Reagan Revisionism
Backing off Bush, media recall a crush-worthy conservative
By Peter Hart
Apr 01 2007
Like many prominent pundits, Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria has of late expressed his frustration with the foreign policy of George W. Bush. In the magazine’s March 19 issue, Zakaria lamented that the Bush administration “began intervening directly in the domestic affairs” of Latin American countries, a move he presented as a break from the recent past: “American foreign policy toward Latin America had been on the right track for two decades. Ronald Reagan orchestrated an extraordinary turnaround, supporting human rights, democracy and free trade in several countries.”
Zakaria can be given partial credit on one point: Reagan did push on Latin America a set of policies that are referred to as “free trade,” though these policies include increased restrictions on trade in the form of tightened patent and copyright laws. The current leftward trend in the region’s politics seems in large part due to a pushback against those types of economic plans.
Celebrating Ronald Reagan’s stance on human rights and democracy in the region is another matter. Zakaria’s assessment is completely at odds with the actual policies of the Reagan administration—as illustrated by Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s declaration that “international terrorism will take the place of human rights in our concern because it is the ultimate abuse of human rights” (Time, 2/9/81), and U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick’s urging the embrace of “authoritarian” states on the grounds that they were preferable to “totalitarian” ones (Commentary, 11/79).
Totalitarian or not, the regimes Reagan and Co. embraced managed to rack up substantial body counts: The Argentine generals killed approximately 30,000, El Salvador’s death squads murdered some 75,000 and an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were exterminated by a succession of dictators—including Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, whom Reagan proclaimed had gotten a “bum rap.”
More:
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/reagan-revisionism/
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Reagan’s Hand in Guatemala’s Genocide
January 23, 2012
Exclusive: Guatemala has begun a politically difficult process to make human rights violators of the 1980s accountable for their crimes, including genocide inflicted on Indian villages, but the United States still heaps praise on the killers’ chief American accomplice, Ronald Reagan, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
Guatemala is taking steps to hold an ex-dictator accountable for genocide committed against Maya-Ixil Indians in the 1980s, even as the United States continues to honor the American president — Ronald Reagan — who helped make that genocide possible.
A Guatemalan judge orderedEfraín Ríos Montt to appear in court on Thursday in what could be the start of a process for trying the former military dictator on genocide charges for authorizing scorched-earth campaigns against Maya-Ixil villages suspected of sympathizing with leftist guerrillas.
In the late 1990s, a United Nations truth commission investigated the slaughters, which involved the killing of men, women and children, and labeled the massacres carried out during Ríos Montt’s 17-month reign in 1982 and 1983 as “genocide.” Two of Ríos Montt’s generals were arrested on war crimes and genocide charges last year.
However, while Guatemala, though beset by many serious problems including widespread poverty, takes politically difficult steps to impose some accountability on these war criminals, the U.S. politician most associated with Ríos Montt and his genocide, remains the subject of endless adoration.
More:
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/23/reagans-hand-in-guatemalas-genocide/
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