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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 05:36 PM
Original message
El Salvadoran Def Min arrested on old passport charge. El Salv in prison charged with Chandra Levy
murder. Connection? Get out your tinfoil hat, and let's see if there are any dots to be connected here.

I've started the ball rolling in this Struggle4progress thread on the former El Salvadoran Defense Minister's arrest:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3752558

Anybody know if the El Salvadoran in prison has been formally charged with Levy's murder? I'll go back and find those news reports, and take a look at them, in view of this odd arrest of the former El Salv Def Min in Miami.
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Bacchus39 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 06:00 PM
Response to Original message
1. nope, don't see any connection at all
since he is in jail on various charges of sexual offenses, seems he was a habitual predator and a good place to start looking for suspects is with those who have committed attacks in the same area in the past.

I imagine in many courtrooms in the country you will find Salvadorean immigrants charged with crimes particularly those with MS-13 connections. are you going to try and associate those with the former defense minister too? its quite unlikely whoever killed her knew or cared she was a congressional intern.

not to defend Condit who is a sleeze ball, but the entire basis for the media fervor was that he had an affair with her.
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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 06:29 PM
Response to Reply #1
3. The accounts I've read, quoting his two victims--not sexual offenses.
They described it as "personal"--they were pushed, knocked down, robbed--not raped. More like purse-snatching. "Habitual predator" is not accurate. I've now read quite a bit more on his background, and "vicious murderer" is just not there. Of course anybody can commit murder--and he had some incidents of violence, threats, anger. But I'm just not seeing Levy's vicious murder in his pattern.

Re: the El Salv ex-general. I'm just struck with the coincidence. I identified it as "tinfoil"--so far. But the more I look into it, the less "tinfoil" does it seem. I think the ex-general's arrest on a 2006 passport violation is very strange, indeed.
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Bacchus39 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 07:51 PM
Response to Reply #3
6. what would a passport arrest have to do with the Chandra Levy case?
Edited on Mon Feb-23-09 07:58 PM by Bacchus39
sorry, this is absurd.

you said in another thread that Cheney did a "favor" for Condit by mudering her. Again, makes no sense. If she had not been murdered its likely that their affair would not have been made public, at least at the time, and his political career ruined.

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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 06:18 PM
Response to Original message
2. Oh, boy, read this. This is incredible...
Edited on Mon Feb-23-09 06:19 PM by Peace Patriot
And there's a photo of Ingmar Guandique (the jailed El Salvadoran). Oh, something smells with this. Read the account of his original handling by authorities...

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=70400

Chandra Levy killed by illegal alien?
Jail informant tells police Salvadoran murdered intern for $25,000
Posted: July 24, 2008
12:00 am Eastern

© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Seven years after Chandra Levy's remains were found in a Washington, D.C., park, a year-long investigation by the Washington Post offers evidence the congressional intern was murdered by an illegal alien.

As suspicion mounted that Levy's boss, Rep. Gary Condit, D-Calif., might be involved in her disappearance, the case became front-page news in the summer of 2001. But with the Sept. 11 attacks, law enforcement personnel in the capital quickly turned their attention to the the nation's security, and Levy's case became a distant memory for the public.

But the Post says that as authorities searched for Levy in Rock Creek Park they overlooked the July 2 confession of an illegal alien who had attacked two other women in the park.

Ingmar Guandique, 20, an illegal alien from El Salvador, was not questioned until after a jail informant told police in mid-September Guandique admitted to murdering Levy.

Guandique was taken to the U.S. attorney's office in Washington Sept. 21, where he was interrogated by police and prosecutors and given pictures of Levy. The Salvadoran said he had never seen her, except on television.

However, a Park Police detective, Joe Green, told the Post he showed Guandique a picture of Levy, and the illegal alien admitted he had seen her. According to the report, Green did not remember giving the information to police.

"I should have said something," Green later told the paper.

An informant comes forward

On Oct. 19, 2001, authorities questioned the informant claiming Guandique admitted to the murder. The informant told police the Salvadoran was depressed and confided in him one day in the jail yard. According to the informant, Guandique said he murdered a woman named Chandra Levy in the park – and that Condit paid him $25,000 to kill her.

The unidentified man said Guandique first got drunk and high on drugs, and then he found Levy jogging on a path in the place Condit told him to go. According to the story, the illegal alien hid, jumped out and stabbed her in her neck and abdomen. Levy stumbled to the ground, and Guandique buried her body in the woods, leaving the knife inside her body. The $25,000 was then sent to the man's relatives in El Salvador.

