Losing Latin America (Grandin)

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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby JackRiddler » Mon May 16, 2011 7:10 pm

.

Thanks for this compilation, AD.

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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Sat Dec 03, 2011 12:51 pm

“I am terrified by the fragility of human destiny: in one stroke, in an instant, life is changed forever, the individual has neither a vote nor a voice: a kidnapping on horseback, a Gestapo official knocking at the door, a Ford Falcon in the streets of Buenos Aires, in the front seat someone is hooded, someone who will never be heard of again. But behind this fear comes a worse one, fear of society’s silence: the silence of the people who won’t leave their houses to stop the suffering of the woman burned in the night, the silence of those who stay away so they are not ‘contaminated’ by the victims who have been on the other side, the silence of the nineteenth-century intellectuals who follow the traditions of the time, looking the other way and speaking only of their own concerns (like the struggle against Rosas) in order to build themselves a position of personal power, while the extermination of blacks and Indians goes on.”

– Susana Rotker, Captive Women: Oblivion and Memory in Argentina
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 08, 2011 11:38 am

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/07/ ... -backyard/

DECEMBER 07, 2011

New Latin American and Caribbean Bloc Defies Washington
Out of the Backyard

by BENJAMIN DANGL



Rain clouds ringed the lush hillsides and poor neighborhoods cradling Caracas, Venezuela as dozens of Latin American and Caribbean heads of state trickled out of the airport and into motorcades and hotel rooms. They were gathering for the foundational summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), a new regional bloc aimed at self-determination outside the scope of Washington’s power.

Notably absent were the presidents of the US and Canada – they were not invited to participate. “It’s the death sentence for the Monroe Doctrine,” Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said of the creation of the CELAC, referring to a US policy developed in 1823 that has served as a pretext for Washington’s interventions in the region. Indeed, the CELAC has been put forth by many participating presidents as an organization to replace the US-dominated Organization of American States (OAS), empower Latin American and Caribbean unity, and create a more equal and just society on the region’s own terms.

The CELAC meeting comes a time when Washington’s presence in the region is waning. Following the nightmarish decades of the Cold War, in which Washington propped up dictators and waged wars on Latin American nations, a new era has opened up; in the past decade a wave of leftist presidents have taken office on socialist and anti-imperialist platforms.

The creation of the CELAC reflected this new reality, and is one of various recent developments aimed at unifying Latin America and the Caribbean as a progressive alternative to US domination. Other such regional blocs include the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) which has successfully resolved diplomatic crises without pressure from Washington, the Bank of the South, which is aimed at providing alternatives to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the Bolivarian Alliance of Latin America (ALBA), which was created as an alternative to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, a deal which would have expanded the North American Free Trade Agreement throughout Latin America, but failed due to regional opposition.

The global economic crisis was on many of the leaders’ minds during the CELAC conference. “It seems it’s a terminal, structural crisis of capitalism,” Bolivian President Evo Morales said in a speech at the gathering. “I feel we’re meeting at a good moment to debate … the great unity of the countries of America, without the United States.”

The 33 nations comprising the CELAC make up some 600 million people, and together are the number one food exporter on the planet. The combined GDP of the bloc is around $6 trillion, and in a time of global economic woes, the region now has its lowest poverty rate in 20 years; the growth rate in 2010 was over 6% – more than twice that of the US. These numbers reflect the success of the region’s social programs and anti-poverty initiatives.

In an interview with Telesur, Evo Morales said the space opened by the CELAC provides a great opportunity to expand the commerce of Latin America and the Caribbean in a way that does not depend on the precarious markets of the US and Europe. In this respect he saw a central goal of the CELAC being to “implement politics of solidarity, with complementary instead of competitive commerce to resolve social problems…”

While the US is the leading trading partner for most Latin American and Caribbean countries, China is making enormous inroads as well, becoming the main trade ally of the economic powerhouses of Brazil and Chile. This shift was underlined by the fact that Chinese President Hu Jintao sent a letter of congratulations to the leaders forming the CELAC. The letter, which Chávez read out loud to the summit participants, congratulated the heads of state on creating the CELAC, and promised that Hu would work toward expanding relations with the region’s new organization.

The US, for its part, did not send a word of congratulations. Indeed, Washington’s official take on the CELAC meeting downplayed the new group’s significance and reinforced US commitment to the OAS. Commenting on the CELAC, US Department of State spokesman Mark Toner said, “There [are] many sub-regional organizations in the hemisphere, some of which we belong to. Others, such as this, we don’t. We continue, obviously, to work through the OAS as the preeminent multilateral organization speaking for the hemisphere.”

Many heads of state actually saw the CELAC meeting as the beginning of the end for the OAS in the region. This position, held most passionately by leaders from Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba, was best articulated by Venezuelan President, and host of the CELAC meeting, Hugo Chávez. “As the years pass, CELAC will leave behind the old OAS,” Chávez said at the summit. “OAS is far from the spirit of our peoples and integration in Latin America. CELAC is born with a new spirit; it is a platform for people’s economic, political and social development, which is very different from OAS.” He later told reporters, “There have been many coup d’états with total support from the OAS, and it won’t be this way with the CELAC.”

However, the presidents involved in the CELAC vary widely in political ideology and foreign policy, and there were differing opinions in regards to relations with the OAS. Some saw the CELAC as something that could work alongside the OAS. As Mexican chancellor Patricia Espinosa said, the OAS and the CELAC are “complementary forces of cooperation and dialogue.”

A test of the CELAC will be how it overcomes such differences and makes concrete steps toward developing regional integration, combating poverty, upholding human rights, protecting the environment and building peace, among other goals. The final agreements of the two day meeting touched upon expanding south to south business and trade deals, combating climate change and building better social programs across the region to impact marginalized communities. In addition, the CELAC participants backed the legalization of coca leaves (widely used as a medicine and for cultural purposes in the Andes), condemned the criminalization of immigrants and migrants, and criticized the US for its embargo against Cuba.

Various presidents at the CELAC spoke of how to approach these dominant issues. Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega said the CELAC should “monitor and rate” the US anti-drug efforts. As long as the US continues its consumption of drugs, Ortega said, “All the money, regardless of by how much it’s multiplied, and all the blood, no matter how much is spilled” won’t end the drug trade.

Yet there are plenty of contradictions within the CELAC organization itself. The group is for democracy but includes the participation of Porfirio Lobo from Honduras, the president who replaced Manuel Zelaya in unfair elections following a 2009 military coup. The CELAC is for environmental protection, yet its largest participant, Brazil, is promoting an ecologically disastrous agricultural model of soy plantations, GMO crops and poisonous pesticides that are ruining the countryside and displacing small farmers. The group is for fairer trade networks and peace, yet various participating nations have already signed devastating trade deals with the US, and corrupt politicians at high levels of government across the region are deeply tied to the violence and profits of the transnational drug trade.

These are some of the serious challenges posed to Latin American and Caribbean unity and progress, but they do not cancel out the new bloc’s historical and political significance. The creation of the CELAC will likely prove to be a significant step toward the deepening of a struggle for independence and unity in the region, a struggle initiated nearly 200 years ago and largely led by Latin American liberator Simón Bolívar, whose legacy was regularly invoked at the CELAC conference.

In 1829, a year before his death, Bolívar famously said, “The United States appears destined by Providence to plague America with miseries in the name of Freedom.” Yet with the foundation of the CELAC under the clouds of Caracas, the march toward self-determination is still on.



Benjamin Dangl attended the CELAC conference. He is the author of book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (AK Press) is on contemporary Latin American social movements and their relationships with the region’s new leftist governments. He is editor of TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events, and UpsideDownWorld.org, a website on activism and politics in Latin America. Email BenDangl(at)gmail(dot)com.
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Sat Feb 25, 2012 10:26 am

Elliott Abrams' Dark History in Latin America and the Struggle for Justice

February 25, 2012

By Cyril Mychalejko
Source: Upside Down World



Elliott Abrams, a former high level State Department official during the 1980s, testified last week that the Reagan administration knew that Argentina's military junta was systematically stealing babies from murdered and jailed democracy activists and giving them to right-wing families friendly to the regime.

In a meeting with the Junta's ambassador in Washington on December 3, 1982, Abrams suggested that the dictatorship could "improve its image" by creating a process with the Catholic Church of returning the children, some of whom were born in secret torture chambers, to their legitimate families. The contents of this meeting were recorded in a memo Abrams wrote, which was declassified by the State Department in 2002 and is now a key piece of evidence against former junta officials in this high profile trial.

“While the disappeared were dead, these children were alive and this was in a sense the gravest humanitarian problem,” Abrams read from his cable via videoconference testimony to a federal court in Buenos Aires. But this didn't deter the State Department at the time from granting Argentina certification indicating that the country's human rights record was improving.

Alan Iud, a lawyer representing The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who claim that as many as 500 children were stolen, said that Abrams' testimony “exceeded our expectations.” However, Abrams' and the Reagan Administration's relationship with the military junta was not adversarial, something that has been lost in the story, if not the trial. In fact, in 1978, even before being elected president, Ronald Reagan wrote a column in The Miami News attacking President Jimmy Carter's criticisms of Argentina's record of human rights abuses. Reagan countered that the military junta “set out to restore order” and that too much was being made over the jailing of “a few innocents.” However, human rights organizations estimate that tens of thousands of people were tortured, killed and disappeared during Argentina's “dirty war.” One of Reagan's first acts as president was to overturn military aid restrictions put in place by Carter as a result of the regime's horrendous human rights record. The administration even hosted Argentine generals “at an elegant state dinner.” Furthermore, Reagan paid members of Argentina's notorious death squads to travel to Honduras to train the Contras, as well as Honduran paramilitaries, such as the infamous death squad Battalion 3-16, as the Baltimore Sun revealed in a 1995 exposé.

