either way, the analogy he made with the above and with direct U.S support for Latin American counter-revolutionary movements and death squads, was totally redundant.
Someone asked me that question on a similar (or identical) thread before.
I have no idea.
Isn't this like asking a Miami Dolphins fan who their favourite 49'rs player is?
:think:
What U.S politicians have done the least damage to the World?
Ok, it was worth a try.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHYQ0XiMB34
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
These kinds of people just really don't feature that highly in my scheme of things: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9qCTCzO ... re=related
best: none of them
Woodrow Wilson has to be up there as one of the worst: WWI, The Federal Reserve and the IRS. George W. was pretty horrible. FDR, despite him reppin' the Hudson Valley of NY is also very low on my list.
Best president in my lifetime: Slick Willy. I still am no fan of him.
Defeating the Nazis may or may not have happened with our help but I think one of the real motivating factors for our deal with the Soviets had to do with defeating Japan and thus securing Asia as a democracy rather than a continuation of communism. American foreign policy has certainly been about fighting against communism and establishing our place at the top of the global power scheme.
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
I AM MINE
Byrnzie it was threat. When your enemy backs another country in your own back yard your going to react.
Except it doesn't even have to be in your 'backyard' - Vietnam.
And there doesn't even have to be any threat - Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, e.t.c.
But the U.S government will take any excuse it can get, especially when it's global hegemony is at stake.
Vietnam was a total mess. The S. Vietnamese government was corrupt. But then again we went thier because the Soviets were backing N. Vietnam. Same thing with Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada. You had communist governments being established. The Soviets tried to influence countires as mush as we did. Like I said before its not like the government before was any better. But like the saying goes the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Iraq was another total mess that I was totally against. The only thing Iraq did was give more power to Iran. As time as gone by I believe more and more that we should go back to isolationism. We are fortuante enough that we can produce and manufacture anything. (At least we use to).
And there's a lot more to that story than your comment suggests.
Seriously, what year is this? Have we learned nothing in the past 40 or 50 years?
Let's just say for arguments sake that you're right about this. Let's say that all the leftist, populist governments in Latin America who sought to use their national resources for the benefit of their own people, rather than allowing U.S corporations to siphon off all the wealth and exploit them, were actually just lackeys for the Soviets.
What right did the U.S have to wage war on these people?
No country has the right to invade another country. With that being said both the Soviets and the US propped up governments.
Some of the best:
Reagan
Lincoln
Washington
Jefferson
Teddy Roosevelt
Eisenhower
Some of the worst:
FDR - I struggle with this one because their are good things. I put him here because of his number of terms elected, I think if he lived he would have tried to make the USA a monarchy.
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Jackson
Nixon
Lyndon Johnson
I'm inclined to put Carter and GWB on this list....GWB needs more time to be decided, just like Obama.
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.c ... ntry-98923
I suppose orchestrating genocide is something to be admired, or ignored, right?
'...At the end of the 19th century Guatemala came under the rule of a dictator who put his country on the economic map by encouraging landowners to buy and run coffee plantations. The Roman Catholic church was deprived of its lands for the purpose, and within 30 years Americans were the major investors. A powerful army and police force were set up to protect the wealthy landowners and their flourishing businesses. The Indians, with the status of peasants and labourers, saw nothing of the wealth being generated under a series of grasping dictators.
But in 1944 the current dictator was overthrown, and a new, enlightened government introduced reforms which put the interests of the native people first. Indians in both town and country were given consideration, social security, and education. Labourers could now set up workers' unions, and this gave them political strength as well.
However, attempts at land reform brought Guatemala's 'Ten Years of Spring' to an end. When the Guatemalan government planned a programme of compulsory purchase of land so that it would come under State ownership, the USA, its business interests threatened, set up a scare: 'hostile communists were at work'. America organised and trained a corps of eager Guatemalan exiles, then launched an invasion to bring down the government. In and after this blood-stained encounter - in which thousands died - workers' unions and political parties were suppressed, other reforms cancelled, and dissidents hunted down for assassination. Many appalled liberals fled into exile (including the young doctor 'Che' Guevara). A military dictator was helped to take over the government, followed by a string of right-wing military leaders dedicated to eliminating the left wing. In 1962 their policies resulted in a civil war that was to last over 35 years.