While authorities had some serious doubts about Condit's role in the informant's story, they did suspect that Guandique could have been involved in the crime, the Post reported. So, the informant, who spoke minimal English, was given a polygraph, but he failed. The FBI test showed the man was "deceptive" when asked if Guandique told him he stabbed Levy and if Guandique received $25,000 for committing the murder.
(MORE)

----------

The following is an anti-immigrant site, but it's got interesting, detailed info on Bush immigration policy re El Salvador. Guandique was not an illegal. He had a pending application for special status.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3827/is_200206/ai_n9097779

---------

Here's a long news report on the pending arrest. (How do you arrest someone who's already in prison?)

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/20090222_Arrest_reportedly_near_in_Chandra_Levy_case.html

Get this...

"A second person aware of the probe, a law enforcement official who spoke to investigators, said yesterday that the break in the case came in part from DNA evidence."

DNA evidence seven years later?! Something's not right with this.

------

WaPo (CIA)--last year--all about Guandique's background and "hard-scrabble" home in El Salvador. (Apparently father was kidnapped/killed by "rebels.") They make quite a case against him.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/specials/chandra/ch6_1.html

-------

Another anti-immigrant site says he's in fed prison in California. (Why Calif?)
http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3990

------

The Guardian is totally buying this sudden solution of the case...
(written by "Paul Harris in New York"--note: I don't always trust the Guardian; I've seen quite suspect articles in it.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/21/usa

----------------

I'm going to do some more research on the Defense Minister arrest.
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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 06:45 PM
Response to Reply #2
4. The timing on this is completely perplexing. I remember so clearly when the actual
Edited on Mon Feb-23-09 06:49 PM by Judi Lynn
Levy suspect was nabbed, and it seems like centuries ago.

Will read these links you've posted later. Only had enough time to get a glimpse before running off again.

Thanks for posting these items.

Oh, yeah, running things back to the other Salvadoran business in Miami:
I got a fleeting glance at the material struggle4progress posted in the LBN thread you posted in, and wanted to mention South Florida has always been a cauldron of dirty, shady murderous slugs working below the radar since before the Bay of Pigs, when George H. W. Bush contributed two of his own boats to the Cuban invasion, and the world's largest spy station operated in the Miami area. It also was the area which provided so many Iran Contra scum, some of them also involved in the bombing of the Cubana airliner, killing all 73 people on board. Many of these people are connected to the Bushes, going back decades and decades, ranging all over the world, including work done for that international assassination program created to murder leftists, "Operation Condor," and Nixon's Cuban friend, Bebe Rebozo, and his Watergate burglars, and on and on and on and on. My God! What a bunch of vermin.

If anyone could ever run down all of this, and put it in a book, it would probably make people gag just trying to read it. Way too many crooked, filthy characters all in the same place. The sheer corruption and creepiness is enough to corrode South Florida and make it sink beneath the water!

An author once described the area as the place where Latin America has vomited up all its former dictators, torturers, and death squad operators, etc.
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Bacchus39 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 07:54 PM
Response to Reply #2
7. due process my friend. the murder charge is a separate offense
from the inmate's other offenses. he has to be arrested, processed, officially charged, a trial. all of that. it does not matter he is doing time for other crimes.
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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 07:18 PM
Response to Original message
5. Here's a complete rundown on the case against Def Minister Garcia...
and another plaintiff on the slaughter of thousands of El Salvadorans during the civil war. A U.S. appeals court upheld the ruling in 2006.

So, this guy, former Def Min Garcia, has been living in Miami, presumably in typical anti-Castro Miami mafia comfort, and possibly luxury, protected by the Bushwhacks, ever since? That's what I'm getting from this. And he was just now arrested on an old passport violation, from 2006.

The Center for Justice and Accountability says nothing about Garcia's assets:

"Asset Collection

"In July 2006, with the judgment final, General Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova was forced to relinquish over $300,000 of his own funds. This collection represents one of the first human rights cases in U.S. history in which survivors have recovered money from those found responsible for abuses. Almost all of the proceeds have been donated to charity by our heroic clients.

