Bush to meet with Salvador president this month

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Xinhua

Bush to meet with Salvador president this month


www.chinaview.cn 2007-11-17 00:39:24 Print

WASHINGTON, Nov. 16 (Xinhua) -- U.S. President George W. Bush will host El Salvador's President Elias Antonio Saca in the White House on Nov. 29 for talks on Iraq and other issues, the White House said in a statement on Friday.

"El Salvador is a strong ally of the United States and a firm partner in the War on Terror, including the contribution of nine rotations of troops as part of the international coalition supporting the Iraqi people's efforts to build a free and peaceful Iraq," the statement said.

The two leaders will also discuss the recent initiative to enhance security cooperation with Central America to combat organized crime, drug smuggling, and international terror, the statement added.

Saca has been an ally of the United States and dispatched troops to Iraq to support the U.S.-led coalition there.





Read more: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-11/17/content_7092213.htm

[Judi Lynn]

1. Background on recent (since 1980) US/El Salvador policy:

~snip~
The historic role of the United States in El Salvador, where 2 percent of the population owned 60 percent of the land, was to make sure governments were in power there that would support U.S. business interests, no matter how this impoverished the great majority of people. Popular rebellions that would threaten these business arrangements were to be opposed. When a popular uprising in 1932 threatened the military government, the United States sent a cruiser and two destroyers to stand by while the government massacred thirty thousand Salvadorans.

The administration of Jimmy Carter did nothing to reverse this history. It wanted reform in Latin America, but not revolution that would threaten U.S. corporate interests. In 1980, Richard Cooper, a State Department expert on economic affairs, told Congress that a more equitable distribution of wealth was desirable. "However, we also have an enormous stake in the continuing smooth functioning in the economic system. .. . Major changes in the system can .. . have important implications for our own welfare."

In February 1980 El Salvador Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero sent a personal letter to President Carter, asking him to stop military aid to El Salvador. Not long before that, the National Guard and National Police had opened fire on a crowd of protesters in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral and killed twenty-four people. But the Carter administration continued the aid. The following month Archbishop Romero was assassinated.

There was mounting evidence that the assassination had been ordered by Roberto D'Aubuisson, a leader of the right wing. But D'Aubuisson had the protection of Nicolas Carranza, a deputy minister of defense, who at the time was receiving $90,000 a year from the CIA. And Elliot Abrams, ironically Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, declared that D'Aubuisson "was not involved in murder."

When Reagan became President, military aid to the El Salvador government rose steeply. From 1946 to 1979, total military aid to El Salvador was $16.7 million. In Reagan's first year in office, the figure rose to $82 million.
Congress was sufficiently embarrassed by the killings in El Salvador to require that before any more aid was given the President must certify that progress in human rights was taking place. Reagan did not take this seriously. On January 28, 1982, there were reports of a government massacre of peasants in several villages. The following day, Reagan certified that the Salvadoran government was making progress in human rights. Three days after certification, soldiers stormed the homes of poor people in San Salvador, dragged out twenty people, and killed them.
When, at the end of 1983, Congress passed a law to continue the requirement of certification, Reagan vetoed it.

The press was especially timid and obsequious during the Reagan years, as Mark Hertsgaard documents in his book On Bended Knee. When journalist Raymond Bonner continued to report on the atrocities in El Salvador, and on the U.S. role, the New York Times removed him from his assignment. Back in 1981 Bonner had reported on the massacre of hundreds of civilians in the town of El Mozote, by a battalion of soldiers trained by the United States. The Reagan administration scoffed at the account, but in 1992, a team of forensic anthropologists began unearthing skeletons from the site of the massacre, most of them children; the following year a UN commission confirmed the story of the massacre at El Mozote.
(snip/...)

