Bush Puts Iran-Contra Figure In Post
inq.philly.com
From my previous link (I was not aware of America's subversion of Nicaraguan elections in the 1920s and 1930s):
Secret War
The second primary component of the Iran Contra scandal was the funneling of profits from the arms dealings with Iran toward the arming and training of a secret army to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. It was a revolutionary government that came to power in 1979 when a broad-based coalition of social groups pushed out the dictator General "Tacho" Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the third in a family dynasty that ruled Nicaragua by virtue of his U.S. backing. Formed, funded and trained by the CIA, the army was named the Contras, Spanish for "against". (When Reagan pitched for them on TV, he called them "The Freedom Fighters" and likened them to "our Founding Fathers.") The Contras had been formed from what had been the National Guard (La Guardia Nacionale) of the deposed dictator Somoza. The real fight for freedom was the struggle of Nicaraguans who were trying to throw off the oppressive single-family dictatorship that had originally been installed by American power in the 1930s and propped up by American aid ever since. The freedom the Contras were fighting for was freedom of American oil companies, fruit companies and so forth, who needed a brutal dictatorship in power to keep the population quiet while they pulled all of the marketable resources out of the country.
Anastasio was the nephew of Anastasio Somoza Garcia, the dictator who had been installed by the American government in the 1930s to protect "American interests," such as oil, sugar and fruit. After 40 years of the Somoza family ruling the country as if it had been their own private possession, they had finally been pushed from power by a broad coalition of different segments of Nicaraguan society who had come together against the brutal dictatorship.
In the late 1970s, after a series of particularly bloody purges in which thousands of Nicaraguans were tortured, raped, killed, "disappeared," Somoza had finally gone too far. Even the professional classes no longer felt safe from his violence. This time even Washington could not hold him up. A revolutionary group that called itself the Sandinistas in honor of a revolutionary hero who defied U.S. interests in the '20s and '30s led a broadly based popular movement that overthrew Somoza. They set up their own government, which wasn't exactly what Washington wanted. The Carter State Department, knew Somoza could not stay in power in Nicaruagua. Washington had urged Somoza to step down, but had wanted to install a new leader to maintain the status quo. But events went beyond their control and the Somoza regime fell apart.
The new government had had some remarkable success with its reforms, in redirecting agricultural production to feed Nicaraguans, for example, and dramatically cutting the illiteracy rate. Washington policy makers saw a threat in Nicaragua becoming an example to other Third World countries of how they could improve conditions for their own people if they defied the control of U.S. business interests.
Funding the war against Nicaragua had been explicitly forbidden by law. Congress had acted to stop the flow of money when the army's reputation for rampaging through Nicaruaguan villages raping, torturing and murdering peasants had become too well known and had turned U.S. public opinion against them. Particular incidents, such as a videotaped murder of an American journalist by the Contras, received widespread exposure on American TV and ignited resistance. But although Congress had forbidden U.S. support of the war, and the Constitution gives the authority to make war to Congress, the Reagan administration had allegiances it considered more important than its Constitutional contract with the American people. The government of Nicaragua had to be overthrown, whether Congress or the people were behind it or not. |
