Many here remember the tragedy of the support by the Reagan Administration for right wing, paramilitary death squads. Thugs, supported by the U.S. administration, often in spite of American law, in the name of "anti-communism," have given us a sordid legacy throughout Central America. Of course, part of the reason for this support was the profits derived from U.S. corporations and investors who were financially and ideologically tied to these regimes of brutality; Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, a candidate who regularly invoked the holy Republican name of Reagan, is one such profiteer.
As they always say about political observation, follow the money....
Speaking with Pandering this past weekend to an audience of (mostly conservative) Miami Cuban-Americans while campaigning in Florida, Romney made sure to throw the crowd some red meat, in the form of wacks to Fidel Castro. However, the context for this was particularly revealing, as Romney offered up a particularly Reaganesque (as well as GW Bushesque) connection.
After his son, Craig, who learned Spanish while working as a missionary in Chile, warmed up the crowd by speaking Spanish, Romney put the focus on Fidel Castro.
He told the crowd about meeting a man named Ricardo who was later killed by militants in El Salvador. Romney had met Ricardo early in Romney's career as a venture capitalist. "You see, Ricardo's family had lost their oldest son to rebels in El Salvador," Romney said. "And these rebels were financed by the wealth of Fidel Castro . . . And I vowed that I would never give in to Fidel Castro."
The crowd broke into cheers and applause.
"Go, Mitt, go! Go, Mitt, go!"
The sordid history of the U.S. and Central America in general and El Salvador in particular, requires a close examination. Here is some useful background, focusing on the 1980s. Please forgive the length, but this is very important piece of history.
On May 7, 1980 the progressive Col. Adolfo Majano discovered a plot by the extreme right led by D'Aubuisson, who was arrested with 23 others. One week later six hundred Salvadoran peasants fleeing into Honduras were massacred at the Rio Sumpul by troops from both El Salvador and Honduras. After right-wing supporters chanted "Communist" outside the home of US ambassador Robert White, D'Aubuisson was released. On June 26 soldiers stormed the National University and killed fifty as the government closed the university. In October the Salvadoran army killed 3,000 peasants in Morazan, and more US military advisors secretly arrived in El Salvador. Five rebel groups joined together to form the Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN).
After Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States, he assured Salvadoran business leaders that he would resume military aid. Six FDR leaders in San Salvador were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. On December 4 the bodies of Maryknoll sisters Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel, and missionary Jean Donovan were found near the airport after they had been raped and murdered by soldiers of the National Guard. The next day President Carter suspended aid to El Salvador. After the third junta disbanded as Duarte became provisional President of El Salvador, Carter restored economic aid. On January 5, 1981 three agrarian reform advisors, two from the United States, were shot to death in San Salvador. Concerned that President-elect Reagan would intervene, the FMLN tried to launch a final offensive before he took office; but the popular organizations had been so devastated by the death squads that a general strike failed. On January 14 Carter's National Security Council approved $5.9 million in lethal aid to El Salvador.
The capable and outspoken US ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, was fired by the new Secretary of State Alexander Haig within a week after Reagan's inauguration. In February the Reagan administration issued a White Paper claiming that Salvadoran guerrillas were receiving arms and training from Cuba and Nicaragua; they proposed $25 million in additional military aid to El Salvador with 26 more advisors. By June the US press had refuted virtually every point of the White Paper. On March 9 Reagan signed a Presidential finding authorizing CIA covert operations to support the government of El Salvador with $19.5 million, ostensibly to interdict arms supplies coming from Nicaragua and Honduras.
In January 1982 the US began training Salvadoran troops at Fort Bragg and Fort Benning. To keep aid going to El Salvador the Reagan administration had to certify that it was making progress on human rights. This finding was immediately refuted in the press by numerous human rights organizations. The Salvadoran Communal Union (UCS) complained that at least ninety officials of peasant organizations had been killed in 1981. Amnesty International reported human rights violations on a "massive scale." The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Americas Watch argued there were hundreds of politically motivated murders, torture, and mutilation by paramilitary forces. The Washington Post and the New York Times reported extensively on the El Mozote massacre. Relatives of the four murdered churchwomen complained that the Salvadoran government had covered up the case and had not tried anyone for their murders. Dozens of those in the US Congress were so appalled that they sponsored a resolution to declare the certification null and void. A Newsweek poll found that 89% of those familiar with US policy said that the United States should not send troops to El Salvador.
