Terror in Latin America and the Caribbean [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

October 01, 2014

Sorrow's Season

Terror in Latin America and the Caribbean

by W.T. WHITNEY Jr.


Cuban national hero José Martí referred to land lying between the Rio Grande River and the Straits of Magellan as “Our America.” In an essay with that title published in 1892, Martí evoked the Rio Grande boundary as a divide between peoples with their own history, culture and future and an industrializing, crass civilization to the north promising no good.

Indeed, U.S. agents or proxies would soon be sewing grief and despair. Early in the 20th century they launched military incursions. Subsequently less blatant interventions left terror in their wake. Anniversaries in September and October – a season of sorrow in Our America – recall murder and mayhem. One asks: Can international solidarity prevent victims? Who in North America, epicenter of terrorist plotting, will take on that job?

On September 9, 1954, deposed Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz left for exile. Three months earlier the CIA had colluded with Guatemala’s wealthy elite to engineer a military coup. Civil war between leftist insurgents and the CIA-supported Guatemalan military lasted three decades and took the lives of 200,000 mostly indigenous and poor Guatemalans.

On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military overthrew socialist President Salvador Allende. Speaking to officials plotting against his election three years earlier, National Security Council director Henry Kissinger observed that: “I don’t see why we have to stand by and watch a country go communist by the irresponsibility of its own people.”

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/01/terror-in-latin-america-and-the-caribbean/