13

The Fledgling Democracies

As discussed earlier, U.S. intervention in Central America is unpopular, but the potential costs to the United States are minimal, apart from Nicaragua. Correspondingly, only in the case of Nicaragua do elite groups articulate popular concerns, to a limited extent. The far more savage attack against the population of El Salvador imposes no serious costs for the supervisors of international terrorism. There was rising concern and a corresponding increase in honest reporting in 1981-83, when it appeared that the resort to violence by the U.S. and its mercenary forces might not be successful. But elite concerns were stilled, and reporting virtually ceased, as soon as it appeared that state terrorism might achieve its goals. El Salvador barely exists in the consciousness of the media and Congress, except as a demonstration of the U.S. commitment to democracy and human rights, and the successes achieved in the pursuit of these noble ends.

The situation was much the same in the 1960s. The primary target of U.S. aggression was always South Vietnam, but protest over that “noble cause”—as it is now regularly described—was limited until the popular movements gained force, because the destruction of South Vietnam was not perceived in elite circles as harmful to their interests. The extension of the aggression to North Vietnam, in contrast, was controversial from the start, because of the risks of a confrontation with China or the USSR. So pervasive was this cynicism that the U.S. doctrinal system recognizes no such event as the U.S. attack against South Vietnam, though it certainly occurred, surely from 1962, obviously from 1965. The extraordinary subordination of world opinion to U.S. power is illustrated by the fact that throughout most of the world, there is no recognition or awareness of the U.S. attack against South Vietnam. One finds no reference to this historical event in standard histories; the United Nations never condemned this attack or recognized that it took place, nor did it prepare documents on the war crimes carried out during the U.S. aggression in South Vietnam (or elsewhere, for that matter), in marked contrast to the reaction at the UN and elsewhere to the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan. The final illustration of the subservience of Western opinion to the United States is the common pretense that the world ignores the Soviet aggression in Afghanistan,1 while it bitterly protested the U.S. “intervention” in Indochina “in defense of South Vietnam.” In the real world, the Western governments supported the U.S. aggression in Indochina, either tacitly or openly, providing ample reason for their populations to protest, and strenuously so. The Soviet aggression, in contrast, is universally denounced.

The pattern is a familiar one, in many other cases as well, and by no means only in the United States.

Returning to El Salvador, we may rejoice that political killings by the security forces reduced to over four a day,2 now that the government death squads have “decapitated the trade unions and mass organisations,” a conservative British correspondent observes, so that “numbers are down and the bodies are dropped discreetly at night into the middle of Lake Ilopango and only rarely wash up on to the shore to remind bathers that the repression is still going on.”3 Few know—or would care if they knew—that “government agents routinely torture prisoners in their custody, conduct ‘disappearances,’ and commit political killings in attempts to eliminate opposition to the government,” that “Salvadorans who allegedly violate human rights remain virtually immune from investigation and prosecution,” and that “most victims are non-combatant civilians, including women and children,” the primary targets being “refugee workers, trade unionists, and university staff and students” subjected to “arrest, torture, and killing.”4 Now that Duarte’s U.S.-organized terror has “decapitated” and demolished labor and the popular organizations that might have laid the basis for meaningful democracy, the editors of the New Republic inform us that “The real model for supporting the push toward democracy in our sphere” is El Salvador, exulting in the success of their advice to Reagan to continue with the assault “regardless of how many are murdered,” since “there are higher American priorities than Salvadoran human rights.”5 They are joined in this admiration for the successful terror carried out under Duarte’s aegis by many others within mainstream liberalism, as cited earlier.

There is no reaction here to the report by the Salvadoran Church that its social workers are receiving death threats and that the government, with the aid of the U.S. Embassy, “appears to be engaged in a major confrontation with church officials after repeated accusations by police informers that churches have knowingly aided leftist guerrilla groups.” The head of the Lutheran church, “who was arrested and tortured by the police three years ago,” expressed concern over the campaign to bar social projects and work with refugees, noting that the charges virtually amount to a death sentence. On the basis of charges by a woman who says “that she had confessed only because the police had threatened to harm her 18-year old daughter,” the Duarte government renewed its longstanding efforts, with the cooperation of the U.S. Embassy, to undermine human rights groups, arresting rights workers who say “they were beaten and threatened by the police for almost two weeks.” In July 1986, “the government deported 23 foreign religious activists, including 19 Americans, who sought to accompany” refugees back to their homes. In June, the mutilated corpse of a young man was found after he had appealed to the Red Cross to prevent the army from once again displacing returnees from their homes—by “burning of our houses, our crops, our lands,” peasants recounted. Meanwhile, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs reported that a U.S. “police training program” in Washington in June and July “included three of the most notorious death squad members in San Salvador” who will “have their techniques upgraded,” and that in the same weeks “more than 10 independent human rights activists have been arrested by Salvadoran Security forces,” some tortured according to the Archbishop, in actions defended by the U.S. Embassy.6