Roberto D'Aubuisson had founded the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) that drew policies from the 1980 platform of the US Republican Party. The US ambassador Deane Hinton warned that a victory by the right-wing ARENA party in the upcoming election could be a disaster; so the CIA spent two million dollars to help the Christian Democrats. In the March 1982 election about 85% of El Salvador's eligible voters cast ballots. The Christian Democrats won 24 of the sixty seats in the Assembly; but the rest were taken by five rightist parties with ARENA getting 19 seats and the PCN fourteen. Ambassador Hinton persuaded the parties not to challenge the election results nor block agrarian reform and warned them that if they elected D'Aubuisson president, US aid may stop. Despite opposition by ARENA, the Christian Democrat Alvaro Magaña was elected President, though D'Aubuisson became the leader of the Constituent Assembly, which in May suspended the agrarian reform.
In July 1982 the Reagan administration had to certify El Salvador's human rights record again and argued that the 1,573 political murders in the first half of the year were less than the year before, though the number was more than the previous six months. In October leaders of the FDR and FMLN offered to negotiate without preconditions by sending a letter that was delivered to President Magaña by Archbishop Rivera y Damas. That month Ambassador Hinton warned the US-Salvadoran Chamber of Commerce that the "Mafia" that was murdering innocent civilians and Americans must be stopped. After guerrilla commandos destroyed most of the Salvadoran air force at the Ilopango air base in late January 1983, President Reagan used his emergency powers to send $55 million in military aid to El Salvador without congressional approval.
In January 1983 President Reagan issued his third certification of human rights progress in El Salvador, and on April 27 he spoke to a joint session of Congress urging them to support his anti-Communist effort in Central America, arguing, "The national security of all the Americas is at stake in Central America."3 In late May assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs Thomas Ender and Ambassador Hinton were both replaced for trying to get the Salvadorans to stop human rights violations. In June a hundred US military advisers began training Salvadoran troops in Honduras. In July, Reagan certified El Salvador's human rights record again even though no one had been brought to trial for the deaths of the churchwomen or the agrarian workers, and in November the President vetoed a bill that would have continued the certification requirements. On October 25, 1983 US Marines and Army Rangers invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada, where a military coup led by the Marxist deputy prime minister Bernard Coard had taken power on October 13; that government and resisting Cuban workers were removed as Reagan argued that US medical students had to be protected.
For the fiscal year of 1984 the US Congress gave the Reagan administration a third less military aid for El Salvador than they requested, but the $64.8 million was still more than twice that of the previous year. On December 11 Vice President George Bush visited President Magaña but in a toast warned him, "Your cause is being undermined by the murderous violence of reactionary minorities,"4 and he denounced the "cowardly death squads."
On March 25, 1984 Salvadorans voted for president, and a runoff was scheduled for May between Christian Democrat Duarte and D'Aubuisson of ARENA. During the congressional recess in April, President Reagan invoked his emergency powers to send $32 million in military aid to El Salvador. Meanwhile the CIA spent $2.1 million covertly to back Duarte, using the German Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a Venezuelan Institute, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID). D'Aubuisson's friend Jesse Helms learned of it and complained on the Senate floor, and death threats were made against US ambassador Thomas Pickering. Duarte won the election and promised to end the death squads, implement reform, and negotiate peace with the guerrillas. This was enough to persuade the US House of Representatives to vote 212-208 to resume military aid. After a Salvadoran jury convicted five former National Guardsmen of killing the four church women, Congress was more willing to pass aid for El Salvador. The Reagan administration managed to compile $196.6 million for the war in El Salvador in 1984, and $123.25 million was authorized for 1985.