Meanwhile, Argentina isn't the only Latin American country facing its bloody past—and Abrams played a role in these state atrocities as well.

In Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt is standing trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. Rios Montt, an evangelical general who ruled Guatemala in 1982-83 after seizing power through a military coup, was a close ally of Washington who received training at the infamous “School of the Americas”. He is accused of being responsible for “1,771 deaths, 1,400 human rights violations and the displacement of 29,000 indigenous Guatemalans.”

Reagan, with Abrams' assistance, not only covered up, but aided and abetted war crimes and genocide in Guatemala. For example, President Reagan traveled to Guatemala in December 1982 to declare that Rios Montt was getting a “bum rap”, while praising the dictator's “progressive efforts” and dedication to democracy and social justice. Just a few days after Reagan's presidential visit the Guatemalan military massacred 251 men, women and children in Las Dos Erres.

In another recent instance, El Salvador's President Mauricio Funes apologized and asked for forgiveness for the 1981 El Mozote massacre where the Atlacatl battalion, a notorious US-trained death squad, killed as many as 1,000 people. Like in Guatemala and Argentina, Reagan with Abrams' help simultaneously armed and covered-up the human rights abuses in El Salvador. The country endured a 12-year civil war which left some 70,000 people dead, with the Reagan-backed government and paramilitaries believed to be responsible for over 90 percent of the deaths. In 1993 when Congress planned to investigate the Reagan administration's role in human rights abuses in El Salvador an indignant Abrams' called it “a reprehensible McCarthyite charge," while also saying that, "The Administration's record on El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement."

Unfortunately, as Latin America seeks to reconcile with its unsavory past in order to forge a more just and humane future, the United States blindly barrels on—never looking back. The US media is missing an excellent opportunity to use Abrams' career as a vehicle to examine and reflect on the United States' bloody and barbaric history in the hemisphere. One could even argue that there should be a Truth Commission in the United States. Yet it is because of this willful ignorance and institutionalized impunity that diplomats such as Abrams, who the Philadelphia Inquirer in a rare moment of editorial clarity in 2001 described as a “deceitful, scheming coddler of Latin American tyrants” and “uncontrite peddler of lies,” can continue to resurface in Washington as a national security council member to President George W. Bush and as an informal adviser to president Barack Obama.

Back in 2009, President Obama said in response to a question about whether he would apologize for the CIA's role in Chile's 1973 coup, "I'm interested in going forward, not looking backward. I think that the United States has been an enormous force for good in the world."

If history isn't going to repeat itself the president and U.S. citizens need to think again, and start looking back to history so justice can move forward.


Cyril Mychalejko is an editor at http://www.UpsideDownWorld.org.



From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://zcommunications.org/elliott-abra ... mychalejko
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby StarmanSkye » Sun Feb 26, 2012 6:47 am

In 1829, a year before his death, Simon Bolívar famously said, “The United States appears destined by Providence to plague America with miseries in the name of Freedom.”

Perhaps he meant to say, or at least should have said, not 'America' but "the Americas."

A central tenet of modern US Foreign policy has been to subvert and sabotage the sovereignty of nations wherever the US ruling elites could scheme to satisfy an interest for significant political, economic or strategic advantage -- a cold-blooded ruthlessness that is so contrary to the cultivated image of American idealism that most of its citizens simply choose not to believe it despite whatever compelling evidence they are shown. 30 years since the US aided and abetted the murderous Death Squads in Guatamala that disappeared many tens of thousands of rural peasants in a campaign of state-inspired terror-intimidation to defend the brutal military regime of General Rios Mont from the 'leftist' threat of social justice idealism based on the community spirit of peaceful self-empowerment-realization and the transgressive mobilization of liberation theology, many Americans refuse to acknowledge America's active role in encouraging the genocidal butchery.

Damn Obama with his facile, "We shouldn't look back" self-serving Sophistry.
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Wed Jun 13, 2012 2:19 pm

http://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/nai ... rbtds.html

Image


Behind the Death Squads: An exclusive report on the US role in El Salvador's official terror

by Allan Nairn (The Progressive, May, 1984)


[From the Editor's page: "The rising level of political violence in El Salvador and the increasing military involvement of the United States began making front-page headlines in this country about five years ago. But as Allan Nairn reports in his carefully researched article, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon set their intervention in motion much earlier. They have been actively aiding official terror in El Salvador for more than two decades—often in violation of US law, always in violation of Washington's pious rhetoric calling for an end to the violence.

Allan Nairn, a twenty eight year old free-lance writer, lives in New York City but has spent much of his time these last four years in Central America. His reporting from the region has been used by such varied outlets as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, In These Times, The Guardian of London, Multinational Monitor, and CBS News.

Nairn's work on this article, which he hopes to expand into a book, began late last year and included a five-week stay in El Salvador, where he conducted dozens of interviews with military officers, civilian officials, members of the security forces, US diplomats, and other sources."]



Early in the 1960's, during the Kennedy Administration, agents of the US government in El Salvador set up two official security organizations that killed thousands of peasants and suspected leftists over the next fifteen years. These organizations, guided by American operatives, developed into the paramilitary apparatus that came to be known as the Salvadoran Death Squads.

Today, even as the Reagan Administration publicly condemns the Death Squads, the CIA—in violation of US law—continues to provide training, support and intelligence to security forces directly involved in Death Squad activity.

Interviews with dozens of current and former Salvadoran officers, civilians, and official American sources disclose a pattern of sustained US participation in building and managing the Salvadoran security apparatus that relies on Death Squad assassinations as its principle means of enforcement.

Evidence of US involvement covers a broad spectrum of activity. Over the past twenty years, officials of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the US armed forces have:

conceived and organized ORDEN, the rural paramilitary and intelligence network described by Amnesty International as a movement designed "to use clandestine terror against government opponents." Out of ORDEN grew the notorious "Mano Blanco," the White Hand, which a former US ambassador to El Salvador, Raul H. Castro, has called "nothing less than the birth of the Death Squads";

conceived and organized ANSESAL, the elite presidential intelligence service that gathered files on Salvadoran dissidents and, in the words of one US official, relied on Death Squads as "the operative arm of intelligence gathering";

enlisted General Jose Alberto "Chele" Medrano, the founder of ORDEN and ANSESAL, as a CIA agent;

trained leaders of ORDEN in surveillance techniques and use of automatic weapons, and carried some of these leaders on the CIA payroll;

provided American technical and intelligence advisers who often worked directly with ANSESAL at its headquarters in the Casa Presidencial;

supplied ANSESAL, the security forces, and the general staff with electronic, photographic, and personal surveillance of individuals who were later assassinated by Death Squads. According to Colonel Nicolas Carranza, director of the Salvadoran Treasury Police, such intelligence sharing by US agencies continues to this day;

kept key security officials—including Carranza, Medrano, and others—on the CIA payroll. Though the evidence is less conclusive about Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, presidential candidate of the right wing ARENA party, some of his close associates describe him as a former recipient of CIA funding;

furnished intelligence files that D'Aubuisson used for a series of 1980 television broadcasts in which he denounced dozens of academics, trade unionists, peasant leaders, Christian Democrats, and members of the clergy as communists or guerrilla collaborators. Many of the individuals D'Aubuisson named in his television speeches were subsequently assassinated. The broadcasts launched D'Aubuisson's political career and marked the emergence of the paramilitary front which later became ARENA;

instructed Salvadoran intelligence operatives in the use of investigative techniques, combat weapons, explosives, and interrogation methods that included, according to former treasury police agent, "instruction in methods of physical and psychological torture";

and, in the last decade, violated the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, which prohibits spending US funds "to provide training, or advice or provide any financial support for police, prisons or other law enforcement forces for any foreign government or any program of internal intelligence or surveillance on behalf of any foreign government."


Up to the early 1960's, El Salvador's security forces had been little more than loosely coordinated barracks units in the service of local land owners and political "caudillos." "They had very, very limited political orientation, if any," says Robert Eugene Whedbee, who served as CIA station chief in El Salvador from 1962 to 1964. That began to change with the Kennedy Administration's Alliance for Progress, founded on the assumption that national security systems working side by side with capitalist development would preempt communist revolution in Latin America.

In El Salvador, the US State Department, the CIA, the Green Berets, and the Agency for International Development (AID) all participated in the effort to suppress dissent.

The United States was "developing within the civil security forces ... an investigative capability for detecting criminal and/or subversive individuals and organizations and neutralizing their activities," wrote Byron Engle, director of the AID Public Safety Program, in a 1967 memo to his staff. "This requires a carefully integrated effort between the investigative element and the regular police, paramilitary or military force, operating separately or in conjunction with each other." Engle, himself a former CIA official, referred to thirty-three countries, including El Salvador, in which the Public Safety Program was operating.

The landmark event in the formation of the national security apparatus in El Salvador and the rest of Central America was the Declaration of San Jose, issued on March 19, 1963, at the conclusion of a meeting of six Central American presidents. "Communism is the chief obstacle to economic development in the Central American region," proclaimed President Kennedy, who had chaired the meeting.

