¡Nunca Olvida! Never Forget! The US role in Iraq’s death squads

[NNN0LHI]

http://english.alarabonline.org/display.asp?fname=2006%5C09%5C09-09%5Czopinionz%5C970.htm&dismode=x&ts=09/09/2006%2007:45:12%20%C3%95

Hector Gomez Calito’s body was found by the road, 18 miles outside Guatemala City, his legs and stomach burnt, his tongue cut out.

‘Death in the Afternoon’, Edwin Charles, New Socialist April 1986

The year was 1986 and Guatemala had just emerged from 31 years of military dictatorship. The death toll stood at 138,000 since the CIA-engineered coup of 1954. The government had officially blamed the violence on everything from foreigners to the heat, yet most of the victims had been ‘disappeared’ by the various branches of the security forces (or private death squads largely made up of moonlighting members of the police or army), armed, trained and supported by the US military. Guatemala’s democratic ‘opening’ made little difference to the disenfranchised majority struggling for basic rights; nor did it halt the ravages of the security forces, which found themselves in a stronger position, free to pursue their internally directed war behind a ‘constitutional veneer’. By 1989 the death toll for the decade alone had reached some 100,000 killed and another 40,000 disappeared.

You can find a similar story in El Salvador, where the US felt it necessary, first, to engineer a civilian, José Napoléon Duarte, as president in 1980 and then to insist on constitutional (1982) and presidential (1984) elections. Such a commitment to ‘democracy’ provided the necessary gloss for the massive expansion of US military involvement under the Reagan administration, leading to a decade of brutal internal conflict. In fact, the US ran the war in El Salvador through a handful of assets in key positions and a military mission whose role was to create counterinsurgency forces to take the war to the guerrilla while the bulk of the armed forces held static positions. The result was a genocidal war of aggression against the Salvadoran population, whose targets, as Chomsky reminds us, were ‘peasants, labour organizers, students, priests or anyone suspected of working in the interests of the people’.

The full extent of the US role in El Salvador was not evident at the time. It has taken the courage of dedicated investigators in truth commissions, the heartbreaking work of forensic anthropologists and the first-hand testimonies of former soldiers and torturers to break the conspiracy of silence.

Serious scholars and activists of Latin American history, and US Imperialism in general, have learned to recognize the role and impact of US involvement in ‘counterinsurgency’ wars. A whole movement in the US is dedicated to closing down the notorious School of the Americas (recently renamed the Western Hemisphere School of Security Cooperation), because activists know that despite the human rights courses and the lessons in bomb disposal, many of the war criminals that have plagued Latin America over recent decades are the alumni of that academy of war.

Such activists have also learned to mistrust the Western media, which has consistently misrepresented or failed to report the horrific crimes committed by US proxy armies. Those activists have listened closely to the voices of the people in struggle and recorded their testimonies as part of their campaign to bring an end to US military training and assistance programs. Laboratories have been established on the ground to investigate and analyze the crimes of the state, as well as to dignify the memories of the victims. Uncovering the truth is not a matter of taking selected quotations from mainstream press articles or reading through blogs, but of building real links with organizations rooted in popular struggle.