last night i watched a movie about chile in 1973. it was about

[catmother]

corruption and torture. it starting me thinking. this seems to happen all over the world. what causes people and governments to act this way? is power all that important? :dilemma:

[Ignacio Upton]

1. What was it? House of Spirits?

nt.

[catmother]

2. no. but i do recall that one. this one was called "love and

shadows" (i believe). it was with antonio banderes and jennifer connelley. i believe "house of spirits" was with meryl streep.

[Judi Lynn]

3. You might want to look over some US documdents going back to 1970

on Nixon/Kissinger's scheme to overthrow Salvador Allende:

Department of State, U.S. Embassy Cables on the Election of Salvador Allende and Efforts to Block his Assumption of the Presidency, September 5-22, 1970: This series of eight cables, written by U.S. Ambassador to Chile, Edward Korry, record the reaction and activities of the U.S. Embassy after the election of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity coalition. Known as "Korrygrams," his reports contain some of the most candid, and at times undiplomatic, opinions and observations ever offered by a U.S. Ambassador. With titles such as "No Hope for Chile," and "Some Hope for Chile," Korry provides extensive details about political efforts to block Allende's ratification by the Chilean Congress. The cables report on the activities of Chile's political institutions in response to Allende's election and provide Korry's explicit assessments of the character of key Chilean leaders, particularly the outgoing president, Eduardo Frei.
(snip)

coming forward to the last entry, from 1982:

FBI, Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA), January 21, 1982: This report provides a summary of information taken from prison letters written by Michael Townley, the DINA agent responsible for the assassination of Orlando Letelier. This report includes information not directly provided to the FBI by Townley, but drawn from analysis of his correspondence with his DINA handler: details about meetings between Chilean President Pinochet and Italian terrorists and spies, codenames and activities of DINA personnel, collaboration between DINA and anti-Castro Cubans; the creation of a fake terrorist organization to take the blame for a DINA kidnapping in Argentina; DINA involvement in relations between Great Britain and Northern Ireland; and Townley's fear that information about kidnappings and assassinations of prominent critics of Pinochet would somehow be traced back to him.
(snip)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8.htm

[catmother]

4. i wasn't sure, but i thought the US might have been involved. why

not? we were in el salvador and nicaraugua. always putting our 2 cents where it doesn't belong. was it el salvador that we put the bad guys in power and then realized it later?:cry:

[Judi Lynn]

5. The right-wing U.S. Presidents have ALWAYS known exactly with whom

they are doing business. They arrange support for the leaders who will protect right-wing U.S. interests in their countries. If you want to see some of the effects of U.S. meddling in El Salvador, here's a look at lots of photos which might refresh your memory. Some are simply too graphic to easily display in a D.U. post:

http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2004-37%2CGGLD%3Aen&q=massacre+El+Salvador

You might want to do some scanning of material on "El Mozote," only ONE of the massacres in El Salvador.

El Mozote massacre
The El Mozote Massacre took place in the village of El Mozote, in Morazán department, El Salvador, on December 11, 1981, when Salvadoran armed forces killed an estimated 900 civilians in an anti-guerrilla campaign. It is thought to be the worst such atrocity in modern Latin American history.

The massacre was both a low point and a turning point in the bitter civil war that ravaged this Central American country between the late 1970s and early 1990s. As news of the massacre slowly emerged, the Reagan administration in the United States dismissed it as FMLN propaganda because it seriously undermined efforts by the U.S. government to bolster the human rights image of the Salvadoran government, which the US was supporting with large amounts of military aid. Subsequently, the details of the massacre were verified, raising new doubts about American Cold War-driven policy towards both the country and the region.
(snip/...)

http://www.answers.com/topic/el-mozote-massacre

THE MOZOTE MASSACRE

It was the reporters' word against the government's

by Mike Hoyt
Hoyt is associate editor of CJR.
EL MOZOTE, El Salvadore, Oct. 20 -- In a small rectangular plot among the overgrown ruins of a village here, a team of forensic archeologists has opened a window on El Salvador's nightmarish past. . . . Nearly 11 years after American-trained soldiers were said to have torn through El Mozote and surrounding hamlets on a rampage in which at least 794 people were killed, the bones have emerged as stark evidence that the claims of peasant survivors and the reporters of a couple of American journalists were true.