The Declaration of San Jose triggered a series of follow-up meetings among Central American ministers of the interior, who held jurisdiction over police and internal security. These meetings—organized and run by the US State Department with assistance from the CIA, AID, the Customs Bureau, the Immigration Service, and the Justice Department—"were designed to develop ways of dealing with subversion," recalls William Bowdler, who represented the State Department at the sessions.

For El Salvador, Washington assigned a central role to General Medrano, then a senior officer of the National Guard and the army general staff.

Medrano is something of a legend in Salvadoran politics. Rank and file National Guardsmen still revere him as a fearsome "jefe" and the hero of the 1969 war with Honduras. To his supporters, he is "the founder of Salvadoran nationalism." But to Christian Democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte, Medrano is something else—"the father of the Death Squads, the chief assassin of them all."

Medrano, now retired, prides himself on moving about El Salvador unaccompanied by bodyguards. He drives through the countryside armed only with a .45 caliber pistol and a glove compartment stocked with hand grenades. In a recent series of interviews spanning some twelve hours, he spoke freely about the origins and growth of the security system.

"ORDEN and ANSESAL—the Salvadoran National Security Agency—grew out of the State Department, the CIA, and the Green Berets during the time of Kennedy," Medrano told me. "We created these specialized agencies to fight the plans and actions of international communism. We organized ORDEN, ANSESAL, and counterinsurgency courses, and we bought special arms—G3 automatic rifles—to detain the communist movement. We were preparing the team to stop communism."

The meetings of the interior ministers resulted in the formation of ANSESAL and parallel domestic security agencies in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras and Costa Rica. These forces "would meet every three months under the supervision of the State Department and exchange information and methods of operation," says Medrano. "They had direct radio teletypes from office to office."

According to a US advisor who helped install the teletype system, known as the Central American Communications Network, it was part of a broader plan "to reorganize the intelligence effort and get Central Americans to work together against subversion. At the meetings, you'd say to them 'Well, if I had this sort of equipment, I'd do this and this,' — sort of ease them along."

The State Department and AID's Public Safety office in El Salvador had administrative responsibility for establishing the ANSESAL network, Medrano says, but the substantive day-to-day intelligence work was coordinated by the CIA: "The CIA was already participating in connections with us. The CIA would work with us and give us reports."

"Medrano was the CIA's boy," says one current State Department official. Indeed, Medrano himself says he was on the CIA payroll, a fact confirmed by ORDEN colleagues. "he came to my house regularly. He was a close friend," recalls Raul Castro, US ambassador to El Salvador from 1964 to 1968. "And he was a good friend of the United States."

Medrano flew frequently to Washington for consultations at CIA headquarters. In July 1968, he received a silver Presidential medal from Lyndon Johnson "in recognition of exceptionally meritorious service." Medrano refuses to discuss the particular service he performed though he recalls Jonson's words as the President presented him with the medal: " 'I know all about you Medrano. You're doing good work. I know your pedigree'—like I was a bull!"

The US government also sent Medrano on a three-month tour of Vietnam, were he traveled with Army units, the Green Berets, and CIA operatives. As he recalls it, Medrano "studied every aspect of warfare from primitive jungle fighting to psychological civic action to strategic bombing."

Medrano gave Washington ample return on its investment. In El Salvador, he organized an intricate, many-tiered intelligence and paramilitary network that extended from the remotest mountain hamlets to the presidential palace. The rural component of this network was ORDEN (Spanish for "Order"), a group funded in Medrano's words, to "indoctrinate peasants regarding the advantages and the disadvantages of the communist system."

Green Beret Colonel Arthur Simons was instrumental in the development of ORDEN, says Medrano. In 1963, Simons, then commander of the 8th Special Forces group in Panama, dispatched a team of counterinsurgency trainers to El Salvador. (According to his service record, Simons had recently completed a stint as commander of the White Star Mobile Training Team, a Green Beret unit that had been sent to Laos to work with indigenous troops. Previously, he had served as chief of staff at the Army Special Warfare Center in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which was originally called the Psychological Warfare Center and was later renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for Military Assistance.)

"Colonel Simons sent me ten men to begin training us," recalls Medrano. After "talking among ourselves and with Simons, the idea occurred to us to catechize the people. We talked about how we had to indoctrinate the people, because he who had the population wins the war.

"The army can easily annihilate guerrillas in the urban zone," says Medrano, "but the peasants are tough. They are good in the mountains. They can walk at night, see in the dark, see among the trees. We couldn't let them be deceived the guerrillas."

Medrano says the Green Berets helped him plan the structure and ideology of ORDEN, and then stayed on to train a team of Salvadoran soldiers, among them Colonel Carranza, who now heads the Treasury Police, and Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, currently chief of the Third Brigade and El Salvador's star combat commander. The soldiers went to the countryside to instruct civilian ORDEN leaders, who in turn established the organization's local chapters. At its peak, ORDEN membership reached and estimated 100,000. "It was almost like a religion," Medrano recalls.

ORDEN had the dual mission of teaching anticommunism and gathering information on individuals deemed suspicious. "You discover the communist by the way he talks," says Medrano. Generally, he speaks against Yankee imperialism, he speaks against the oligarchy, he speaks against military men. We can spot them easily." Once identified, they would be reported to ORDEN's central office, where a staff of eighty would record the information and relay to ANSESAL. There, "we could study it and pass it on to the president, who would take appropriate action." says Medrano.

"In this revolutionary war, the enemy comes from our people," Medrano says. "They don't have the rights of Geneva. They are traitors to the country. What can the troops do? When they find them, they kill them."

Sometimes the killings were carried out by ORDEN itself, other times by the army, the National Guard, or the "Mano Blanco" Death Squad. Former ambassador Castro says Mano Blanco was an offshoot of ORDEN, and the same people in ORDEN were to some extent the same people in the Mano Blanco. Even today some of the same people are in the Death Squads. That was the origin."

According to US and Salvadoran officials, the close relationship between the security forces and the US government was sustained over the next twenty years.

Edgar Artiga, a civilian leader of ORDEN, says he and eighty other ORDEN officials participated in a two-month CIA course in 1969. The course, held at the headquarters of the Salvadoran National Guard, was taught jointly by General Medrano and three CIA instructors from the US embassy, who brought along movies about life in the Soviet Union. The curriculum says Artiga, included "anti-communism, democracy, detection and identification, and self-defense." Trainees were instructed in the US of 9-millimeter revolvers and such weapons ad the M-16 rifle, which was not yet generally available. All the students were paid daily in cash, according to Artiga. A number of Artiga's classmates continued on the CIA payroll after the course was completed, he says.

Training was also conducted in the United States. Among those who received such schooling was Carlos Sosa Santos, the leading explosives expert for the Salvadoran armed forces, who was instructed by the AID Public Safety Program. Sosa has trained dozens of army and security force members in "techniques for secretly placing bombs in houses, cars, and individuals' personal belongings," according to a National Police intelligence officer who studied under Sosa.

The US contribution extends far beyond training. American intelligence services have actually furnished the names, photographs, and whereabouts of suspected dissidents, say Salvadoran security officials.

This March, during a tour of the political intelligence archives of the National Police Center for Analysis and Investigations, I spoke with Captain Rafael Lopez Davila, who displayed files on leftist political leaders. The dossiers included entries reporting on their travels to foreign cities, specifying what flights they took, whom they visited, and where they stayed. The CIA provided such information, Lopez says.

According to General Medrano, the CIA regularly kept ANSESAL posted on the activities of Salvadorans working or studying abroad. In important cases, the CIA supplied photographs and tapes of conversations.

A Salvadoran who served as an aide to a senior intelligence official in the 1970's says he was shown CIA photographic and electronic surveillance reports on many dissidents. "With this information, we knew exactly what we were doing, who was who," he says, adding that many of the subjects were later assassinated by Death Squads.

A former staff member of the Casa Presidencial reports that an American CIA officer told him the CIA and the Salvadoran forces kept Rutilio Grande, a prominent Jesuit priest, under surveillance before his March 1977 assassination. The CIA agent claimed to have seen the dossier on Father Grande, which reportedly included photos and accounts of his visits to other Central American countries as well as his activities in his home parish of Aguilares. A former Treasury Police officer who goes by the name of Rene Hurtado says that he was told by ANSESAL members that their agency was responsible for killing Grande.

When a reformist junta briefly came to power in El Salvador in 1979, it abolished ORDEN and ANSESAL and condemned the organizations for committing human rights abuses. Since then the Salvadoran military have continued to maintain and expand their surveillance and record-keeping activities. And as in the 1960's and 1970's, when US agents and technicians invented and oiled the intelligence machine, US personnel remain at the center of the system.

According to a Salvadoran colonel involved in the process, the United States routinely receives copies of all major political surveillance reports compiled by Salvadoran security officers. In turn, US officials provide the security forces with information. Colonel Carranza confirmed this relationship.

"The Americans would directly receive all the information on a case even before we had developed the activity, before we had decided how we would terminate a case," Carranza says, referring to the procedure in effect before 1983. "Now we give everything—in relation to captures that the Treasury police have made—to the general staff and THEY give it to the embassy."

US intelligence officials "have collaborated with us in a certain technical manner, providing us with advice," says Carranza. "They receive information from everywhere in the world, and they have sophisticated equipment that enables them to have better information or at least confirm the information we have. It's very helpful." Carranza says he processes the information with "a small computer, and we also work with the general staff's computer for developing a workable inventory and index."