The oppressed people did their best. Despite the civil war, church leaders helped peasants to reclaim unwanted marshland, build co-operative villages and sustain both their traditional culture and new left-wing politics. Work was done to teach and maintain literacy and good health practices. A quiet, non-violent opposition movement for civil rights began to grow.
...The Guatemalan government, using the Guatemalan Army and its counter-insurgency force (whose members defined themselves as 'killing machines'), began a systematic campaign of repressions and suppression against the Mayan Indians, whom they claimed were working towards a communist coup.
Their 2-year series of atrocities is sometimes called 'The Silent Holocaust'.
In the words of the 1999 UN-sponsored report on the civil war: 'The Army's perception of Mayan communities as natural allies of the guerrillas contributed to increasing and aggravating the human rights violations perpetrated against them, demonstrating an aggressive racist component of extreme cruelty that led to extermination en masse of defenceless Mayan communities, including children, women and the elderly, through methods whose cruelty has outraged the moral conscience of the civilised world.'
Working methodically across the Mayan region, the army and its paramilitary teams, including 'civil patrols' of forcibly conscripted local men, attacked 626 villages. Each community was rounded up, or seized when gathered already for a celebration or a market day. The villagers, if they didn't escape to become hunted refugees, were then brutally murdered; others were forced to watch, and sometimes to take part. Buildings were vandalised and demolished, and a 'scorched earth' policy applied: the killers destroyed crops, slaughtered livestock, fouled water supplies, and violated sacred places and cultural symbols.
Children were often beaten against walls, or thrown alive into pits where the bodies of adults were later thrown; they were also tortured and raped. Victims of all ages often had their limbs amputated, or were impaled and left to die slowly. Others were doused in petrol and set alight, or disembowelled while still alive. Yet others were shot repeatedly, or tortured and shut up alone to die in pain. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open. Women were routinely raped while being tortured. Women - now widows - who lived could scarcely survive the trauma: 'the presence of sexual violence in the social memory of the communities has become a source of collective shame'.
Covert operations were also carried out by military units called Commandos, backed up by the army and military intelligence. They carried out planned executions and forced 'disappearances'. Death squads (some of which in time came under the army's umbrella), largely made up of criminals, murdered suspected 'subversives' or their allies; under dramatic names, such as 'The White Hand' or 'Eye for an Eye', they terrorised the country and contributed to the deliberate strategy of psychological warfare and intimidation.
URNG's guerrillas could not provide assistance to the Mayan Indians: there were too few of them. There were certainly too few to be a real threat to the State, whose massive and brutal campaign was largely driven by long-term racist prejudice against the Mayan majority. Of the human rights violations recorded, the State and the Army were responsible for 93%, the guerrillas for 3%.
Throughout the period of the genocide, the USA continued to provide military support to the Guatemalan government, mainly in the form of arms and equipment. The infamous guerrilla training school, the School of the Americas in Georgia USA, continued to train Guatemalan officers notorious for human rights abuses; the CIA worked with Guatemalan intelligence officers, some of whom were on the CIA payroll despite known human rights violations. US involvement was understood to be strategic - or, put another way, indifferent to the fate of a bunch of Indians - in the wider context of the Cold War and anti-Communist action.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_Civil_War
Initially, the U.S. perceived no political or economic threat from the election of President Árbenz Guzmán, because he appeared to have “no real sympathy for the lower classes”...When the successful reforms began to threaten "stability" in neighboring countries where suffering people did not fail to take notice, the Inter-American Affairs Bureau officer Charles R. Burrows, of the U.S. State Department, warned: "Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail." Central America was small, with porous borders, so news traveled fast. "It was impossible to escape the contagion," asserted right wing journalist Clemente Marroquín Rojas as the May 1954 strike paralyzed the north coast of Honduras, while from El Salvador, President Osorio sent a message of fear. His country, he warned, "would be next on the list."[41][42]
However in the geopolitical context of the U.S.–U.S.S.R. Cold War (1945–1991), the secret intelligence agencies of the U.S. deemed such liberal land-reform nationalization as government communism, instigated by the U.S.S.R.
