June 15, 2006 - The discussion on the leftward trend of Latin America in recent years reflects all the confusion, worldwide, about what it means to be on the left in the twenty-first century. The confusion is among all wings of world political opinion. There are various explanations for this confusion. The most obvious reason is that different people are measuring different things as the criterion of moving left. The second is that no such political tendency is perfectly linear. It always reflects ups and downs, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an overall trend. And the third reason is that politicians notoriously speak multiple languages to different audiences, but that doesn’t mean one cannot discern bottom lines.
The first thing to distinguish among criteria is whether we are speaking of a given regime’s position on geopolitical issues or their internal policies. Of course the two are linked. But nonetheless regimes are not necessarily consistent. For Latin America the main geopolitical issue is their attitude towards and relationship with the United States. There seems little question that, on this issue, the vast majority of Latin American states have moved a considerable distance since 2000. One only has to ask the U.S. Department of State about it. They are quite aware that their voice is no longer heard with the respect and fear it once was. This is more than a matter of Chavez’s strident tones. We can see this even in the volatile actions and largely centrist views of the present government in Ecuador. The fact is that openly rightwing candidates do not win elections any more, except in Colombia. This simply wasn’t true as recently as a decade ago.
The second thing to look at is the position of the various regimes on questions relating to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the multiple propositions for free trade agreements offered by the United States. If the WTO is stymied in its present negotiations, if the IMF matters a lot less than it did a decade ago, and if the United States can get nowhere in the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), it is in large part due to the numerous "left-of-center" governments in Latin America which have put obstacles in their way. This is not the doing of Cuba but of Brazil and Argentina. Even in Peru, the newly-elected very centrist president, Alan Garcia, who defeated Ollanta Humala (openly endorsed by Chavez), said in his first post-victory declaration that he was going to review critically every clause of the bilateral free trade agreement the previous Peruvian government had been negotiating with the United States.
Those who criticize the various new Latin American regimes from the left tend to emphasize what they have been doing internally more than their geopolitical stances. There are several critical "internal" issues. The first is the rights of the so-called indigenous populations. This has been a political issue in Latin American countries for over two centuries. But it is only today that there is beginning to be a breakthrough in terms of their rights. This is in large part the result of the increased consciousness and political mobilization of these populations.
Of course, this varies country by country. And the power of indigenous populations is in part related to their demographic strength. Still, notice what has been happening. Presidential candidates of indigenous origins have been elected in a number of countries. Their mobilization was a crucial factor in the election of Evo Morales, himself of these origins, in Bolivia. Their mobilization has made it difficult for Ecuador to stay in its traditionally rightwing political position. We need scarcely mention the obvious case of Mexico, which now lives and operates within the context of a situation changed fundamentally by the Zapatista rebellion. Even in a country which has a rather small percentage of indigenous peoples, such as Chile, their struggle has now become a major issue with which the government must contend.
The second issue, often closely allied to the first one, is that of land reform. Here the left critics of the concept of a leftward turn have probably their strongest case. The fact is that the Brazilian Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) has in effect reneged on its pledges to carry out some significant reform. And, in consequence, its crucial supporter, the Movimento dos Sem Terras (MST), has moved further and further away from the PT. But the new Bolivian government has just announced that it will move forward on land reform. And if it does, this should create a big boost for such movements in other countries.
The third internal issue is the control of natural resources (not only mining and energy but water). This doesn’t always mean outright nationalization but it certainly means a significant degree of state control and a significant national retention of income generated. Here too, bit by bit, albeit often slowly, there has been movement. One need only read the screams about protectionism to see that this is a reality with which multinationals know they have to come to terms today. In past decades, they could easily arrange friendly coups d’état. This has become very difficult, as Venezuela has demonstrated.
The fourth internal issue is the degree to which the new regimes allocate significant additional resources to education at all levels and to health-related structures. Here too, as with land reform, the results so far have been limited, although one of the reasons has been lack of governmental resources, something which may be overcome by measures in other domains. We have to reserve judgment on this account.
Finally, there is the question of the degree to which the military is being constrained from direct interference in the national decision-making processes. Latin America today is very different indeed from the epoch, not so long ago, of military coups supported by the United States, and military regimes specializing in torture. Indeed, the amnesties that the military arranged for themselves when they returned to the barracks are being revoked, slowly and carefully but up to this point successfully.
So, what is the overall picture? Latin America has definitely moved left from where it was. Whether this will continue and amplify in the next decade is a function both of the evolving world geopolitical picture and the degree to which left social movements within Latin America will maintain cohesion and put forward lucid programs.
Commentary No. 187.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.
Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein, distributed by Agence Global. For rights and permissions, including translations and posting to non-commercial sites, and contact: rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.336.286.6606. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically, or e-mail to others, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To contact author, write: immanuel.wallerstein(AT)yale.edu.
Permission granted by the author on December 8th, 2006.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
PINOCHET: A Declassified Documentary Obit - National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 212
Washington D.C., December 12, 2006 - As Chile prepared to bury General Augusto Pinochet, the National Security Archive today posted a selection of declassified U.S. documents that illuminate the former dictator's record of repression. The documents include CIA records on Pinochet's role in the Washington D.C. car bombing that killed former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt, Defense Intelligence Agency biographic reports on Pinochet, and transcripts of meetings in which Secretary of State Henry Kissinger resisted bringing pressure on the Chilean military for its human rights atrocities.
"Pinochet's death has denied his victims a final judicial reckoning," said Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive's Chile Documentation Project. "But the declassified documents do contribute to the ultimate verdict of history on his atrocities."
Most of the documents posted today are drawn from a collection of 24,000 declassified records that were released by the Clinton administration after Pinochet's October, 1998, arrest in London. Many of them are reproduced in Kornbluh's book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.
Pinochet died of complications from a heart attack on December 10, which was, by coincidence, International Human Rights Day.
READ THE DOCUMENTS: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB212/index.htm
"Pinochet's death has denied his victims a final judicial reckoning," said Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive's Chile Documentation Project. "But the declassified documents do contribute to the ultimate verdict of history on his atrocities."
Most of the documents posted today are drawn from a collection of 24,000 declassified records that were released by the Clinton administration after Pinochet's October, 1998, arrest in London. Many of them are reproduced in Kornbluh's book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.
Pinochet died of complications from a heart attack on December 10, which was, by coincidence, International Human Rights Day.
