Reagan's Paradoxical Legacy to Latin America

[struggle4progress]

Ronald Reagan is probably remembered most in Latin America as a ruthless anti-communist who went out of his way -- and outside the law -- to support the anti-Sandinista contras in Nicaragua, and to strengthen brutal regimes in countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala, as long as they remained loyal to his crusade against Soviet influence.

For Central America, the 40th U.S. president was either a godsend who helped steer the region away from a Cuban destiny, or a destructive meddler who had no respect for sovereignty. Whatever one's view, it is a fact that Washington's involvement in Central America during the Reagan years helped fuel conflicts that left thousands of innocent people dead and thousands more fleeing the violence. Many who fled came to this country illegally.
<snip>

Yet in November 1986, months before the worst crisis of his presidency, the Iran-contra scandal, Reagan signed into law the most sweeping immigration reform in decades, allowing about 3 million illegal immigrants to stay, work and, more importantly, become U.S. citizens.

Reagan's legacy to Latin America and Latin Americans is paradoxical. He was painfully shortsighted at times and visionary at others. His crusade against the "evil empire" cut a destructive path through Central America, yet his optimism about individuals helped open U.S. doors to millions.
<more>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31889-2004Jun10.html

Fairly standard mainsteam "on the one hand, on the other hand"
Honest effort but lacking analysis

[Zuni]

1. I think that it is fair

But I would point out that Central American warfare does not begin or end with Reagan (in fact it predates Colombus and the Spaniards--read about the Aztecs). It goes back hundreds of years, and there were many wars. With ot without Reagan there would have been Central American warfare, and with or without Soviet and Cuban aid there would have been warfare.
The problem with this is that the paper does not seem to acknowledge the harshness of the Communists, nor does it seem to acknowledge that not every Latin American anti-communist was a Death Squad Leader.
And Reagan did, in fact, pressure El Salvador several times to crack down on terroristic anti-communist forces, including sending 'mush mouth' Bill Casey to confront El Salvador's government witgh a threat to cut off all aid if they did not begin to improve their record. And El Salvador did, after a very bad period in the late 1970s-early 1980s, improve.

[struggle4progress]

2. Of course "Central American warfare does not begin or end with Reagan"

but it is completely meaningless to insist that "there would have been .. warfare" under any circumstances: one simply does not know what would have happened "if."

The article makes no claim that "every Latin American anti-communist was a Death Squad Leader."

You seem to suggest that "Soviet and Cuban aid" is responsible for the death squad activity. In fact, the death squad activity was principally directed against students, clergy, unionists, peasants, and others who questioned economic control by the oligarchies. The epithet "communist" was applied without any discrimination to anyone who opposed certain features of the status quo.

Reagan's alleged "pressure" against "terroristic anti-communist forces" was entirely verbal and ineffectual, as military aid to the death squad governments continued without interruption. The situation in El Salvador remained grim throughout the Reagan area, and "improvements" were perhaps attributable to the fact that after large numbers of government opponents had been killed, less violence was needed to maintain the level of terror.

I am interested by your general claim about the "harshness of the Communists": do you have any evidence to support such a view, or are these just beliefs that you absorbed up somehow during Reagan's tenure?

[Zuni]

7. I have read a lot about the era

and the Sandanistas were not nice guys. They were hard core Leninists. The Sandanistas cracked down on personal freedoms, drove many peasants and Indians (the Miskito Indians had been left alone by Somoza. The war against the Indians was not trivial as Chomsky suggests.) off their land to create collective farms, arrested and tortured dissidents, shut down major newspapers, filled the country with Soviet, Warsaw Pact, North korean and Cuban 'advisors', sponsored wars in other central American countries, ran guns and drugs (including for Manuel Noriega and Pablo Escobar), used defoliants and area bombing, mass internment and many other measures that would be roundly condemned if they hadn't been supported by Chomsky and other lefties.
I have reade about the Contra wars, and know that many myths about the Contras/Sandanistas are repeated without challenge on DU. It is almost like a left wing FR when it comes to Ortega and his merry band of

It sounds like you have done less research, other than reading Chomsky and other sources for a nice left wing circle jerk, but Death squad activity was by far at it's worst in the early 1980s.
The death squads were not an official part of El Salvador's policy---they were renegades working in El Salvador's Treasury Department. Many of their activities were not sanctioned by the government. I know that after 1984, when Duarte was elected, he made it policy to curb terroristic activity.