Colonel Adolfo Blandon, the armed forces chief of staff, says "six or seven" US military advisors—several of them specialists in intelligence and psychological warfare—are currently working with the general staff.

The National Guard now concentrates on monitoring "unions and strikes and the penetration of the education system, where they are brainwashing our students," says Colonel Aristedes Napoleon Montes, director of the National Guard. Reynaldo Lopez Nuilla, director of the National Police, says he has an intelligence staff of 200, including a thirty-man "operations group." He too, cites unions as an area of concentration, but also mentions the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission (the nongovernmental one, that is; the government maintains its own "human rights commission," of which Lopez Nuilla is a member). And the Catholic organization Socorro Juridico (legal assistance), "we know to be organized precisely by the guerrillas," says Lopez Nuilla. "it's evident in the things they say."

In the National Police political intelligence archive, originally organized by US AID Public Safety advisors, Captain Rafael Lopez Davila, the investigations chief, showed me a special section on unions and their members. The three story filing room also contained a "library of subversive literature," which along with Karl Marx's "Das Kapital" and Lenin's collected works, held the publications of UCA, El Salvador's Catholic University.

According to the Salvadoran armed forces "Guide to Normal Operating Procedures," a confidential policy manual, each army and security force outpost is required to maintain a "Special Archive of S-2 Intelligence." The file covers "the disposition of the subversive delinquents (their location ... styles of action and mobilization)," lists "militants and sympathizers," and carries a miscellaneous "register of personalities of the enemy."

Names enter the archive through surveillance reports from officers and informants or through reports from troops who have detained an individual for questioning. To qualify for a place in the files, and individual may commit such divers offenses as "carrying or moving subversive propaganda of whatever type ... insulting authority ... carrying notebooks, papers or symbols related to subversive organizations [or] traveling in cars destined for points of concentration of the subversive delinquents—unauthorized demonstrations and rallies, etc., especially if the attitude is suspicious."

Surveillance reports compiled by local intelligence units are retained for their own files while a copy os forwarded to the central archives of the service involved. Individual subjects are interrogated, says Colonel Montes, first at the local post and then, if the case warrants it, at the intelligence section of the security force. "All of this information is then turned over to the general staff, with whom we retain a very close coordination," Montes says.

This intelligence system serves as the nerve center of Death Squad operations. "We worked with written orders," recalls one former National Guardsman, a fifteen-year veteran who says he went on Death Squad missions while stationed in the province of La Libertad. "We got names and addresses and were told to pick them up, get information, and kill them later." In important cases, he adds, special troops or security force agents would come from San Salvador with the lists.

"Every garrison of any size had Death Squads. It's that simple," says a US official in San Salvador who studied the Death Squads last year. "All of this comes out of a military intelligence function."

When the Reagan Administration launched a publicity campaign against the Death Squads last December, it pointed a finger at individual officers, leaking their names to the press and demanding their removal. Three of those officers were the directors of the intelligence departments of the Treasury Police, the National Guard, and the National Police.

Asked why the Administration chose to blame those specific individuals while leaving the institutions untouched, the US official in San Salvador responded: "Things generated in Washington create certain necessities that don't necessarily reflect the true problems here, but are done for political purposes up there, and this is a good example." The official, heavily involved in the publicity campaign, considered it a success.

"These men were done an injustice," says Colonel Blandon, the chief of staff. "We kept asking the embassy for proof against them but they never gave it. The American's sacrificed them to avoid their own problems."

The use of the term "Death Squad" has, in some respects, fostered a profound misunderstanding of El Salvador's official terror apparatus. It conjures up images of discrete bands of gangsters randomly cruising the countryside in search of opportunities to kill. In fact, the term more meaningfully applies to a system that can dispatch a soldier at any time to kill a selected victim.

Another misunderstanding about the Death Squads arises from the fact that they came to public notice in the United States in connection with the spectacular emergence of Roberto D'Aubuisson as a powerful political figure. US officials who want to shield the Salvadoran government from culpability in the Death Squads, as well as some liberals who want to undermine D'Aubuisson's electoral prospects, have promoted the mistaken notion that the Death Squad phenomenon—this sprawling institution with a twenty year history and tens of thousands of victims, is the personal instrument of one diabolical man.

In March, Roberto Eulaio Santivanez, a former colonel who had been paid $50,000 by critics of US policy in El Salvador, began circulating to the mass media a detailed account of Death Squad operations. Speaking as an unnamed source from "the highest level of the security police," Santivanez told The New York Times that D'Aubuisson was "the man who organized and continues to direct the Death Squads."

Santivanez charged that former Defense Minister Jose Guillermo Garcia and Colonel Carranza, director of the Treasury Police, helped organize and operate D'Aubuisson's Death Squad network. In a CBS News interview with Walter Cronkite, Santivanez said Carranza had been on the CIA payroll. The New York Times confirmed the CIA connection, citing US intelligence sources. They reported that Carranza had received $90,000 per year for the past five or six years. (Two colleagues of Carranza had said he was a CIA agent weeks before Santivanez did.)

According to Santivanez's version as reported in The Times, the Death Squads did not exist before D'Aubuisson rose to prominence in the wake of the 1979 reformist coup. Because of a commitment to protect Santivanez's anonymity, the story identified him as a source with "personal knowledge of these crimes because his government post had put him in direct contact with top military leaders." In fact, Santivanez was the director of ANSESAL and D'Aubuisson's immediate superior from 1977 to 1979, a period of mounting government repression that culminated in the fall of the Carlos Humberto Romero government and the abolition of ANSESAL for its role in the Death Squad killings.

Santivanez was "Romero's black man," says the US embassy official who studied the Death Squads. "He kept the files and took care of people when there was dirty work to be done. His hands are as bloody as anybody's." The official nonetheless confirms that Santivanez's account of involvement in the Death Squads by Carranza and the high command was "substantially correct," though he says it exaggerated D'Aubuisson's personal role.

The story of the relationship between the US government and the D'Aubuisson branch of the contemporary Death Squads is complex, paradoxical, and far from complete.

D'Aubuisson, a Medrano protege whom the General remembers as "a fine officer who was loved by the people," made his mark in the ORDEN-ANSESAL network, organizing ORDEN chapters as a National Guard officer and rising to second in command of ANSESAL under Santivanez.

"Roberto was an officer of ANSESAL, which is affiliated with the CIA," says Major Oscar Serrato, one of a small group of Salvadorans who began secretly collaborating with D'Aubuisson soon after the reformist junta came to power in October 1979. Two years later, Serrato helped found ARENA, the rightist political party D'Aubuisson heads. "He worked with the CIA for years, and that's how he was able to learn all the machinations, the people, national as well as international, that were working to establish the communist scheme."

Two of D'Aubuisson's former associates from the National Guard and ANSESAL claim he received US government money, one saying it came from the CIA, the other from either the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency. State Department officials in El Salvador during the 1970's say that although D'Aubuisson had "a disturbingly close relationship" with one US military attache (who could not be reached for comment), they did not know whether he had received payments.

When D'Aubuisson officially left the army after the 1979 coup, he launched his political movement with a series of television speeches. He assailed the junta for abolishing ORDEN—"born in the bosom of the armed forces," D'Aubuisson declared. "ORDEN has ceased to function with that name," he said, "but its principles live and are newly serving the fatherland with the Frente Democratica Nacionalista (Democratic Nationalist Front, D'Aubuisson's new political organization)."

D'Aubuisson openly defended the security forces for their role in the spate of disappearances and assassinations in late 1979 and early 1980. "In no moment should you feel culpable for fighting these terrorists," he said. "If our commanders have captured people like this, they are committing no fault." And he quoted from Napoleon: "Nothing done to defend your country is against the law."

Having established the principle, D'Aubuisson got down to specifics, marshaling charts, photos, videotapes, and computer graphics for an intricately detailed, name-by-name, face-by-face tirade against "El Salvador's terrorist conspiracy."

D'Aubuisson denounced union leaders, priests, academics, peasant organizers, students, professionals, government officials, and Christian Democrats. Among those he named was Archbishop Oscar Romero, whom he told, "You still have time to change your ways." He also attacked Mario Zamora, a leading Christian Democrat and member of the government who—like others identified in the broadcasts—was assassinated in a matter of weeks.

"Unfortunately, when we mentioned a person, POOM, they'd shoot them," says Alberto Bondanza, a D'Aubuisson intimate and one of the founder of ARENA. "Then they started linking us with the Death Squads. If by chance the army arrived and happened to shoot one of these people in a battle, then everybody threw the blame on us."

D'Aubuisson was pointing out the communists so the troops could kill them," Medrano says. "He had good information. He was speaking the truth."

"He had everything—photos and complete personal histories—direct from the ANSESAL files," says Major Serrato, who participated in the planning meetings out of which the broadcasts grew. He said D'Aubuisson made copies of the ANSESAL material shortly before the agency was dissolved and its archives transferred to the general staff. "The proofs he presented were concrete and irrefutable: photos and documents that were prepared by the CIA, documents from the archives of the CIA. All of the material was passed back and forth constantly."

D'Aubuisson maintained CIA contacts in 1980 and 1981, according to Jimmy Nixon, an American citizen and ARENA activist who ferried visitors and private messages to D'Aubuisson while he was staying in Guatemala during that period. Nixon says he is uncertain of the current relationship.

Another American closely associated with D'Aubuisson, Billy Murphy, complains of the treatment ARENA received at the hands of the US embassy under the Carter Administration and its last ambassador, Robert White. "Those sons of bitches were doing everything they could against us," he says.