READ THE DOCUMENTS: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB212/index.htm
WAR CRIMINALS IN OUR MIDST - Washington Bullets: Pinochet And Kissinger
The story of the death of General Augusto Pinochet, according to the American media, is the story of justice denied, the story of a man, a murderer, a monster who died without having ever faced justice for his crimes—and worse, without having ever even admitted that his brutal legacy left him anything other than loved and respected by his countrymen. But there is another story: the chance that still remains to bring some of those most directly responsible for the crimes of the Chilean regime to justice. Such as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Readers of TomPaine.com already know that only in the past decade, extraordinary progress has been made in bringing closure to the crimes of Pinochet's rule, which started with a military coup against a democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende and ended with, hopefully, the establishment of the Pinochet Precedent:
The big turning point came on October 16, 1998, the day Pinochet was arrested in London on a Spanish court order. ...The British courts stripped Pinochet of his “sovereign immunity” and ruled that Spain could extradite him for torture. Although British Home Secretary Jack Straw intervened and released the aging general after 16 months on “humanitarian grounds,” the case sent a chilling message to other rulers: you no longer sit on privileged thrones above international law. This “Pinochet Precedent” is the crowning global achievement of a 30-year struggle.
But American media in general ignored completely the role that the American government had in the crimes of not just the coup, not just the reign of terror which Pinochet's secret police extended around the South American continent and across the globe—including the worst terrorist act on U.S. soil prior to 9/11, the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt in 1976 in Washington, D.C.—but also multiple attempts to overthrow the democratic government of Chile in the years prior to the coup. These efforts were coordinated from the very top of the American government, by President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Neither The Washington Post nor The New York Times, either in their obits, or in each of their respective editorials reflecting on Pinochet's death, mentions the name Kissinger. In fact, the Post is odious enough to claim that in the end, Pinochet (and patron Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who also died last week) were "right" and can be given the credit for Chile's economy and stable liberal democracy now (never mind the fact that before Pinochet, Chile had a history of liberal democracy unbroken since the 1930s and unparalleled by any South American, or even many European countries).
By 1975, Sen. Frank Church had already established through public hearings culpability for U.S. covert activities in Chile in the decade leading up to Pinochet's coup. According to his report, "Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973," while the official U.S. response to Allende's attempts to gain power were diplomatic chills and attempts to organize embargos, there was a "Track II" process, at the order of Richard Nixon and coordinated by Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, then-Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Henry Kissinger and Attorney General John Mitchell, without the knowledge of the Departments of State and Defense or the U.S. ambassador to Chile. In 1970, in order to prevent Allende from being elected, Nixon ordered a coup:
Track II activities in Chile were undertaken in response to President Nixon's September 15 order and were directed toward actively promoting and encouraging the Chilean military to move against Allende. ...
Although certain elements within the Chilean army were actively involved in coup plotting, the plans of the dissident Chileans never got off the ground. A rather disorganized coup attempt did begin on October 22, but aborted following the shooting of General Schneider.
Chilean Commander-in-chief Rene Schneider's assassination in 1970 greatly destabilized Chilean politics and was part of a coup prompted by Richard Nixon. The Federation of American Scientists' Intelligence Resource Program summarizes these activities, including funding of terrorist groups.
Meanwhile, the United States pursued a two-track policy toward Allende's Chile. At the overt level, Washington was frosty, especially after the nationalization of the copper mines; official relations were unfriendly but not openly hostile. The government of President Richard M. Nixon launched an economic blockade conjunction with U.S. multinationals (ITT, Kennecott, Anaconda) and banks (Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank). The U.S. squeezed the Chilean economy by terminating financial assistance and blocking loans from multilateral organizations. But during 1972 and 1973 the US increased aid to the military, a sector unenthusiastic toward the Allende government. The United States also increased training Chilean military personnel in the United States and Panama.
According to notes taken by CIA director Richard Helms at a 1970 meeting in the Oval Office, his orders were to "make the economy scream." It was widely reported that at the covert level the United States worked to destabilize Allende's Chile by funding opposition political groups and media and by encouraging a military coup d'état. The agency trained members of the fascist organization Patria y Libertad (PyL) in guerrilla warfare and bombing, and they were soon waging a campaign of arson. CIA also sponsored demonstrations and strikes, funded by ITT and other US corporations with Chilean holdings. CIA-linked media, including the country's largest newspaper, fanned the flames of crisis. While these United States actions contributed to the downfall of Allende, no one has established direct United States participation in the coup d'état and few would assign the United States the primary role in the destruction of that government.
However, the FAS notes that no evidence could be shown in 1975 of Kissinger's or Nixon's role in the 1973 coup itself. That would have to wait almost 30 years, to President Clinton's declassification in 2000 of a raft of intelligence documents regarding CIA activities in Chile at the prompting of Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y. The Hinchey report is packed with revelations, including that the CIA paid $35,000 to Schneider's killers. But Peter Kornbluh of the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, still sorting through them, revealed in 2004 records of a conversation between Kissinger and Nixon (.pdf).
The transcript records a call made by President Nixon to Kissinger's home on the weekend following General Augusto Pinochet's violent overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Kissinger reports to the president that the new military regime was "getting consolidated" and complains that the press is "bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown." When Nixon notes that "our hand doesn't show on this one though," Kissinger responds that "We didn't do it" [referring to the coup itself]. I mean we helped them….created the conditions as great as possible."
"We didn't do it" means they didn't directly organize the coup—they had merely spent the past three years trying to goad various members of the Chilean military to overthrow their government. Meanwhile, other revelations of the Hinchey documents, as Kornbluh summarizes, include:
Within a year of the coup, the CIA was aware of bilateral arrangements between the Pinochet regime and other Southern Cone intelligence services to track and kill opponents.
The CIA made Gen. Manuel Contreras, head of [Pinochet's secret police] DINA, a paid asset only several months after concluding that he “was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Junta.” After the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington D.C., the CIA continued to work with Contreras even as “his possible role in the Letelier assassination became an issue.”
The CIA made a payment of $35,000 to a group of coup plotters in Chile after that group had murdered the Chilean commander-in-chief, Gen. Rene Schneider in October 1970—a fact that was apparently withheld in 1975 from the special Senate Committee investigating CIA involvement in assassinations. The report says the payment was made “in an effort to keep the prior contact secret, maintain the good will of the group, and for humanitarian reasons.”
The CIA has an October 25, 1973 intelligence report on Gen. Arellano Stark, Pinochet’s right-hand man after the coup, showing that Stark ordered the murders of 21 political prisoners during the now infamous “Caravan of Death.” This document is likely to be relevant to the ongoing prosecution of General Pinochet, who is facing trial for the disappearances of 14 prisoners at the hands of Gen. Stark’s military death squad.