So begins Tim Golden's October 22 New York Times story, which describes the unearthing of skeletons by forensic experts working in what was once a collection of rural villages in northern El Salvador. A similar article, by Douglas Farah, appeared the same day in The Washington Post. Reporters from both papers had been the only journalists to report on the 1981 massacre, and both Raymond Bonner of the Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the Post paid a price for their coverage, which drew immediate fire from Reagan administration officials and others on the political right. To Bonner and Guillermoprieto, and to photojournalist Susan Meiselas, who traveled to El Mozote with Bonner back in 1981, the belated confirmation of what they knew to be true was both welcome and disturbing, bringing back strong memories of the grisly scene they came upon at the end of a long walk through Morazan province, a guerrilla stronghold.

It was shortly before Christmas in 1981 that soldiers from the elite American-trained Atlacatl Battalion conducted a search-and-destroy operation around El Mozote. A few days after they entered the area, the guerrillas' clandestine radio station began to broadcast reports of a massacre of civilians in the area. Reporters started pushing the guerrillas, officially called the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, for proof. "There wasn't a reporter there (in El Salvador) who didn't want to go in with them," Bonner recalls.

The rebels, who had a sophisticated sense of how to use the media, offered guided behind-the-lines tours to reporters from America's two most important newspapers. Bonner and Meiselas were the first to go in, in early January. The journey involved traveling through government-held territory. Bonner remembers fording a river, carrying his clothing over his head, under a full moon. Meiselas says that what she most vividly remembers about their arrival in El Mozote was the sound, or the lack of it: "A very haunted village. Nothing moving. A plaza with a number of destroyed houses. And total silence."

In his story for the Times, Bonner reported seeing "the charred skulls and bones of dozens of bodies buried under burned-out roofs, beams, and shattered tiles," and more bodies along the trail leading into the village and at the edge of a nearby cornfield, including bodies of women and children.

Guillermoprieto arrived at the village a few days later, with another band of rebels. She wrote of "dozens of decomposing bodies still seen beneath the rubble and lying in nearby fields, despite the month that has passed since the incident." In what had once been a white-washed church, "countless bits of bones -- skulls, rib cages, femurs, a spinal column -- poked out of the rubble."

"The difficulty I had at the time," says Meiselas, "was finding visual evidence of what had occurred. The bodies were dispersed. The burial sites, we didn't have any clues to where they were. We couldn't confirm the numbers."

The numbers the local peasants were reporting were staggering. They gave Bonner a list of 733 names, mostly children, women, and old people, who they said had been murdered by government soldiers. The lead paragraph of his January 27 article read: "From interviews with people who live in this small mountain village and surrounding hamlets, it is clear that a massacre of major proportions occurred here last month," and the piece went on to cite a great deal of circumstantial evidence tying the killings to the army.
(snip/...)

http://archives.cjr.org/year/93/1/mozote.asp



http://images.google.com/images?q=El+Mozote++&svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-37,GGLD:en&start=40&sa=N

[catmother]

6. thanks. i need my memory refreshed. actually i wasn't paying

too much attention to politics back then. too busy working. the movie "of love and shadows" was based on a book written by isabel allende, niece of salvador allende.

some reviews of the movie were good -- some bad. one reviewer said it would appeal to the left wing. i guess that's us.

:cry:

[Judi Lynn]

7. The pattern has seemed to play out that Americans usually DON'T know

what has happened unless something extraordinary happens, like news somehow leaks back to the States, or someone finally gets some documents declassified and publishes them.

Most information ordinary Americans have had on the blood bath in Chile following the Nixon/Kissinger engineered overthrow of the elected Salvador Allende, and the emplacement of the coup President, General Pinochet didn't really get around here until the later years. It has been basically buried, and unknown.

They haven't been open about it, because they know there would not actually be much popular support among honest, clean Americans.

[catmother]

8. you're absolutely right. i remember in the 80s the front page

of a new york newspaper had headlines about el salvador. i knew that things were bad. in fact, we were working very hard and one of the attorneys was complaining. i said to him "you're lucky you're here, not in el salvador". :cry: