U.S. Plunges Central America Back To Era Of Coups And Death Squads

[Judi Lynn]

U.S. Plunges Central America Back To Era Of Coups And Death Squads
Submitted by Chip on Sat, 2010-03-27 18:21.

Rick Rozoff | March 26, 2010

March 24th of this year was the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Roman Catholic archbishop of El Salvador.

His killing drew attention to the murderous rampages of death squads in that nation and throughout Central America as no other slaying had, although hundreds of thousands of civilians were slaughtered in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras before and during the 1980s by paramilitary formations usually led by graduates of the U.S.'s School of the Americas and covertly funded by the same nation's Central Intelligence Agency.

Graduates of the Pentagon's School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia (now the equally euphemistic Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) include the man responsible for ordering Romero's killing, the late Roberto D'Aubuisson; Efrain Rios Montt, head of the military junta in Guatemala in 1982-1983 which perpetrated some of the worst atrocities in the nation's bloodstained history; and Romeo Vasquez Velasquez, who was dismissed as chief of the Honduran military on June 25 of last year and led the coup against President Manuel Zelaya three days later.

After being appointed El Salvador's top ecclesiastic in 1977 Romero, hitherto considered a doctrinal if not a political conservative, spoke out forcefully against the abuses of the country's military and the deaths squads linked to it.

More:
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/51032

Editorials, etc.:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x526509

[protocol rv]

1. Unsupported Claim

I don't like US foreign policy, but this article is a cheap shot. The guy discusses something which happened 30 years ago. You don't have something more recent? Even the invasion of Panama by Bush Dad is more recent.

[Wilms]

2. More recent? Keep reading.

From the article:

In addition, it was reported on March 25 that Nicaragua's ambassador to the Organization of American States, Denis Moncada, accused the U.S. ambassador to his nation, Robert Callahan, of "meddling in Nicaraguan internal affairs." Callahan, Moncada continued, "has publicly supported attempts by Nicaraguan opposition parties, rating as fraudulent the 2008 municipal elections, when the Sandinista National Liberation Front won the majority of the country's mayoralties." <17>

The Nicaraguan press recently published an article by Uruguayan journalist Jorge Capelan titled "The United States and its Web of NGOs in Nicaragua," which detailed that "the destabilizing strategy the United States has pursued in Venezuela through non-governmental organizations and 'contractor' firms is also being applied in Nicaragua against the Sandinista government."

The report documented that since 1994 the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) created "so-called Offices of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in several countries worldwide.

"They were originally created to support transition to capitalism in Eastern European countries, but they later spread to other states where it was necessary to address situations in which US interests were threatened."