Reagan and Central America
* What: Civil wars and campaigns of repression in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. In Guatemala, the US government collaborated on campaigns that were clearly genocidal. El Salvador and Nicaragua saw mass atrocities and Reagan-sponsored terrorism.
* Reagan's support for genocide and terrorism included American weapons, funding, CIA and military intelligence, US government recruiting and payment of mercenaries, US troops as military advisers, bombing campaigns by the US military, US government payment and direction of third party nations Argentina and Israel, US diplomatic support, and US officials covering up atrocities from the world media.
* On one side were the Reagan administration; military dictatorships in El Salvador and Guatemala (until very limited military controlled semi-democracies began in 1984 in El Salvador, in 1986 in Guatemala); Contra guerillas, mercenaries, and Miskito Indians (until a Miskito-Sandinista truce in 1984); and the military dictatorship of Honduras, whose country became a base for the Contras to carry out terrorist attacks against Nicaraguans.
* On the other side were a democratically elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua with a broad coalition of farmers, laborers, business, churches, students, and a small number of Marxists. In El Salvador, the FMLN coalition of guerillas was a mix of leftists and Marxists. But they were not the main targets of the dictatorship, army, and death squads. A nonviolent popular protest movement of farmers, workers, and students led by the Catholic Church and civic organizations was. In Guatemala, a few tiny groups of guerillas were not the main targets of the military. Nonviolent Mayan Indian villages were the main victims of genocide.
* The Body Count: Over 325,000 Central Americans killed, at least 200,000 Guatemalans, 75,000 Salvadorans, 50,000 Nicaraguans, and 184 Hondurans.
* From 500,000 to 1,000,000 Salvadoran refugees fled to the United States, 500,000 to 750,000 more to Mexico. One fifth of the Salvadoran population was displaced, including within the country. At least 15% of all Guatemalans fled their nation, nearly all of them Mayan Indians, just from 1981-82 alone. 1.5 million Guatemalans fled the violence either within Guatemala or by fleeing the country. Genocide in Guatemala was so extreme, it was the only nation anywhere in Latin America to consistently decline in population.
* In Guatemala, what had been a civil war in the 1950s between the military and guerillas turned into a wave of repression against an urban population in the 1960s and 70s, and then became outright genocide against Mayan Indians in the 1980s. 626 Indian villages were massacred. Over 85% of victims killed in the civil war were slaughtered by the Guatemalan army, 10% by paramilitary death squads. Reagan holds the ugly distinction of causing the deaths of more Native people than any other president in US history.
* Who Also Gets the Blame:
* The regimes of Generals Efrain Rios Montt, Oscar Mejia, and Fernando Lucas Garcia in Guatemala deserve the greatest blame for genocide. Rios Montt was the most extreme of the three, a fanatic evangelical fundamentalist who believed he was directed by God to kill those he most hated, Mayan Indians and Catholics, both of whom he considered Marxists. Reagan infamously claimed Rios Montt “gets a bum rap” during the same week Rios Montt ordered the highest number of massacres.
* The regime of Rene D'Aubisson in El Salvador, leader of ARENA, a far right party that directed death squads. D'Aubisson's bodyguards personally carried out the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero.
* The Contra mercenaries and its leaders Adolfo Calero and Ernesto Bermudez in Nicaragua were far more terrorists than rebels. They attacked farms and villages, murdering and raping civilians, almost never fighting the military. At no point did the Contras have a popular base of support among Nicaraguans. Many such as Bermudez were formerly of the hated National Guard, enforcers for the Somoza family dictatorship, despised by nearly all Nicaraguans. Many Contras were hired mercenaries. Some Contras were low level former Sandinistas, politically useful as front men. Only Eden Pastora, known as Comandante Zero, was a prominent former Sandinista. Pastora was based in Costa Rica and avoided other Contras, and quit fighting in 1984. Only Miskito Indian fighters in the group Misurata had a popular base among their own population.
* The CIA shares the blame for deaths among the Miskitos when it used their fighters and territory to launch Operation Christmas, and much of the blame for all Contra terrorism. The CIA recruited Adolfo Calero all the way back in 1962. The CIA organized most Contra groups and recruited the other groups to ally together, providing training, intelligence, money, and weapons.
