Extra! Update April 2007
Reagan Revisionism
Backing off Bush, media recall a crush-worthy conservative
By Peter Hart
Like many prominent pundits, Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria has of late expressed his frustration with the foreign policy of George W. Bush. In the magazine’s March 19 issue, Zakaria lamented that the Bush administration “began intervening directly in the domestic affairs” of Latin American countries, a move he presented as a break from the recent past: “American foreign policy toward Latin America had been on the right track for two decades. Ronald Reagan orchestrated an extraordinary turnaround, supporting human rights, democracy and free trade in several countries.”
Zakaria can be given partial credit on one point: Reagan did push on Latin America a set of policies that are referred to as “free trade,” though these policies include increased restrictions on trade in the form of tightened patent and copyright laws. The current leftward trend in the region’s politics seems in large part due to a pushback against those types of economic plans.
Celebrating Ronald Reagan’s stance on human rights and democracy in the region is another matter. Zakaria’s assessment is completely at odds with the actual policies of the Reagan administration—as illustrated by Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s declaration that “international terrorism will take the place of human rights in our concern because it is the ultimate abuse of human rights” (Time, 2/9/81), and U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick’s urging the embrace of “authoritarian” states on the grounds that they were preferable to “totalitarian” ones (Commentary, 11/79).
Totalitarian or not, the regimes Reagan and Co. embraced managed to rack up substantial body counts: The Argentine generals killed approximately 30,000, El Salvador’s death squads murdered some 75,000 and an estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were exterminated by a succession of dictators—including Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, whom Reagan proclaimed had gotten a “bum rap.”
More:
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3453~~~~~Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities
by Robert Parry
Published on ConsortiumNews.com on Sunday, 6 February 2011
When you’re listening to the many tributes to President Ronald Reagan, often for his talent making Americans feel better about themselves, you might want to spend a minute thinking about the many atrocities in Latin America and elsewhere that Reagan aided, covered up or shrugged off in his inimitable "aw shucks" manner.
~snip~
For instance, in the late 1970s, when Argentina’s dictators were inventing a new state-terror program called “disappearances” – the unacknowledged murders of dissidents – Reagan was making himself useful as a columnist deflecting the human rights complaints coming from the Carter administration. At the time, Argentina’s security forces were rounding up tens of thousands of political opponents who became subjects of ingenious torture techniques often followed by mass killings, including a favorite method that involved shackling naked prisoners together, loading them onto a plane, piloting the plane out to sea and shoving them through the plane’s door, like sausage links.
~snip~
More substantively, Reagan authorized CIA collaboration with the Argentine intelligence service for training and arming the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel force created to overthrow Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government. The Contras were soon implicated in human rights atrocities of their own.
Torture was also on the Reagan’s administration’s menu for political enemies. A 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report, examining the CIA’s abusive “war on terror” interrogations under President George W. Bush, noted the spy agency’s past “intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals whose interests are opposed to those of the United States.” The report noted “a resurgence in interest” in teaching these techniques in the early 1980s “to foster foreign liaison relationships.” The report said, “because of political sensitivities,” the CIA’s top brass in the 1980s “forbade Agency officers from using the word ‘interrogation” and substituted the phrase “human resources exploitation” in training programs for allied intelligence agencies.
More:
http://baltimorechronicle.com/2011/020611Parry.html
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