"CJA and Florida attorney Dave Gorman began the collection effort in 2003, deposing both Garcia and Vides Casanova about their assets. In addition to the initial collection, CJA continues to pursue collection of approximately $140,000 that we allege Vides Casanova fraudulently transferred after the filing of the suit in order to keep the money beyond the reach of the plaintiffs."


http://www.cja.org/cases/romagoza.shtml

----------

What was he living on? A Bushwhack federal subsidy (such as many Miami mafia get)? Why was nothing collected from him? Where are his assets? And what is the connection between that verdict and his passport violation arrest so much later--if any?
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EFerrari Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 08:00 PM
Response to Original message
8. Co-incidentally, before the UN verdict, CIA said El Mozote never happened.
D'Aubuisson was a big wheel in the World Anti-Communist League. Organized in 1961, WACL serves as a worldwide umbrella organization for extreme-right militants. Among its members are expatriate Nazis, Italian terrorists, Japanese fascists, racist Afrikaners, Latin American death squad leaders and a number of US congressmen and "former" CIA agents.

Even aside from its participation in WACL, the CIA has done much to encourage bloodshed in El Salvador. With billions of dollars in US military aid at its disposal, it's flown air raids, waded into combat and trained the military units that formed the death squads.

The agency's spin doctors have also worked to improve the government's image. This often consisted of denying that atrocities like the 1982 massacre at El Mozote ever happened. Agency sycophants in the media parroted this line shamelessly until, in 1993, the UN Truth Commission investigated El Mozote and determined that 733 peasants had been murdered there. All in all, the Truth Commission concluded, 63,000 Salvadorans were killed between 1979 and 1992.

In 1982, after he was out of office, Jimmy Carter called El Salvador's government the "blood-thirstiest in the hemisphere." It's too bad he didn't come to that realization back when he-like his predecessors and successors-was funding it.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/ElSalvador_CIAHits.html
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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 08:04 PM
Response to Original message
9. More about the previous 2 incidents involving Guandique in Rock Creek Park...
From page 3 of the WaPo article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/specials/chandra/ch6_3.html

It sounds to me like a possible case of jogging while being brown. As for the Levy murder, when Guandique either bumped into or assaulted (depending on who you believe) the 2 other women joggers, they either overreacted or defended themselves from assault, and Guandique ran away in fright. If he assaulted them, did he then escalate to vicious murder? The story as laid out in this article sounds very questionable to me. And what is this business of DNA evidence 7 years later? Plenty of time to concoct false evidence, I think. Is there any hope that this man will get a fair trial? He is an El Salvadoran peasant who doesn't speak English, charged with the most famous murder of our era. I am thinking he is a patsy.
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Bacchus39 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 08:15 PM
Response to Reply #9
12. wow, you are defending this scum.
and believing his version of events rather than the victims who reported him.
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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Feb-24-09 01:34 AM
Response to Reply #12
13. I've learned to look twice at charges against the brown and the black, even if
they were convicted. You have an awful lot of faith in our justice system to call a poor brown guy who doesn't speak English "scum." In any case, I'm not "defending" him. I'm just saying I smell a rat.

This poor Latino who maybe got railroaded the first time, for what may have been accidents or robberies--we really don't know, with our justice system the way it is--suddenly turns out, 7 years later, to be Chandra Levy's murderer? I'm not buying it. It smells like the Anthrax case smelled--odd, very late in the day, trumped out. I don't know if you read all my comments on this, but Chandra Levy left her apartment without her keys, cell phone or wallet/purse. She searched MapQuest Rock Creek Park sites that were potential meeting places, before she left her apartment. She was packed to leave DC for good. She had given up her apartment and her gym membership--and there is plenty of evidence that she was having a traumatic breakup with Condit. It's possible that Guandique murdered her. But the FBI Lab took two months to get into her computer and then revised her disappearance time, back in 2001. The same Lab--which does all DC police lab work--apparently now claims to have DNA evidence fingering Guandiqueseven years later?

