Top US diplomat visits El Salvador

[struggle4progress]

SAN SALVADOR (AFP) — The US State Department's top diplomat for Latin America Tom Shannon arrived in El Salvador on Wednesday, three days after leftist Mauricio Funes, leader of an ex-rebel party, was elected president.

Before his victory, former TV journalist Funes said El Salvador, which in the past sent troops to Iraq, would remain a staunch ally of the United States, where some 2.5 Salvadorans reside.

Shannon was due to meet with outgoing president Antonio Saca before meeting with Funes ...

US President Barack Obama on Wednesday telephoned Funes to congratulate him on his victory and said he was ready to strengthen bilateral ties, the Salvadoran president-elect said in a first post-election news conference ...

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i8u98rdp1oj65KGtFhhS5dY--C8Q

[Peace Patriot]

1. Hm. Shannon is the Bushwhack appointee for the western hemisphere, and as such,

has been in a top position throughout some real bad shit thrown around in Latin America, including mass deaths of union leaders, peasant farmers, human rights workers and others in Colombia, and coup attempts against democratic governments in Venezuela (2002, and on-going coup and assassination plots, and non-stop psyops and propaganda), and Bolivia (this last September--a coup funded and organized out of the US embassy, which included massive rioting and the machine-gunning of some 30 unarmed peasant farmers). That kind of shit.

I don't know what his involvement in the worst shit was, but no one who worked for Bush, and tolerated the extensive crimes of the Bush Junta, is to be trusted, and I wonder what he's doing representing Barack Obama.

[struggle4progress]

2. Thanks. I didn't know who he was but was interested he rushed t'meet w'ARENA soon as th'FMLN won

[rabs]

6. Shannon may be on his way out

Three names to replace Shannon have emerged in Latam diplomatic circles:

Anne W. Patterson, U.S. amb. to Pakistan.

Kristie A. Kenney, current U.S. ambassador in Philippines, wife of U.S. Amb. to Colombia William Brownfield.

Dr. Arturo Valenzuela, Chilean-American academic who worked with Bill Clinton as Latam advisor.

[Judi Lynn]

7. I heard of her when she was the ambassador to Colombia.

She didn't stay too long there. Apparently they need someone really hard bitten for that post.

http://upload.wikimedia.org.nyud.net:8090/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Anne_W_Patterson.jpg http://newspakistan.net.nyud.net:8090/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/51.jpg

[rabs]

8. Can't say I don't blame her for leaving Colombia

From Wikipedia

Patterson served as United States Ambassador to El Salvador from 1997 to 2000, and then United States Ambassador to Colombia 2000 to 2003. While ambassador to Colombia, Patterson and U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone were the alleged targets of a failed bomb plot while on an official visit to the Colombian town of Barrancabermeja.

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Judi, how do you highlight (bold, ital, underline) a word, sentence etc? Wanted to highlight "alleged target of a failed bomb plot"

[Judi Lynn]

9. It's easy to remember once you've done it.

For "bolding" a word, put b inside a pair of brackets ( which look like staples) like this <b> only using a left and right bracket on either side to encase it. The brackets and the b won't be visible. On the other side of the word, phrase, paragraph you want to bold, type </b> substituting brackets for the pointy symbols.

For italics, use an i, like this, <i> only substituting brackets for the < and >'s. To end the italics word, phrase, etc., type </i> substituting brackets for the <>s.

For underline, <u>, brackets around u, and </u> with brackets instead of <>'s on the other side.

If you want to combine bolding and italics, put them in a row, and on the other side, make sure you do it in reverse order: <b><i><u> word or phrase, etc. </u></i></b>

To add actual color, as highlighting with a marker, on one side of the passage you want to highlight, write <span style="background-color:FFFF99"> on one side of the passage then write </span> on the other side, substituting brackets.

You can change the color of the highlighting using any of the color codes, from a site like this:
Color Charts
http://www.webmonkey.com/reference/Color_Charts

It takes a while to remember the formula for that one but it's a lot of fun. You can get a standard color if you write it like this, also, using the standard color name instead of a color hex code. That way you don't also have to throw in the #. It simplifies, somewhat:

<span style="background-color:yellow"> word or phrase to be highlighted</span>

If you want to make a word or a letter larger than the others, you can put <font size=4> on one side of the letter, or word(s) and </font> on the other. If you use 5, or 6 the letters get a lot larger, of course, so you can experiment. I think it's helpful when referring to the internetS made famous by _{George W. Bush.} (To drop a word or words below the line slightly, put _{before the word and} after the word, substituting brackets for the pointy things.)