Chilean poet and playwright Ariel Dorfman has been the most eloquent voice of memory against Pinochet's crimes and has time and again reminded us of the culpability of Kissinger in all of his crimes. After Pinochet was arrested in 1998, Dorfman wrote an open letter, in Spanish, to Kissinger:
What I have wanted to see for 25 years now—and I still have a hard time believing that it might be about to happen—is that before your death you will be forced to look with your blue eyes into the dark and light eyes of the women whose sons and husbands and fathers and brothers you made disappear, one woman after another. I want for them to have the chance to tell you how their lives were fractured and torn apart by an order that you gave, or by the 'action' of the secret police that you chose not to stop. I have asked myself what would happen to you if you were forced to hear day after day the multiple stories of your victims and to acknowledge their existence.
When Pinochet was formally indicted in 2004, Dorfman went on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.
AMY GOODMAN: There's a lot of discussion, Ariel Dorfman, of Pinochet right now. What about those still alive in this country that supported that coup? President Nixon has died, but Henry Kissinger is still with us.
ARIEL DORFMAN: Well, you know, it's very interesting to see that the United States government has never been able to really live up to and understand that it is responsible for many of these horrors. You know, we Chileans have our own sins to pay in the sense that there were things --
AMY GOODMAN: We only have five seconds.
ARIEL DORFMAN: Oh. I think Kissinger should be indicted.
Christopher Hitchens, before he became enamored of the war crimes of the current regime, also wrote eloquently about the need to prosecute someone other than third-world dictators and Serbian generals to prove the legitimacy of international law, by not exempting the most powerful. From his book The Trials of Henry Kissinger, quoted by the Toronto Globe and Mail:
If the drive to put Kissinger in the witness box, let alone the dock, should succeed, then it would rebut the taunt about 'victor's justice' in war-crimes trials. It would demonstrate that no person, and no society or state, is above the law. Conversely, if the initiative should fail, then it would seem to be true that we have woven a net for the catching of small fish only.
The guns of the coup were filled with bullets sold to the army by Washington. Those bullets gunned down thousands of Chileans, including folksinger Victor Jara, students and teachers thought to have leftist sympathies, and many others who became desaparecidos--disappeared, when their bodies were dumped from airplanes and helicopters into the ocean. Tens of thousands were tortured.
Those Washington bullets represented crimes whose primary perpetrator just passed away, but others who were responsible not just walk free, but are honored and feted by all. As Donald Rumsfeld moves from the Pentagon to the courtroom to face his crimes, let us not forget those of Henry Kissinger.
Readers of TomPaine.com already know that only in the past decade, extraordinary progress has been made in bringing closure to the crimes of Pinochet's rule, which started with a military coup against a democratically elected Socialist president, Salvador Allende and ended with, hopefully, the establishment of the Pinochet Precedent:
The big turning point came on October 16, 1998, the day Pinochet was arrested in London on a Spanish court order. ...The British courts stripped Pinochet of his “sovereign immunity” and ruled that Spain could extradite him for torture. Although British Home Secretary Jack Straw intervened and released the aging general after 16 months on “humanitarian grounds,” the case sent a chilling message to other rulers: you no longer sit on privileged thrones above international law. This “Pinochet Precedent” is the crowning global achievement of a 30-year struggle.
But American media in general ignored completely the role that the American government had in the crimes of not just the coup, not just the reign of terror which Pinochet's secret police extended around the South American continent and across the globe—including the worst terrorist act on U.S. soil prior to 9/11, the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt in 1976 in Washington, D.C.—but also multiple attempts to overthrow the democratic government of Chile in the years prior to the coup. These efforts were coordinated from the very top of the American government, by President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
Neither The Washington Post nor The New York Times, either in their obits, or in each of their respective editorials reflecting on Pinochet's death, mentions the name Kissinger. In fact, the Post is odious enough to claim that in the end, Pinochet (and patron Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who also died last week) were "right" and can be given the credit for Chile's economy and stable liberal democracy now (never mind the fact that before Pinochet, Chile had a history of liberal democracy unbroken since the 1930s and unparalleled by any South American, or even many European countries).
By 1975, Sen. Frank Church had already established through public hearings culpability for U.S. covert activities in Chile in the decade leading up to Pinochet's coup. According to his report, "Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973," while the official U.S. response to Allende's attempts to gain power were diplomatic chills and attempts to organize embargos, there was a "Track II" process, at the order of Richard Nixon and coordinated by Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, then-Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Henry Kissinger and Attorney General John Mitchell, without the knowledge of the Departments of State and Defense or the U.S. ambassador to Chile. In 1970, in order to prevent Allende from being elected, Nixon ordered a coup:
Track II activities in Chile were undertaken in response to President Nixon's September 15 order and were directed toward actively promoting and encouraging the Chilean military to move against Allende. ...
Although certain elements within the Chilean army were actively involved in coup plotting, the plans of the dissident Chileans never got off the ground. A rather disorganized coup attempt did begin on October 22, but aborted following the shooting of General Schneider.
Chilean Commander-in-chief Rene Schneider's assassination in 1970 greatly destabilized Chilean politics and was part of a coup prompted by Richard Nixon. The Federation of American Scientists' Intelligence Resource Program summarizes these activities, including funding of terrorist groups.
Meanwhile, the United States pursued a two-track policy toward Allende's Chile. At the overt level, Washington was frosty, especially after the nationalization of the copper mines; official relations were unfriendly but not openly hostile. The government of President Richard M. Nixon launched an economic blockade conjunction with U.S. multinationals (ITT, Kennecott, Anaconda) and banks (Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank). The U.S. squeezed the Chilean economy by terminating financial assistance and blocking loans from multilateral organizations. But during 1972 and 1973 the US increased aid to the military, a sector unenthusiastic toward the Allende government. The United States also increased training Chilean military personnel in the United States and Panama.
According to notes taken by CIA director Richard Helms at a 1970 meeting in the Oval Office, his orders were to "make the economy scream." It was widely reported that at the covert level the United States worked to destabilize Allende's Chile by funding opposition political groups and media and by encouraging a military coup d'état. The agency trained members of the fascist organization Patria y Libertad (PyL) in guerrilla warfare and bombing, and they were soon waging a campaign of arson. CIA also sponsored demonstrations and strikes, funded by ITT and other US corporations with Chilean holdings. CIA-linked media, including the country's largest newspaper, fanned the flames of crisis. While these United States actions contributed to the downfall of Allende, no one has established direct United States participation in the coup d'état and few would assign the United States the primary role in the destruction of that government.