In March 1988 the ARENA party won control of El Salvador's National Assembly. Peace-loving senators Mark Hatfield and Tom Harkin tried to hold back half of El Salvador's military aid for six months so that they would negotiate an end to the war; but their amendment was stopped in committee after dying Duarte sent a message from Walter Reed Hospital. ARENA candidate Alfredo Christiani was elected president in March 1989. In November the guerrillas launched a major offensive but could not get the support they wanted in the capital San Salvador. The military reacted to this by sending out death-squads against journalists, clerics, relief workers, and intellectuals, murdering six Jesuit priests and two women at the Central American University on November 16. The US Congress responded to these developments by cutting the military aid for 1990 in half. In the 1980s the US had given El Salvador nearly $4 billion in overt aid. In April 1990 representatives of the FMLN and the El Salvador government met at Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations. The next month the US House adopted the Moakly-Murtha amendment that cut military aid in half again unless the FMLN refused to negotiate or got weapons from abroad or murdered civilians. In July an important accord on human rights was reached by the FMLN and the El Salvador government.
After a US helicopter was shot down in January 1991, the Bush administration restored the extra military aid. In October the FMLN agreed to disarm when they were promised major reforms in the government and economic improvements such as land reform. Finally at the very end of UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar's term on the last day of 1991, a peace agreement was made. The United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador (ONUSAL) successfully monitored the peace accord and supervised elections in 1994. The UN also mediated an end to 36 years of civil war in Guatemala in 1996. Altogether the low-intensity wars of the 1980s had killed more than two hundred thousand people in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala, resulting in more than two million refugees.
As the Center for International Policy explains,
The Nationalist Republican Alliance, better known as ARENA, was "founded in 1981 by Roberto D' Aubuisson -- a former Army intelligence
officer who was cashiered by the military following the 1979 coup."(6)
According to a 1985 CIA intelligence assessment, "Behind ARENA's
legitimate exterior lies a terrorist network led by D'Aubuisson henchmen
and funded by wealthy Salvadoran expatriates residing in Guatemala and
the United States."(7) U.S. documents demonstrate that at the time of
its formation, ARENA was first and foremost a paramilitary organization.
Even as it built itself into a modern political party, it never lost its
paramilitary character, even though some of its members, including
President Cristiani, sought to distance themselves from its more violent
tendencies.
Hmmm, "wealthy Salvadoran expatriates residing in Guatemala and the United States." Sounds a bit like Mitt Romney's investor, Ricardo Poma, mentioned in Romney's speech and described in one business publication as the scion of El Salvador
While later ARENA leaders have pledged to respect human rights a full accounting of atrocities has yet to be done. In fact, was have seen evidence that political violence by right wing death squads against political opponents of the oligarchs continues on. This article points out that a recent victim of the death squads was also
the victim of a privatization scheme following its election in 2006. Immediately before leaving office, the preceding municipal administration, from the right-wing ARENA party, handed over the Laguna Alegria Natural Park to a community development association called ADESCAM. The privatization of this valuable resource was part of a broader ARENA strategy to leave newly-elected FMLN municipal governments without the resources to function.
What does Mitt Romney and the rest of the GOP field have to say about this? Or about human rights more generally?
Anyway, going back to Romney's partner Poma, here is some information about his ties
to the murdorous ARENA Party (courtesy of the progressive Envio magazine.)
The Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA) is still the most emblematic rightwing party in El Salvador and has held the presidential office for the last three terms, spanning a total of 15 years. It now aspires and is preparing to win its fourth term in office in 2004. Its main leaders are Archie Baldocchie Dueñas from the financial sector (Banco Agrícola); Roberto Murray Meza from the financial-industrial sector linked to beer and soft drink production; Roberto Palomo from ADOC Shoes; Carlos Boza Delgado from the Poma Group, linked to shopping malls, hotels and car distributors; Carlos Araujo Eserzki, a close relative of Salvadoran communications czar Boris Eserzki; and Ricardo Sagrera from Hilasal Towels.
These businessmen head up both their companies and the party and are quite happy to use the state apparatus to further their own business deals. They consider it essential to the success of their companies for ARENA to win the elections again, understanding perfectly well that patrimonial use of the state guarantees them public policies that help meet the goal of all companies: maximum profits. And like most businessmen, both within and outside ARENA, they do not accept the fact that they have two responsibilities: making money and contributing to public welfare.
The Multinational Monitor also ran an article that indicated ARENA's ties to the Poma family.
And here is what the end result of a country run by death squads looks like: