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

[bvar22]

1. We are sowing a crop that we will NOT wish to reap....

...by our continuing support for the few remaining Right Wing "Puppet" Oligarchs left in Central and South America.

VIVA Democracy!
We could use some here.

[truedelphi]

2. As we slip into becoming the next Banana Republic,

We really need to examine what happened south of our borders.

The "disappeared" in Chile were all progressives. That is who the government goes after - the progressives. Today the progressives in our nation have little chance of being elected.

Tomorrow it could be decidedly worse.

And of course none of this can happen if our nation possesses an informed and informing media.

Our media seeks only to ensure the COHESION that has been so much of the fabric of this nation since 9/11. Cohesion came about after 9/11 because of how scared we were. (And that whole thing was deliberately planned -read Nicholas Rockefeller's remarks to Aaron Russo, months before 9/11. Read the remarks of the American officials in Afghanistan months before 9/11 - "Give us the pipeline and we will offer you gold. Hold us back from the pipeline and we will see that you suffer a carpet of bombs.") The Tea Baggers serve "Mission Cohesion" now. As a populace, the existence of the Tea Baggers forces us to consider that it is the DLC Centrist way or else the Highway belonging to Sarah Palin, and no other path to progress exists.