President Reagan not only funded the savage El Salvador government, he used that nation, as well as Guatemala and Honduras, as springboards to attack Nicaragua. James Carroll, in his award-winning "House of War"( Houghton Mifflin), said Reagan "increased what had been relatively modest support to three of the most repressive regimes in the world, just as their police-state methods reached new levels of savagery, all in the name of staving off the Marxists."
Just why the U.S. Developed Death Squads in El Salvador may have something to do with profit-hungry US corporations operating Central America. As Carroll sees it, "More than two thirds of the region's people had been made desperately poor over three generations by an American-sponsored, single-crop, agri-business economy that had made a mere 5 percent of the population fabulously wealthy."
" The Latin oligarchs were not owners, exactly," Carroll explains, "but in effect agents of such American companies as United Fruit and Domino Sugar, and multinational corporations like Gulf & Western. Dictators had been installed in these countries to protect this U.S. dominance."
The slaughter in El Salvador, in which the CIA played a primary role, expresses the duality of U.S. foreign policy---where the White House espouses freedom and self-determination for all peoples while the reality, kept from the knowledge of the American public, is a policy of oppression to serve the interests of misguided U.S. corporate officials exploiting foreign labor. Should it be a surprise that after years of busting labor unions from El Salvador to Iraq, US politicians are attempting to do the same Stateside? Is it surprising that after denying millions of people the world over their fundamental right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the U.S. Congress has extended the Patriot Act and President Obama has assumed kingly powers, including the right to arrest anyone and throw away the key?
In this stunning disintegration of American democracy, the CIA is regularly found siding with the worst corporate interests---big oil companies such as BP that want government to punish those who expect them to agree to a fair profit; agricultural giants that want cheap labor to maximize short-term profits; and so forth. Such firms are afraid of both free enterprise and fair enterprise, and have turned the face of the nation towards unbridled corporate fascism. Like the Ku Klux Klan of old, the CIA is the new illegal, "invisible empire," one that works harmoniously with its one-time employee, President Obama, to serve the needs of the Empire. The Republic is dead.#
(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant for good causes who also writes on political and military topics.)
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
7
4
3
