Reply #60: Money Trumps Peace ... in Grenada.

[Octafish]

Remember how 241 Marines, Airmen, Sailors and Soldiers were left exposed and killed by a suicide truck bomber in Beirut in 1983?

Who could remember the same thing had happened to the U.S. and French embassies only weeks before when we had an invasion to think about?

Then, again, that seems to have been the point.

Remembering Reagan's Invasion of Grenada

We take a look at the 1983 U.S.-invasion of Grenada that led to the installation of a pro-American government to replace the former rule of the leftist President Maurice Bishop. We speak with Bishop's former Press Secretary Don Rojas, who was deported from Grenada by the U.S. military.

DemocracyNow.org
Thursday, June 10th, 2004

In the early morning hours of October 25, 1983, the United States invaded the small Caribbean nation of Grenada. The fiery leftist President Maurice Bishop had been assassinated days earlier. The initial invasion consisted of some 1,200 US troops. At the time of the invasion, a delegation of 500 Cubans were in the country.

They included doctors, engineers, teachers and construction workers, who were there to help build an international civilian airport for Grenada. When the US forces moved in they landed at the airport, they killed more than a dozen Cubans and more than 40 Grenadian soldiers. The U.S. quickly consolidated its occupation of the island and expanded its force to more than 7,000. By December a pro-American government was established.

Don Rojas, the former Press Secretary for President Maurice Bishop of Grenada from 1981-1983. Before that he was the Editor in Chief of Grenada's national newspaper "The Free West Indian." When US Marines invaded Grenada in 1983, he was deported by the US military to Barbados. He is currently the General Manager of Pacifica station WBAI in New York.

SNIP...

DON ROJAS: I was serving the Maurice Bishop government at the time as the press secretary to the prime minister. Prior to that, I had served in the capacity of editor of the national newspaper, editor-in-chief, as you pointed out in your introduction. Maurice Bishop was attempting to empower the Grenadian people, a people who had a long history of slavery followed which British colonialism, followed by independence in 1974. Five years after formal independence from Britain, Maurice bishop attempted to begin a social experiment to empower the Grenadian people, to involve them in the decision-making that would affect their daily lives. To bring a popular form of democracy to a country that had for, as I said for centuries, had been under the thumb of foreign rulers, in this particular case, the British. Maurice Bishop's vision for Grenada was of a small country standing tall and proud in the Caribbean region, and in the world community. He was able to bring his message very successfully of a new way for Grenada and the Caribbean to the world, to the United Nations, to the non-aligned movement, et cetera, and received tremendous acclaim around the world at a time. At the time of his death, he had an international stature that was -- you might say, it was far out of proportion to the size of the country.

AMY GOODMAN: How did he die?

DON ROJAS: He was killed. He was assassinated on the morning of October 19 in a bloody coup d'état. Several of the members of his cabinet and others --

CONTINUED...

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/10/1425246

Thank you for giving a damn, emperor72. Your caring means the world to me.