I am extremely skeptical. And I really don't know if it has anything to do with the also weird sudden arrest of Defense Minister Garcia, also on an old charge (passport violation from 2006!)--but I think we're seeing a lot of strange, delayed stuff, here, and I want to know more. I followed the Chandra Levy case back in 2001. In fact, it was my first clue as to how fucked up our corpo/fascist media had become. There were so many things they didn't follow up on, that pointed to a political murder (of Levy). It was amazing to me. I hadn't followed a media story so closely in a long time, and their incompetence--and also that the DC police and the FBI--astounded me. There was evidence that someone pulled her Bureau of Prisons internship early--she got suddenly fired, several weeks before she disappeared. No follow up. They took months to interview Condit's wife, who had made a highly unusual trip to DC the week Levy disappeared. Condit and his wife were estranged. Many holes in his published schedule were filled with "dinner with wife" type items that week. Then there is Condit's meeting with Cheney during Levy's disappearance hours, which no one--not any reporters, not the DC police, not the FBI--ever asked Cheney or his aides about, even to verify that the meeting took place, and to verify Condit's whereabouts at the beginning of Levy's disappearance hours, and the beginning of a 3 hour hole in his schedule. No questions! Finally, in their trumped up second search of Rock Creek Park (in 2001), with all their new recruits paraded on the front pages, they missed her body, which was found a year later right off one of the paths they searched.

So, you see, I know about this case, and it is no small matter to me that our politicized and Bushwhack purged Dept of Justice and FBI have suddenly come up with a suspect--some poor peasant from El Salvador! And, I find it very curious that, in the same week, they arrest another El Salvadoran who oversaw the death squads during the civil war and has been living a protected life in Miami, on an old passport violation.

Maybe it's a coincidence. Maybe not. We'll see. I just have no reason to trust our justice system, and every reason to believe that the Bushwhacks heavily manipulated our justice system for political ends.
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Bacchus39 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Feb-24-09 09:25 AM
Response to Reply #13
17. he has been convicted on assault charges and is in prison, and appears to have murdered
someone. "Scum" is a mild term in my book.

he seems to have alot of jogging "accidents" doesn't he?

its not "suddenly". His "accidents" occurred at the same time as the Levy murder.

actually, what troubles me about the justice system is not that they are implicating this douchebag, but the ineptitude of not investigating the connection years ago.
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Peace Patriot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Feb-24-09 10:40 AM
Response to Reply #17
18. Well, you've convicted him, so why does he need a trial?
scum, douchebag, murderer

really, Bacchus

And, yes, it is curious, isn't it, the apparent ineptitude of the DC police/FBI. Seven years! They knew about this suspect wa-a-a-y back then, and they're only getting around to DNA evidence now?

This smells very bad. I don't know what the smell is. I'm just guessing. And then this other equally smelly thing happens, also an El Salvadoran, the same week?
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Bacchus39 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Feb-24-09 10:52 AM
Response to Reply #18
19. he has already been convicted. thats why he is in jail.
he'll get his shot to defend himself at the murder trial.

actually it wasn't the DC police, rather the FEderal National Park police I believe.

I don't see what is so smelly about the other passport case. If he is guilty of passport fraud then he deserves to be arrested and charged.
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EFerrari Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 08:04 PM
Response to Original message
10. More on CIA, death squads, El Mozote:
El Salvador, 1980-89. Declassified documents re 32 cases investigated by United Nations appointed Truth Commission on El Salvador reveal U.S. officials were fully aware of Salvadoran military and political leaders' complicity in crimes ranging from massacre of more than 700 peasants at El Mozote in 1981 to murder of 6 Jesuit priests in 1989, and thousands of atrocities in between. Lies of our Time 3/1994, pp. 6-9

El Salvador, 1980-89. President Reagan and Vice President Bush instituted polices re fighting communists rather than human rights concerns. From 11/1980 through 1/1991 a large number of assassinations — 11/27, 5 respected politicians; 12/4, rape and murder of 3 American nuns and a lay workers; 2 American land reform advisers on 1/4/1981. Archbishop Romero killed 3/1980. There clear evidence D'Aubuisson's involvement but Reagan administration ignored. On TV, D'Aubuisson, using military intelligence files, denounced teachers, labor leaders, union organizers and politicians. Within days their mutilated bodies found. Washington had identified most leaders of death squads as members Salvadoran security forces with ties to D'Aubuisson. With U.S. outrage at bloodshed, U.S., via Bush, advised government slaughter must stop. Article discusses torture techniques used by security forces. Washington Post op-ed by Douglas Farah, 2/23/1992, C4

El Salvador, 1980-90. COL Nicolas Carranza, head of Treasury Police, on CIA payroll. Minnick, W. (1992). Spies and Provocateurs, p. 32

http://www.serendipity.li/cia/death_squads1.htm
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EFerrari Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Feb-23-09 08:08 PM
Response to Original message
11.  A bit more on the Reagan cover up of El Mozote / Robert Parry
Edited on Mon Feb-23-09 08:09 PM by EFerrari
snip

Because of that P.R. offensive, the reality about the El Mozote massacre remained in doubt for almost a decade until the war ended and a United Nations forensic team dug up hundreds of skeletons, including many little ones of children.