It does not merit even a single word in the national press when five imprisoned members of the Human Rights Commission CDHES, the only UN-recognized Human Rights Group in El Salvador, produce a carefully documented 160-page study, described as credible by Amnesty International, on the “routine” and “systematic” use of torture in a survey of over 400 political prisoners, fellow inmates at the Mariona prison almost all of whom report torture. Their study provides a detailed record of tortures, with names, dates and careful description, including sworn testimony that a U.S. army major administered electrical torture. The study was widely distributed to the press, but ignored, apart from the San Francisco Examiner.7 In contrast, reports of harassment of human rights activists in Managua, not remotely approaching the atrocities documented in El Salvador, merit a front-page story in the New York Times.8

The Treasury Police had arrested virtually all members of CDHES in May 1986; of the 8 Salvadorans who founded the Commission in 1978, four have been killed, two have “disappeared,” one is in exile, and the status of the eighth is unknown. Its president, Marianela Garcia Villas, was murdered by a U.S.-trained elite battalion while gathering evidence on the use of napalm.9 The Marin County religious task force sent volunteers to El Salvador after the May arrests to offer some protection to the remaining human rights workers and help them continue their grim work. They describe the regular procession of peasants and urban poor who find their way to the Commission’s unmarked office to tell their stories and seek information about missing family members. Continuing their work in Mariona prison after their arrest, the members of the Commission also succeeded in smuggling out a videotape with testimonies of torture; this too was distributed to the media, with no response. The tape also includes a segment made by a European journalist who entered an area from which journalists are excluded and filmed interviews with villagers whose houses had just been destroyed and families killed by bombing in January 1987, also unreported.10

Atrocities continue regularly, occasionally reported. In April 1987 the Confederation of Cooperative Organizations reported army murders and rapes in the San Carlos cooperative. A few days later, a law student, a member of the executive committee of the student association, was murdered in Santa Ana by a death squad. Labor leaders reported that five workers were killed and two women sexually abused in a police raid on a cooperative federation, while 20 union members were seized by police and the secretary general of the National Association of Agricultural Workers in San Miguel province was tortured and murdered by soldiers, then beheaded, after being captured on his way to arrange a loan for a peasant cooperative.11 On May 15th a woman leading a CoMadres demonstration was run over by a car apparently driven by the national police. Five alleged guerrilla “collaborators” were murdered by the elite Arce battalion, notorious for human rights violations, on May 22, eliciting a condemnation from the Archbishop. On the 27th, five carloads of men in civilian clothes broke into the office of the Lutheran church at gunpoint and stole their records after issuing death threats to human rights workers. The following day, the CoMadres office was destroyed by bombing, with four people injured, and a refugee group demonstrating at the Cathedral was fired upon. A day later, three truckloads of men with machine guns broke into the CDHES office, fleeing when it seemed that journalists might arrive. On the 30th, the secretary-general of the teachers union was shot at a demonstration outside the Mariona prison calling for amnesty for political prisoners, by guards within the prison according to union leaders.12

In June, CDHES reported 14 political assassinations and more than 100 disappearances in the first 5 months of 1987. In mid-July, it reported that at least 13 corpses had been found in and around the capital during the preceding week in “the silent resurgence of the death squads.” The Commission alleges that “victims are left “with signs of torture,” while judicial authorities say that they have no concrete information.13 The increase in visible atrocities—as distinct from those in more remote areas—also led foreign human rights analysts and diplomats to suspect that death squads are returning to regular operations in the urban centers. Growing opposition to the increasingly isolated Duarte government may be a factor in the resurgence of urban terror. Army operations chief Col. Emilio Ponce observes that “the guerrillas are returning to the first phase of clandestine organization” in the cities, and to “mobilization of the masses.” “This isn’t new,” the director of the Catholic Church human rights office observes:

The death squads always appear when opposition increases and the government can’t control it. We have no doubt that there’s a military structure behind the death squads, given the level of intelligence they have, and their resources and infrastructure. Only people linked to military structures could have this kind of organization—a private group couldn’t do it.14

Another reason for the death squad resurgence in urban areas may be that the State of Siege declared in March 1980, as Duarte joined the government and the terror began in full force, lapsed in January 1987. The military no longer have the “legal” right to carry out repressive actions and as a result, “human rights officials and diplomats say they fear that the security forces will now be tempted to kill rather than arrest people suspected of being leftists.”15 The lapse in the State of Siege was purely technical, resulting from a boycott of the National Assembly by the conservative parties, but Times correspondent James LeMoyne prefers to see it as a consequence of the decision of the Duarte government to “normalize” the situation, reporting that Duarte “lifted a state-of-siege law” to enhance a “political opening” and forgetting what the Times had published on the back pages a few months earlier.16

The State of Siege announced in Nicaragua in October 1985 elicited outraged denunciations and calls for a renewal of overt aid to the contras to overcome these abuses, so offensive to our libertarian passions. In contrast, there was total silence when El Salvador renewed its State of Siege two days later, as it had done monthly since March 1980. The Salvadoran State of Siege has been next to unmentionable in the press. The New York Times never mentioned it in its numerous editorials on El Salvador, which also succeeded in avoiding most other ongoing atrocities, preferring fables about “reformist democrats led by Mr. Duarte” who are unable to stem the violence of “the left and right.”17 There is not the slightest comparison between the repression under the State of Siege in Nicaragua and the massive atrocities conducted by the U.S.-installed government in El Salvador under its own unmentionable State of Siege, and media coverage and outrage is inversely related to the extent of atrocities, though directly related to U.S. government priorities.