[struggle4progress]

8. "nice left wing circle jerk"?

You claim "the Sandanistas were ... hard core Leninists," whatever that means. This is vintage right-wing language, which at least obscures the ideological diversity of the revolutionaries. Certainly, it's at least possible that some identified themselves this way, but your sweeping generalization sheds no real light on anything.

You should go back and look at the standard human rights sources from the 1980s. It's pretty clear, for example, that the "Miskito Indian crisis" was largely fiction, although the opponents of the Sandinistas did tell some whoppers that frightened some Indians into leaving their lands.

What "wars in other central American countries" do you believe the Sandinistas sponsored? I must say, this is the first time I've heard this claim, though I suppose it's possible some right-winger made the accusation at some time in the 1980s.

You claim the Sandinistas "ran guns and drugs .. for Manuel Noriega." I regard this as extremely unlikely, since Noriega was on the CIA payroll for an extended period. Given the historical record of contra drug smuggling (including Ollie North's interventions to prevent prosecution of at least on contra smuggler), this accusation seems to be a right wing ploy to cover contra misdeeds by counter-accusation.

I'd certainly be interested to know what your sources are. You happily accuse me of not knowing anything about this; I conversely wonder whether you have been reading your "histories" with a sufficiently critical eye.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. As to your question about Sandinista-sponsored wars

the Reaganites claimed that the reason they were supporting the Contras was that the Sandinistas were fomenting revolution in El Salvador--as if conditions in El Salvador weren't miserable enough to inspire revolts by themselves.

(My talking point during those years whenever a rightwinger talked about "Communists spreading revolution through infiltration" was to ask, "How come there are no Communist guerillas in Finland, Norway, or Japan? All these countries share a border with the Soviet Union.")

By all accounts, conditions for ordinary people were and remain so wretched that average Cuban living conditions would seem like a vast improvment.

[struggle4progress]

19. Thanks, Lydia. I did follow this issue closely in the 1980s ...

... and was amazed then at how much of the propaganda coming from the Administration was promptly debunked. But as the years have passed, I have (mercifully) forgotten many of the painful lies we were told.

I appreciate the reminder.

[Karmadillo]

10. Fascinating perspective. Any chance you could let us know

on which sources you're relying? Thanks.

[Karmadillo]

11. Kick to give Zuni a chance to produce links/documentation

on left wing myths, circle jerks etc.

[eridani]

3. Commie harshness? What horseshit.

This is what we had on 'our' side.

http://www.understandingpower.com/chap2.htm

The true nature of the U.S.-client regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala should be fully appreciated. See for example, Reverend Daniel Santiago , "The Aesthetics of Terror, The Hermeneutics of Death," America , Vol. 162, No. 11, March 24, 1990, pp. 292-295.

An excerpt:
I have heard Tonita tell her story at least a dozen times. She has recounted the horror for each delegation of North Americans who visited the refugee camp on the outskirts of San Salvador. With so many tellings, Tonita's testimony has acquired a repetitive quality. When translated and transcribed, it is somewhat unbelievable. What is convincing, however, is not the story itself, but Tonita's visceral reaction to each telling. Her tears are not the stage tears of an actress; the lines of pain that cross her wrinkled face have not been enhanced with makeup. Tonita's story is quite believable and that is the problem.

Tonita is a peasant from Santa Lucia, a rural village near the volcano of San Vicente in El Salvador. One day, two years ago, at 11:00 A.M., Tonita left her one-room home to carry lunch to her husband, Chepe, and their two teen-age sons who were cutting firewood on the volcano. She left her three smallest children -- an 18-month-old daughter, a 3-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter -- in the care of her sister and mother. . . . Entering the house , Tonita was greeted by the grisly spectacle of a feast macabre. Seated around a small table in the middle of her house were her mother, sister and three children. The decapitated heads of all five had been placed in front of each torso, their hands arranged on top, as if each body was stroking its own head. This had proven to be difficult in the case of the youngest daughter. The difficulty had been overcome by nailing the hands onto the head. The hammer had been left on the table. The floor and table were awash with blood. In the very center of the table was a large plastic bowl filled with blood; the air hung heavy with its sweet, cloying smell. Tonita's neighbors had fled when the Salvadoran National Guard began their killing. The Guardia had not tried to stop the people from fleeing and, indeed, they encouraged it. One neighbor, Doña Laura, returned for Tonita and found her standing in the doorway, moaning and staring at her decapitated mother, sister and children. . . .

