-Caveat Lector- from alt.conspiracy ----- As always, Caveat Lector. Om K ----- <A HREF="aol://5863:126/alt.conspiracy:508837">A CHAPTER FROM CIA'S SORDID PAST</A> ----- Subject: A CHAPTER FROM CIA'S SORDID PAST From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Dr. Jai Maharaj) Date: Mon, Mar 22, 1999 8:34 AM Message-id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> A CHAPTER FROM CIA'S SORDID PAST By K. V. Krishnaswamy The Hindu Monday, March 22, 1999 AS the Cold War was winding down in the late Eighties, one of Mr. Mikhail (remember him?) Gorbachev's advisers told an American friend: ``We are doing something really terrible to you. We are depriving you of an enemy.'' For all its tantalising simplicity, the statement was predicting with amazing clairvoyance the state of suspended animation in which the espionage agencies of the two superpowers, the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S. and the KGB of the former Soviet Union, were to find themselves in the aftermath of the Cold War's end. Even as these agencies have been reinventing a role for themselves in the past decade, startling new material from the archives is being released that throws light on their activities during the Cold War. The German reunification, for one, stirred a torrent of interest in the activities of the Stassi, the espionage agency of East Germany, and yielded an avalanche of information on the ways of the cloak-and-dagger men. The revelations in Germany caused no horrified reaction since Europe was the main battlefield and visible victim of the ideological war. But far away a grim battle was being fought which received hardly any attention, first because America saw no reason to turn the spotlight on it and secondly because it had won the battle even before it began through methods it is now regretting. The objective of that war was to keep communism out of the Americas. A flood of democratic vitality across the Latin American continent has recently led to a digging up of the recent past in order to come to terms with it, to garner knowledge to ensure against a repetition of that terrible experience. The arrest of the Chilean dictator, Gen. Pinochet, and the bizarre battle over his fate also helped focus some attention on a continent that has remained in the shadow for long. Now comes an apology from the American President for the way the CIA (not named by him, of course) teamed up in the Sixties and Seventies with rightist forces to instal a government in Guatemala that killed tens of thousands, including indigenous Mayan Indians, in a 36-year civil war. There was a free flow of arms and money to these fascist despots to keep communism and revolution at bay. Gen. Pinochet was one distinguished beneficiary of this short-sighted policy. Here is a resume, however imperfect, of that inglorious period in south and central American history. Only the tyranny of geography could have kept Asia largely ignorant of the brutalisation of those societies, of the murders and forced disappearances in the civil wars that tore the fabric of these nations. That many of them have been able to recover from the trauma of that period is a tribute to their resilience. It was a time when either bloc considered that if you were not with it you were in the enemy camp, when nonalignment and independence of foreign policy action were derided and undermined, when democracy was not yet fashionable. It was South America's misfortune that a revolution was succeeding so close to the capitalist bastion, in fact across the shores of America, sparking and spreading revolutionary fervour. It was a time when Latin America spawned more theorists than successful revolutions. America, with its vast resources and ideological fervour aided by an overzealous intelligence agency, ensured that no other revolution succeeded even as Washington went about trying to annul the successful one of Mr. Fidel Castro. The Castro example, alas, proved to be the wrong model. For, conditions in Latin America differed considerably as Che Guevara and his Bolivian adventurists were to find to their ultimate destruction. Guevara was then dreaming of ``opening the final stage of the liberation of the Americas,'' according to the diary recovered from his knapsack by the Bolivian military after his capture and murder in 1967. He had helped romanticise the Cuban revolution with his comrade-in-arms, Mr. Castro. But he was mistaken when it came to duplicating that revolution. For, what the revolutionaries in Latin America were up against was not the type of flabby dictatorship that Mr. Castro and his men faced and overthrew. They had to contend with a state apparatus in which the military by tradition exerted a dominant role and was well-entrenched. The regimes - encompassing a wide swath from Argentina deep down south to Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Central America's Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua - had for historical reasons a tendency to lapse into authoritarianism. They were, therefore, ever on the alert to meet leftist guerilla campaigns. At the ready were time-tested counter- revolutionary weapons: terror and torture, infiltration and intelligence and, above all, a notoriously ruthless apparatus whose face is just now being systematically unmasked. Gen. Pinochet's Chile typified the havoc wrought by the fascist groups as they entrenched themselves with generous assistance from the CIA. No one had any doubt then save sections of Americans that but for the active cooperation of the intelligence agency the democratic seed would have sprouted in Chile. The election of the socialist Salvador Allende was then hailed universally and Chile was held up as carrying the promise of a pluralist democratic society. Gen. Pinochet and his men in khaki stamped out that light in a violent coup that forced Allende to commit suicide. The year was 1973. The bloody decade had begun in earnest. The battle against communism had, of course, begun the previous decade, scoring a major victory with the liquidation of Che Guevara and his dedicated band of guerillas. ``The U.S. will no longer take part in campaigns of repression,'' Mr. Bill Clinton promised a fortnight ago. ``We must and will instead continue to support the peace and reconciliation process,'' he added at a forum with regional leaders in Guatemala city, hailing Guatemala as a society coming to terms with its painful past and moving forward. ``For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong and the U.S. must not repeat that mistake.'' ``We are determined to remember the past,'' the President said, ``but never to repeat it.'' To most Latin Americans, the apology must have come rather too late even in terms of its symbolism. Nor would the irony of it have been lost on them. For, only a month ago Guatemala's version of the truth commission had released its findings on the murders and disappearances that had taken place during the military regime. The only surprise in its conclusions was that they were contained in an official document. The report said that the U.S. gave money and training to Guatemalan forces that committed acts of genocide against Mayans and leftist groups and other extreme human rights abuses during the brutal conflict which began in 1960. It said that American training of Guatemalan military officers in counter-insurgency techniques played a significant role in the torture, kidnapping and execution of thousands of civilians. The CIA released crucial documents on its role to the Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission but has been reluctant to declassify details about its involvement in Chile. A U.S. Senate committee began an investigation in 1975 into the CIA's role in destabilising the socialist government of Allende. It found that the agency had run numerous covert operations to keep Allende from becoming President and had close ties to the most sinister of Gen. Pinochet's secret service organisations. Declassified documents also reveal that Richard Nixon in 1970 ordered the CIA to organise a military coup in Chile. The most revolting of the details relates to the vigilante killings, often by death squads composed of off-duty policemen. In the State of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, a former policeman operated a death squad. Almost all of these countries witnessed security men moonlighting as gangsters. A brutalised society and an inadequate judicial system ensured that the perpetrators had the cover of popular acquiescence and even approval. One of Argentina's well-known historians once warned that ``the next bend in the road for the countries of the continent is unlikely to be the last.'' But an America pushing for capitalist economic revolution in its backyard has the obligation to ensure that there are no more violent turns in Latin America's democratic path. End of the article by K. V. Krishnaswamy Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion. Jai Maharaj Latest world news at: http://www.flex.com/~jai/topnews.html Om Shanti ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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