It is necessary to maintain the atmosphere of terror in El Salvador to ensure that the “popular organizations” do not recover from the savage onslaught conducted by the U.S. mercenary forces to establish the proper conditions for “democracy.” Meanwhile “illiterate 16-year-old kids [are] wrenched from their villages or shantytowns, rounded up by the police” and forced into the army to become mercenary killers, while “the BMWs and the Mercedes have never been more numerous,” “the chic restaurants and nightclubs of the Zona Rosa are filled,” and “the city’s upper crust, high on violence and money and dulled by a servile press and television, dance the cha-cha and make small talk.”18 In the cities, popular protest is increasing, attributed by authorities to guerrilla subversion; and in the countryside, Chris Norton reports, the rebels “exude a new confidence” as they carry out regular attacks against military outposts and “have made significant progress over the past two years in winning support among the cautious, normally conservative townspeople,” while their “slow, patient political work” is also paying dividends among the peasantry. They “are busy building an infrastructure” in rural areas, where people “still seem to feel more comfortable with the presence of the guerrillas rather than with the army”:

Interviews in different parts of the country reveal that support for the guerrillas, especially in the countryside, appears to be holding firm . . . ‘People see that the guerrillas are more humane, and there is an intuitive sense that they’re on the people’s side,’ notes one Catholic church official. Adds an old-time labor leader: ‘The campesinos know whose interests the army really represents’.19

According to the U.S. government, the guerrillas are able to sustain their operations only because of support from Nicaragua. This claim is necessary, as part of the important pretense that the guerrillas operating in El Salvador without visible external support, having been driven to the countryside by U.S.-organized terror, are comparable to the U.S. proxy army attacking Nicaragua, which cannot survive or “maintain its morale” without its daily air drops and other U.S. sustenance. Accordingly, the claims of Operation Truth are echoed by the national media: “The rebels deny receiving such support from Nicaragua,” James LeMoyne asserts, “but ample evidence shows it exists, and it is questionable how long they could survive without it.”20

Assuming this charge to be accurate, we are left with a question that he does not address: even if we are willing to grant the incompetence of U.S. intelligence and the New York Times, can it be so extraordinary that they have never been able to provide any credible evidence for this crucial support, though Nicaragua has never had any problem in providing ample evidence for U.S. support for the proxy army? A curious paradox indeed.

Recall also the impermissible question raised in note 12, chapter 1.

The center-right Christian Democrats who constitute Duarte’s political base, meanwhile, have succumbed to the usual temptations. “While PDC officials self-consciously set about to displace the oligarchy,” Chris Norton writes, “they seem to have decided to replace it with themselves.” Duarte’s son Alejandro sports two new haciendas; the executive director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce alleges that PDC officials “are making hundreds of thousands of colones a day in profits” by diverting basic foods, intended for the poor at affordable prices, to private outlets, along with many similar practices. Ignacio Martin Baro, vice-rector of the Jesuit-run Central American University, comments that “The tradition in this country is for whomever comes to power to take advantage of the situation. We expected the Christian Democrats to be different, but they haven’t been. They’ve been the same.” “This should come as no surprise,” Norton comments. “Despite their Christian moralizing (based on their claim to be inspired by the social teachings of the Catholic Church), the PDC is a party of middle-class professionals who saw themselves and the country as being held back by some of the semi-feudal aspects of Salvadoran capitalism.” They put themselves “at the helm” to remedy these defects, promising reforms as “a populist party with mass support from the poor,” but quickly taking on the traditional role of corrupt oppressors. They have also used their control of U.S.-funded food and work projects for the nearly ½ million displaced persons to compel participation in government marches and rallies, under the threat that benefits will be cut if they do not.21 As we have seen, the government’s policies are perceived by the general population as welfare for the rich, and most regard “democracy” as a generally meaningless charade (see chapter 5). But with the possibility of a genuine movement “with mass support from the poor” eliminated by successful state terror, the large majority of the population can only watch the farcical workings of “democracy,” now properly functioning as a game among various privileged sectors, under the watchful eyes of the security forces and the American Embassy, who reign unchallenged.