However, the FAS notes that no evidence could be shown in 1975 of Kissinger's or Nixon's role in the 1973 coup itself. That would have to wait almost 30 years, to President Clinton's declassification in 2000 of a raft of intelligence documents regarding CIA activities in Chile at the prompting of Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y. The Hinchey report is packed with revelations, including that the CIA paid $35,000 to Schneider's killers. But Peter Kornbluh of the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, still sorting through them, revealed in 2004 records of a conversation between Kissinger and Nixon (.pdf).
The transcript records a call made by President Nixon to Kissinger's home on the weekend following General Augusto Pinochet's violent overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Kissinger reports to the president that the new military regime was "getting consolidated" and complains that the press is "bleeding because a pro-Communist government has been overthrown." When Nixon notes that "our hand doesn't show on this one though," Kissinger responds that "We didn't do it" [referring to the coup itself]. I mean we helped them….created the conditions as great as possible."
"We didn't do it" means they didn't directly organize the coup—they had merely spent the past three years trying to goad various members of the Chilean military to overthrow their government. Meanwhile, other revelations of the Hinchey documents, as Kornbluh summarizes, include:
Within a year of the coup, the CIA was aware of bilateral arrangements between the Pinochet regime and other Southern Cone intelligence services to track and kill opponents.
The CIA made Gen. Manuel Contreras, head of [Pinochet's secret police] DINA, a paid asset only several months after concluding that he “was the principal obstacle to a reasonable human rights policy within the Junta.” After the assassination of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington D.C., the CIA continued to work with Contreras even as “his possible role in the Letelier assassination became an issue.”
The CIA made a payment of $35,000 to a group of coup plotters in Chile after that group had murdered the Chilean commander-in-chief, Gen. Rene Schneider in October 1970—a fact that was apparently withheld in 1975 from the special Senate Committee investigating CIA involvement in assassinations. The report says the payment was made “in an effort to keep the prior contact secret, maintain the good will of the group, and for humanitarian reasons.”
The CIA has an October 25, 1973 intelligence report on Gen. Arellano Stark, Pinochet’s right-hand man after the coup, showing that Stark ordered the murders of 21 political prisoners during the now infamous “Caravan of Death.” This document is likely to be relevant to the ongoing prosecution of General Pinochet, who is facing trial for the disappearances of 14 prisoners at the hands of Gen. Stark’s military death squad.
Chilean poet and playwright Ariel Dorfman has been the most eloquent voice of memory against Pinochet's crimes and has time and again reminded us of the culpability of Kissinger in all of his crimes. After Pinochet was arrested in 1998, Dorfman wrote an open letter, in Spanish, to Kissinger:
What I have wanted to see for 25 years now—and I still have a hard time believing that it might be about to happen—is that before your death you will be forced to look with your blue eyes into the dark and light eyes of the women whose sons and husbands and fathers and brothers you made disappear, one woman after another. I want for them to have the chance to tell you how their lives were fractured and torn apart by an order that you gave, or by the 'action' of the secret police that you chose not to stop. I have asked myself what would happen to you if you were forced to hear day after day the multiple stories of your victims and to acknowledge their existence.
When Pinochet was formally indicted in 2004, Dorfman went on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.
AMY GOODMAN: There's a lot of discussion, Ariel Dorfman, of Pinochet right now. What about those still alive in this country that supported that coup? President Nixon has died, but Henry Kissinger is still with us.
ARIEL DORFMAN: Well, you know, it's very interesting to see that the United States government has never been able to really live up to and understand that it is responsible for many of these horrors. You know, we Chileans have our own sins to pay in the sense that there were things --
AMY GOODMAN: We only have five seconds.
ARIEL DORFMAN: Oh. I think Kissinger should be indicted.
Christopher Hitchens, before he became enamored of the war crimes of the current regime, also wrote eloquently about the need to prosecute someone other than third-world dictators and Serbian generals to prove the legitimacy of international law, by not exempting the most powerful. From his book The Trials of Henry Kissinger, quoted by the Toronto Globe and Mail:
If the drive to put Kissinger in the witness box, let alone the dock, should succeed, then it would rebut the taunt about 'victor's justice' in war-crimes trials. It would demonstrate that no person, and no society or state, is above the law. Conversely, if the initiative should fail, then it would seem to be true that we have woven a net for the catching of small fish only.
The guns of the coup were filled with bullets sold to the army by Washington. Those bullets gunned down thousands of Chileans, including folksinger Victor Jara, students and teachers thought to have leftist sympathies, and many others who became desaparecidos--disappeared, when their bodies were dumped from airplanes and helicopters into the ocean. Tens of thousands were tortured.
Those Washington bullets represented crimes whose primary perpetrator just passed away, but others who were responsible not just walk free, but are honored and feted by all. As Donald Rumsfeld moves from the Pentagon to the courtroom to face his crimes, let us not forget those of Henry Kissinger.
Pinochet's Death Spares Bush Family Criminal Conviction For Crimes Against Humanity
By Robert Parry
December 12, 2006
Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s death on Dec. 10 means the Bush Family can breathe a little bit easier, knowing that criminal proceedings against Chile’s notorious dictator can no longer implicate his longtime friend and protector, former President George H.W. Bush.
Although Chilean investigations against other defendants may continue, the cases against Pinochet end with his death of a heart attack at the age of 91. Pinochet’s death from natural causes also marks a victory for world leaders, including George H.W. and George W. Bush, who shielded Pinochet from justice over the past three decades.
The Bush Family’s role in the Pinochet cover-up began in 1976 when then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush diverted investigators away from Pinochet’s guilt in a car bombing in Washington that killed political rival Orlando Letelier and an American, Ronni Moffitt.
The cover-up stretched into the presidency of George W. Bush when he sidetracked an FBI recommendation to indict Pinochet in the Letelier-Moffitt murders.
Over those intervening 30 years, Pinochet allegedly engaged in a variety of illicit operations, including terrorism, torture, murder, drug trafficking, money-laundering and illicit arms shipments – sometimes with the official collusion of the U.S. government.
In the 1980s, when George H.W. Bush was Vice President, Pinochet’s regime helped funnel weapons to the Nicaraguan contra rebels and to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, an operation that also implicated then-CIA official Robert M. Gates, who will be the next U.S. Secretary of Defense.