Now the Washington Post has added a new grisly detail. Several months after the massacre, the Salvadoran army returned to the scene and collected the skulls of some El Mozote children as novelty items, the Post reported.

“They worked well as candle holders,” recalled one of the soldiers, Jose Wilfredo Salgado, “and better as good luck charms.”

snip

The Post reported that “witnessing the aftermath of what his colleagues did in El Mozote and reflecting on those skulls changed his mind about how the war was being fought.” Salgada said his mentor, Col. Domingo Monterrosa, who later died in a helicopter crash, had ordered an act of “genocide” in El Mozote.

http://consortiumnews.com/2007/012907.html

:tinfoilhat:

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rabs Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Feb-24-09 02:56 AM
Response to Original message
14. Agree there is something strange going on here.


Your observation about why the indictment now if his illegal entry into the U.S. was in 2006 is on the mark. How did he get out to travel to El Salvador if his passport had been confiscated?

This guy was defense minister when the four American Maryknoll nuns were killed. Also the time Archbishop Romero was gunned down while he officiated Mass, although that is generally blamed on Roberto D'Aubuisson.

Still, Garcia was allowed to retire to Florida.

Looking around found that Garcia had been granted political asylum sometime after he arrived in 1989. He claimed at the time his life had been threatened by leftists in El Salvador.

Tried to find out something on his finances in the Salvadoran media but found nothing. But common sense indicates that while defense minister he pocketed enough of the U.S. military aid to assure him a comfortable retirement in Florida. Incidentally, he lives in Plantation, an up-scale section of Fort Lauderdale.


Carlos Mauricio, one of the plaintiffs in the civil suit against Garcia and Vides Casanove, says the following is in the transcripts of the trial. It shows that at best Garcia is a habitual lier, or he is a complete "moran."

(partial translation)

Gen. Garcia had the gall to say that he had never seen a cadaver here in El Salvador.

When he was asked why he did not investigate the massacre at El Mozote, he said he did not know.

Then the lawyer asked, "But you, as defense minister read the newspapers? "No."

(Lawyer) But you watched television? "No.'

But you listened to the radio? "No."

Did you read magazines? "Never."

Then Gen. Garcia said, "Okay, I'm going to tell you the reality of why I did not investigate El Mozote; it was because I did not have a vehicle. And why not one human rights violation was investigated? Because our agents did not have pencils to write with."

--------------------------------

Los generales García y Vides Casanova llegaron a decir que "no sabían". Por ejemplo, el general García tuvo la osadía de decir que él nunca había visto un cadáver aquí, en El Salvador, ¿qué te parece? y cuando le preguntaron por qué no investigó la matanza de El Mozote, dijo que no sabía. Entonces le preguntó el abogado, "pero, usted como Ministro de Defensa leía los periódicos", "no", dijo. "Pero veía televisión". "Tampoco". "Pero, oía la radio", "No", dijo. "Leía las revistas". "Nunca", dijo. Entonces el general García dijo: "Bueno, le voy a decir la realidad por lo que no investigué lo de El Mozote, fue porque no tenía vehículo. Y ¿sabe por qué nunca se investigó una violación a los derechos humanos?, porque los agentes no tenían lápices para escribir". Y esto está registrado. Vos te leés la minuta legal y allí está lo que dijo. ¡Él no sabía! ¡

--------------------------------


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EFerrari Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Feb-24-09 03:54 AM
Response to Reply #14
15. Everything this notable was involved in was either planned by
or funded and encouraged by CIA. Imho, they were hoping he would go to his reward before any judgments against him could be recorded and they were keeping an eye on him in Miami por las dudas.

(When my grandfather retired from that position, he left with his pension. Papi! Why did you have to be honest! lol)
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Judi Lynn Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Feb-24-09 05:19 AM
Response to Reply #14
16. Powerfully resistant to allowing the loved ones of his victims to learn what happened.
I've never seen a testimony that bizarre. Is he afraid to admit the truth, or is he simply laughing in everyones' faces?