While the Christian Democratic professional elites are demanding their share of privilege and power, the traditional oligarchies have hardly suffered under U.S. tutelage in “democracy.” “The wealth of the country is now concentrated in fewer hands than before agrarian reform,” and “the rich have more control than before,” according to Dean Héctor Marroquín Arévalo, dean of the University of El Salvador, a conclusion confirmed by others. “The oligarchy is more powerful now,” adds Juan Garcia, a professor of sociology at the University of Central America who has studied the effects of the reform: “If anything, the reforms aggravated the wide differences in wealth.” The agrarian reform, instituted by the U.S. in 1980, generated “windfall profits for the wealthy people who were supposed to shoulder the burden of the economic restructuring,” Times correspondent Lindsey Gruson observes, and “saddled the cooperatives with debts” that they cannot repay because of the provisions for compensation to landowners, while “many of the cooperatives were illegally stripped by landowners of their machinery and livestock.” A USAID report “found that as many as 95% of the cooperatives were unable to pay interest on their debts, which totaled an estimated $800 million.” Dean Marroquín estimates that 98% are “in effect bankrupt.” Production has fallen sharply in export crops apart from sugar cane, and Salvadoran agriculture has been “immeasurably damaged,” a USAID consultant comments. Worse, peasants are confined by the reform to small and unproductive plots, which rapidly become exhausted and unfertile, saddled with debts they cannot pay and lacking technical assistance, not to speak of the “1.8 million peasants who were overlooked in the 1980 program.”

Gruson’s report fails to observe that these are exactly the consequences predicted from the start by U.S. and Salvadoran government critics of the U.S.-initiated reform, which was imposed without any effort to engage or organize the poor and even bypassed Salvadoran government specialists. Like the Alliance for Progress, Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative, and similar programs generally, the U.S.-imposed plan was a completely cynical effort; these programs are not instituted because of a sudden recognition of the suffering of the poor, but out of fear that they might respond to organizing appeals that would impel them to seek to extricate themselves from their misery in ways incompatible with the Fifth Freedom (so-called “Communism”). Nor do we hear derisive commentary on the “failures,” “mismanagement” and “incompetence” of the American supervisors of this failed effort, as is standard media fare with regard to the “Marxist-Leninist managers of misery,” though the resources available to the United States are not notably less than those of its Nicaraguan enemy.22

The signing of the peace accords in early August 1987 was followed by an upsurge of repression in the urban areas, evoking no interest here as usual. In commentary rare to the point of near uniqueness, Chris Norton observes from San Salvador:

Electoral posturing aside, diplomats say peace is harder to achieve here than in Nicaragua because the Salvadorean guerrillas, in contrast to the US financed Nicaraguan rebels, are an indigenous revolutionary movement, independent of external outside support from one source.

Political analysts say the continuing arrests and disappearances of labor leaders and members of other opposition groups does not bode well for national reconciliation. More than a dozen labor activists have been arrested since the peace plan was signed Aug. 7. The head of the university workers union was kidnapped Aug. 31. And the government still refuses to talk with the labor opposition.

“If this were going on in Nicaragua, [international observers] would be going crazy,” says one political analyst.23

What was “going on in Nicaragua” did not compare to this record. Again, reporting and outrage were inversely proportional to degree of repression, and quite in accord with U.S. government priorities; the usual pattern.

The enhanced repression in El Salvador during the spring and summer of 1987 did not pass entirely without reaction here. The Reagan administration informed Congress on August 31 that it intends to provide over $9 million in equipment and weapons to the Salvadoran police, certifying to Congress that El Salvador “has made significant progress during the preceding six months in eliminating any human-rights violations, including torture, incommunicado detention, detention of persons solely for nonviolent expression of their political views or prolonged detention without trial.” An accompanying report states that the U.S. assistance program “has met, or exceeded, expectations across the board and has uniformly fulfilled the criteria of human-rights improvements on the part of the public security forces”; this statement may very well be true, considering the expectations of Ronald Reagan and George Shultz, and the criteria that would satisfy their administration, which was providing exactly the same kind of upbeat certification to a docile Congress while the terror they organized in El Salvador reached its crescendo a few years earlier. Americas Watch issued a report on August 29 stating that the security forces continue to commit murder and other rights abuses, and is thus failing to meet the requirements of the Central American peace plan.24 It was barely mentioned in the media, and in fact the whole issue is only of marginal interest. The state has determined that human rights violations in Nicaragua are the only topic of concern; the Free Press can hardly be expected to challenge these priorities.

