Saint Reagan's bloody legacy in Central America

"When I give food to the poor, I'm called a saint. When I ask why they are poor, I'm called a communist." -Archbishop Dom Helder Camara. This essay is part of an occasional feature on this blog that presents compelling stories from elsewhere in the world, particularly Africa, that are little reported in the American media. It's part of my campaign to get people to realize there is a lot going on in the world outside the US, IsraelStine and the Trumped Up Enemy of the Month. A list of all pieces in this series can be found found here.


As the clowns seeking the Republican presidential nomination fall over themselves to claim to be Ronald Reagan, a couple of articles I read recent cast a different shadow on the late Republican's legacy in Central America.

In The New York Review of Books' blog, the excellent Alma Guilermoprieto ran a chilling piece on the new ganglands of El Salvador. The country was the location of the most bloody of central American wars in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration backed a brutal junta and savage right-wing death squads which murdered tens of thousands of people, including most infamously Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero.

Another mass murderer backed by Saint Reagan was Efrain Rios Montt, the military dictator of Honduras. He has been indicted on charged of genocide for his alleged role in mass war crimes and human rights abuses in the 1980s.

School of the Assassins and the Honduran coup

This op-ed piece in The Los Angeles Times talks about how School of the Americas'-trained generals with close ties to Washington insiders were behind the military theft of power in Honduras.

Iran, Honduras, Niger and the knee jerks

"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

ZNet has a good piece critiquing leftist knee-jerk reaction to the popular uprising in Iran. Opposition leader Mir-Hossein Mousavi may be no progressive, having been the Ayatollah Khomeni's prime minister for most of the 1980s. The mere fact that the religious elite allowed him to be on the ballot in the first places means that he was never going to be a transformational figure.

And there is some question whether international reporting is overstating the extent of the protests because they seem concentrated in large cities and done by people with access to Twitter and cell phone cameras. By most accounts, the incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains popular in the more conservative rural areas.

But it seems clear that the discontent is real, legitimate and home grown. And it also seems clear that the politicians, Mousavi and Ahmadinejad, have become almost incidental to the uprising and that the entire theocratic system is being called into question. The brutal overreaction of the system's forces of disorder seems to back up the wounded bear theory.

If the mostly secular western left can't support group of liberal minded citizens rising up against the oppression of a regressive, hypernationalistic conservative theocracy, then who can it support?

(Who knew that left-wing media whore Hugo Chavez was such a fan of conservative religious states? Then again, the cult of personality Chavez has erected around himself has some distinctly messianic characteristics)

Sadly, this seems to bolster my contention that some of the left are entirely preoccupied with who and what they're against, rather than who and what they are for.

And speaking of bloody power grabs, ZNet also has a good analysis of the illegal military coup in Honduras that exiled left-wing president Manuel Zelaya. Both Chavez and President Obama have denounced the coup. Since the knee jerks don't have independent thoughts of their own, I wonder how they'll react.

Though Ethan over at My Heart's in Accra blog ponders why the protests in Iran and the coup in Honduras got a wildly different international reaction than the coup in Niger. Then again, yellow cake controversies aside, the CIA has historically played little role in Niger so the knee jerks don't have a template, democracy and human rights not being a real factor for them.

Which coups count?

Ethan at My Heart's in Accra muses on the wildly differing international reaction to the protests in Iran, the coup in Honduras and coup in Niger.