* Dogmatic anti-Communists, including Reagan, often blamed the victims, the Sandinistas, though less than a tenth of the Sandinistas were Marxist-influenced, let alone Communists. But the Sandinista military did carry out reprisals and forced relocation of 10,000 Miskito Indians. With most Contras hiding, sheltered in bases in Honduras, Sandinista forces turned to attacks upon Miskito villages in a failed but bloody attempt to defeat them. The Miskitos and Sandinistas finally signed a truce in 1984, giving Miskitos an autonomous region and some self rule in 1987.
* The regime of General Policarpio Paz in Honduras and his brutal death squad Battalion 316 controlled the country until 1982, and were infamous for corruption and ties to drug cartels. His successor, Roberto Suazo, was nominally elected, but most parties were barred and the military remained the real power in the country. Honduras became a base for the Contras to launch terrorist attacks against Nicaraguan villages, schools, hospitals, farms, and industry.
* Vice President and then President George Bush Sr. was informed throughout of the illegal funding of the Contras. After becoming president in 1988, he continued US government support for the Guatemalan and Salvadoran governments and Contra terrorists carrying out atrocities. The civil wars only came to an end because of a peace process pushed by Costa Rican President Arias.
* Bush also pardoned all defendants in the Iran-Contra scandal for their crimes. This enabled them to become part of his administration and then that of his son's. Both Bush administrations set records for having the most ex-convicts of any administration.
* When the Iran-Contra scandal broke, most other criminals involved conveniently blamed the late CIA Director William Casey. While Casey certainly played a huge role, that does not absolve the other criminals.
* Iran-Contra defendant Colonel Oliver North played the central role in funneling money illegally to support Contra terrorism. North directed money laundering and weapons smuggling from the White House basement.
* Elliot Abrams led the State Department's Human Rights Office in covering up atrocities and human rights abuses and attacking human rights groups. Most notoriously, he claimed a massacre at El Mozote of over 500 Salvadoran civilians was “not credible,” arguing it was purely made up by leftist guerillas. Abrams also convinced the Sultan of Brunei to give $10 million to Contra terrorists.
* John Negroponte was the US Ambassador to Honduras, appointed to be a complete change from the previous ambassador appointed by Carter, who lobbied for human rights. Negroponte provided logistics support for Contra terrorists, justified human rights abuses by the Honduran dictatorship to Congress, and worked to undermine peace talks.
* Otto Reich ran the Office of Public Diplomacy, a “white propaganda” operation spreading positive stories about the Contras to try to counterbalance massive evidence of their atrocities.
* Pat Roberson and the Christian Broadcasting Network funneled millions to Contra terrorists, even holding telethons to support them in the name of fighting Communism, though none of the nations involved were Communist or in any danger of becoming so.
* The Argentine military dictatorship sent arms and training by military advisers and intelligence agents, many of the same torturers carrying out human rights abuses in their own country.
* Israel and South Africa also sent military advisers and weapons.
* The Saudi Arabian monarchy contributed $35 million to Contra terrorism at the request of the Reagan administration.
* The Sultan of Brunei, like the Saudis an extremely wealthy absolute monarchy flush with oil money, contributed S10 million. Amusingly, North's money laundering operation proved to be surprisingly incompetent and deposited it to the wrong account, and so the funds were never used.
* The Taiwanese government allowed North to solicit $2 million from conservative and anti-Communist Taiwanese businessmen to support Contra terrorism.
* Conservative fund raiser Carl Chanell raised $2.7 million for Contra terrorists, working with Otto Reich's Office of Public Diplomacy. He pleaded guilty to fraud, but then died from pneumonia.
* The US Congress sent $100 million to the Contras on condition it not be used for “logistics.” To Congress's credit, Speaker “Tip” O'Neil and Edward Boland led the opposition to Reagan's Contra terrorism. The Boland Amendment cut off funds for the Contras, leading directly to the Iran-Contra Scandal, an attempt to continue to fund the terrorism without Congress's approval.