Like El Salvador, Guatemala too is generally regarded as a great success of the U.S. dedication to fostering democracy—a tolerable pretense, now that the population has been thoroughly intimidated by U.S.-backed terror on a scale that reached near-genocidal proportions.25 But now all is well, with death squad killings continuing and the newly-elected President acknowledging frankly that he can do nothing given the roots of actual power in the military and the oligarchy and that the civilian government are merely “the managers of bankruptcy and misery.”26 The Campesino Unity Committee, which had more than 100,000 members in 1981, “today does not dare to begin openly organizing in the countryside” and “the union movement proceeds with great caution” as a result of the terror of the past years. In its “year of promises” (1986), the Christian Democratic government failed to undertake social reforms though it did pursue policies for the benefit of the private sector, supported by the wealthy and the military, while “socio-economic conditions continued to worsen for the majority of Guatemalans.” The military closely supervise “virtually every aspect of government.” The effective control by the military and the business interests linked to them is illustrated by the fact that even more so than in El Salvador, the government would not dare to prosecute military officers for horrendous human rights abuses.27

The head of the armed forces, defense minister of the elected government, when asked about human rights abuses, says that the Army “defended the state of Guatemala,” and the “casualties suffered by the Guatemalan people” were not its fault, since the Army merely “reacted against the terrorists in order to control the seizure of power by them.” President Cerezo, in a television interview in August 1987, indicated that most of the “disappeared” had gone to live abroad or joined the guerrillas, “a measure of his [quite understandable] reluctance to confront the human rights issue in Guatemala and thereby antagonize the army,” Mesoamerica comments.28

The civilian government remains “a project” of the military, as the armed forces explained when they allowed it to take office. Stephen Kinzer reports that President Cerezo “has not managed to wrest significant power from the army, in the view of diplomats and Guatemalan officials, and describes his government “as ‘a transition regime’ in which civilians will not be able to consolidate true power, but will be able to survive in office, gradually managing to curb the armed forces,” he hopes. Nineth Garcia, the director of the leading human rights organization (the Mutual Support Group; GAM), states that “Here democracy is a coverup . . . the military is the real power . . . ” A Western diplomat observes that the death squad apparatus “is still in place, it is simply not working at the moment” except for occasional incidents as “the squads are indulging now in more selective repression”—all that is required, as “democracy” functions in the intended manner.29

So do the U.S. media, where GAM reports are dismissed because it “represents only a tiny minority, mostly peasant Indians from the countryside long ignored by the political process anyway.” This “minority” in fact is the majority of the population. It is, however, correct to say that they have been “ignored” by the political process, ever since the U.S. succeeded in overturning Guatemala’s experiment with democracy in 1954; and it is instructive that this is sufficient reason to ignore their plight.30

TV journalist Elizabeth Farnsworth describes “the shadow of fear” that is “evident” in Guatemala. Seeking subjects for interviews, she found “that only people who already had a high profile, such as Church or elected officials, dared speak for attribution”; “the sense of fear is almost palpable in the hesitant and carefully chosen words of Bishop José Ramiro Pellecer,” who consented to be interviewed, “though I think he fears for others and not for himself,” she adds. Asked to “describe the changes that have taken place in Guatemala” under the elected Cerezo government, he says that “We are making a try at democracy but, in reality, there has not been much change.” Exactly as in El Salvador, according to the perceptions of the public, though not Operation Truth and its minions. Bishop Pellecer agrees that the civilian government is “just a mask or façade for the military to hide behind.” The death squads “are lying in wait, making certain things do not get out of hand,” with violence increasing “the farther from the capital you get.” “Things are more or less as they were before.” The press has barely changed: “A civilian government is being attacked, but that was done before. There is still no criticism of the military,” who retain effective power.31

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs continues to characterize Guatemala, along with El Salvador, as “currently the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator.” Inforpress Centroamerica in Guatemala reports political killings at the rate of one a day in May-June 1987, a small part of a rising tide of violence; what happens in the countryside is little known. The Mexican press reports that “the practice of repression and intimidation against workers” continues, though “more selectively” than before, and “since the inauguration of President Cerezo, the Security Forces, disguised as the Death Squads, have continued kidnapping and assassinating labor union leaders,” citing a series of examples, while “the Christian Democratic authorities have found new methods of intimidation and pressure.” The U.S. press meanwhile reports, accurately no doubt, that the guerrillas have lost support because they “were unable to protect the Indians from the military.” Ken Anderson, a lawyer for the International Human Rights Law Group monitoring conditions in the countryside, says that “The Indians have been signed over to the army. With a hundred or more killings or disappearances a month since January [1987], I’m not optimistic that things have changed much.”32

Economic conditions continue to deteriorate for the poor, with “oppressive poverty” so severe that in Guatemala City, “drivers look straight ahead with calculated indifference, dispirited by the exhibition of such misery.” There is a new austerity program designed to salvage the faltering economy. Its “principal victims have been members of the shrinking middle class and the urban and rural poor. Most Guatemalans’ living standards have dropped to levels surpassed 15 years ago. More than 50 percent of the economically active population are unemployed,” while the civilian president has “devoted his energies to attacking the labor movement.”33