When Pinochet faced perhaps his greatest risk of prosecution – in 1998 when he was detained in London pending extradition to Spain on charges of murdering Spanish citizens – former President George H.W. Bush protested Pinochet’s arrest, calling it “a travesty of justice” and joining in a successful appeal to the British courts to let Pinochet go home to Chile.
Once Pinochet was returned to Chile, the wily ex-dictator employed a legal strategy of political obstruction and assertions of ill health to avert prosecution. Until his death, he retained influential friends in the Chilean power structure and in key foreign capitals, especially Washington.
Pinochet’s History
Pinochet’s years in the service of U.S. foreign policy date back to the early 1970s when Richard Nixon’s administration wanted to destroy Chile’s democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.
The CIA launched a covert operation to “destabilize” Allende’s government, with the CIA-sponsored chaos ending in a bloody coup on Sept. 11, 1973. Gen. Pinochet seized power and Allende was shot to death when Pinochet’s forces stormed the Presidential Palace.
Thousands of political dissidents – including Americans and other foreigners – were rounded up and executed. Many also were tortured.
With Pinochet in control, the CIA turned its attention to helping him overcome the negative publicity that his violent coup had engendered around the world. One “secret” CIA memo, written in early 1974, described the success of “the Santiago Station’s propaganda project.” The memo said:
“Prior to the coup the project’s media outlets maintained a steady barrage of anti-government criticism, exploiting every possible point of friction between the government and the democratic opposition, and emphasizing the problems and conflicts that were developing between the government and the armed forces. Since the coup, these media outlets have supported the new military government. They have tried to present the Junta in the most positive light.” [See Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File]
Despite the CIA’s P.R. blitz, however, Pinochet and his military subordinates insisted on dressing up and acting like a casting agent’s idea of Fascist bullies. The dour Pinochet was known for his fondness for wearing a military cloak that made him resemble a well-dressed Nazi SS officer.
Pinochet and the other right-wing military dictators who dominated South America in the mid-1970s also had their own priorities, one of which was the elimination of political opponents who were living in exile in other countries.
Though many of these dissidents weren’t associated with violent revolutionary movements, the anticommunist doctrine then in vogue among the region’s right-wing military made few distinctions between armed militants and political activists.
By 1974, Chilean intelligence was collaborating with freelancing anti-Castro Cuban extremists and other South American security forces to eliminate any and all threats to right-wing military power.
The first prominent victim of these cross-border assassinations was former Chilean Gen. Carlos Prats, who was living in Argentina and was viewed as a potential rival to Pinochet because Prats had opposed Pinochet’s coup that shattered Chile’s long history as a constitutional democracy.
Learning that Prats was writing his memoirs, Pinochet’s secret police chief Manuel Contreras dispatched Michael Townley, an assassin trained in explosives, to Argentina. Townley planted a bomb under Prats’s car, detonating it on Sept. 30, killing Prats at the door and incinerating Prats’s wife who was trapped inside the car.
On Oct. 6, 1975, a gunman approached Chilean Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton who was walking with his wife on a street in Rome. The gunman shot both Leighton and his wife, severely wounding both of them.
Operation Condor
In November 1975, the loose-knit collaboration among the Southern Cone dictatorships took on a more formal structure during a covert intelligence meeting in Santiago. Delegates from the security forces of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia committed themselves to a regional strategy against “subversives.”
In recognition of Chile’s leadership, the conference named the project after Chile’s national bird, the giant vulture that traverses the Andes Mountains. The project was called “Operation Condor.”
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency confidentially informed Washington that the operation had three phases and that the “third and reportedly very secret phase of ‘Operation Condor’ involves the formation of special teams from member countries who are to carry out operations to include assassinations.”
The Condor accord formally took effect on Jan. 30, 1976, the same day George H.W. Bush was sworn in as CIA director.
In Bush’s first few months, right-wing violence across the Southern Cone of South America surged. On March 24, 1976, the Argentine military staged a coup, ousting the ineffectual President Isabel Peron and escalating a brutal internal security campaign against both violent and non-violent opponents on the Left.
The Argentine security forces became especially well-known for grisly methods of torture and the practice of “disappearing” political dissidents who would be snatched from the streets or from their homes, undergo torture and never be seen again.
Like Pinochet, the new Argentine dictators saw themselves on a mission to save Western Civilization from the clutches of leftist thought.
They took pride in the “scientific” nature of their repression. They were clinical practitioners of anticommunism – refining torture techniques, erasing the sanctuary of international borders and collaborating with right-wing terrorists and organized-crime elements to destroy leftist movements.
Later Argentine government investigations discovered that its military intelligence officers advanced Nazi-like methods of torture by testing the limits of how much pain a human being could endure before dying. Torture methods included experiments with electric shocks, drowning, asphyxiation and sexual perversions, such as forcing mice into a woman’s vagina.
The totalitarian nature of the anticommunism gripping much of South America revealed itself in one particularly bizarre Argentine practice, which was used when pregnant women were captured as suspected subversives.
The women were kept alive long enough to bring the babies to full term. The women then were subjected to forced labor or Caesarian section. The newborns were given to military families to be raised in the ideology of anticommunism while the new mothers were executed.
Many were taken to an airport near Buenos Aires, stripped naked, shackled to other prisoners and put on a plane. As the plane flew over the Rio Plata or out over the Atlantic Ocean, the prisoners were shoved through a cargo door, sausage-like, into the water to drown. All told, the Argentine war against subversion would claim an estimated 30,000 lives.
The 1976 Argentine coup d’etat allowed the pace of cross-border executions under Operation Condor to quicken.
On May 21, gunmen killed two Uruguayan congressmen on a street in Buenos Aires. On June 4, former Bolivian President Juan Jose Torres was slain also in Buenos Aires. On June 11, armed men kidnapped and tortured 23 Chilean refugees and one Uruguayan who were under United Nations protection.
A Grudge
Despite protests from human rights groups, Pinochet and his fellow dictators felt immune from pressure because of their powerful friends in Washington. Pinochet’s sense of impunity led him to contemplate silencing one of his most eloquent critics, Chile’s former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, who lived in the U.S. capital.
Earlier in their government careers, when Letelier was briefly defense minister in Allende’s government, Pinochet had been his subordinate. After the coup, Pinochet imprisoned Letelier at a desolate concentration camp on Dawson Island, but international pressure won Letelier release a year later.
