For Yoshi: About Reagan, death squads and the cold war

[lao tzu]

taoist (i spelled it right this time!), I genuinely am naive when it comes to whatever y'all are talking about now (death squads???), and Jimmy never seems to have the time to explain to me what he's talking about when he refers to the evils of the Reagan Administration that I'm not familiar with (and how could I be, I was born in '86), so would you mind explaining what all this is about?

Yeah, I got the idea you were young. It wasn't a burning issue for me at the time, but I'm familiar with the charges at least, or at least some of the charges. Don't quote me, or take my word for it without checking the story yourself. This is off the top of my head, the impressions of someone who lived through it.

COLD WAR. That's the context you need to keep in mind here. All of the events I'm describing took place during the cold war. This was the era of battle by proxy. We didn't fight the soviets, we fought their representatives. We didn't fight them directly, either, we fought them through local opposition. All of the "death squads" Jimmy is talking about were "ours," but not really ours, if you follow me. And the people we were fighting — by having someone else do the fighting — were "theirs," but not actually theirs, too. Everyone knew the score.

Latin America was one of the battlegrounds, but far from the only one. From Arabia to the South Pacific, we had our boys and they had theirs, and we sicced them on each other as if they were nothing more than message flags on a battleship, in reckless disregard of the human consequences. It's easy to say it was evil, but less easy to name something that would have been better. The morality is pretty complicated. I can respect the motivations for both the left and right, but it's hard to say anyone comes out looking pretty when you examine the tactics. There are no white hats in this movie.

Nicaragua and Guatemala are two of the countries that come to mind, though we had "influence" in a number of others. In Nicaragua, a leftist government called the "Sandinistas" came to power, headed by Daniel Ortega. Democratically elected, but far too friendly with Castro for Reagan's taste, putting them into the soviet camp. In response, Reagan funded the "Contras," hoping for a political reversal by means of civil war. By themselves, the Contras were little more than a nuisance to Nicaragua; they were utterly dependent on our support to continue their fight. Congress cut the funding, eventually, and Reagan went around them to gather funding through other means.

Remember this the next time you hear some talking head saying democracies don't go to war with democracies. There's a nasty little list of democratically elected governments we've overthrown to put in a dictator, a shah, a general, whatever. Iran is still mad at us for deposing Mossadegh. Chile is furious with us for giving them Pinochet. But those were all well before Reagan's administration. Still, in a sense, he rode to power on the blowback from the installation of the Shah. Latin America was Reagan's part of the cold war.

Congress tried to cut the funding for the Contras a number of times before they succeeded. Each time, Ortega would make some public statement to wind up the right wing, and the measure would fail. It was mindblowingly obvious that Ortega was doing so on purpose, knowing he needed the opposition from the Contras in order to cement his own support. I've no doubt congress knew it as well, but was forced by political considerations to play angry for the cameras. Ortega was engaging in a political ploy, and there's no way our politicians didn't recognize it.

In Guatemala, a right-wing government held power in the midst of their own civil war, a nasty little critter that went on for most of thirty years. They were vicious. They used death squads. Those death squads were "ours," by the logic of the cold war, and they were "commanded" by Reagan, by the same logic. There were a few incidents that got major press, a couple nuns getting tortured and killed, an American citizen killed with CIA authorization, the usual muckups that go with covert operations. That was enough to shine a spotlight on our foreign policy in the region, and like anything else that's been growing in the dark too long, it wasn't a pretty sight.

Supporting a legitimate government, no matter how dictatorial, is one thing. The contras, though, were a rebel force in a civil war. If these guys were all Tom Paynes and Thomas Jeffersons that wouldn't have been any trouble. But from any standard of humanity, they were just as bloody and vicious as the Guatemalans, or the Sandinistas for that matter. That's not what killed their support, though. Tuck a camera into one of their camps for a couple weeks and then air the story on the evening news. Americans wouldn't stand for it. Child soldiers. Girl soldiers. Sexual enslavement of little children and children taught to kill. It was stomach turning. That's what killed the support. Americans turned away from the screens and looked down at their own little fifth-graders, asking what if that was my kid.

Funding for the contras ended.