Turning to Honduras, it merits no attention when the Honduran Human Rights Defense Commission releases a document reporting that hundreds of Honduran peasants were driven from their homes and forced into refugee camps in a joint operation of the contras and the Honduras 6th Army Battalion, their homes and possessions commandeered by the contras who killed peasants suspected of being Sandinista collaborators; mass kidnappings and other means of intimidation have led to the flight or removal of some 16,000 peasants from an area turned over to the contras by the Honduran government and wealthy Cuban-Honduran tobacco magnates who own vast estates near the border, according to the Commission and other sources. The minority leader of the Honduran Congress, Nicolas Cruz Torres, reports that 35 villages have been forcibly evacuated by the contras, a situation “not created by Honduras but by the government of the United States which is financing the counterrevolutionaries.”34

The chief of staff of the Honduran military from March 1984 to February 1985, General Walter Lopez Reyes, told a news conference in Tegucigalpa that the CIA has bribed Honduran politicians so that they will continue to back U.S. aid to the contras, that in Honduras the contras have been involved in assassinations and disappearances of “numerous people for being against their mode of operation,” and that the CIA “is prepared to control even the secret services of the Honduran police and to infiltrate all the government” of President Azcona. The Honduran Committee for the Defense of Human Rights reports that 300 people have been killed for political reasons and another 130 have disappeared in police custody.35

Young men are forcibly press-ganged into the army, dragged “out of theaters, buses and off the street for immediate induction into the Armed Forces,” while “the sons of the wealthy are generally exempt”; “the general practice is to seize three times as many males as are needed, select the best for induction, and return the others to the families for a price.”36 The practice is the same, though apparently still more brutal and more sharply class-based, in El Salvador; and in Guatemala, the other “fledgling democracy,” where Defense Minister Gramajo confirmed in an August 1987 television interview that the army does not recruit from the upper strata of society and that one-fourth of new recruits are impressed into the army.37 This practice, common in U.S. domains, elicits no comment. In contrast, the resort to a civilian draft in Nicaragua, as is standard in democratic states in wartime or conditions of perceived threat, elicited massive outrage among a new breed of extreme civil libertarians who denounced this further demonstration of totalitarianism, with much fevered reporting of protests against the draft in Nicaragua. This enthusiasm was supplanted by muffled annoyance when the protests stilled after the government instituted such typical totalitarian measures as transporting groups of mothers to visit soldiers in the field and organizing Mothers’ Councils to deal with personal problems, and when it became clear that as in such states as Israel, military service appears to function as a device of national integration; “these boys have come back proud,” a Western European diplomat comments.38

The U.S. role in Honduras was adequately characterized by Ambassador John Ferch, removed from his post in June 1986 because he insisted on treating the civilian government, rather than the military command, as the country’s highest authority, a signal failure of perception from the point of view of George Shultz and Elliott Abrams. He commented to Newsday that he was removed “because they wanted somebody down there to be strong enough and proconsul enough that no Honduran government is going to object to anything.”39 Another factor in his removal appears to have been his objection to State Department trickery in using the pretext of an alleged Nicaraguan “invasion” to induce Honduras to accept military aid, apparently funnelled to the contras as part of the illegal supply operation in March 1986. As for the CIA role, apart from training the battalion implicated in death squad activities and torture, it is also reported by a Honduran army defector to have arranged a fabricated forced “confession” by a kidnapped prisoner that he headed a “guerrilla front” and had planned attacks against U.S. installations; having learned his lines under appropriate inducements, he was to be displayed by the genocidal Guatemalan generals backed by the U.S. (as he was), in a further contribution to Operation Truth.40

Food First Central America analyst Medea Benjamin, working in the area, uncovered “a food crisis of frightening proportions in the southern part of the country” in 1986. “We alerted the national media in the United States,” Food First reports, “but the story went uncovered.” They report that hundreds of thousands of peasants are starving while President Azcona refused food aid, though other regions have food surpluses and the government announced that Honduras was self-sufficient in corn and beans in 1986 and is exporting beans to El Salvador. The Archbishop in the southern region protested the government’s refusal to recognize the crisis: “We’ve seen scenes of misery like never before,” he said, “children with swollen bellies, old people looking like corpses, women and children begging for food, men roaming the streets searching for work,” lacking money to buy the food that is available, including thousands “displaced by the contras,” according to a physician researching malnutrition at the National University.41

Recall the derisive commentary on the “Marxist-Leninist” dogma and “gross incompetence” of the Sandinista commandantes, which impels them to interfere with market mechanisms in an effort to ensure that the poor will have something to eat, one element of the flood of abuse directed against these appalling criminals who remind us of Hitler and Stalin. The Free Press is wise to keep its eyes averted from areas of Honduras on the Nicaraguan border, though it hardly needs notification from Food First of the critical conditions in the region through which reporters traipse in pursuit of encouraging news about the military prowess of “the resistance.” Inspection of Honduras would yield unwanted conclusions about the application of market principles in a state organized for the needs of the oligarchy and the military, following the lessons taught them by their benefactor from the North. Better to look the other way, much like the drivers in Guatemala City.