[U.S Aid to Guatemala]
In 1977, the Carter administration announced a suspension of military aid to Guatemala, citing the Guatemalan government as a "gross and consistent human rights violator" while noting that the situation was improving under the administration of president Kjell Eugenio Laugerud García. Despite this prohibition however, covert and overt US support for the Guatemalan army continued. In fiscal years 1978, 1979 and 1980 (the three years for which the Carter administration can be held responsible), the US delivered approximately $8.5 million in direct military assistance to Guatemala, mostly Foreign Military Sales credits, as well as export licensing for commercial arms sales worth $1.8 million, a rate which differs very little from that of the Nixon-Ford Administrations.[56] The CIA also served as a channel for US military support to Guatemala during this period. In 1981, the Reagan administration approved a $2 million covert CIA program for Guatemala.[57] In April 1982 (one month after Efrain Rios Montt took power) CIA operations expanded to $42.5 million.[58]
In fiscal years 1981, 1982 and 1983, overt US military aid deliveries totaled $3.2 million, $4 million and $6.36 million respectively; a combined total of approximately $13.54 million (shipments included vital overhauls for previously acquired Bell UH-1 helicopters and A-37 counterinsurgency aircraft).[59] These official figures on military aid during this period do not take into account the transshipment of aircraft spare parts and other military equipment between the US and Guatemalan militaries. Nor do these figures account for the US$20 million sale of two Lockheed-built C-130 transport planes or the US$25 million delivery of dual-use helicopters to the Guatemalan military between December 1980 and December 1982 (which shared interchangeable parts with previously acquired units), delivered primarily under contracts licensed by the US Department of Commerce.[60] In addition, the United States authorized the provision of American-made equipment through third party sources, mainly Israel and Argentina. General Rodolfo Lobos Zamora, a leading military official during the conflict, mentioned the United States, Israel, and Argentina as countries that "spontaneously" offered military aid to the dictatorship.[61]
Israel, like the United States, was an arms supplier to Guatemala during the civil war in the 1970s, with its first officially acknowledged arms shipments taking place in 1974 and continuing throughout the duration of the conflict.[62] By 1983, the New York Times reported that Israel was not only acting as a surrogate for the United States (in a similar fashion to its actions in Nicaragua), but also working to oppose the Soviet Union and grow the market for Israeli arms.[63] Prominent Israeli arms deliveries to Guatemala consisted of 15,000 Galil automatic rifles (delivered from 1974 to 1977[64]; sources suggest that these were sold at a 300% mark-up[65]), IMI Uzi submachine guns, up to 1,000 FN MAG general purpose machine guns[66], 17 IAI Arava STOL aircraft (delivered from 1976 to 1978)[67], as well as 10 RBY MK 1 armored cars, 3 patrol boats, 5 field kitchens, and large quantities of ammunition. Israel also provided intelligence and operational training. In 1982, Efraín Ríos Montt told ABC News that his success was due to the fact that "our soldiers were trained by Israelis", and in 1981 the chief of staff of the Guatemalan army said that the "Israeli soldier is the model for our soldiers". There was not much outcry in Israel at the time about its involvement in Guatemala, though the support was not a secret.[68] Despite public praise for Israel, Guatemalan officials were critical of Israel. General Hector Gramajo stated in an interview, "Maybe some Israeli's taught us intelligence but for reasons of business...The hawks (Israeli arms merchants) took advantage of us, selling us equipment at triple the price."[69] In late 1981, with explicit authorization from the State Department and the Pentagon, ten American-made M41 Walker Bulldog light tanks were delivered to the Guatemalan Army by Belgium at a cost of US $34 million.[60]
In fiscal year 1979, the U.S. also provided Guatemala with $24 million in economic aid, including $5.3 million in PL 480 funds. The reaction of U.S. policy makers in multilateral lending institutions was at best ambiguous during the Carter administration. The U.S. only voted against 2 of 7 multilateral development bank loans for Guatemala between October 1979 and May 1980. In August 1980, it was reported that the U.S. had reversed its position entirely on multilateral development assistance to Guatemala. At that time, the U.S. refused to veto a $51 million loan from the IDB that was earmarked for government use in the turbulent Quiché area of northern Guatemala.[70]