But Murphy adds that ARENA enjoyed amiable relations with one political officer at the embassy who "would always let us know in advance what was going to happen in the junta. "He and other D'Aubuisson aids, met regularly with "good friends" from the US military group and the embassy's military attache, he says. "You had a wonderful man here" in the Military Group, says Murphy. "He did his best, but he couldn't do anything."

Clandestine US ties with the Salvadoran security apparatus remain firm, and appear to have been strengthened in the 1980's. National Guardsmen Luis Alonzo Bonilla claims that US military and civilian personnel helped train members of the security forces as bodyguards in 1980. Bonilla, who says he took a similar course in 1985, says it included instruction in combat and ambush techniques. A National Police detective and member of the elite explosives unit established by AID's Public Safety Program says four of his associates visited the United States for an explosives course in November 1983.

"I've been visited by some members of the embassy with whom I've always maintained good relations," Carranza told me last september, "and I have the promise that they are going to help us train our personnel." He said he also needed investigation and interrogation equipment, and was unruffled by the fact that US law prohibits such aid.

"Yes," he remarked, "but by means of other ways, by let's say friendship with some members of the American embassy, I think I can get not only equipment but training." He said he would obtain them through "outside channels," adding, "I don't know whether it would be wise to put this out for the knowledge of the American people."

Once the Treasury Police received the lie detection, fingerprinting, and ballistic equipment he requested, "we would have a better way of doing an investigation than putting pressure on the victim," Carranza said. "Now when you have a prisoner, you have to put pressure on him, questioning him again and again, day and night."

This March, Francis Stanley Martinez a corporal in the National Police intelligence department, said he and nine colleagues in the security forces—three from the Treasury Police, three from the National Guard, and three from the National Police—were about to depart for an in-depth CIA training course in the United States. He subsequently said the departure date had been postponed until some time in April. The course would cover investigation, surveillance, weapons, and interrogation, Martinez said.

"You have to know all the aspects to work in intelligence here," he said. "It's very different from the United States. Here intelligence is hard to get, and the delinquent is very different. Here, the first thing you have to do is grab them by the neck."

In the 1960's, when the United States was building a Salvadoran security system based on surveillance and assassination, the enterprise enjoyed unified support within the US government. With State Department officials and CIA operatives presiding, General Medrano and his counterparts from Anastasio Somoza's Nicaragua and Peralta Azurdia's Guatemala would gather around a table and give speeches about "who the communists were," as Medrano puts it, "what they were up to, and what we should do about them."

Over time, changing political conditions opened something of a rift between the State Department professionals and their Pentagon and CIA colleagues. During the Carter Administration, their disagreements were often clear and pronounced. Under Reagan, the State Department has been brought back into line. Public and Congressional pressures, however, have compelled the Administration to voice public criticism of the Death Squads even as it secretly funnels aid and intelligence to the military and security forces that run them.

US complicity in the dark and brutal work of El Salvador's Death Squads is not an aberration. Rather, it represents a basic, bipartisan, institutional commitment on the part of six American Administrations—a commitment to guard the Salvadoran regime against the prospect that its people might organize in ways unfriendly to that regime or to the United States.

This narrative is included in the same article:

"You Learn How To Torture ..."

Rene Hurtado is the pseudonym of a former member of the Salvadoran Treasury Police who now lives in a Minneapolis suburb. In an interview in late March, he said that the Treasury Police, a branch of El Salvador's security forces, would routinely kidnap, interrogate, torture and then kill political suspects. He claims to have participated in torture sessions and provides a detailed account of the methods employed.

According to Hurtado, US personnel conducted an intelligence course for Treasury officers that included training "in methods of physical and psychological torture." He claims to have met with the US instructors. Though he refuses to say whether he himself received training from them, he asserts that some of his associates did.

The intelligence course was given for one month in 1980 at the headquarters of the Salvadoran army general staff, Hurtado says. The instructors did not observe or participate in actual torture sessions, nor did they visit Treasury Police headquarters, he explains. But in the classroom, he says, they discussed such techniques as psychological torture, manual beating, and electric shock, occasionally supplementing the lectures with Spanish-language written material that was more generalized than the oral presentations. The instructors were sometimes in military uniform, sometimes in civilian dress.

Hurtado, who gave his real name but asked that it not be used, showed documents and photographs verifying his military and Treasury Police service.

At one time, Hurtado held a sensitive position for which he was carefully screened. Following a fight with a superior officer, he was expelled from the military in 1981, he says. he resides in the United States without legal immigration status and is being sheltered by the religious sanctuary movement. He was contacted directly and independently after another former member of the Salvadoran military provided his home telephone number.

What follows is Hurtado's account of the interrogation and torture methods used by the Treasury Police:

First, you try to torture him psychologically. If he's a Marxist or a revolutionary, it's not easy to make him talk, so you have to psychologically harm the prisoner. If the person is important—if he's, let's say, a journalist or a teacher or a labor or student leader, or if he's a person with some leadership or has something to offer—he isn't treated cruelly at the beginning. Well, of course, they may hit him at some time, but after that, when he's taken to one of the interrogation rooms, you start by talking to him as a friend, you try to convince him that you understand his idealism.

You might say: "Who are the companeros in your organization and why do they kill us? How many people have you killed?" Things like that. You try to trap the person psychologically. You'll say:

"Don't be a fool. Those bastards want to f--- you over, they're using you. We could kill you right here and now, but we're not killers, we're not your enemy. If you collaborate with us, we're going to get you out of the country. Where would you like to go. Europe? Spain? England? We'll send you to one of those countries. We'll give you money, but you have to talk to us, because if you don't, we're going to f--- you over."

When you are trying to interrogate for the first time, you try to come across as a sensitive decent person—not as a killer. You say you are not a bastard like the other interrogators. You make friends with him. You offer him a soda and some food. You ask him where his mom and dad live, you talk about his wife and kids. It has a tremendous impact when he knows his kids have been captured but he doesn't know where they are.

But after using these methods for a few days or a week or two, you start getting tough. You will say:

"Look, those bastards are giving me a lot of sh--. Because they want you to talk, they're going to beat the sh-- out of you. And I don't want those bastards to think I'm screwing up. So if you don't talk, I'm going to turn you over to those f---ers and they're going to beat the piss out of you."

After these sessions, the physical torture begins. First, you put the prisoner in a small, completely dark room, and you don't let him sleep. You place him, naked and handcuffed, on a bed frame. The room stinks horribly because of the urine and excrement of former prisoners, and you keep him there for a week without sleep so that his nerves will be shot when you start to torture him.

When the actual physical torture begins, there are a lot of different methods: cutting off pieces of his skin, burning him with cigarettes. They teach you how to hit a person in the stomach, but in a sophisticated way so the person suffers a lot of pain but you don't see signs on the outside. Or sometimes you just beat his hands and beat him in the stomach, either with fists or with heavy sticks. Beat him, and beat him, and beat him.

After that, if he still doesn't talk, you take him to a toilet filled with excrement. You put on gloves and shove his head in the toilet for thirty seconds or so. You pull him out, then shove his head in again. You do this over and over.

Then you wash him and take him to the electric shock room. There's a special torture room in the Treasury Police; only the intelligence section can enter, no uniformed men are allowed. It's soundproof so they don't hear anything outside.

You learn how to give electric shocks, shocks to the brain, shocks to the stomach. There are some very sophisticated methods for this kind of torture. It's a little machine; you use a cord like a telephone, like an old phone with a crank and you start turning the crank. You do it with different wires; they're small. There's a more sophisticated one that looks like a radio, like a transformer; It's about fifteen centimeters across, with connecting wires. It says General Electric on it.

It's like if you have a stereo and you don't know how to use it, you learn: This generates twenty volts, this forty volts, this will give a serious blow, this less so, this one will kill a person.

You put the wires on the prisoner's vital parts. You place the wires between the prisoners's teeth, on the penis, in the vagina. The prisoners feel it more if their feet are in water, and they're seated on iron so the blow is stronger. If you put mineral water on them and then do the shock, it's agonizing.

In general, you will kill the prisoners because there's an assumption they shouldn't live. If we pass them to the judge, they'll go free and we'll maybe have to pick them up again. If there's lots of pressure—like from Amnesty International or some foreign countries—then we might pass them on to a judge, but if there's no pressure, then they're dead. When it's over, you just throw him in the alleys with a sign saying Mano Blanco, ESA (Secret Anticommunist Army), or Maximiliano Hernandez Brigade [three names commonly used by Salvadoran Death Squads].

You learn how to torture, how to cut the balls off a person when he's still alive. These are the things that happen in war.



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'No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... Revolution is but thought carried into action.'
—Emma Goldman
American Dream
 
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby Marie Laveau » Wed Jun 13, 2012 2:59 pm

"The era of the United States as the dominant influence in Latin America is over," says the Council on Foreign Relations, in a new report filled with sober policy suggestions for ways the U.S. can recoup its waning influence in a region it has long claimed as its own.


Oh, boo effing hoo.

Firstly, I doubt if it's true. Probably a "watch what might left hand is doing, while my right hand knocks your teeth out," kind of "ignoring."