Official funding, that is. The Reagan administration started finding creative financing techniques. A word to the Saudis to get them to chip in, a few other favors called in here and there, drug trafficking monies, and one particular incident that was just too gaudy to miss. The day Reagan was inaugurated, the embassy hostages were released from Iran. That didn't mark the end of hostage taking in Iran. So imagine the chess pieces. Iran holding about 30 hostages, funding needed for the Contras, and a war between Iran and Iraq driving demand from Iran for advanced weaponry.

We set up a deal to sell weapons to Iran through Israel, with a markup intended to finance the Contras. Not a lot of money, not a lot of arms, but enough to get $15 million for the Contras. The weapons were shipped through Lebanon, and the Lebanese press dug out the story and published it. We'd gotten our noses pretty well bloodied two years earlier in Lebanon taking sides in their civil war. In 1983, two suicide bombers simultaneously drove trucks into the US Marine barracks and the into the French barracks, nearly wiping out our ground forces. One of my buddies missed being in that barracks by fifteen minutes. We had to leave. With that in their recent history, you can understand a bit why the Lebanese took advantage of our arms sale to thumb their noses at us again. You can't pick one side in a civil war without the other sides taking it personally.

Eventually, Syria came in and quelled the civil war in Lebanon in much the same way that Vietnam took control of Cambodia. Ortega has been in and out of power in Venezuela. The Contras share power with the Sandinistas, today. There are national reconciliation councils in Guatemala. The lesson I take from all that is that people will find ways to heal given the chance. No matter how nasty our foreign relations become, there's hope of fixing things.

There's enough grist in there to mill out any kind of story you want. You've got your sex and violence and drugs and terrorism. You've got your democracies acting like communists and communists acting like democracies and all of them acting badly. You've got covert operations and state betrayals and presidential pardons to cover up the scandals. Fact is always more fascinating than fiction. It's also a whole lot harder to figure out. Real people don't behave like characters in a novel.

So there you have it, as I see it. Yes, there were real "death squads" supported by Reagan, and Carter, and presidents all the way back to the beginning of the cold war, and probably all the way back to the founding of the country, and it didn't end with Reagan, either. It has always been part of our foreign policy, and probably always will be, in my opinion, because when it works, it works well, or so it seems in the short run. I don't know if there are better alternatives, but I do know we won't find any if we don't try. I think it's worth the effort.

Here's a couple of wiki links to follow up if you're still interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Be...rracks_bombing

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_contra

As ever, Jesse

[Conductor42]

Thank you, taoist. It's nice to see someone actually believing me when I say "I don't know what you're talking about".

By chance, would this be around the same time that the CIA was caught being directly involved - and profiting from - the "illegal" drug trade?

[lao tzu]

Thank you, taoist. It's nice to see someone actually believing me when I say "I don't know what you're talking about".

You're welcome.

By chance, would this be around the same time that the CIA was caught being directly involved - and profiting from - the "illegal" drug trade?

Yes it would, but not by chance. Profits from a CIA-run "illegal" drug trade were also funneled to the Contras, and they got caught doing it. Again, it wasn't a lot of money or a lot of drugs, and it was done with a certain amount of deniability. It was just more of the same. A little bit here, a little bit there, put it together and you've got a finance package. Funding revolutions is always a dirty business.

As ever, Jesse

[Conductor42]

Well, I never thought it was by coincidence.

But I do have to wonder of the extent to which Reagan was directly involved with all of this. The CIA is notorious for its belief that it is above the law. To them, Reagan might simply have been another pawn in the game.

[Ryokan]

Reagan probably said "We got to do something about this Daniel Ortega. Then his NSA says do what? And then Reagan says I don't know, whatever we have to to get rid of the guy. Then the Cia does whatever they have to do, secure in their Presidential authorization. And when it comes back to bite Reagan, or Kennedy or Eisenhower before him in the booty, they can say well I didn't mean THAT. The US is not a bad government by governments standards. But all systems this large grind up people, countries even, and spit them out, by design or even by accident. That's why you can love your country, and support your leaders, but never ever trust your government. Even when intending the best it is more than capable of doing the worst.

[Conductor42]

I agree, but the whole thing with the drug war really makes me wonder.

I mean, on one hand you could look at it as Reagan acting against the CIA.
On the other hand, you could look at it as Reagan helping to increase the CIA profits.
And of course, he could have - though not likely, IMO - been oblivious to the whole thing.