Now, Pinochet was chafing under Letelier’s rough criticism of the regime’s human rights record. Letelier was doubly infuriating to Pinochet because Letelier was regarded as a man of intellect and charm, even impressing CIA officers who observed him as “a personable, socially pleasant man” and “a reasonable, mature democrat,” according to biographical sketches.
By summer 1976, George H.W. Bush’s CIA was hearing a lot about Operation Condor from South American sources who had attended a second organizational conference of Southern Cone intelligence services.
These CIA sources reported that the military regimes were preparing “to engage in ‘executive action’ outside the territory of member countries.” In intelligence circles, “executive action” is a euphemism for assassination.
Meanwhile, Pinochet and intelligence chief Manuel Contreras were putting in motion their most audacious assassination plan yet: to eliminate Orlando Letelier in his safe haven in Washington, D.C.
In July 1976, two operatives from Chile’s intelligence service DINA – Michael Townley and Armando Fernandez Larios – went to Paraguay where DINA had arranged for them to get false passports and visas for a trip to the United States.
Townley and Larios were using the false names Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral and a cover story claiming they were investigating suspected leftists working for Chile’s state copper company in New York. Townley and Larios said their project had been cleared with the CIA’s Station Chief in Santiago.
A senior Paraguayan official, Conrado Pappalardo, urged U.S. Ambassador George Landau to cooperate, citing a direct appeal from Pinochet in support of the mission. Supposedly, the Paraguayan government claimed, the two Chileans were to meet with CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters.
An alarmed Landau recognized that the visa request was highly unusual, since such operations are normally coordinated with the CIA station in the host country and are cleared with CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Though granting the visas, Landau took the precaution of sending an urgent cable to Walters and photostatic copies of the fake passports to the CIA. Landau said he received an urgent cable back signed by CIA Director Bush, reporting that Walters, who was in the process of retiring, was out of town.
When Walters returned a few days later, he cabled Landau that he had “nothing to do with this” mission. Landau immediately canceled the visas.
The Assassination
It remains unclear what – if anything – Bush’s CIA did after learning about the “Paraguayan caper.” Normal protocol would have required senior CIA officials to ask their Chilean counterparts about the supposed trip to Langley.
However, even with the declassification of more records in recent years, that question has never been fully answered.
The CIA also demonstrated little curiosity over the Aug. 22, 1976, arrival of two other Chilean operatives using the names, Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral, the phony names that were intended to hide the identity of the two operatives in the aborted assassination plot.
When these two different operatives arrived in Washington, they made a point of having the Chilean Embassy notify Walters’s office at CIA.
“It is quite beyond belief that the CIA is so lax in its counterespionage functions that it would simply have ignored a clandestine operation by a foreign intelligence service in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere in the United States,” wrote John Dinges and Saul Landau in their 1980 book, Assassination on Embassy Row. “It is equally implausible that Bush, Walters, Landau and other officials were unaware of the chain of international assassinations that had been attributed to DINA.”
Apparently, DINA had dispatched the second pair of operatives, using the phony names, to show that the initial contacts for visas in Paraguay were not threatening. In other words, the Chilean government had the replacement team of Williams and Romeral go through the motions of a trip to Washington with the intent to visit Walters to dispel any American suspicions or to spread confusion among suspicious U.S. officials.
But it’s still unclear whether Bush’s CIA contacted Pinochet’s government about its mysterious behavior and, if not, why not.
As for the Letelier plot, DINA was soon plotting another way to carry out the killing. In late August, DINA dispatched a preliminary team of one man and one woman to do surveillance on Letelier as he moved around Washington.
Then, Townley was sent under a different alias to carry out the murder. After arriving in New York on Sept. 9, 1976, Townley connected with Cuban National Movement leader Guillermo Novo in Union City, New Jersey, and then headed to Washington. Townley assembled a remote-controlled bomb that used pieces bought at Radio Shack and Sears.
On Sept. 18, joined by Cuban extremists Virgilio Paz and Dionisio Suarez, Townley went to Letelier home in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington. The assassination team attached the bomb underneath Letelier’s Chevrolet Chevelle.
Three days later, on the morning of Sept. 21, Paz and Suarez followed Letelier as he drove to work with two associates, Ronni Moffitt and her husband Michael. As the Chevelle proceeded down Massachusetts Avenue, through an area known as Embassy Row, the assassins detonated the bomb.
The blast ripped off Letelier’s legs and punctured a hole in Ronni Moffitt’s jugular vein. She drowned in her own blood at the scene; Letelier died after being taken to George Washington University Hospital. Michael Moffitt survived.
At the time, the attack represented the worst act of international terrorism on U.S. soil. Adding to the potential for scandal, the terrorism had been carried out by a regime that was an ostensible ally of the United States, one that had gained power with the help of the Nixon administration and the CIA.
Threat to Bush
Bush’s reputation was also at risk. As authors Dinges and Landau noted in Assassination on Embassy Row, “the CIA reaction was peculiar” after the cable from Ambassador Landau arrived disclosing a covert Chilean intelligence operation and asking Deputy Director Walters if he had a meeting scheduled with the DINA agents.
“Landau expected Walters to take quick action in the event that the Chilean mission did not have CIA clearance. Yet a week passed during which the assassination team could well have had time to carry out their original plan to go directly from Paraguay to Washington to kill Letelier. Walters and Bush conferred during that week about the matter.”
“One thing is clear,” Dinges and Landau wrote, “DINA chief Manuel Contreras would have called off the assassination mission if the CIA or State Department had expressed their displeasure to the Chilean government. An intelligence officer familiar with the case said that any warning would have been sufficient to cause the assassination to be scuttled. Whatever Walters and Bush did – if anything – the DINA mission proceeded.”
Within hours of the bombing, Letelier’s associates accused the Pinochet regime, citing its hatred of Letelier and its record for brutality. The Chilean government, however, heatedly denied any responsibility.
That night, at a dinner at the Jordanian Embassy, Senator James Abourezk, a South Dakota Democrat, spotted Bush and approached the CIA director. Abourezk said he was a friend of Letelier’s and beseeched Bush to get the CIA “to find the bastards who killed him.” Abourezk said Bush responded: “I’ll see what I can do. We are not without assets in Chile.”
A problem, however, was that one of the CIA’s best-placed assets – DINA chief Contreras – was part of the assassination. Wiley Gilstrap, the CIA’s Santiago Station Chief, did approach Contreras with questions about the Letelier bombing and wired back to Langley Contreras’s assurance that the Chilean government wasn’t involved.
Following the strategy of public misdirection already used in hundreds of “disappearances,” Contreras pointed the finger at the Chilean Left. Contreras suggested that leftists had killed Letelier to turn him into a martyr.
