Robert Parry: How Reagan Promoted Genocide

[marmar]

from Consortium News:


How Reagan Promoted Genocide
February 21, 2013

Special Report: A newly discovered document reveals that President Reagan and his national security team in 1981 approved Guatemala’s extermination of both leftist guerrillas and their “civilian support mechanisms,” a green light that opened a path to genocide against hundreds of Mayan villages, reports Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry


Soon after taking office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan’s national security team agreed to supply military aid to the brutal right-wing regime in Guatemala to pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but their “civilian support mechanisms,” according to a newly disclosed document from the National Archives.

Over the next several years, the military assistance from the Reagan administration helped the Guatemalan army do just that, engaging in the slaughter of some 100,000 people, including what a truth commission deemed genocide against the Mayan Indians in the northern highlands.

The recently discovered documents at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, also reveal that Reagan’s White House was reaching out to Israel in a scheme to circumvent congressional restrictions on military equipment for the Guatemalan military.

In 1983, national security aide Oliver North (who later became a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal) reported in a memo that Reagan’s Deputy National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane (another key Iran-Contra figure) was approaching Israel over how to deliver 10 UH-1H helicopters to Guatemala to give the army greater mobility in its counterinsurgency war. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/02/21/how-reagan-promoted-genocide/

[BainsBane]

1. hundreds is low

and support for military dictatorship in Guatemala dated back to 1954 when the State Department and CIA orchestrated a coup against a democratically elected president. Estimates, if I recall correctly, are that 180,00 died in the ensuing civil wars.

Additionally, Reagan's war on Central America stretched beyond Guatemala. El Salvador was a particularly atrocious human rights abuser, with the site of El Mozote representing the worst mass killing in the Americas, with 800-1000 victims. US intervention there likewise predated Reagan, but he certainly intensified the conflict as part of an effort to defeat the Socialist government in Nicaragua.

[Sekhmets Daughter]

2. I recently read Parry's

"America's Stolen Narrative" This is just a small part of Reagan's abuses.

[indepat]

3. Disclosures such as this are nettlesome, but surely will not slow down the Gipper's deification

process. On the issue of the genocide involving the slaughter of 100,000, this puppy wonders how many million people throughout the world the U.S. has taken part in killing since the end of WWII. Would appreciate any reliable known estimate.

[BainsBane]

4. That's a tough one to estimate. I expect it's close to a million

You can access primary documents and analysis of them on the website of the National Security Archive: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/

[indepat]

6. Was thinking the Vietnamese death toll were in the millions

[BainsBane]

7. Could be higher

Than we could possibly comprehend. The worst thing to me is the cultural amnesia about US human rights abuses abroad. To even raise the issue incurs charges of anti-Americanism.

[yurbud]

5. why can't Dem presidents be as creative about doing good as Repubs are about doing harm?