Secondly, if it is true - and let's hope it is - maybe those poor people can get some peace and quiet for a score of years or so. I honestly don't know of anyone (well, besides the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, etc.) that deserves it more. Poor people.
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 19, 2013 10:51 am

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175650/

The Latin American Exception
How a Washington Global Torture Gulag Was Turned Into the Only Gulag-Free Zone on Earth

By Greg Grandi
n

The map tells the story. To illustrate a damning new report, “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detentions and Extraordinary Rendition,” recently published by the Open Society Institute, the Washington Post put together an equally damning graphic: it’s soaked in red, as if with blood, showing that in the years after 9/11, the CIA turned just about the whole world into a gulag archipelago.

Back in the early twentieth century, a similar red-hued map was used to indicate the global reach of the British Empire, on which, it was said, the sun never set. It seems that, between 9/11 and the day George W. Bush left the White House, CIA-brokered torture never saw a sunset either.

All told, of the 190-odd countries on this planet, a staggering 54 participated in various ways in this American torture system, hosting CIA “black site” prisons, allowing their airspace and airports to be used for secret flights, providing intelligence, kidnapping foreign nationals or their own citizens and handing them over to U.S. agents to be “rendered” to third-party countries like Egypt and Syria. The hallmark of this network, Open Society writes, has been torture. Its report documents the names of 136 individuals swept up in what it says is an ongoing operation, though its authors make clear that the total number, implicitly far higher, “will remain unknown” because of the “extraordinary level of government secrecy associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition.”

No region escapes the stain. Not North America, home to the global gulag’s command center. Not Europe, the Middle East, Africa, or Asia. Not even social-democratic Scandinavia. Sweden turned over at least two people to the CIA, who were then rendered to Egypt, where they were subject to electric shocks, among other abuses. No region, that is, except Latin America.

What’s most striking about the Post’s map is that no part of its wine-dark horror touches Latin America; that is, not one country in what used to be called Washington’s “backyard” participated in rendition or Washington-directed or supported torture and abuse of “terror suspects.” Not even Colombia, which throughout the last two decades was as close to a U.S.-client state as existed in the area. It’s true that a fleck of red should show up on Cuba, but that would only underscore the point: Teddy Roosevelt took Guantánamo Bay Naval Base for the U.S. in 1903 “in perpetuity.”

Two, Three, Many CIAs

How did Latin America come to be territorio libre in this new dystopian world of black sites and midnight flights, the Zion of this militarist matrix (as fans of the Wachowskis' movies might put it)? After all, it was in Latin America that an earlier generation of U.S. and U.S.-backed counterinsurgents put into place a prototype of Washington’s twenty-first century Global War on Terror.

Even before the 1959 Cuban Revolution, before Che Guevara urged revolutionaries to create “two, three, many Vietnams,” Washington had already set about establishing two, three, many centralized intelligence agencies in Latin America. As Michael McClintock shows in his indispensable book Instruments of Statecraft, in late 1954, a few months after the CIA’s infamous coup in Guatemala that overthrew a democratically elected government, the National Security Council first recommended strengthening “the internal security forces of friendly foreign countries."

In the region, this meant three things. First, CIA agents and other U.S. officials set to work “professionalizing” the security forces of individual countries like Guatemala, Colombia, and Uruguay; that is, turning brutal but often clumsy and corrupt local intelligence apparatuses into efficient, “centralized,” still brutal agencies, capable of gathering information, analyzing it, and storing it. Most importantly, they were to coordinate different branches of each country’s security forces -- the police, military, and paramilitary squads -- to act on that information, often lethally and always ruthlessly.

Second, the U.S. greatly expanded the writ of these far more efficient and effective agencies, making it clear that their portfolio included not just national defense but international offense. They were to be the vanguard of a global war for “freedom” and of an anticommunist reign of terror in the hemisphere. Third, our men in Montevideo, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Asunción, La Paz, Lima, Quito, San Salvador, Guatemala City, and Managua were to help synchronize the workings of individual national security forces.

The result was state terror on a nearly continent-wide scale. In the 1970s and 1980s, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s Operation Condor, which linked together the intelligence services of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile, was the most infamous of Latin America’s transnational terror consortiums, reaching out to commit mayhem as far away as Washington D.C., Paris, and Rome. The U.S. had earlier helped put in place similar operations elsewhere in the Southern hemisphere, especially in Central America in the 1960s.

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans had been tortured, killed, disappeared, or imprisoned without trial, thanks in significant part to U.S. organizational skills and support. Latin America was, by then, Washington’s backyard gulag. Three of the region’s current presidents -- Uruguay’s José Mujica, Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff, and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega -- were victims of this reign of terror.

When the Cold War ended, human rights groups began the herculean task of dismantling the deeply embedded, continent-wide network of intelligence operatives, secret prisons, and torture techniques -- and of pushing militaries throughout the region out of governments and back into their barracks. In the 1990s, Washington not only didn’t stand in the way of this process, but actually lent a hand in depoliticizing Latin America’s armed forces. Many believed that, with the Soviet Union dispatched, Washington could now project its power in its own “backyard” through softer means like international trade agreements and other forms of economic leverage. Then 9/11 happened.

“Oh My Goodness”

In late November 2002, just as the basic outlines of the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition programs were coming into shape elsewhere in the world, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld flew 5,000 miles to Santiago, Chile, to attend a hemispheric meeting of defense ministers. "Needless to say,” Rumsfeld nonetheless said, “I would not be going all this distance if I did not think this was extremely important." Indeed.

This was after the invasion of Afghanistan but before the invasion of Iraq and Rumsfeld was riding high, as well as dropping the phrase “September 11th” every chance he got. Maybe he didn’t know of the special significance that date had in Latin America, but 29 years earlier on the first 9/11, a CIA-backed coup by General Pinochet and his military led to the death of Chile’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende. Or did he, in fact, know just what it meant and was that the point? After all, a new global fight for freedom, a proclaimed Global War on Terror, was underway and Rumsfeld had arrived to round up recruits.

There, in Santiago, the city out of which Pinochet had run Operation Condor, Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials tried to sell what they were now terming the “integration” of “various specialized capabilities into larger regional capabilities” -- an insipid way of describing the kidnapping, torturing, and death-dealing already underway elsewhere. “Events around the world before and after September 11th suggest the advantages,” Rumsfeld said, of nations working together to confront the terror threat.

“Oh my goodness,” Rumsfeld told a Chilean reporter, “the kinds of threats we face are global.” Latin America was at peace, he admitted, but he had a warning for its leaders: they shouldn’t lull themselves into believing that the continent was safe from the clouds gathering elsewhere. Dangers exist, “old threats, such as drugs, organized crime, illegal arms trafficking, hostage taking, piracy, and money laundering; new threats, such as cyber-crime; and unknown threats, which can emerge without warning.”

“These new threats,” he added ominously, “must be countered with new capabilities.” Thanks to the Open Society report, we can see exactly what Rumsfeld meant by those “new capabilities.”

A few weeks prior to Rumsfeld’s arrival in Santiago, for example, the U.S., acting on false information supplied by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, detained Maher Arar, who holds dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship, at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport and then handed him over to a “Special Removal Unit.” He was flown first to Jordan, where he was beaten, and then to Syria, a country in a time zone five hours ahead of Chile, where he was turned over to local torturers. On November 18th, when Rumsfeld was giving his noon speech in Santiago, it was five in the afternoon in Arar’s “grave-like” cell in a Syrian prison, where he would spend the next year being abused.

Ghairat Baheer was captured in Pakistan about three weeks before Rumsfeld’s Chile trip, and thrown into a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan called the Salt Pit. As the secretary of defense praised Latin America’s return to the rule of law after the dark days of the Cold War, Baheer may well have been in the middle of one of his torture sessions, “hung naked for hours on end.”

Taken a month before Rumsfeld’s visit to Santiago, the Saudi national Abd al Rahim al Nashiri was transported to the Salt Pit, after which he was transferred “to another black site in Bangkok, Thailand, where he was waterboarded.” After that, he was passed on to Poland, Morocco, Guantánamo, Romania, and back to Guantánamo, where he remains. Along the way, he was subjected to a “mock execution with a power drill as he stood naked and hooded,” had U.S. interrogators rack a “semi-automatic handgun close to his head as he sat shackled before them.” His interrogators also “threatened to bring in his mother and sexually abuse her in front of him.”

Likewise a month before the Santiago meeting, the Yemini Bashi Nasir Ali Al Marwalah was flown to Camp X-Ray in Cuba, where he remains to this day.

Less than two weeks after Rumsfeld swore that the U.S. and Latin America shared “common values,” Mullah Habibullah, an Afghan national, died “after severe mistreatment” in CIA custody at something called the “Bagram Collection Point.” A U.S. military investigation “concluded that the use of stress positions and sleep deprivation combined with other mistreatment... caused, or were direct contributing factors in, his death.”

Two days after the secretary’s Santiago speech, a CIA case officer in the Salt Pit had Gul Rahma stripped naked and chained to a concrete floor without blankets. Rahma froze to death.

And so the Open Society report goes... on and on and on.

Territorio Libre

Rumsfeld left Santiago without firm commitments. Some of the region’s militaries were tempted by the supposed opportunities offered by the secretary’s vision of fusing crime fighting into an ideological campaign against radical Islam, a unified war in which all was to be subordinated to U.S. command. As political scientist Brian Loveman has noted, around the time of Rumsfeld’s Santiago visit, the head of the Argentine army picked up Washington’s latest set of themes, insisting that “defense must be treated as an integral matter,” without a false divide separating internal and external security.