CIA headquarters, of course, had plenty of evidence that Contreras was lying. The Pinochet government had flashed its intention to mount a suspicious operation inside the United States by involving the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay and the deputy director of the CIA. Bush’s CIA even had in its files a photograph of the leader of the terrorist squad, Michael Townley.
Yet, rather than fulfilling his promise to Abourezk to “see what I can do,” Bush ignored leads that would have taken him into a confrontation with Pinochet. The CIA either didn’t put the pieces together or avoided the obvious conclusions the evidence presented.
The Cover-up
Indeed, the CIA didn’t seem to want any information that might implicate the Pinochet regime. On Oct. 6, a CIA informant in Chile went to the CIA Station in Santiago and relayed an account of Pinochet denouncing Letelier.
The informant said the dictator had called Letelier’s criticism of the government “unacceptable.” The source “believes that the Chilean Government is directly involved in Letelier’s death and feels that investigation into the incident will so indicate,” the CIA field report said. [See Kornbluh, The Pinochet File.]
But Bush’s CIA chose to accept Contreras’s denials and even began leaking information that pointed away from the real killers.
Newsweek’s Periscope reported in the magazine’s Oct. 11, 1976, issue that “the Chilean secret police were not involved. …. The [Central Intelligence] agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile’s rulers were wooing U.S. support, could only damage the Santiago regime.”
Similar stories ran in other newspapers, including the New York Times.
Despite the lack of help from Washington, the FBI’s legal attaché in Buenos Aires, Robert Scherrer, began putting the puzzle together only a week after the Letelier bombing.
Relying on a source in the Argentine military, Scherrer reported to his superiors that the assassination was likely the work of Operation Condor, the assassination project organized by the Chilean government.
Another break in the case came two weeks after the Letelier assassination on Oct. 6, 1976, when anti-Castro terrorists planted a bomb on a Cubana Airlines DC-8 before it took off from Barbados. Nine minutes after takeoff, the bomb exploded, plunging the plane into the Caribbean and killing all 73 people on board including the Cuban national fencing team.
Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who had left the plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named two prominent anti-Castro extremists, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, as the architects of the attack.
A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents. Although Posada was a CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veteran and stayed in close touch with some former CIA colleagues, senior CIA officials again pleaded ignorance.
For the second time in barely two weeks, Bush’s CIA had done nothing to interfere with terrorist attacks involving anticommunist operatives with close ties to the CIA. [For more on Posada, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush's Hypocrisy: Cuban Terrorists."]
But the Cubana Airlines bombing put federal investigators on the right track toward solving the Letelier assassination. They began to learn more about the network of right-wing terrorists associated with Operation Condor and its international Murder Inc. However, CIA Director Bush continued to assert the innocence of Pinochet’s regime.
On Nov. 1, 1976, the Washington Post cited CIA officials in reporting that “operatives of the present Chilean military Junta did not take part in Letelier’s killing.” The Post added that “CIA Director Bush expressed this view in a conversation late last week with Secretary of State Kissinger.”
Regarding the Letelier murder, George H.W. Bush was never pressed to provide a full explanation of his actions.
When I submitted questions to Bush in 1988 – while he was Vice President and I was a Newsweek correspondent preparing a story on his year as CIA director – Bush’s chief of staff Craig Fuller responded, saying “the Vice President generally does not comment on issues related to the time he was at the Central Intelligence Agency and he will have no comment on the specific issues raised in your letter.”
My editors at Newsweek subsequently decided not to publish any story about Bush’s year at the CIA though he was then running for President and citing his CIA experience as an important element of his resumé.
The Carter Interregnum
After Jimmy Carter became President in 1977, federal investigators cracked the Letelier case, successfully bringing charges against Townley and several other conspirators.
Prosecutor Eugene Propper told me that Bush’s CIA did provide some information about the background of suspects, but didn’t volunteer the crucial information about the Paraguayan gambit or supply the photo of the chief assassin, Townley. “Nothing the agency gave us helped us break this case,” Propper said.
Though U.S. prosecutors grasped the criminal nature of the Pinochet government, the wheels of justice turned slowly. Before the prosecutors could climb the chain of command in Chile, the Republicans had returned to power in 1981, with George H.W. Bush serving as Vice President and acting as a top foreign policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
Despite the mounting evidence of Pinochet’s guilt in a terrorist act on U.S. soil, the dictator emerged from his pariah status of the Carter years to regain his position as a favored ally under Bush and Reagan.
When help was needed on sensitive projects, the Reagan administration often turned to Pinochet. For instance, in 1982, after Reagan decided to tilt Iraq’s way during the Iran-Iraq War, one of Pinochet’s favored arms dealers, Carlos Cardoen, manufactured and shipped controversial weapons to Saddam Hussein’s army.
Regarding these Iraqi arms shipments, former National Security Council aide Howard Teicher swore out an affidavit in 1995 detailing Reagan’s decision and describing the secret roles of CIA Director William Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates, in shepherding the military equipment to Iraq.
Teicher said the secret arming of Iraq was approved by Reagan in June 1982 as part of a National Security Decision Directive. Under it, Casey and Gates “authorized, approved and assisted” delivery of cluster bombs and other materiel to Iraq, Teicher said.
Teicher’s affidavit corroborated earlier public statements by former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe and Iranian-born businessman Richard Babayan, who claimed first-hand knowledge of Gates’s central role in the secret Iraq operations.
In his 1992 book Profits of War, Ben-Menashe wrote that Israeli Mossad director Nachum Admoni approached Gates in 1985 seeking help in shutting down unconventional weapons, especially chemicals, moving through the Chilean arms pipeline to Iraq.
Ben-Menashe wrote that Gates attended a meeting in Chile in 1986 with Cardoen present at which Gates tried to calm down the Israelis by assuring them that U.S. policy was simply to ensure a channel of conventional weapons for Iraq.
Though Gates denied Ben-Menashe’s and Babayan’s allegations in 1991 – when Gates underwent confirmation hearings to be CIA director – he has never been asked to publicly respond to Teicher’s affidavit which was filed in a Miami court case in 1995.
Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were aware of the discrepancies between the Teicher and Gates accounts when Gates appeared at a Dec. 5, 2006, confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Defense, but no one asked Gates to respond to Teicher’s sworn statement.
A source at the United Nations also has told me that some of the documents captured in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 shed light on the Cardoen arms pipeline, but those records have never been made public.
