At last, a fitting memorial for Ronald Reagan ...

[eppur_se_muova]

This was probably posted here at the time it was originally written, but I came across it while using The Google to search for other items, and thought it deserved another look, as another six months of relevations about Bu**sh**co's "crusade" in Iraq invite obvious comparisons. The author, Robert Parry, will be a familiar name to many here. The atrocities described were commited a quarter of a century ago, but justice has never been served on the enablers in the Reagan regime.

Reagan & the Salvadoran Baby Skulls

By Robert Parry
January 30, 2007

Ronald Reagan’s many admirers may find this idea offensive, but – given a new report by the Washington Post – it might be fitting to have a display at Reagan National Airport to show how Salvadoran baby skulls were used as candle holders and good luck charms. Perhaps the presentation could contain skeletal remains of Guatemalans and Nicaraguans, too.

It might be modeled after skeletons on display in Cambodia from the slaughters by the Khmer Rouge. After all, it was President Reagan – more than any other person – who justified and facilitated the barbarity that raged through Central America in the 1980s, claiming the lives of tens of thousands of peasants, clergy and students, men, women and children.

Reagan portrayed the bloody conflicts as a necessary front in the Cold War, but the Central American violence was always more about entrenched ruling elites determined to retain their privileges against impoverished peasants, including descendants of the region’s Maya Indians, seeking social, political and economic reforms.

One of the most notorious acts of brutality occurred in December 1981 in and around the Salvadoran town of El Mozote. The government’s Atlacatl Battalion – freshly trained and newly armed thanks to Reagan’s hard-line policies – systematically slaughtered hundreds of men, women and children.

When the atrocity was revealed by reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Reagan administration showed off its new strategy of “perception management,” denying the facts and challenging the integrity of the journalists.
***
more: http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/012907.html

[speedoo]

1. K&R, thanks.