Crimes in freedom’s name: Dick Cheney’s
El Salvador
By Mark Engler
Oct. 8 — We know that distortions abounded in the Vice
President’s contribution to the Cheney-Edwards debate on OCt. 5.
But one moment that hasn’t received much attention is Dick Cheney’s
revealing misuse of the 1980s civil war in El Salvador. Observers of
Latin American affairs were shocked and awed when the Vice President
cited the conflict as a parallel for the current predicament in Afghanistan:
“Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador,”
Cheney said. “We had a guerilla insurgency controlled roughly a
third of the country, 75,000 people dead. And we held free elections.
I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress... And as the terrorists
would come in and shoot up polling places as soon as they left, the
voters would come back and get in line and would not be denied their
right to vote. And today El Salvador is a [whole] of a lot better because
we held free elections... And [that concept] will apply in Afghanistan.
And it will apply as well in Iraq.”
The most relevant fact that the Vice President omits here is that the
75,000 people were killed not by the guerillas, but by the government
that Cheney was supporting and its paramilitary death squads. The second
most relevant fact is that the 1984 elections were widely recognized
as a farce, with a long line of genuine opposition candidates already
having been killed off and with the US spending $10 million to manipulate
the outcome. That this is the model for exporting democracy says a lot
about what the neoconservatives have in store for us.
In truth, if El Salvador is a whole of a lot better off today, it is
because the movement against the government continued. A UN Truth Commission,
mandated as part of the country’s 1992 peace accords, affirmed
a reality that the Reaganites steadfastly denied then and prefer to
forget today. The Commission found the FMLN guerillas responsible for
5 percent of human rights violations and the Armed Forces responsible
for 90percent, with the remaining 5 percent undetermined.
The New York Times commented upon the release of the report:
“A United Nations Truth Commission now confirms what the Reagan
Administration sought to cloud — that terrible crimes were perpetrated
in freedom’s name by the armed forces of El Salvador. ... The report
identifies a former Defense Minister as one of the senior officers who
ordered the killing of six Jesuit priests in 1989. It names another
Defense Minister as among those who tried to cover up the murder of
four American churchwomen. It finds that Roberto D’Aubuisson, the
right-wing politician and hero to Senator Jesse Helms, ordered the murder
of Archbishop Romero.”
The Times’ columnist Anthony Lewis concluded: “[T]he United
States spent $6 billion supporting a Salvadoran Government that was
dominated by killers. We armed them, trained their soldiers and covered
up their crimes.” While John Kerry is complicit in the invasion
of Iraq, he made some important stands in the 1980s denouncing US sponsorship
of human rights abuses in both El Salvador and Nicaragua. The right
wing’s continuing anger at these stances makes for interesting
reading, as it mimics Cheney in drawing exactly the wrong lessons from
Central American history.
A prime example: Hugh Hewitt’s recent defense of the bloody, illegal
Contra War in The Weekly Standard . Hewitt claims that Senators Kerry
and Harken, by visiting Nicaragua in 1985, were “appeasing”
Sandinista Daniel Ortega, whom he calls one of “America’s
enemies.” The quotes from the time that Hewitt uses to evidence
this supposedly damning charge in fact show someone with a considerably
more lucid view of the region’s politics than those in power, then
or now:
“If you look back at the Gulf of Tonkin resolution,” Kerry
said, “if you look back at the troops that were in Cambodia, the
history of the body count, and the misinterpretation of the history
of Vietnam itself, and look at how we are interpreting the struggle
in Central America and examine the CIA involvement, the mining of the
harbors, the effort to fund the Contras, there is a direct and unavoidable
parallel between these two periods of our history.” Even as the
neocons continue to warp their meaning, the parallels continue. With
Cheney holding up as exemplary the record of US intervention in Central
America, we can be sure that “crimes in freedom’s name”
is a concept that will apply well into the future.
Source: CommonDreams.org
Lies in Haiti
By Zoe Moskovitz and Sasha Kramer
Oct. 2 -- On Sept. 5, 2004 the Florida Sun Sentinel published
an article by Alva James-Johnson entitled Haiti’s Fragile Peace.
Having recently returned from a trip to Haiti with a group of human
rights monitors, we read the article with great interest. Haiti’s
Fragile Peace is another in a long line of articles published in the
mainstream media that portray the conflict in Haiti as a chaotic power
struggle between equally violent rival factions over which the interim
government is attempting to gain control. After interviewing community
organizers, elected officials, and labor leaders we came away with a
very different impression.
Whether or not the government of Haiti currently acknowledges having
ties to the former military, despite the fact that Latortue hailed them
as “freedom fighters” in early March, it was our impression
that the majority of Haitians see the interim government and the former
military as two hands on the same body. One hand presents the façade
of legitimacy, while the other violently represses legitimate political
dissent.
We believe that it is irresponsible to state that angry Aristide loyalists
are “just as dangerous” as the ex-military soldiers that have
now taken over several towns in the south of Haiti and continue to force
thousands of grassroots community organizers and former Lavalas officials
into hiding. Indeed, Aristide loyalists are angry. They feel that their
fledgling democracy and the laws and procedures dictated by the constitution
have been taken away from them by a relatively small armed force and
an international community intent on removing the president they elected.
We attended the soccer game and did not see the burning tires or shots
fired that James-Johnson reported, but perhaps tires were burned and
shots fired that day. Nonetheless, presenting these random actions as
equivalent to the targeted violence of the former military is misleading.
The former military is composed of several thousand heavily armed soldiers
with no political mandate; those that support Aristide are part of a
popular movement that is several million strong, essentially unarmed,
and comprised of citizens who have the right to protest. The so-called
“chimere” represent only a fringe element of an overwhelmingly
peaceful movement, whereas violence and intimidation are the sole tactics
used by the former military to silence the voice of the masses. While
we respect the author’s intention to present a balanced view of
the situation, after interviewing dozens of victims of human rights
abuses we feel that the ongoing political repression in Haiti is almost
entirely directed at Lavalas supporters.
Understanding the current situation in Haiti requires careful reading
to separate propaganda from fact, even when the sources are well known
media outlets, such as the Sun Sentinel, or credible human rights organizations
such as Amnesty International. Since the February 2004 coup Amnesty
International has rightly criticized the former military and the government
and international forces that have allowed them to act with relative
impunity. However, Amnesty International’s 2004 human rights report
on Haiti presents evidence in a misleading way that fueled the propaganda
campaign against the elected government and Lavalas party. We tallied
the killings reported in Amnesty’s 2004 Haiti report and found
that the conclusions they draw are biased and directly contradict the
evidence they present. Their summary states that “Political violence
increased as rifts between opposing sides widened. Numerous abuses were
allegedly committed, most frequently by supporters of the government
and its party, Fanmi Lavalas (FL — Lavalas Family).”
However, the report documents 37 Fanmi Lavalas activists or government
officials were killed while only one opposition party member was killed.
There were two killings in which neither the victim’s nor the killer’s
political affiliation were clear. Eleven people, also of unclear political
affiliation, were killed by police. These facts, contained within the
report, stand in stark contrast to the conclusion presented in the introduction
and misrepresent the nature of political violence in Haiti.
We encourage those concerned by the misrepresentation of political violence
in Haiti to pressure media outlets and Amnesty International to strive
for accuracy rather than balance in their reporting. This is particularly
important now that the scales have been tipped even further; the former
military now control a large portion of the country and thousands of
Lavalas supporters have been killed. We also applaud those media outlets,
such as the SF Bayview, that have worked so hard to separate truth from
propaganda in their reporting on Haiti.
Source: counterpunch