Travelling to southern Honduras and Nicaragua to advance his political aspirations, presidential candidate Senator Robert Dole was deeply affected by “the suffering in Central America,” which, as he saw first-hand, “is widespread.” He was particularly moved, he says, by the suffering he saw “when I visited Miguel Cardinal Obando y Bravo, the Archbishop of Managua, and Violetta Chamorro, the publisher of the censored opposition paper La Prensa—courageous reminders that we are working for something very precious: freedom and dignity.” He also saw “widespread suffering” in southern Honduras: “in the hollow eyes of thousands of Nicaraguan refugees.” That is all. No Honduran “children with swollen bellies, old people looking like corpses, women and children begging for food, men roaming the streets searching for work” while the wealthy enjoy “democracy” in Tegucigalpa; no victims of U.S. terror in Nicaragua, no peasants in Honduras wandering through the countryside after having been “displaced by the contras,” in our “pursuit of the goals that nearly all Americans share: democracy and an end to Soviet intrusion in Central America” (Dole). In short, a worthy candidate for the office of President.42

The visit by Senator Dole and his delegation to Managua was a “circus,” in Dole’s words, because President Ortega insisted that the meeting be public, saying “it was better that the interviews take place in the presence of witnesses, so there could be no false posturing afterward,” Stephen Kinzer reports. Senator John McCain opened the meeting by informing Ortega breezily that he had just met with contra military commander Enrique Bermúdez of Somoza’s National Guard: “Colonel Bermúdez sends his very best regards,” Senator McCain told Mr. Ortega as the meeting began. “Colonel Bermúdez and Ronald Reagan should stop killing Nicaraguan children,” Ortega responded. He also asked “Why doesn’t President Reagan receive me or my congressmen? We receive you whenever you want. You don’t even consult us in advance, which is a lack of respect. You just say there’s a flight, and we’re coming.”43

Ortega understated the point. While it is taken for granted that U.S. supporters of the proxy army should have free access to the territory under U.S. attack, even giving public talks and press conferences where they call for renewed attacks against Nicaragua by the “freedom fighters” they praise for helping the CIA defend liberty, the Godfather’s own turf is under stricter control. Thus, when a delegation of Nicaraguan parliamentarians including six opposition delegates sought to visit the U.S. to present Congress with a formal protest against contra aid, their visas were delayed in order to force them to cancel their visit, an event considered so normal in a terrorist culture that it passes without notice or comment, along with the barring of mothers tortured by Duarte’s security services from our sacred soil, because they might tell the wrong stories to a few people in churches, threatening American democracy.44

When Senator Dole protested the jailing of two opposition lawyers for 30 days for participation in an unauthorized protest rally, banned by the emergency regulations, Ortega responded by producing “a photograph of an American priest, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, being arrested in the United States in April during a protest against American support for the contras.” He offered to free the two lawyers immediately in exchange for the freedom of Father Bourgeois, a Navy veteran wounded in the Vietnam war and now a Maryknoll priest, who is serving a nine-month sentence in Federal Prison in Louisiana for trespassing after a demonstration at a military base; in Ortega’s words, “held in your jail for protesting your president’s immoral policy of killing Nicaraguans.” The two opposition leaders were released in the custody of Rep. Thomas Harkin; Rev. Bourgeois remained in prison, with no further comment here, as there had been none before this odd point was raised by the totalitarian Sandinistas. Senator Dole’s press aide described the exchange offer as “a gimmick,” adding that “It is ludicrous to compare our system with theirs.” Shown a photo of the priest being dragged off by two policemen at the moment of his arrest, Dole responded: “You have us mixed up with the Soviet Union.”45 The press treated the matter of Rev. Bourgeois’s incarceration, previously unreported, as a curiosity. Dole’s brilliant and courageous performance at the “circus,” as he perceives it, promises to be a centerpiece for his presidential campaign.

The incident and others like it, and the reaction here, reflect a form of imperial arrogance that is remarkable in the late 20th century, though perhaps King Leopold’s delegates behaved similarly in the Congo a century ago. One might ask how Japanese fascist legislators would have been greeted in Washington in 1942, when the national territory was not under attack, bringing greetings from General Tojo.

Meanwhile the U.S. government proceeds to convert Honduras into its major base for subversion and aggression in the region, taking over the role that Nicaragua filled under Somoza. Apart from its favorable location for these ends, Honduras offers other advantages, as explained by Colonel Joseph Lucas, director of operations for the Southern Command:

The airfields we build give us training we couldn’t get anywhere else; there is not a place in the United States where you can go and build an airfield. There is not a place in the United States where the National Guard can go and build a long road without running afoul of the unions and contractors and all that [“The environmental impact statements alone could kill you,” another Southern Command spokesman said.] So we benefit in the training aspect and training for every point from deployment to employment to redeployment to country [sic].46

There is no concern here over Honduras, not a country but rather a region to be robbed by the traditional oligarchy and their foreign associates along with the new super-rich, the military and politicians on the U.S. aid gravy train, while much of the population is reduced to ever greater misery. The country is a “democracy,” under effective military rule, the overwhelming majority of the population playing the approved role of passive onlookers. As U.S. influence increased in the early 1980s, so did human rights violations, corruption, prostitution, economic decline for much of the population, ecological destruction in the interests of export-oriented agribusiness linked to U.S. corporations, and the takeover of parts of the country by U.S. Nicaraguan mercenaries. These developments elicit virtually no commentary, no protest, no public meetings, no congressional inquiries—in fact, nothing, except for the normal self-adulation in elite circles about this further demonstration of our impressive dedication to democracy and human rights.