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncarebu21.html#elsal

http://www.businessfacilities.com.nyud.net:8090/images/bfsep06p52a.jpg



http://www.whitehouse.gov.nyud.net:8090/news/releases/2007/02/images/20070227-1_d-0044-2-515h.jpg

[Judi Lynn]

2. Bush, El Salvador's Saca, to meet November 29

Bush, El Salvador's Saca, to meet November 29
1 hour ago

WASHINGTON (AFP) — US President George W. Bush will welcome El Salvador's President Elias Antonio Saca November 29 for talks on troop levels in Iraq and other issues, the White House announced Friday.

"El Salvador is a strong ally of the United States and a firm partner in the War on Terror, including the contribution of nine rotations of troops as part of the international coalition supporting the Iraqi people's efforts to build a free and peaceful Iraq," spokeswoman Dana Perino said in a statement.

Saca announced in mid-July that El Salvador, the only Latin American country with a military presence in war-ravaged Iraq, would cut troop levels in August from 380 to 300.

Bush and Saca were also to discuss "the recent initiative to enhance security cooperation with Central America to combat organized crime, drug smuggling, and international terror," said Perino.

http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5iMSYDhB-G-bXOmNrLGpk4WOAd-Ug

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Does this meeting indicate _Bush will try to talk Tony Saca into leaving the troops in Iraq in order to receive continuing favors from the U.S.?

Here's how Tony Saca won his last election:

Similar to the strategy that worked in the 2004 balloting which elected Tony Saca, ARENA's current campaign is marked by use of explicit fear tactics and the smiling face of the popular Tony Saca. Campaigning across the country for mayors and legislators, Saca explicitly plays to the fears of Salvadorans.

One of the themes of the 2004 election was the warning that if the FMLN won the presidency, Salvadorans living in the US would be deported. That theme is being used again. This weekend, La Prensa reported that Saca played on the current uncertainty over the status of the TPS program which protects more than 200,000 Salvadorans from deportation. As he heads to Washington this week to meet with George Bush, Saca asserted that he will achieve stability in migration matters, but warned his listeners that "If they vote for the FMLN, it is sure that their family members will be deported."
(snip/...)

http://luterano.blogspot.com/2006/02/arena-campaigns-with-saca-and-fear.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The New York Times
March 22, 2004
U.S.-Backed Rightist Claims Victory in Salvador Election

By TIM WEINER

MEXICO CITY, March 21 — After a bitter campaign for president in El Salvador, a conservative pro-American businessman claimed victory Sunday night over a battle-hardened former Communist guerrilla.

The ruling party’s candidate, Antonio Saca, 39, a media mogul tacitly supported by the United States, was winning 57 percent of the vote in early returns. Schafik Handal, 73, a longtime left-wing leader, had 36 percent.

The campaign revived cold-war fervors from El Salvador’s civil war. An estimated 75,000 people died as an American-backed government fought left-wing rebels between 1980 and 1992.

Mr. Saca's party, the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA, was linked to death-squad killings in the 1980's. Mr. Handal's party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, was the rebel force that fought the government. After a 1992 peace treaty, the FMLN became a legitimate political party, and now controls 31 of 84 seats, a plurality, in Congress.

American officials who were behind-the-scenes players in Central America's anti-communist campaigns during the 1980’s had openly opposed Mr. Handal.

Otto Reich, President Bush's special envoy for the Western Hemisphere, and Roger Noriega, an Assistant Secretary of State, inferred in public statements that El Salavdor's commercial, economic and political relations with the United States could suffer if the leftist won.
(snip/...)

http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/elsalvador/victory.htm

[Peace Patriot]

5. The time is coming when the bullying, the brutality and the utter immorality of

U.S. policy in Latin America will seem like a bad dream, people like Saca will be identified as what they really are--gangsters--and some overarching title will be found--such as The Era of Shame--to describe this dreadful period of history.