This is only one tableau of many. Other scènes macabres have been created by the armed forces in their 10-year exhibition of horror and death. People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador -- they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones while parents are forced to watch. . . . There is a purpose to all of this. One embraces a certain style in order to achieve a certain effect. Stories of atrocities committed by Government security troops spread by word of mouth. It is the attention to detail that captures people's imagination and leaves them shaking. But these stories are not fairy tales. The stories are punctuated with the hard evidence of corpses, mutilated flesh, splattered brains and eyewitnesses. Sadomasochistic killing creates terror in El Salvador. Terror creates passivity in the face of oppression. A passive population is easy to control. Why the need to control the peasants? Somebody has to pick the coffee and cotton and cut the sugar cane.

[struggle4progress]

4. Yes, that's the way I remember it.

One damning human rights report after another sketched this picture of US-affiliated death squads terrorizing the poor, all in the name of "anti-communism."

[Zuni]

6. Thanks for the Chomsky, but

He distinctly said that refugee accounts (when reffering to the Khymer Rouge in the 1970s) could not be trusted. Read 'Distortions from a Fourth Hand'.
He peddles the communist line on everything without question.

[struggle4progress]

9. Did you ever actually read Chomsky on the Khmer Rouge?

I don't believe he ever denied Khmer Rouge atrocities. He did make a credible effort at scholarly criticism of mass media discussions of the subject.

In this context, he may indeed have indicated that there are some problems with refugee accounts. But his criticism of sloppy summaries was apparently too much for right wingers, who promptly flew into a rage and misquoted him to misrepresent his views.

I'm reasonably sure that right wing sources produced your quote that Chomsky "peddles the communist line on everything without question," which is simply dishonest. Chomsky has never been a communist, to my knowledge: he seems instead to have produced his own pecular amalgam of anarchist, libertarian, and socialist ideas.

Anyway, this was all a diversion from the original topic. Do you always change the subject when someone disagrees with you?

[funnymanpants]

16. This is dishonest

It is not just Chomsky who claims that the US was responsible for human rights abuses. There was a report done in the 90's administration that lays the blame at the US's doorstep for 100,000 dead in Central America.

You have also made the astounding claim that the Sandinistas exported wars to other countries. I am not aware of this happening and from what I know (admittedly this area is not my area of expertise), most of your claims sound like right-wing propaganda. For example, I know that the Sandinistas won the election easily in what was termed a model for democracy by one watchdog group.

Could you please provide links and documentation for your claims?

[Karmadillo]

5. Some paradox.

All seems cut from the same cloth. Misery for the average Latin American inhabitant and cheap labor for US corporations.

[jonallen1]

12. one of many paradoxes.

For more examples of Reagan's Legacy, look at this:

http://www.kirktoons.com/cartoons.html

[struggle4progress]

13. Sadly enough, that's the truth.

[Karmadillo]

14. Thanks for posting. Makes the case very persuasively.

n/t

[newyawker99]

15. Hi jonallen1!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

17. I'm really wondering where you get your info, Zuni

Because many of the charges you are making were later found to have been made up out of whole cloth by Otto Reich.

My sources for my "left-wing circle jerk" beliefs are a former nun who worked in Nicaragua both before and after the Sandinista revolution, a Spanish professor who had been researching Central American literature since the late 1960s, Salvadoran and Panamanian exchange students, and a grad school friend who drove down the Pan American highway in the early 1970s, and former Peace Corps workers who had served in the region.

As I type this response, I can see only the last paragraph of your post. "The death squads were not an official part of El Salvador's policy---they were renegades working in El Salvador's Treasury Department." Ah yes, the mysterious "death squads." Everyone seemed to know exactly who they were, and they had torture chambers and prisons, but gee whiz, the Salvadoran government just couldn't do a thing to stop them! Even good old Duarte could only "curb" the death squads, not arrest them and put them on trial as serial killers, which is what they were. (And frankly, he didn't "curb" them so much that a dissident would notice.)

Did you get your beliefs about Central America out of a Reagan-era ROTC textbook? Because you sure sound like what my ROTC-enrolled students were saying back in the mid 1980s.