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just like Reagan, through his Office of Public Diplomacy, and Otto Reich, and Ortega's best move is to prepare the Nicaraguan public by telling them how that works. Defang the bastard. I hope enough of them are starting to recognize the roadsigns and are realizing this is something they've already been through, not all that long ago, to the great grief and suffering of so very many Nicaraguan citizens and their stricken families, all orchestrated and financed by Reagan and the U.S. taxpayers' money, and good old fashioned death squads. Here's a good look at something Reagan brought to the world during the same time-frame as his handiwork in Nicaragua: The El Mozote episode is, sadly, only one example of violence borne of Reagan’s foreign policy. The troops that did the killing were supported by his administration because they were fighting leftist rebels. A 1992 report produced by a UN-sanctioned truth commission described the awful event:"On 10 December 1981, in the village of El Mozote in the Department of Morazan, units of the Atlacatl Battalion detained, without resistance, all the men, women and children who were in the place…. Early next morning, 11 December, the soldiers reassembled the entire population in the square. They separated the men from the women and children and locked everyone up in different groups in the church, the convent and various houses."
"During the morning, they proceeded to interrogate, torture and execute the men in various locations. Around noon, they began taking the women in groups, separating them from their children and machine-gunning them. Finally, they killed the children. A group of children who had been locked in the convent were machine-gunned through the windows. After exterminating the entire population, the soldiers set fire to the buildings." The report noted that "the Atlacatl Battalion was a ‘Rapid Deployment Infantry Battalion’ or BIRI,’ that is, a unit specially trained for ‘counter-insurgency’ warfare. It was the first unit of its kind in the armed forces and had completed its training under the supervision of United States military advisors, at the beginning of that year, 1981."
When two reporters—Raymond Bonner of The New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post —reported the massacre in January 1982, the Reagan administration denied it had occurred. Reagan’s point-man on Latin America, Elliott Abrams, told Congress that these reports were no more than commie propaganda. That is, he lied. (Today, Abrams, that lover of truth and human rights, is a staff member on Bush’s National Security Council responsible for Middle East matters.) A forensic investigation conducted in the early 1990s proved that the massacre had happened. And the truth commission’s report noted that "two hundred forty-five cartridge cases recovered from the El Mozote site were studied. Of these, 184 had discernable headstamps, identifying the ammunition as having been manufactured for the United States Government at Lake City, Missouri. ...All of the projectiles except one appear to have been fired from United States-manufactured M-16 rifles."
Thanks to Ronald Reagan, American tax dollars supported the murder of hundreds of El Salvadoran villagers. And the UN-backed commission, after examining 22,000 atrocities that occurred during the 12-year civil war in El Salvador, attributed 85 percent of the abuses to the Reagan-assisted right-wing military and its death-squad allies. Similar patterns transpired in Guatemala and Honduras in the 1980s.
The El Mozote massacre, though perhaps the largest massacre in modern Latin American history, is a minor footnote in the history of the Cold War, but it is, as writer Mark Danner, author of The Massacre at El Mozote , observed, "a central parable of the Cold War." It is also a telling tale of Reaganism. The lives of the people butchered in this small village by U.S.-trained troops were worth as much of that of the man whose body now lays in a casket draped with the Stars and Stripes. Media commentators have been hailing Reagan as heroic, iconic, patriotic and optimistic figure who led an "American life." It was indeed an American life, but one with lethal consequences for others. That is as important a piece of the Reagan story—if not more so—as his oh-so-sunny and cheery outlook.
I doubt the villagers of El Mozote were thinking about Reagan’s wonderful disposition when made-in-the-USA bullets supplied to their killers by the U.S. government, in accordance with Reagan’s foreign policy, were piercing their bodies and ending their non-American lives.
(snip/) http://www.tompaine.com/articles/reagans_bloody_legacy.php |
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