* Reagan was the blindest and perhaps the most fanatic man to ever be US President. His own diaries reveal a man who saw Communists everywhere, in every nation, every profession, every group that opposed him on virtually any issue, seemingly everywhere but under his bed. The world according to Ronald Reagan was one where Communists had as much power as in Reagan's worst nightmare and Communists' wildest dream.
* To a very paranoid Ronald Reagan, tiny Nicaragua with territory seventy times smaller than the US and a population less than a third of Los Angeles was a grave threat to the US and every other nation in North America. Even tinier Grenada, an island smaller than Reagan's home of Orange County and with a population smaller than Bloomington, Indiana, was also somehow a threat to the US and the entire region. Thus Reagan launched an invasion of Grenada in 1985. US troops found nothing but an airport being built for tourism, and so the Reagan administration put out false claims of Soviet stockpiles of arms and a Cuban base, claiming Cuban construction workers were commandos.
* A democratic and wildly popular movement, the Sandinistas, at the time Reagan began his war, had the support of fully nine tenths of Nicaraguans, from businessmen to church groups to students, urban laborers, farmers, and the middle class. Among them were some leaders who were Marxist-influenced, though not orthodox Communists nor favoring dictatorship. But to dogmatic anti-Communists like Reagan, this was enough. A single Communist in an organization always made it “Communist” or Communist dominated, and they assumed all Communists were controlled from Moscow. This was not even remotely true, since Communists had always fought amongst themselves since the 1920s. (See Sections Four and Nine.)
* This, to be honest, delusion of Reagan's had tragic consequences for the whole region. Reagan absolutely believed Nicaragua had to be defeated, its democratic movement crushed, and he was willing to wreck all of Central America to do so. He assumed the fall of the previous government, the US allied Somoza dictatorship, had to be planned by Moscow, rather than the local uprising it was. (Somoza led a brutal regime that treated Nicaragua like his own plantation.) Reagan also assumed Castro and Cuba were controlling the Sandinistas, and Cuba in turn was run by the Kremlin. Finally, he assumed the Sandinistas must be behind uprisings in neighboring El Salvador and Guatemala.
* None of the claimed Communist conspiracies believed by Reagan were true. The Sandinistas had no Soviet support in its early days, not until half a decade after Reagan attacked Nicaragua with the Contras. Most early support came from, for example, democratic allies in Costa Rica and Venezuela. Cuba's help to Nicaragua was always mostly nonmilitary, teachers, doctors, and technicians building roads and schools. There were some small arms sent by Cuba, none by the Soviets. The Soviets did send about two dozen helicopters, five to six years after Reagan first attacked Nicaragua with the Contras.
* In El Salvador, the country had long been ruled by the Fourteen Families, wealthy white elites ruling over a mestizo and Indian population under a military dictatorship. A rebel group, FMLN, was a coalition of leftists, socialists, and some Marxists. While Reagan assumed they must be controlled from Nicaragua, in turn controlled by Cuba, and yet in turn controlled by the Soviets (anti Communist conspiracy theories were always ridiculously elaborate) in fact they were a popular uprising. The FMLN got no direction from other countries, only some small arms, with most of their weapons seized from the Salvadoran military or police and funding for their uprising from robbery and kidnappings.
* The Salvadoran dictatorship, always brutal, became far worse precisely because Reagan collaborated with them. US planes bombed El Salvador from the Panama Canal Zone. US Special Forces trained Salvadoran troops, who now modeled their tactics on the US-Vietnam War. US arms poured in. Salvadoran soldiers massacred civilians, raped and tortured with impunity. The Archbishop of El Salvador, Oscar Romero, had earlier been murdered by the Salvadoran military, and part of the crowd of his funeral mourners were massacred. Four American nuns and a lay volunteer in El Salvador had also been murdered, but not before being gang raped by soldiers. In one of the most surreal scenes in Congressional history, Reagan's Secretary of State, Al Haig, argued before Congress the nuns must have been armed, fired on the soldiers, and then tried to run a roadblock.
