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Who do you think fucked up those Central American Countries (Original Post) malaise Jun 2019 OP
We did Butterflylady Jun 2019 #1
John Perkins malaise Jun 2019 #7
Like in '100 years of solitude' then later came the Chicago Boys. very sad. Kurt V. Jun 2019 #2
Did you notice the proud boys wearing T shirts with malaise Jun 2019 #3
i absolutely noticed. pretty disgusting. Kurt V. Jun 2019 #4
Reaping ode2joi1 Jun 2019 #5
GHWB, "And I helped". Brother Buzz Jun 2019 #6
Hehehehehhe malaise Jun 2019 #10
Viva Zapata! Brother Buzz Jun 2019 #14
Phil Ochs had it right onethatcares Jun 2019 #8
K&R ck4829 Jun 2019 #9
Yep, along with Brain-dead Ronnie and his "War on Drugs." GoCubsGo Jun 2019 #11
What a day to remind me malaise Jun 2019 #12
William Blum's Killing Hope davekriss Jun 2019 #13
Here's Return - a painful but true poem malaise Jun 2019 #15

malaise

(269,177 posts)
7. John Perkins
Sat Jun 22, 2019, 06:43 PM
Jun 2019

It's among my bedside books along with Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America.

I remember the US media ridiculing Chavez for giving Obama a copy of Open Veins.

malaise

(269,177 posts)
3. Did you notice the proud boys wearing T shirts with
Sat Jun 22, 2019, 06:35 PM
Jun 2019

Pinochet did nothing wrong - Chile was the test tube for the neo-liberals and they have fucked up the entire planet

ode2joi1

(12 posts)
5. Reaping
Sat Jun 22, 2019, 06:39 PM
Jun 2019

You are making capitalism and the donor class look bad. They are about immune from any repercussions for their gangsterism. The average citizen will pay the price. Robber Barons will just pick up and move to another place that's been "pacified" by the U.S. MIC/Rand Corporation.

GoCubsGo

(32,094 posts)
11. Yep, along with Brain-dead Ronnie and his "War on Drugs."
Sun Jun 23, 2019, 06:44 PM
Jun 2019

That's when it really got fucked up, and why nothing has changed since then.

malaise

(269,177 posts)
12. What a day to remind me
Sun Jun 23, 2019, 06:47 PM
Jun 2019

They finally buried Seaga today. We too had our own drugs for guns. Thank you Ronnie and GHW Bush - the patron saint of colored socks

davekriss

(4,628 posts)
13. William Blum's Killing Hope
Sun Jun 23, 2019, 06:56 PM
Jun 2019

Great inventory of the damage we’ve done.

Also, Carolyn Forche’s The Return. It’s a poem that for me was deeply moving. It was written shortly after her return from El Salvador just before our clandestine intervention was to turn deadly intense.

malaise

(269,177 posts)
15. Here's Return - a painful but true poem
Sun Jun 23, 2019, 07:25 PM
Jun 2019
https://drunkenlibrary.com/2018/08/27/return-carolyn-forche/
“Return” – Carolyn Forché

Upon my return to America, Josephine:
the iced drinks and paper umbrellas, clean
toilets and Los Angeles palm trees moving
like lean women, I was afraid more than
I had been, even of motels so much so
that for months every tire blow-out
was final, every strange car near the house
kept watch and I strained even to remember
things impossible to forget. You took
my stories apart for hours, sitting
on your sofa with your legs under you
and fifty years in your face.
So you know
now, you said, what kind of money
is involved and that campesinos knife
one another and you know you should
not trust anyone and so you find a few
people you will trust. You know the mix
of machetes with whiskey, the slip of the tongue
that costs hundreds of deaths.
You’ve seen the pits where men and women
are kept the few days it takes without
food and water. You’ve heard the cocktail
conversation on which their release depends.
So you’ve come to understand why
men and women of food will read
torture reports with fascination.

Such things as water pumps
and co-op farms are of little importance
and take years.
It is not Che Guevara, this struggle.
Camillo Torres is dead. Victor Jara
was rounded up with the others, and José
Martí is a landing strip for planes
from Miami to Cuba. Go try on
Americans your long, dull story
of corruption, but better to give
them what they want: Lil Milagro Ramirez,
who after years of confinement did not
know what year it was, how she walked
with help and was forced to shit in public.
Tell them about the razor, the live wire,
dry ice and concrete, grey rats and above all
who fucked her, how many times and when.
Tell them about retaliation: José lying
on the flat bed truck, waving his stumps
in your face, his hands cut off by his
captors and thrown to the many acres
of cotton, lost, still, and holding
the last few lumps of leeched earth.
Tell them of José in his last few hours
and later how, many months later,
a labor leader was cut to pieces and buried.
Tell them how his friends found
the soldiers and made them dig him up
and ask forgiveness of the corpse, once
it was assembled again on the ground
like a man. As for the cars, of course
they watch you and for this don’t flatter
yourself. We are all watched. We are
all assembled.

Josephine, I tell you
I have not rested, not since I drove
those streets with a gun in my lap,
not since all manner of speaking has
failed and the remnant of my life
continues onward. I go mad, for example,
in the Safeway, at the many heads
of lettuce, papayas and sugar, pineapples
and coffee, especially the coffee.
And when I speak with American men,
there is some absence of recognition:
their constant Scotch and fine white
hands, many hours of business, penises,
hardened by motor inns and a faint
resemblance to their wives. I cannot
keep going. I remember the American
attaché in that country: his tanks
of fish, his clicking pen, his rapt
devotion to reports. His wife wrote
his reports. She said as much as she
gathered him each day from the embassy
compound, that she was tired of covering
up, sick of his drinking and the loss
of his last promotion. She was a woman
who flew her own plane, stalling out
after four martinis to taxi on an empty
field in the campo and to those men
and women announce she was there to help.
She flew where she pleased in that country
with her drunken kindness, while Marines
in white gloves were assigned to protect
her husband. It was difficult work, what
with the suspicion on the ride in smaller
countries that gringos die like other men.
I cannot, Josephine, talk to them.

And so, you say, you’ve learned a little
about starvation: a child like a supper scrap
filling with worms, many children strung
together, as if they were cut from paper
and all in a delicate chain. And that people
who rescue physicists, lawyers and poets
lie in their beds at night with reports
of mice introduced into women, of men
whose testicles are crushed like eggs.
That they cup their own parts
with their bedsheets and move themselves
slowly, imagining bracelets affixing
their wrists to a wall where the naked
are pinned, where the naked are tied open
and left to the hands of those who erase
what they touch. We are all erased
by them, and no longer resemble decent
men. We no longer have the hearts,
the strength, the lives of women.
Your problem is not your life as it is
in America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense
of yourself as apart from others. It is
not your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless.
You have not returned to your country,
but to a life you never left.
1980

(Written as published from The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché.)
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