You can copy and paste this and substitute the < and > with brackets and to see how it works.

I hope this will work. I learned to do it from reading what posters told other posters when they asked how to do it, myself! It just takes some practice to remember.

Also, if you attempt this on a different message board, it will probably work using the < and > in place of the brackets. That's the original symbol used in html, I assume.

Hope something here will help. They are a relief to know, sometimes.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Tom Shannon was right in the thick of Bush's fiendish plots against Latin American countries.

He made public statements insulting all the leftists at one time or another.

He replaced Roger Noriega, a true fat little monster who, in his early days, was an aide to Senator Jesse Helms. Noriega replaced Cuban "exile" (and former propaganda chief for Ronald Reagan during his war on the people of Central America through Iran/Contra) Otto Reich, a recess appointment whom the Senate refused to approve, leaving _Bush to slide him under the door into the State Department at the first possible Congressional holiday break. He was not able to keep him, so he replaced him with Noriega, who was a holy terror to the officials of Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Shannon is their full functioning, back-stabbing, politically-hostile-to-leftists replacement Assistant Sec. of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs.

Didn't take him long to show up on their doorstep, did it?

http://justf.org.nyud.net:8090/files/images/gallery/thumbs/080723bo08.jpg

Talking with sneaky, duplicitous _Bush ambassador Phillip Goldberg before he was asked to leave.

http://justf.org.nyud.net:8090/files/images/gallery/thumbs/080723bo03.jpg http://justf.org.nyud.net:8090/files/images/gallery/thumbs/080723bo04.jpg

Tom Shannon acting the big deal with Bolivia's elected President Evo Morales.

[Judi Lynn]

4. El Salvador votes away its bad past

El Salvador votes away its bad past

The left's electoral victory put an end to US meddling and proved that Salvadoran democracy is no regional threat

* Mark Weisbrot

Last Sunday's election in El Salvador, in which the leftist FMLN (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation) won the presidency, didn't get a lot of attention in the international press. It's a relatively small country (7 million people on land the size of Massachusetts) and fairly poor (per capita income about half the regional average). And left governments have become the norm in Latin America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, Uruguay and Venezuela have all elected left governments over the last decade. South America is now more independent of the United States than Europe is.

But the FMLN's victory in El Salvador has a special significance for this hemisphere.

Central America and the Caribbean have long been the United States' "back yard" more than anywhere else. The people of the region have paid a terrible price – in blood, poverty and underdevelopment – for their geographical and political proximity to the United States. The list of US interventions in the area would take up the rest of this column, stretching from the 19th century (Cuba, in 1898) to the 21st, with the overthrow of Haiti's democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide (for the second time) in 2004.

Those of us who can remember the 1980s can see President Ronald Reagan on television warning that "El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts" as he sent guns and money to the Salvadoran military and its affiliated death squads. Their tens of thousands of targets – for torture, terror and murder – were overwhelmingly civilians, including Catholic priests, nuns and the heroic archbishop Oscar Romero. It seems ridiculous now that Reagan could have convinced the US Congress that the people who won Sunday's election were not only a threat to our national security, but one that justified horrific atrocities. But he did. At the same time millions of Americans – including many church-based activists – joined a movement to stop US support for the terror, as well as what the United Nations later called genocide in Guatemala, along with the US-backed insurgency in Nicaragua (which was also a war against civilians).

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/mar/18/el-salvador-election

[Judi Lynn]

5. Adding more from article posted above:

~snip~
This time around, the Obama administration, after receiving thousands of phone calls – thanks to the solidarity movement that stems from the 1980s – issued a statement of neutrality on the Friday before the election. The administration appears divided on El Salvador as with the rest of Latin America's left: at least one of Obama's highest-level advisors on Latin America favoured the right-wing ruling party. But the statement of neutrality was a clear break from the Bush administration.

~snip~
But the majority of Salvadorans, who are poor or near-poor, decided that the left would be more likely than the right to look out for them in hard times. That's a reasonable conclusion, and one that is shared by most of the hemisphere.