But history was not on Rumsfeld’s side. His trip to Santiago coincided with Argentina’s epic financial meltdown, among the worst in recorded history. It signaled a broader collapse of the economic model -- think of it as Reaganism on steroids -- that Washington had been promoting in Latin America since the late Cold War years. Soon, a new generation of leftists would be in power across much of the continent, committed to the idea of national sovereignty and limiting Washington’s influence in the region in a way that their predecessors hadn’t been.

Hugo Chávez was already president of Venezuela. Just a month before Rumsfeld’s Santiago trip, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the presidency of Brazil. A few months later, in early 2003, Argentines elected Néstor Kirchner, who shortly thereafter ended his country’s joint military exercises with the U.S. In the years that followed, the U.S. experienced one setback after another. In 2008, for instance, Ecuador evicted the U.S. military from Manta Air Base.

In that same period, the Bush administration’s rush to invade Iraq, an act most Latin American countries opposed, helped squander whatever was left of the post-9/11 goodwill the U.S. had in the region. Iraq seemed to confirm the worst suspicions of the continent’s new leaders: that what Rumsfeld was trying to peddle as an international “peacekeeping” force would be little more than a bid to use Latin American soldiers as Gurkhas in a revived unilateral imperial war.

Brazil’s “Smokescreen”

Diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks show the degree to which Brazil rebuffed efforts to paint the region red on Washington’s new global gulag map.

A May 2005 U.S. State Department cable, for instance, reveals that Lula’s government refused “multiple requests” by Washington to take in released Guantánamo prisoners, particularly a group of about 15 Uighurs the U.S. had been holding since 2002, who could not be sent back to China.

“[Brazil’s] position regarding this issue has not changed since 2003 and will likely not change in the foreseeable future,” the cable said. It went on to report that Lula’s government considered the whole system Washington had set up at Guantánamo (and around the world) to be a mockery of international law. “All attempts to discuss this issue” with Brazilian officials, the cable concluded, “were flatly refused or accepted begrudgingly.”

In addition, Brazil refused to cooperate with the Bush administration’s efforts to create a Western Hemisphere-wide version of the Patriot Act. It stonewalled, for example, about agreeing to revise its legal code in a way that would lower the standard of evidence needed to prove conspiracy, while widening the definition of what criminal conspiracy entailed.

Lula stalled for years on the initiative, but it seems that the State Department didn’t realize he was doing so until April 2008, when one of its diplomats wrote a memo calling Brazil’s supposed interest in reforming its legal code to suit Washington a “smokescreen.” The Brazilian government, another Wikileaked cable complained, was afraid that a more expansive definition of terrorism would be used to target “members of what they consider to be legitimate social movements fighting for a more just society.” Apparently, there was no way to “write an anti-terrorism legislation that excludes the actions” of Lula’s left-wing social base.

One U.S. diplomat complained that this “mindset” -- that is, a mindset that actually valued civil liberties -- “presents serious challenges to our efforts to enhance counterterrorism cooperation or promote passage of anti-terrorism legislation.” In addition, the Brazilian government worried that the legislation would be used to go after Arab-Brazilians, of which there are many. One can imagine that if Brazil and the rest of Latin America had signed up to participate in Washington’s rendition program, Open Society would have a lot more Middle Eastern-sounding names to add to its list.

Finally, cable after Wikileaked cable revealed that Brazil repeatedly brushed off efforts by Washington to isolate Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, which would have been a necessary step if the U.S. was going to marshal South America into its counterterrorism posse.

In February 2008, for example, U.S. ambassador to Brazil Clifford Sobell met with Lula’s Minister of Defense Nelson Jobin to complain about Chávez. Jobim told Sobell that Brazil shared his “concern about the possibility of Venezuela exporting instability.” But instead of “isolating Venezuela,” which might only “lead to further posturing,” Jobim instead indicated that his government “supports [the] creation of a ‘South American Defense Council’ to bring Chavez into the mainstream.”

There was only one catch here: that South American Defense Council was Chávez’s idea in the first place! It was part of his effort, in partnership with Lula, to create independent institutions parallel to those controlled by Washington. The memo concluded with the U.S. ambassador noting how curious it was that Brazil would use Chavez’s “idea for defense cooperation” as part of a “supposed containment strategy” of Chávez.

Monkey-Wrenching the Perfect Machine of Perpetual War

Unable to put in place its post-9/11 counterterrorism framework in all of Latin America, the Bush administration retrenched. It attempted instead to build a “perfect machine of perpetual war” in a corridor running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico. The process of militarizing that more limited region, often under the guise of fighting “the drug wars,” has, if anything, escalated in the Obama years. Central America has, in fact, become the only place Southcom -- the Pentagon command that covers Central and South America -- can operate more or less at will. A look at this other map, put together by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, makes the region look like one big landing strip for U.S. drones and drug-interdiction flights.

Washington does continue to push and probe further south, trying yet again to establish a firmer military foothold in the region and rope it into what is now a less ideological and more technocratic crusade, but one still global in its aspirations. U.S. military strategists, for instance, would very much like to have an airstrip in French Guyana or the part of Brazil that bulges out into the Atlantic. The Pentagon would use it as a stepping stone to its increasing presence in Africa, coordinating the work of Southcom with the newest global command, Africom.

But for now, South America has thrown a monkey wrench into the machine. Returning to that Washington Post map, it’s worth memorializing the simple fact that, in one part of the world, in this century at least, the sun never rose on US-choreographed torture.



Greg Grandin is a TomDispatch regular and the author of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Lost Jungle City, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. Later this year, his new book, Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, will be published by Metropolitan Books.
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Thu Jun 01, 2017 9:11 pm

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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Tue Dec 04, 2018 9:28 am

https://www.thenation.com/article/georg ... ird-world/

George H.W. Bush, Icon of the WASP Establishment—and of Brutal US Repression in the Third World

Obituaries have transformed the terror that Bush inflicted, depicting it as heroism.

By Greg Grandin

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George H.W. Bush is sworn in as director of the CIA on January 30, 1976. (dpa via AP Photo)


George Herbert Walker Bush represented a ruling class in decay. His WASP awkwardness, his famous syntactical struggles—described in obituaries as an ah-shucks genuineness, a goofy, “irreducible niceness”—was symptomatic of an Establishment in crisis. Franklin Foer, writing in The Atlantic, notes the nostalgia of the encomiums. The public apparently yearns for a time when politics were less coarse, when the country’s clubby elites were well-bred, well-voweled (compare the pleasantly rolling i’s and o’s found in the Harrimans and Roosevelts with the guttural u of today’s ruling clan), and well-mannered, their grasping and groping kept out of the press, for the most part.

What Foer doesn’t mention, and what is perhaps the single most important through-line in Bush’s life, is the way the extension of the national-security state, and easy recourse to political violence in the world’s poorer, darker precincts, allowed Anglo-Saxon men like Bush to stem the decomposition and to sharpen their class and status consciousness.

Raised in the shadow of legends, of a father (Prescott Bush) and two grandfathers (Samuel Bush and George H. Walker) who helped steer the expansive, epic era of Episcopalian capitalism—when American industry and politics had become interlocked with militarism—George H.W. Bush came into his own during the glory days of covert action in the Third World. This period ran from, say, the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran through the Guatemala coup in 1954 and the Cuban Revolution in 1959 to the assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba and the Bay of Pigs in 1961, until the eve of escalation in Vietnam.

Bush would serve for a year as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the mid-1970s, but, as Joseph McBride reported in The Nation in 1988, his involvement with the agency had started much earlier. In November 1963, shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover wrote a memo to the State Department describing the briefing of “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency” on the reaction to the assassination by anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Miami (it was feared by some that the exiles might take advantage of the chaotic situation by initiating an unauthorized raid against Cuba). McBride also cited a source with close connection to the intelligence community who confirmed that, as McBride put it, “Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as cover for clandestine activities.”

Kevin Phillips’s American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush provides a helpful summary of the investigative journalism into the Bush family’s long-standing ties to this shadow world, a family linked by but a few degrees of separation to all the most-storied intrigues and collusions in postwar history, everything from the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala to the Iran/Contra scandal. Phillips provides thick descriptions not to prove any particular conspiracy theory but to establish sociological overlap and ideological affinity—the tight class and status connections between elites, like the Bush and Walker family, and foreign policy. According to Phillips, “from Yale’s class of 1943 alone, at least forty-two young men entered the intelligence services” (Bush attended from 1946 to 1948), and nearly every major player involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion had been in Yale’s secret Skull and Bones society. By the time Bush became director of the CIA in 1976, Phillips writes, “three generations of the Bush and Walker families already had some six decades of intelligence-related activity and experience under their belt,” which apparently also involved a Mexico-CIA “money line” that made its way into “the hands of the Watergate burglars.”

Through birth and breeding—at the Greenwich Country Day School, Phillips Academy, and Yale—Bush identified with an Eastern Establishment already, in the decades after World War II, threatened by democratization: by immigration, the rise of a meritocracy, the consolidation of an administrative state that socialized and bureaucratized private economic relations, and the spread of popular culture, which made the markings of WASP habitus available to the population at large. Anybody could wear a polo shirt, soon to be wildly popularized by Ralph Lauren, born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx to parents who had immigrated from Belarus.

