Argentine Angel of Death get Life

In Argentina on Wednesday, Alfredo Astiz, Argentina's infamous "Blond Angel of Death," and 11 other death squad members from the country's period of military rule received life sentences following a twenty-two month trial.

Astiz, nicknamed for his cherubic looks, stood trial with other former officials accused of horrific crimes at the ESMA Naval Mechanics School, where about 5,000 dissidents were held and tortured during the 1976-1983 "Dirty War" dictatorship. Few of the captives survived.

The AP also has a round up of events in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile that are related repression under military rule. In Uruguay, the Senate voted to annul the country's amnesty law, while In Chile, forensic investigators recently identified the remains of Georges Klein, Salvador Allende's French doctor. 

—“Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better…The human rights problem is a growing one.  Your Ambassador can apprise you. We want a stable situation. We won't cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help.” (October 1976)

While you wouldn't expect the AP to rock the boat, I would have like to have seem them follow up on the lack of effort on the part of the United States to come to grips with its frequent support and encouragement of murderous regimes and terrorists in Central and South America.

The two countries [Uruguay and Argentina] are among several Latin American nations still struggling to come to terms with Cold War dictatorships in which regimes routinely tortured, killed or "disappeared" suspected opponents. Most of those dictatorships ended nearly three decades ago.

They are struggling to come to terms with their past. In the United States, on the other hand, the majority of the people are either unaware of what the US did during the Cold War or they justify our government's actions with the all so persuasive, "we won, didn't we?"

In Latin America, the Cold War Never Ends

So many Latin American Cold War-related stories in the past week, it’s hard to keep up. In addition to the indictment of twenty Salvadoran military officials, we have news from Guatemala, Argentina, and Chile.

Stephen Schlesinger, a co-author of Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, published an Op-ed in this weekend's New York Times.

In it, he rightfully criticizes the US government for its orchestration of the 1954 coup that deposed Jacobo Arbenz and put an end to the Guatemala's "ten years of spring." The years spanning the governments' of Juan Jose Arevalo and Jacobo Arbenz were one of the most progressive period's in Guatemala's history.  

Schlesinger is responding to the recent news in Guatemala where the government stated that it intends to recognize Arbenz's legacy. Schlesinger's written a quite entertaining book on the subject of the coup but I guess I don't agree with everything he writes in the Op-ed. 

Washington feared Arbenz because he tried to institute agrarian reforms that would hand over fallow land to dispossessed peasants, thereby creating a middle class in a country where 2 percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land. Unfortunately for him, most of that territory belonged to the largest landowner and most powerful body in the state: the American-owned United Fruit Company. Though Arbenz was willing to compensate United Fruit for its losses, it tried to persuade Washington that Arbenz was a crypto-communist who must be ousted.

Yes, the US feared Arbenz's agrarian reform. However, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to say that the US feared that it might create a middle class. I guess if you believe that US foreign policy towards Guatemala is and/or was designed to keep the people poor so that they would continue to produce goods cheaply in order to benefit US consumers, then it does make sense.

However from my reading of the time, the US feared that a successful land reform would strengthen the communist party and give them a leg up in the upcoming elections. We didn't think that Arbenz was a communist, but members of his government were and the communist party was going to benefit from the reforms. That was the main reason the US government intervened to remove Arbenz - not to prevent the emergence of a middle class.

But there was no evidence that Arbenz himself was anything more than a European-style democratic socialist. And Arbenz’s land reform program was less generous to peasants than a similar venture pushed by the Reagan administration in El Salvador several decades later.

It's true, the United States has promoted land reform in Latin America, including the 1980 reform in El Salvador. However, I have a difficult time comparing US antagonism towards the 1952 agrarian reform in Guatemala carried out while Eisenhower was president and US support for the the 1980 land reform while Carter was president. The Salvadoran reform was designed to stave off revolution by preventing the communists from coming to power and benefiting the moderate right. 

The Carter administration was also the stronger land reform proponent, not the Reagan administration. The Reagan administration's ambivalence (?) towards the reform as well as the ferocious reaction of the right doomed any chance that the reform had. It's no surprise that the US supports land reform when it suits its interests and calls it communist when it does not. The US isn't against land reform in principle.

The coup and its aftermath were obviously a dark period in Guatemala history. Inside Costa Rica posted a story today about the exhumation of four people killed by the army in 1966 during the presidency of Julio Cesar Mendez. The exhumations were carried out in Chiquimula, a department that borders Honduras and El Salvador, and are the first to occur in eastern Guatemala. 

In Argentina, a court charged three former police officers with killing five women (a French-born nun and four women of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) during the country's dirty war. They are accused of  taking part in some 20 "death flights" where victims were thrown in the Atlantic alive. The judge ordered the former officers, along with a former military official and lawyer, assets frozen and taken into custody.Human rights trials have been ongoing in Argentina ever since President Nestor Kirchner overturned an amnesty that was protecting those allegedly involved in dirty war era crimes.

Continuing on in Argentina, an appellate court ruled that 

Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera must submit "blood, saliva, skin, hair or other biological samples ... with or without their consent" for analysis in the National Genetics Databank, which has collected thousands of DNA samples from relatives of people who were killed or "disappeared" during the 1976-83 junta.

Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera are the adopted children of one of Latin America's largest newspaper publishers, Grupo Clarin. The court seeks to determine if they were stolen as babies during the country's dirty war.

The two Noble Herrera adoptees, now in their 30s, have fiercely defended their adoptive mother and say they have no desire to know their birth families.