[Reagan]
Human Rights Watch in 1984 criticized U.S. President Ronald Reagan for his December 1982 visit to Ríos Montt in Honduras, where Reagan dismissed reports of human rights abuses by prominent human rights organizations while insisting that Ríos Montt was receiving a "bum rap". The organization reported that soon after, the Reagan administration announced that it was dropping a five-year prohibition on arms sales and moreover had "approved a sale of $6.36 million worth of military spare parts," to Rios Montt and his forces.[75] Human Rights Watch described the degree of U.S. responsibility thus: "In light of its long record of apologies for the government of Guatemala, and its failure to repudiate publicly those apologies even at a moment of disenchantment, we believe that the Reagan Administration shares in the responsibility for the gross abuses of human rights practiced by the government of Guatemala."
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/23/re ... -genocide/
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 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]
...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.
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.
By JAMES LeMOYNE, Special to the New York Times
Published: November 06, 1987
Central American governments announced a series of measures today to be carried out over the next two months to comply with a new regional peace treaty.
The accord was signed by Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica in August. It calls for specific steps to bring greater political freedom, amnesty, cease-fires in guerrilla wars, and a cutoff of outside aid and use of territory to assist rebel groups.
The measures announced tonight by Nicaragua, including a willingness to enter into indirect negotiations with rebel leaders, had been the most eagerly awaited.
In El Salvador, President Jose Napoleon Duarte announced, as expected, a unilateral cease-fire under which, he said, the armed forces will mount no offensive operations, but will defend themselves if attacked. The rebels broke off peace talks with the Government this past week to protest the slaying of a human rights official sympathetic to the guerrillas.
Mr. Duarte also announced a broad amnesty law that is to apply to all political crimes - absolving both rightist gunmen and leftist rebels from punishment, and probably leading to the release of an estimated 500 prisoners accused of being rebels. Some rebel political leaders may return to El Salvador soon under the amnesty, according to diplomats here.
In addition, Mr. Duarte called on all outside states to stop aiding the Marxist-led guerrillas in El Salvador. He specifically charged that Nicaragua, Libya, East Germany, Vietnam, Cuba and the Soviet Union had aided the rebels in the past.
In Guatemala, a small delegation of political exiles returned to the country this week under the peace treaty to review conditions and consider whether it is possible to begin new political activities after years of repression by Government security forces.
In addition, the Government has announced an amnesty for political prisoners, a law that will have limited effect because the Guatemalan army has killed most people it captured in recent years, according to human rights organizations and Guatemalan Government officials.
Since a meeting last month with rebel officials, the Guatemalan Government has failed to find the means to achieve a cease-fire in the rebel war. Fighting was reported to be continuing in northern Guatemala this week.
In addition, the countryside remains highly militarized, with most adult men serving in Government-run civil defense forces. Few of the estimated 100,000 Guatemalan refugees from past repression have returned, even though the new peace treaty calls for the return of refugees and exiles.
In Honduras, the Government appears to have paid little attention to the peace treaty. It announced the formation of a National Reconciliation Commission, as mandated in the accord, and also is discussing amnesty for a handful of prisoners.
But the National Reconciliation Commission has failed so far to raise the obvious and highly sensitive issue of the presence of Nicaraguan rebels in Honduras or the issue of the denial of political rights to leftists. Resistance on Aid
Most political prisoners in Honduras were released in an amnesty last year.
Honduras has resisted complying with the treaty's demand for a complete cutoff of outside aid and use of territory for rebel groups. The American-backed Nicaraguan rebels have long used Honduras to supply themselves.