That time really is coming. Its drumbeat can be heard throughout South America, where a peaceful, democratic revolution is taking place, with leftist (majorityist) governments elected in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Nicaragua, and more coming soon in Paraguay and Peru, and extending up into Central America. There is nothing that the Saca's and the Bushes and the Democratic Party colluders can do to stop it. They should take a lesson from King Canute, who admonished his fawning advisers, who claimed that he was all-powerful, by taking his throne down the beach, sitting at the foot of the waves and commanding the waves to stop. When the tide would not cease at his command, his point was proved that he was a mere man with no godlike powers.

Sometimes dunderheads (and worse) need the simplest of examples to get a point driven into their skulls. The tide in South America is against these corrupt and criminal representatives of the rich who conspire with the U.S. government and global corporate predators to impoverish and enslave their own people, and to send their resources and wealth out of the country. South Americans no longer agree to be "client states" of the U.S. They are rejecting the World Bank/IMF, U.S. and European corporate predators and the phony, neverending "war on drugs," and are committed to social justice and to regional cooperation--the only way for Latin America to achieve general prosperity.

And this trend will surely move north, where the U.S. has tried to create a buffer zone of violence, drugs and weapons trafficking, political oppression and poverty, against the Bolivarian Revolution to the south. Last year, Mexico came within a hairsbreadth--0.05%--of electing a real leftist, and extraordinary measures of election theft and bribery had to be taken to prevent that from happening. With the liberal Colom's recent election in troubled Guatemala, Amlo's election in Mexico would have begun to build a bridge to the new South American "Common Market" that is in the works, and that contemplates a new OAS without the U.S. as a member (this latter proposed recently by Nicaragua).

The times they are a-changing. Leaders like Saca, and Uribe in Colombia, and the violent rightwing forces that they are in collusion with, and their "free trade" deals with Bush, are dinosauric. They can certainly cause more grief and suffering, which they seem intent upon, but their time is over. And Bush, whose treason seems to know no bounds, is seriously harming the security of the American people, in every way, by alienating half the western hemisphere with brutal fascist alliances and policies aimed STEMMING THE TIDE of democracy to the south.

When we should be BUILDING friendships with these new majorityist democracies, and applauding their achievements, for the sake of our own security as well as common decency, the U.S. instead demonizes their leaders and undermines, and tries to topple them, at every turn, and plays "divide and conquer" where it can. This is the stupidest policy ever devised in Washington DC, and it is going to bite us hard.

It's even stupid from the point of view of Exxon-Mobile and brethren. The more these fascist policies are pursued, the more resources do they lose access to. Exxon-Mobile has now appealed to the World Bank--which is in disrepute throughout South America--to get more money for the oil infrastructure that Venezuela bought out. Good luck to them! The Bolivarians--with their Bank of the South (which Brazil just joined, as did Paraguay)--are driving the World Bank out of the region. (I read a stat that, over the last several years, the World Bank's loans in S/A had gone from 80% of its portfolio to 1%!)

But Bushism is mostly a stupid policy from the point of view of ordinary Americans, who will be paying the cost with the falling dollar, skyrocketing oil prices, and a host of other ills, as South Americans (and soon after Central Americans) look to their own resources, and cooperation amongst themselves, and independent alliances with the rest of the world, to create a prosperous and more equitable future. WE will be the ultimate losers from this illegitimate Bush government's anti-democratic policies.

[AikidoSoul]

3. U.S. in Central and South America is one of vicious control

while wearing the mask of a noble democracy. For many decades our citizens have remained in the dark about the crimes we commit to maintain power and to make the rich richer while wearing the mantle of democracy like a sheild. I wonder whether our own people here in the U.S. will finally get it -- as the middle class here increasingly becomes the equivalent of the peasant class. It's happening very fast here now.

[peacetalksforall]

4. Or ........ they could also be discussing changing drug stops from Mexico

to El Salvador or asking for 18 rotations of troops for their desired Iran invasion. Why is it so easy to play prediction games when they 'meet' with someone. Side deal - they may also be recruiting for Blackwater - for troops in the U.S., must speak English, with kickback to the Pres.