* From the beginning, the Salvadoran army attacks were far more on civilians than on the rebels. The dictatorship's main targets were farmers, unions, churches, and civic groups. The FLMN was willing to end the war in 1982, offering to give up fighting if they could run in elections. But both the dictatorship and Reagan refused. The war would continue for the rest of Reagan's time in office, and then Bush Sr.'s. The FMLN did give up fighting in 1992, and takes part in elections to this very day, as one of the two main parties in El Salvador, and has elected Salvadoran presidents.
* The war could have ended ten years earlier, but for Reagan and his sponsored military dictatorship. Instead, the repression worsened. There were a series of yet more massacres across the country. The dictatorship sponsored a farcical “election” in 1984. The FMLN was barred, and urged a boycott. The political left was supposedly represented by the Christian Democrats, a party that is actually to the right of the Republican Party in the US, supporting an official state church for example. The only other major party was D'Aubission's ARENA, tied to deaths squads and the murder of Archbishop Romero, and even further to the right, almost fascist. ARENA's death squads killed many during the election. ARENA only lost because the CIA financed the Christian Democrats.
* The level of repression stayed the same. Finally, the massacre of six Jesuit priests and their two housekeepers in 1989 was enough. The UN sponsored a human rights agreement. Costa Rican President Arias negotiated a region wide ceasefire in 1991. The FMLN took part in elections in spite of right wing death squad murders. A Truth Commission investigated and found 85% of the violence came from the army, 10% from death squads, and only 5% from the rebels, the last almost all military targets. Most of the Salvadoran-American population dates their arrival from fleeing Reagan's wars.
* To Reagan, even genocide in Guatemala was justified in the name of fighting Communists and “terrorists,” and those carrying out genocide were getting “a bum rap.” The Guatemalan Civil War had begun all the way back in the 1950s, when Eisenhower ordered Guatemala's democratic government overthrown. Ike's reasoning was that their president was pro Communist since he no longer outlawed being a Communist. (His Secretary of State and head of the CIA, the Dulles brothers, were also big investors in the country.) A few Guatemalan soldiers revolted and the rebels were quickly crushed. Then in a pattern that would repeat itself, the military dictatorship started rounding up and killing anyone they imagined supported the guerillas.
* This kind of repression continued through the 1960s and 70s, mostly targeting those in the cities, until it took a far worse turn in the early 1980s. The dictatorship, working with the Reagan administration, committed outright genocide, deliberately targeting Mayan Indians. This was way beyond political repression. Every element of genocide was present, targeting civilian noncombatants, race-motivated atrocities, using rape or mass rapes as a weapon, using starvation as a weapon, forced relocation, and war on culture. This was Reagan-sponsored genocide, Reagan-approved, Reagan-funded and trained. Reagan sent money, CIA training, and weapons including helicopters and tanks. Reagan publicly defended this genocide to the world. Reagan thought that dictator Ríos Montt, “is a man of great personal integrity and commitment,” “totally dedicated to democracy” with “progressive efforts.” Two retired US generals told Guatemalan officials on Reagan's behalf, “Mr. Reagan recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done.” The US Embassy in Guatemala insisted evidence of genocide was a Communist conspiracy of disinformation, and even accused human rights group Amnesty International of being a Communist front.
* The Guatemalan army carried out scorched earth tactics, starving Mayan Indians out, massacring villages, carrying out deaths by beheading, hacking to death, burning alive, or burying alive. An especially vicious tactic was bashing in the heads of small children on rocks, usually in front of their parents. Mass rapes were epidemic, including targeting pregnant women with rape to cause miscarriages. Perhaps the ugliest aspect of the genocide was ordering Mayan Indians to kill other Mayan Indians. Mayan men, the lightly armed Civil Patrols, were ordered to attack other Mayans or their families would be massacred by government troops.
* Guatemala was the Central American nation that received the least amount of attention from Americans and American media. Most Americans did not know where Guatemala was, especially back in the 1980s before there was a substantial Guatemalan immigrant population in the US. Thus the failure for the lack of American action to stop this genocide has to fall partly on the American media.
* The US media largely failed to pay attention because, unlike El Salvador and Nicaragua, there did not seem to be any possibility of American troops being sent to Guatemala. A decade earlier, the media and US public were more concerned with the 58,000 American deaths than the more than twenty times as many Vietnamese deaths. Similarly, during the Iraq War, the public was far more concerned with under 5,000 US deaths compared to as many as two hundred times as many Iraqi deaths.