Escaping the confines of the culture of terrorism, one might also detect other topics worthy of some concern, not only in the “fledgling democracies” but even in the functioning democracy of Costa Rica. Consider, for example, the problem of treatment of the indigenous population. In the early 1980s, Operation Truth succeeded in evoking a passionate concern over the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua after reports that several dozen had been killed by the Sandinista army and thousands forcibly removed in conflicts related to the early stages of the U.S. attack against Nicaragua. This was an intriguing phenomenon in a society that is erected upon genocide of the native population and is not famous for its commitment to right these wrongs or for its attention to the fate of indigenous peoples elsewhere. In his Kennedy parody during his visit to the Bitburg cemetery to honor the memory of the war dead, including Waffen SS, Ronald Reagan solemnly announced that “I am a Jew . . . , a Miskito Indian in Nicaragua,” and Elie Wiesel flew down to witness their plight and evoke the conscience of the nation over it; in contrast, the revered moralist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate found himself unable to manage even a private communication to the government of Israel to ask that they cease their contribution to ongoing genocide in Guatemala, with tens of thousands of Indians slaughtered.47

Concern over the Miskitos abated when it could no longer be exploited for the cause of mobilizing public support for the war against Nicaragua,48 but it is striking to observe that this unprecedented passion for justice for Native Americans did not extend beyond the narrow confines of the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, to Guatemala for example, where the Indian population was being massacred wholesale and driven to concentration camps called “model villages” with enthusiastic support from the United States, or to other regions where the normal conditions of life persist. Journalists and humanitarians do not, for example, wring their hands in dismay over the life of the Guaymí Indians in plantations run by U.S. corporations in Costa Rica and Panama to the present day, where they are assigned such tasks as cleaning drainage ditches, which “requires wading—often up to one’s chest—through snake-infested, muddy, stagnant water contaminated by pesticide and fertilizer runoff.” This is a task that is appropriate for them because “foremen claim that the Guaymí, unlike the Latins or Blacks, ‘don’t mind’ cleaning drainage ditches,” and an assignment that is cheap for the companies because the Indians can be denied health care, are readily exploitable and constantly degraded, and can be replaced easily by others when they die of disease and overwork.49 Nor do we organize proxy armies to pressure the governments to relieve these conditions, or even raise questions at board meetings in New York.

All such questions are off the agenda, useless for the service of power and privilege in the United States, on a par with the ecological destruction and starvation in Central America in the beans-and-forest to hamburger-and-pet food racket. Also off the agenda is the spraying of extensive areas of northern and western Guatemala with highly toxic defoliants by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in May-June, 1987, with 14 people killed, halted after protests by the Guatemalan Congress, in regions that are not known for drug producing but are “conflict zones” in the guerrilla war, leading “some observers to conclude that the anti-drug program had been incorporated into the counter-insurgency strategy of the Guatemalan army.”50 Or, putting speculation aside, it was never a matter of concern that by the 1970s about 40% of U.S. pesticide exports went to Central America, “making the region the world’s highest per capita user of pesticides,” an environmental as well as human calamity as pesticide poisoning takes a further toll among the suffering population. The issue is confronted nowhere apart from Nicaragua, where the government in 1979 “initiated a bold new experiment in environmental policy to combat decades of ecological destruction,” a commitment “rarely seen anywhere in the world,” but now, thankfully, undermined by the U.S. crusade for freedom.51

The same cynicism was illustrated with regard to Nicaragua before the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship. The worst polluter in Nicaragua was the U.S. Penwalt corporation, which poisoned Lake Managua with tons of mercury while operating in Nicaragua to evade U.S. environmental laws.52 During the 1960s and 1970s, Nicaraguan GNP nearly tripled—a triumph of the Alliance for Progress. Meanwhile child malnutrition doubled—a triumph of the particular mode of development sponsored under the Alliance. In 1970, half the population consumed about 70% of the recommended caloric allowance, 56% of children under five were malnourished and over a quarter of these suffered severe malnutrition, a factor contributing to the extremely high infant mortality rate.53 None of this aroused concern. On the contrary, it was the efforts of the government to overcome this human disaster after the 1979 revolution that evoked fear and horror in the United States, disguised under the sudden conversion to the cause of “democracy” and “human rights.”