Re: Eric Margolis
Sun, December 26, 2004
Terror wars can be risky
By Eric Margolis -- Contributing Foreign Editor
TERRORISTS WERE murdering politicians, police and prominent citizens, kidnapping entire families for huge ransoms, blowing up power stations, and blocking main roads, causing paralysis in major urban areas.
Iraq 2004? No. Latin America in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Marxist urban guerrillas were destabilizing Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia and fighting wars in Colombia, Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador.
Attempts this week by Chile's left-leaning government to lay renewed charges against retired Gen. Augusto Pinochet, that nation's 89-year-old former military ruler who crushed Marxist rebels in the 1970s, are a vivid reminder of what happens when "wars on terror" are declared and armed forces given a free hand to win them.
Latino Marxist guerrillas -- Argentina's Montoneros, Peru's Sendero Luminoso, and Uruguay's Tupamaros -- nearly brought those nations to their knees. Tupamaros became a role model for West Germany's Bader Meinhof group and Palestinian Marxists.
These Latin communist groups were supported, to vary- ing degrees, by Cuba's DGI intelligence service and its Soviet big brother, the KGB. Powerful left-wing factions within the Catholic Church and foreign sympathizers also aided the insurgents in their campaign to communize South America.
Crush the rebels
Facing internal chaos and economic collapse caused by Marxist guerrillas, governments declared a "war on terrorism" and ordered their armies and security forces to crush the rebels by any necessary means.
Chile's armed forces overthrew the Cuban and Soviet-backed Marxist president, Salvador Allende, arrested thousands of leftists, tortured many, and killed 3,000 or more. In Argentina, the army killed or "disappeared" 20,000 leftists and tortured thousands more in what was known as the "Dirty War."
Some 200,000 peasants died in Guatemala's civil war.
The intelligence agencies of Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia jointly launched "Operation Condor" to root out Marxists at home and abroad.
This notorious campaign of assassination, torture and mass arrest was patterned on the CIA's "Operation Phoenix.
During the Vietnam War, 30,000 Vietnamese communists and sympathizers were "taken out," to use the current euphemism for cold-blooded murder.
The hard-core Latin American communists were not gentle social reformers, as their leftist supporters in North America and Europe pretended.
They were ruthless, ideological killers whose heroes were mass murderers Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Stalin.
Right-wing regimes and their middle-class supporters knew they would face firing squads or gulags if the left won.
Stalinist Cuba provided a vivid example.
After a decade of killing, torture, disappearances and mass arrests, Latin America's military crushed the Marxist "terroristas."
Military regimes gave way to democratic governments which, in the 1990s, began prosecuting military officers for crimes committed during the Dirty War.
Gen. Pinochet, who, ironically, opened the way for democracy and prosperity in Chile, became the icon of military brutality.
The same "dirty war" process has been happening in the United States since 9/11.
That attack, a massive criminal-political act, quickly led to a militarized response. President George Bush ordered U.S. armed forces to invade Afghanistan, then Iraq.
Shocking FBI documents just revealed by the American Civil Liberties Union show the White House apparently gave the military and intelligence agencies carte blanche to use any means, including torture.
Senior members of the White House, Pentagon and national security agencies should think hard about the last "war on terrorism."