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Reagan: Visions of the Damned (Part One) by Media Lens www.dissidentvoice.org June 11, 2004 ~snip~ Reagan was, Esler insisted, “a man who was loved even by his political opponents in this country and abroad”. At times Esler portrayed Reagan almost as an enlightened being, quoting Nancy Reagan to the effect that her husband “had absolutely no ego”.
Writing in the Daily Mail, Esler went further, presenting the egoless Reagan as a self-help guru: “above all, Ronald Wilson Reagan embodied the best of the American spirit - the optimistic belief that problems can and will be solved, that tomorrow will be better than today, and that our children will be wealthier and happier than we are.” (Esler, ‘The Great Communicator’, Daily Mail, June 7, 2004)
Last December, the Guardian reported that senior BBC journalists and presenters had been banned from commenting on "current affairs and contentious issues" in newspaper and magazine columns. Journalists would be able to pen “non-contentious articles and food, film and music reviews”, Jason Deans noted. (Deans, “BBC confirms ban on columnists,” The Guardian, December 16, 2003)
~snip~
Reagan’s eight years in office (1981-89) resulted in a vast bloodbath as Washington funneled money, weapons and other supplies to client dictators and right wing death squads across Central America. The death toll was staggering: more than 70,000 political killings in El Salvador, more than 100,000 in Guatemala, and 30,000 killed in the US Contra war waged against Nicaragua. Journalist Allan Nairn describes it as “One of the most intensive campaigns of mass murder in recent history.” (Democracy Now, June 8, 2004)
Analyst Chalmers Johnson notes that “the Reagan years {were} the worst decade for Central America since the Spanish conquest.” (Quoted, Milan Rai, War Plan Iraq, Verso, 2002, p.29)
Consider the fate of El Salvador.
In the eighteen-month period leading up elections in El Salvador in March 1982, twenty-six journalists were murdered. In December 1981 the Salvadoran Communal Union reported that eighty-three of its members had been murdered by government security forces and death squads. The entire six-person top leadership of the main opposition party, the FDR, was seized by US-backed government security forces in 1980, tortured, murdered and mutilated. More generally, any left-wing political leader or organizer who gained any kind of prominence in El Salvador in the years 1980-83 was liable to be murdered. Between October 1979 and March 1982, killings of ordinary citizens occurred at the average rate of over 800 per month, on conservative estimates.
~snip~
Between 1980 and 1983, Amnesty International “received regular, often daily, reports identifying El Salvador’s regular security and military units as responsible for the torture, ‘disappearance’ and killing of noncombatant civilians from all sectors of society.” Moreover, “the vast majority of the victims” were “characterised by their association or alleged association with peasant, labour or religious organisations, with human rights monitoring groups, with the trade union movement, with refugee or relief organisations, or with political parties.” (Quoted, Mark Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, 1995, p.161)
This was at a time when the US was directing vast amounts of military aid into the country.
The terror continued throughout the decade. In November 1989, six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter, were murdered by the army. That same week, at least 28 other Salvadoran civilians were murdered, including the head of a major union, the leader of the organization of university women, nine members of an Indian farming cooperative and ten university students.
The Jesuits were murdered by the Atlacatl Battalion, created, trained and equipped by the United States. It was formed in March 1981, when fifteen specialists in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the US Army School of Special Forces. The Battalion was consistently engaged in mass killing. A US trainer described its soldiers as “particularly ferocious... We've always had a hard time getting them to take prisoners instead of ears.” (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, What Uncle Sam Really Wants, Odonian Press, 1993)
In December 1981, the Battalion killed a thousand civilians in a massacre that involved murder, rape and burning. Later, it was involved in the bombing of villages and the murder of hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning and other horrors. The majority of its victims were women, children and the elderly.
The results of Salvadoran military training were graphically described in the Jesuit journal, America, by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador. Santiago told of a peasant woman who came home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top “as if each body was stroking its own head.”
The killers, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had struggled to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so its hands were nailed onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood stood in the centre of the table. Noam Chomsky comments: “According to Rev. Santiago, macabre scenes of this kind aren't uncommon. People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador-they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disembowelled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch.” (Ibid) More:
http://dissidentvoice.org/June04/MediaLens0611.htm
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