Honduran officials argue that Nicaragua must first negotiate a cease-fire with the rebels and offer them a broad political amnesty before the rebels can be expected to lay down their guns and leave Honduras. Costa Rica has supported the Honduran position.
Costa Rica, the only fully functioning democracy in the region, already complies with the peace treaty.
So what?
Did the rebel groups under attack from U.S sponsored death squads in these countries not have a right to defend themselves?
Incredible that people on this message board will go out of their way to try and defend and excuse the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, including children and babies, and the systematic rape of thousands of women.
Because we can't let old Ronnie - The Gipper - look bad now, can we?
So, I'd be better of complaining about everything, huh?
It's easy to be against everything life.
So then it was ok for the Soviet backed rebels to massacre people and take every possession they owned? It was ok for the Sandinistas to torture and murder...but then when the U.S. intervened we are the murderers? I have alot of Nicaraguans friends whose family was raped and murdered for speaking against the government.
Nah, but you could start by not championing liars who directly supported mass murder.
Who's against everything in life? Me?
Does drawing attention to certain inconvenient facts mean I'm against everything in life? That's some weird logic you have there.
Byrnzie if you want to say that both sides commited atrocities I will 100% agree with you. But to completly blame the United States is being short sighted.
http://www.ppu.org.uk/genocide/g_guatemala.html
'Of the human rights violations recorded, the State and the Army were responsible for 93%, the guerrillas for 3%. Four percent were listed as unresolved.'
Then again, why am I arguing with you two? Maybe I should just agree with you in saying that genocide in the name of U.S business interests is a good thing, and anything connected with Communism - either directly or indirectly - deserves to be wiped off the face of the Earth, including men, women, children, and babies. And if mass rape is also involved, then let's defend that too.
Sure, those pesky Commies got what they deserved, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan ... hts_abuses
The CEH stated that at no time during the internal armed confrontation did the guerrilla groups have the military potential necessary to pose an imminent threat to the State. The number of insurgent combatants was too small to be able to compete in the military arena with the Army, which had more troops and superior weaponry, as well as better training and co-ordination. The State and the Army were well aware that the insurgents’ military capacity did not represent a real threat to Guatemala’s political order. The CEH concludes that the State deliberately magnified the military threat of the insurgency, a practice justified by the concept of the internal enemy. The inclusion of all opponents under one banner, democratic or otherwise, pacifist or guerrilla, legal or illegal, communist or non-communist, served to justify numerous and serious crimes. Faced with widespread political, socio-economic and cultural opposition, the State resorted to military operations directed towards the physical annihilation or absolute intimidation of this opposition, through a plan of repression carried out mainly by the Army and national security forces. On this basis the CEH explains why the vast majority of the victims of the acts committed by the State were not combatants in guerrilla groups, but civilians.[5]
For more than two decades Human Rights Watch has reported on Guatemala.[24] A report from 1984 discussed “the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror.[25] HRW have described extraordinarily cruel actions by the armed forces, mostly against unarmed civilians.[24] One example given is the massacre of over 160 civilians by government soldiers in the village of Las Dos Erres in 1982. The abuses included “burying some alive in the village well, killing infants by slamming their heads against walls, keeping young women alive to be raped over the course of three days. This was not an isolated incident. Rather it was one of over 400 massacres documented by the truth commission – some of which, according to the commission, constituted "acts of genocide."[24]
Guatemalan Armed Forces' documents show that Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt layed the foundation for the military plans Victoria 82, Firmeza 83, and Plan Sofia in which the military used counterinsurgency operations to "exterminate the subversive elements in the area - Quiché"[26] for which the UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification determined were "acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people." Mostly the elderly, woman and children.'
Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt, who Reagan publicly supported, defended, and funded.
I dont know what your experiance with Communism is but I would let you know what mine is. My family fled Communism and my grandfather died in Communist prison because he refused to give up his business to the government. My godfather lost his son and wife. They were executed because he didnt support the Communist movement. So I would never advocate for a system that imprisons or enslaves people to one strict ideology.