Clearly, even Helen Keller would have heard about THAT unbearable event a long time ago. There would have been shock waves in that country going on for ages afterward.

http://www.markdanner.com.nyud.net:8090/images/harvard3.png

http://cache.daylife.com.nyud.net:8090/imageserve/0cnA70o5M57hb/610x.jpg

23 months ago: Relatives of Rufina Amaya, the only survivor of a massacre of more than one thousand farmers during the last civil war in El Salvador, carry her coffing during her funeral 09 March 2007 at El Mozote town where the massacre ocurred. Amaya died of a cardiac arrest.

- Survivor of El Mozote Massacre Passes

Rufina Amaya, human rights activist and survivor of the El Mozote Massacre passed on Tuesday March 6, 2007 due to heart failure. She was a mother, grandmother, friend and hero to many.

In 1981 an SOA-trained Salvadoran army battalion known as the Atlacatl Battalion swept through the region of Morazon in a campaign to root out guerillas and their sympathizers. In a shocking turn of events, nearly one thousand peasants were slaughtered in the village of El Mozote.

As the sole survivor, Rufina's brave testimony of the massacre shed light on the atrocities committed by the Salvadoran military and uncovered the Reagan administration's role in providing training and millions of dollars in military aid to a government with a complete disregard for human rights.

The Atlacatl Battalion continued to commit atrocities in El Salvador, including the murder of six Jesuit priests and two Salvadoran women at the University of Central America on November 16, 1989.

?God saved me because he needed someone to tell the story of what happened.? Rufina Amaya continued to be an outspoken and compelling witness to what may have been the largest massacre in modern Latin American history until the day of her death.

Rufina's legacy will live on in the hearts of the people of Latin America and the world.

http://www.soaw.org/article.php?id=1515

http://d.yimg.com.nyud.net:8090/fu/p/081209/afp/isgegpj05091208175250photo01.jpg
"Early on the morning of December 11, 1981, soldiers from the elite US-trained Atlacatl battalion of the Salvadoran armed forces roused residents from their beds and hustled them to the center of town. Men and women were separated and locked in various places, including the church and convent. For the entire day, and into the next and the next, soldiers terrorized and executed everyone they captured, often to sadistic extremes - women and girls were marched into the hills to be raped, infants were speared with bayonets, a group of children was locked in the church and machine gunned through the windows. Many of the bodies were left to rot, others were burned along with the village houses. In all, at least 767 people were killed."
http://notesfromlatinamerica.blogspot.com/2007_07_01_archive.html

http://www.sacredheartsjm.org.nyud.net:8090/assets/images/El_Salvador_013.jpg http://farm3.static.flickr.com.nyud.net:8090/2047/2373985985_f510ff8f78.jpg

Garden planted where some of the innocents fell
~snip~
El Salvador was traditionally ruled by a small group of wealthy oligarchs(Fourteen Families), who had close-knit ties with the US government and traditionally represented the interests of US companies than those of the average Salvadoran campesinos. Anger and discontent mounted among the nation's mistreated masses, and through the 60's and the 70's the opposition composed of workers, peasants, students and church leaders began to radicalize. The Salvadoran right-wing government's response to the opposition was harsher oppression, martial laws, and death squads(who were mostly off-duty policemen or soldiers, veterans, and street gangsters).

In 1979(the same year US-friendly regimes in Iran and Nicaragua were deposed) the right-wing government of Carlos Humberto Romero was replaced with the Revolutionary Government Junta(Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno; JRG), a group of young, moderate and more democratic army officers. JRG began economic and social reforms, but there were disagreements within the junta on how to deal with the growing communist insurgency. Moderates wanted the communist party to be legalized and accepted into the political realm, while hawks wanted to escalate the oppression and keep hunting the guerillas down. Eventually the ultra right-wing faction prevailed. Crackdowns would continue, and death squads with names such as "ORDEN" and Maximiliano Hernández Martínez" would kill anyone they suspected of being communist sympathizers with brazenness.

On March 24 1980, Archbishop Óscar Romero, the widely repected Catholic priest of San Salvador who spoke out against the ruling oligarchy, criticized the military junta's violation of human rights and the persecution of the Catholic church(who were influenced by liberation theology and championed for the rights of the campesinos and workers) and publically requested the US government to stop supporting the regime, was fatally shot by the death squads as he was celebrating Mass. His funeral on March 30 became the scene of a brutal carnage, when bombs exploded and gunmen(whose identies were never identified) fired into the crowd. More than 44 mourners died at the spot. The death of Romero further polarized the situation.
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?p=3912649



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