Argentina's Supreme Court ruled in 2009 against the forced extraction of blood from such adoptees, but said DNA evidence can still be obtained against their will by searching their homes for clothing and other personal objects.

In the case of the Noble Herreras, a controversial attempt to obtain DNA from their underwear last year failed to produce usable samples.

Finally, in Chile,  a judge ordered an investigation into the death of Nobel laureate, Pablo Neruda. Neruda died shortly after the CIA coup that killed President Salvador Allende and Chilean democracy. According to his family and official reports, Neruda died of natural causes - advanced prostate cancer. 

However, Neruda was also a Communist and a friend of President Salvador Allende who was very critical of General Pinochet and the military government that came to power. Neruda's former driver claims that state security agents poisoned him. The investigation into Neruda's death follows the recent exhumation of Salvador Allende's remains.

The investigations and human rights trials underway in Guatemala, Argentina and Chile give me hope that one day we shall see the same in El Salvador. That is unless President Funes' recent actions put an end to repealing the amnesty law.

US Apology to Latin America?

President Obama is on to El Salvador as part of his three-country trip to Latin America. During his visits, Obama has tried to compare the Latin American transitions to democracy with those that today he hopes are taking place across the Middle East and North Africa. Unfortunately, once you start to do that, people start asking what the US did to help Latin America, and Brazil, Chile, and Brazil in particular, take part in that transition.

The sanitized version is that the United States "helped" all three countries, more so in Chile and El Salvador than Brazil, move from military rule to electoral democracy. Sorry, but it's also a little long since I needed a break from grading and it is spring break.

Chile
In 1980s Chile, the US helped the No Coalition defeat General Pinochet's plebiscite on extending his term in office. We also made it clear that we would not accept any effort on his part to go back on his word to step down should he lose the plebiscite.

However by focusing on US efforts in the late 1980s, it covers up our government's role in overthrowing Salvador Allende and the political, economic, and intelligence support we provided to the military government led by Pinochet.

Brazil
In Brazil, I am not really familiar with any significant US support that helped bring about the transition from military to civilian government in 1985. Neves and other civilian politicians seem to have successfully convinced the military to voluntarily surrender office without much coordination or assistance from the US. (Correct me if I am wrong.). US support was more significant in bringing civilian government to and end during the April 1, 1964 military coup that removed Goulart from office.

Like Allende nine years later, Goulart was removed by a military that deemed his too far left. While the US played an active role in Allende's removal, our role in Brazil was more one of encouragement and diplomatic cover. We met with the plotters in the months before the coup and gave them our blessing. We also began to move assets into play should they need our assistance, but none was required. We had also funded opposition candidates in the early 1960s and late 1950s (not unlike Chile), but to little effect.

El Salvador
Finally, in El Salvador, the US was helpful in pressuring or reassuring the Salvadoran military and economic elites that a negotiated settlement to the war between the state and the FMLN was in their best interests. This was mostly in 1991. During the 1970s and 1980s, the US helped to arm and train a Salvadoran military to defeat the Marxist-Leninist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

The army that we supported was engaged in a highly-indiscriminate campaign of violence against anyone perceived as a threat to the security of the Salvadoran states. The victims included campesinos, priests, nuns, teachers, workers, pro-democracy and agrarian reform activists and, of course, guerrillas. They were all labeled terrorists, subversives, or communists.

While repression of the nonviolent opposition would continue throughout the 1980s, it was worse in the cities between 1978 and 1981/1982 and in the countryside thereafter. From my reading of the situation, the US continued to encourage the military to respect human rights to the extent possible as long as it did not get in the way of defeating the communists. When they continued to violate human rights (which was frequently), we provided political cover for the regime. However, the 1989 massacre of the Jesuits notwithstanding, the military was a better trained and more respectful military by the end of the 1980s.

On the civilian side, we were mistrustful of the military and civilian moderates in the October 1979. (This was El Salvador's last chance to avoid a civil war. Romero would be assassinate four months later and Reagan would come to office in January 1981. Most civilians had also given up hope for serious reforms after the coup and then Romero's death.) The US then pushed Jose Napoleon Duarte of the Christian Democratic Party as a political component to the counterinsurgency war. However, for a variety of reasons, Duarte lost power to ARENA and Alfredo Cristiani who then entered into negotiations with the FMLN. (I know I skipped a lot).

With this history, what's sort of apology could the US offer?

1. We are proud that we assisted Brazil, Chile and El Salvador in their transitions to electoral democracy in the 1980s and 1990s. (Then duck all questions about our efforts to undermine or overthrow democracy, prop up dictatorship, and support human rights abuses - this seems to be the path Obama has taken).
2. We regret our contribution to the violence that unfortunately characterized the region's transition from military rule to civilian rule and then go to point 1. Vague enough and makes it sound as if everyone was equally responsible. 
3. We are proud of our defense of democracy and freedom against the forces of tyranny (godless communism might work too) and make no apologies whatsoever.
4. We apologize for our support for military rule and the repression of the nonviolent left in the 1970s and 1980s.
5. While we do not wish to re-open up debates, we are committed to helping the people of the Americas learn the truth about the dead and disappeared.

I'm not that creative, but in the current environment I think the best Obama can do is number 1.

The Allende Family

Gonzalo Meza Allende, a forty-five year old grandson of Salvador Allende, committed on Wednesday.

It is the fourth suicide in the Allende family. Salvador Allende shot himself moments before he was to be captured during the 1973 military coup. A daughter, Beatriz, shot herself in Havana in 1977, and his sister Laura, terminally ill with cancer by 1981, jumped from a Havana hotel.