* Virtually the only pressure put on Reagan and Guatemala's dictatorship was outside the US. Mayan author Rigoberta Menchu published her famous “testimonio,” I, Rigoberta Menchu. Her book won her the Nobel Peace Prize and international condemnation of genocide. Rios Montt's repression even targeted fellow military officers. So they overthrew him. The next dictator, General Oscar Mejia, agreed to very limited elections in 1986. The winner was, as in El Salvador, a Christian Democrat to the right of the Republican Party. While mass executions continued, they were not as many.
* Six years after, the rebels were finally allowed to become a political party, as was a party led by Rios Montt, the dictator who carried out the worst of the genocide. It took until 2009 before those who carried out genocide faced trial. Rios Montt finally was convicted in 2013. The verdict was overturned, but he will be retried in 2015. Some guilty of genocide received sentences of over 6,000 years.
* None of these three countries were in any danger of becoming Communist dictatorships. Nicaragua was actually a democracy, one where the Sandinistas, portrayed by Reagan as a demonic Communist threat, were actually fairly chosen by elections. The Sandinistas even peacefully gave up power after being narrowly defeated in a second set of fair elections. Guerillas in both El Salvador and Guatemala also favored popular rule, and became political parties after war's end, as they had long called for. Guatemala, the country most brutalized, is where the guerillas were smallest and weakest, and never had any remote chance of winning. But Guatemala also has the largest Indian population, and a racist elite that feared them lashed out the harshest at any possible threat to their control.
* In the end, Reagan's wars accomplished little but mass murder. In the twenty first century, both El Salvador and Nicaragua freely chose the very same parties the Reagan administration carried out terrorism to prevent getting elected. In Guatemala, a former general who actually personally took part in genocide, Otto Perez Molina, recently became the country's president. There is even evidence that Perez Molina ordered the death of a Catholic bishop. This is the sole “success” Reagan and his supporters can point to in Central America. Guatemalan society is so traumatized by genocide, slightly over half of its people will vote for a man who carried it out.
* There was widespread opposition to Reagan's state terrorism in Nicaragua and El Salvador. One of the most popular stickers of the 1980s read “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam.” The public pushed Congress, who cut off funding for Contra terrorism. This led directly to the Iran-Contra scandal, where Colonel Oliver North sold weapons to Iran and then used the money to illegally fund Contra terrorists.
* The defendants were all convicted in the Iran-Contra Scandal, not for genocide or terrorism, but for misdemeanors including lying to Congress, withholding information from Congress, and in North's case, for embezzling $40,000. (North told Congress the rather ludicrous lie that the money came from him saving his change every day. The jury did not buy the lie during trial either.)
* Bizarrely, North became a hero to many conservatives. His emotional appearance on television during the scandal hearing moved many, as did his cynically testifying in his Marine uniform. (Though still in the Marines, North never wore his uniform while working in the White House smuggling arms and laundering money.) North ran for the US Senate and came very close to winning, only being narrowly defeated because former First Lady Nancy Reagan campaigned against him, accusing him of lying by saying that Reagan approved the smuggling operation.
* Whether Reagan approved of Iran-Contra or not is ultimately a distraction from crimes far more serious. It is clear that Reagan and his administration set up, sponsored, recruited for, trained, paid for, and directed terrorism in Nicaragua. In El Salvador, the Reagan administration's actions were state-sponsored repression by a military dictatorship. In Guatemala, Reagan collaborated with genocide.
* Today, those Americans complicit in genocide and terrorism still prosper. Negroponte went on to become GW Bush's Ambassador to the UN, and then Ambassador to Iraq, over the objections of human rights groups and congressmen. Elliot Abrams,who spent the 1980s covering up or denying human rights abuses, became GW Bush's adviser on human rights. Abrams was accused of playing a role in a failed overthrow of President Chavez of Venezuela. Some Salvadoran-Americans tried to sue former Salvadoran generals for civil damages. Along with those fleeing terrorism and genocide in Central America, some war criminals also fled to avoid prosecution and are living in the US today.