Bush’s family, despite its Nazi affinities, had done well under the New Deal. But H.W., out of Yale, made the jump to the libertarian rebel lands of West Texas, where “independent” Houston oilmen bridled at the privileged position of monopoly petroleum companies—among others, Standard and Gulf—and their cozy relationship with foreign nations. As the war in Vietnam accelerated the crisis within the Establishment, and as Third World nationalism began to threaten their economic interests, this new class of carbon extractors gained in political influence and injected an intensified ideological fervor into covert ops. Phillips places Bush’s Zapata drilling company (named, apparently, after the 1952 Marlon Brando film Viva Zapata!) at the center of this transformation, involved in both the 1954 Guatemala coup and the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. (According to Phillips, the Walker-Bush Caribbean Cuban sugar holdings took a hit, as Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government “seized the company’s lands, mills, and machinery.”)

Obituaries have transformed the terror that Bush inflicted—as head of the CIA, as Ronald Reagan’s vice president, and as president, on poor countries—depicting it as heroism. The invasion of Panama is given scant notice, and the first Gulf War is judged “just.” But Bush helmed the CIA when it was working closely with Latin American death squads grouped under Operation Condor, naming Ted Shackley, implicated in terror operations in Southeast Asia and Latin America—including Vietnam’s Phoenix program and the 1973 coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende—the agency’s powerful associate deputy director for operations. Bush gave the go-head to the neoconservative Team B project, founded on the idea that, after the US debacle in Vietnam, the agency had become too soft on Third World nationalism. Politicizing intelligence, Team B provided the justification for Reagan’s escalation of the Cold War, including the various operations that made up Iran/Contra. As president, Bush set a precedent that Donald Trump might turn to, pardoning, on his last Christmas in office, six Iran/Contra conspirators, an act that “decapitated,” wrote The New York Times, the work of independent prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. “The Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed,” Walsh said of the pardons.

Bush’s wars in Panama and the Persian Gulf should be remembered for gratuitous killing. On the heels of the fall of the Berlin Wall, his 1989 invasion of Panama established the legal and political foundation (as I’ve written here) for his son’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. The killing in Panama was on a smaller scale than in the Persian Gulf, but it was still horrific: Human Rights Watch wrote that even conservative estimates of civilian fatalities suggest “that the rule of proportionality and the duty to minimize harm to civilians…were not faithfully observed by the invading U.S. forces.” That’s an understatement. Civilians were given no notice. The University of Panama’s seismograph marked 442 major explosions in the first 12 hours of the invasion, about one major bomb blast every two minutes. Fires engulfed the mostly wooden homes, destroying about 4,000 residences. Some residents began to call the ravaged Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo “Guernica” or “little Hiroshima.” Shortly after hostilities ended, bulldozers excavated mass graves and shoveled in the bodies. “Buried like dogs,” said the mother of one of the civilian dead.

This was followed by the Highway of Death in Bush’s Persian Gulf. On February 26, 1991, US gunships massacred thousands of Iraqis fleeing Kuwait City in clear retreat on the road to Iraq. Here’s The Boston Globe (not available online, but published on March 2, 1991) describing the scene: “Flies hummed over the body of one decapitated Iraqi soldier. A charred tank, its hatch flung wide, still smoldered. A battered car lay flipped on its side, a trail of loot spilling from its half-open trunk: jewelry, sacks of potatoes, a pair of women’s red high heels. This was the doomed highway of escape for Iraqis attempting to flee Kuwait City too late. Four days after allied air and ground attacks turned this road into a blazing hell, the route remains a gruesome testament to the destruction rained down as Iraqi soldiers fled north Monday night. Mile after wreckage-jammed mile of highway appeared as if frozen in mid-battle. The remnants of a charred body still clung to a car door.…” The Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill tweeted a reminder that Bush targeted civilian infrastructure in that war, including, on February 13, bombing the Amiriyah shelter in Iraq, which killed more than 400 civilians.

Bush famously had to counter the image of being a “wimp.” So for him, war in the Third World, whatever else it accomplished in terms of US interests, was more than (as Bush put it) “just foreign policy.” It was self-help. “You know,” he told soldiers returning from the Gulf in March 1991, “you all not only helped liberate Kuwait, you helped this country liberate itself from old ghosts and doubts.… No one in the whole world doubts us anymore,” he said. “What you did, you helped us revive the America of our old hopes and dreams.” Driving Iraq out of Kuwait “reignited Americans’ faith in themselves.” That faith was short-lived, destroyed by his son’s wars, but the social decay that both made and unmade the short-lived Bush dynasty—which has now delivered the nation to Trump—continues.
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby Grizzly » Tue Dec 04, 2018 3:54 pm

^^^ and why couldn't you put this in the Magog thread??

:shrug: :shrug:
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Tue Dec 04, 2018 4:23 pm

I could have but decided that Grandin deserves a bump too...
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby Grizzly » Tue Dec 04, 2018 4:27 pm

fair enough...
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Thu Dec 27, 2018 7:55 am

Christmas and Resistance to Slavery in the Americas

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Burning of the Roehampton Estate during the Baptist War, a slave revolt initiated in Jamaica on Christmas Day, 1831

The Christmas season also gave way to the largest slave rebellion in the history of the British Caribbean known as the Christmas Rebellion (or the Baptist War). During ten days in late December 1831 into January 1832, nearly 60,000 slaves (about 20% of the enslaved population of 300,000) led by the black Baptist preacher Samuel Sharpe went on strike and rebelled against plantation owners, demanding freedom and higher wages. According to Michael Craton’s Testing the Chains: Resisting Slavery in the British West Indies (1982), about 500 slaves were brutally killed by the end of the Christmas Rebellion, which Craton argues accelerated the process of emancipation in the British Caribbean.

When the self-described liberto Santiago Martínez ran away from his master and joined the newly established republican army of Gran Colombia on Christmas day in 1820, he was one of hundreds of bonded peoples of African descent who took matters into their hands during this special period of “a little restricted liberty.”


More: https://www.aaihs.org/christmas-and-res ... -americas/
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Re: Losing Latin America (Grandin)

Postby American Dream » Sun Oct 13, 2019 1:06 pm

Secret Societies, Narcoterrorism, International Fascism and the World Anti-Communist League Part III

Image
"The owls are not what they seem"
--old Twin Peaks proverb



The transition from the Medellin cartel to the Cali cartel and finally the Mexicans ones as the dominate force in cocaine trade played out under the auspices of the Guadalajara cartel. Its leader, Miguel Angel "El Padrino" Felix Gallardo, has become something of a legendary figure and for good reason: the operations of the Guadalajara cartel were so vast that the modern day Tijuana, Juarez, Sonora and Sinaloa cartels were spawned from it. Felix Gallardo's cartel was one of the largest cocaine trafficking networks ever assembled.

"Felix Gallardo was specializing in moving cocaine on a scale that had been accomplished only by Columbia's Medellin cartel. It appeared, in fact, that he had the potential to restructure the entire Mexican drug-trafficking industry so that it became a pipeline for South American cocaine...

"The DEA agents knew very little about Felix Gallardo's current operations, although the agency had been aware of him since 1975, when DEA agents found out he had formed a partnership with Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, the cocaine chemist who had been the South American connection for Alberto Sicilia Falcon..."

(Desperados, Elaine Shannon, pgs. 128-129)


Image
Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo

The relationship between Matta Ballesteros and Alberto Sicilia Falcon, a Cuban who became a major drug trafficker in Mexico, is most interesting. Sicilia Falcon seems to have been close to the WACL network. In point of fact, he is possibly the trafficker who took over the South America routes when the Corsican heroin network (largely controlled by famed gangster Auguste Ricord) was destroyed in the alleged WACL-backed heroin coup discussed briefly in part two of this series.

"Somehow Sicilia, a twenty-nine-year-old Cuban exile from Miami, was able to emerge as the ringleader of the so-called 'Mexican connection,' which promptly filled the vacuum created by the destruction of the Ricord network in 1972... The new Sicilia network... was operating by May 1972, and had 'revenues reliably established in the hundreds of millions of dollars' by the time of Sicilia's arrest in July 1975.

"... one learns that Sicilia told the Mexican authorities who had arrested him that he was a CIA agent, and had been trained at Fort Jackson (as had at least one of Nixon's Watergate Cubans) for possible guerilla activity against Cuba. Allegedly he had also worked in Chile against the socialist government of Salvador Allende until he returned to the U.S. in early 1973. He also, according to Mexican police, spoke of a special deal with the CIA; the U.S. government had turned a blind eye to his heroin shipments, while his organization supplied CIA weapons to terrorist groups in Central America, thereby forcing the host governments to accept you U.S. conditions for security assistance.

"... Sicilia was a Cuban exile who had come to Mexico from Miami, where he had links to the Cuban exile community, and had personally negotiated for manufacturing rights to the celebrated 9mm Parabellum machine pistol, better known as the Ingram M-10.

"Parabellum was a Miami-based arms sales firm set up a soldier-of-fortune, Gerry Patrick Hemming, and headed by Cuban exile Anselmo Alliergo IV, whose father had been close to Batista. Parabellum in turn was sales representative for Hemming's friend Mitch WerBell III, a mysterious White Russian, OSS-China veteran, small arms manufacturer, and occasional US intelligence operative, with unexplained relations to the CIA, DEA, and the major drugs-for-arms deal for which he was indicted but acquitted... . Another client interested in producing the Ingram M-10 machine pistol in Latin America, under license from WerBell, was the international fugitive and Nixon campaign contributor, Robert Vesco."

(The Great Heroin Coup, "Foreword," Peter Dale Scott, pgs. 7-8)


Image
Alberto Sicilia Falcon


More: http://visupview.blogspot.com/2013/10/s ... orism.html
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