Bush Sr. Helped Reagan Smooth Over Death Squad Terror in El Salvador

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Telesur

Published 15 December 2016 (6 hours 33 minutes ago)


Newly declassified files reveal that Washington wanted to whitewash El Salvador’s deaths squads to continue backing a bloody war.

In December 1983, then-U.S. Vice President George H.W. Bush slipped away on a little-known trip to Latin America to try to salvage Washington's agreement to fund a bloody Cold War fight against left-wing rebels in El Salvador as a surge in death squad activity threatened to derail its ability to continue supporting the military regime, newly declassified U.S. intelligence documented have revealed.

In a series of memoranda addressed to Bush detailing the goals of the trip to El Salvador, staffers of then-President Ronald Reagan explained that the vice president would be tasked with communicating a "carrot and stick" approach to the military government in El Salvador, at the time immersed in a brutal Washington-backed civil war against communist guerrilla forces.

Reagan's administration was at the time growing uncomfortable with exposure of the Salvadoran military's widespread human rights abuses, such as death squad murders of missionaries and civilians as well as cases of U.S. citizens being killed in the country. The grave human rights situation threatened to put Washington's support for the military government and its Cold War counterinsurgency strategy in "serious jeopardy," the documents state.


Read more: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Bush-Sr.-Helped-Smooth-Over-Death-Squad-Terror-in-El-Salvador-20161215-0013.html

[tenorly]

1. No wonder. I'm sure El Salvador figured prominently in "the Enterprise" plans.

Just as Honduras has. *sniff* *sniff*

[mpcamb]

2. He's still alive...

Send him to the Hague.
Kissinger too.
Missed sending Peron and Pinochet, who lived into his 90s, too. Living a life of luxury while tens of thousands went to slaughter.
Let 'em stand trial.

[elmac]

3. And the very sick reality is

we've been doing to other countries for decades what Putin just did to us.

[KatyMan]

4. Currently reading The Devil's Chessboard

It's so awful and depressing, the harm the US has done to the world in the name of "democracy". I can only read a bit at a time I get so sad and sick. The Dulles brothers were such horrible people and we're still suffering from their horrible stain on our planet.

[elmac]

5. Yes, there is a long list of dirty deeds

since WWII, most south of the boarder but Iran was also screwed over big time & we are still paying for that. The corporatists were so afraid of socialism, that very word meant they couldn't take advantage of cheap labor, cheap natural resources, lack of regulations. I always remember a line from the movie Platoon "We been kicking other peoples asses for so long, I figured it's time we got ours kicked." The only problem is the corporatists aren't the ones that suffer, its the "little people" that take the hit.

[KatyMan]

6. Great post nt

Nt

[burrowowl]

7. Guatemala, etc.

to the Hague Bush I and II

[sarcasmo]

8. Bush SR was stone cold CIA, dating back to the Kennedy era.