Key Leads
Other potential avenues for understanding Pinochet’s covert role in supporting anticommunist strategies in the Reagan-Bush era opened recently, as former DINA chief Contreras turned on his old boss.
In a court document filed in early July 2006, Contreras implicated Pinochet and one of his sons in a scheme to manufacture and smuggle cocaine to Europe and the United States, explaining one source of Pinochet’s $28 million fortune.
Contreras alleged that the cocaine was processed with Pinochet’s approval at an Army chemical plant south of Santiago during the 1980s and that Pinochet’s son Marco Antonio arranged the shipments of the processed cocaine. [NYT, July 11, 2006]
At the time of this alleged cocaine smuggling, Pinochet was a close ally of the Reagan administration, providing help on a variety of sensitive intelligence projects, including shipping military equipment to Nicaraguan contra rebels who also were implicated in the exploding cocaine trade to the United States. [For details on the contra-cocaine scandal, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]
Contreras said Eugenio Berrios, a chemist for Chile’s secret police, oversaw the drug manufacturing. Berrios also was accused of producing poisons for Pinochet to use in murdering political enemies. Berrios disappeared in 1992. [For details on the Berrios mystery, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Pinochet’s Mad Scientist.”]
As this drip-drip-drip of evidence accumulated implicating Pinochet and his American allies in serious crimes and international intrigue, it fell to the second generation of George Bush presidents to put a finger in the dike.
Near the end of the Clinton presidency in 2000, an FBI team reviewed new evidence that had become available in the Letelier case and recommended the indictment of Pinochet.
But the final decision was left to the incoming Bush administration – and George W. Bush, like his father, chose to protect Pinochet. In doing so, the younger George Bush also protected his father’s reputation and the legacy of the Bush Family.
Freed from Washington’s legal pressure, Pinochet was able to fend off intermittent attempts in Chile to bring him to justice during the last half dozen years of his life.
“Every day it is clearer that Pinochet ordered my brother’s death,” human rights lawyer Fabiola Letelier told the New York Times on the 30th anniversary of the Letelier-Moffitt assassinations. “But for a proper and complete investigation to take place we need access to the appropriate records and evidence.” [NYT, Sept. 21, 2006]
Ultimately, Pinochet escaped a formal judgment of guilt for his many crimes, dying on the afternoon of Dec. 10, 2006, at the Military Hospital of Santiago from complications resulting from a heart attack.
As Pinochet took his last breath, the Bush Family, too, had reason for a sigh of relief.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
December 12, 2006
Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s death on Dec. 10 means the Bush Family can breathe a little bit easier, knowing that criminal proceedings against Chile’s notorious dictator can no longer implicate his longtime friend and protector, former President George H.W. Bush.
Although Chilean investigations against other defendants may continue, the cases against Pinochet end with his death of a heart attack at the age of 91. Pinochet’s death from natural causes also marks a victory for world leaders, including George H.W. and George W. Bush, who shielded Pinochet from justice over the past three decades.
The Bush Family’s role in the Pinochet cover-up began in 1976 when then-CIA Director George H.W. Bush diverted investigators away from Pinochet’s guilt in a car bombing in Washington that killed political rival Orlando Letelier and an American, Ronni Moffitt.
The cover-up stretched into the presidency of George W. Bush when he sidetracked an FBI recommendation to indict Pinochet in the Letelier-Moffitt murders.
Over those intervening 30 years, Pinochet allegedly engaged in a variety of illicit operations, including terrorism, torture, murder, drug trafficking, money-laundering and illicit arms shipments – sometimes with the official collusion of the U.S. government.
In the 1980s, when George H.W. Bush was Vice President, Pinochet’s regime helped funnel weapons to the Nicaraguan contra rebels and to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, an operation that also implicated then-CIA official Robert M. Gates, who will be the next U.S. Secretary of Defense.
When Pinochet faced perhaps his greatest risk of prosecution – in 1998 when he was detained in London pending extradition to Spain on charges of murdering Spanish citizens – former President George H.W. Bush protested Pinochet’s arrest, calling it “a travesty of justice” and joining in a successful appeal to the British courts to let Pinochet go home to Chile.
Once Pinochet was returned to Chile, the wily ex-dictator employed a legal strategy of political obstruction and assertions of ill health to avert prosecution. Until his death, he retained influential friends in the Chilean power structure and in key foreign capitals, especially Washington.
Pinochet’s History
Pinochet’s years in the service of U.S. foreign policy date back to the early 1970s when Richard Nixon’s administration wanted to destroy Chile’s democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.
The CIA launched a covert operation to “destabilize” Allende’s government, with the CIA-sponsored chaos ending in a bloody coup on Sept. 11, 1973. Gen. Pinochet seized power and Allende was shot to death when Pinochet’s forces stormed the Presidential Palace.
Thousands of political dissidents – including Americans and other foreigners – were rounded up and executed. Many also were tortured.
With Pinochet in control, the CIA turned its attention to helping him overcome the negative publicity that his violent coup had engendered around the world. One “secret” CIA memo, written in early 1974, described the success of “the Santiago Station’s propaganda project.” The memo said:
“Prior to the coup the project’s media outlets maintained a steady barrage of anti-government criticism, exploiting every possible point of friction between the government and the democratic opposition, and emphasizing the problems and conflicts that were developing between the government and the armed forces. Since the coup, these media outlets have supported the new military government. They have tried to present the Junta in the most positive light.” [See Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File]
Despite the CIA’s P.R. blitz, however, Pinochet and his military subordinates insisted on dressing up and acting like a casting agent’s idea of Fascist bullies. The dour Pinochet was known for his fondness for wearing a military cloak that made him resemble a well-dressed Nazi SS officer.
Pinochet and the other right-wing military dictators who dominated South America in the mid-1970s also had their own priorities, one of which was the elimination of political opponents who were living in exile in other countries.
Though many of these dissidents weren’t associated with violent revolutionary movements, the anticommunist doctrine then in vogue among the region’s right-wing military made few distinctions between armed militants and political activists.
By 1974, Chilean intelligence was collaborating with freelancing anti-Castro Cuban extremists and other South American security forces to eliminate any and all threats to right-wing military power.
The first prominent victim of these cross-border assassinations was former Chilean Gen. Carlos Prats, who was living in Argentina and was viewed as a potential rival to Pinochet because Prats had opposed Pinochet’s coup that shattered Chile’s long history as a constitutional democracy.
Learning that Prats was writing his memoirs, Pinochet’s secret police chief Manuel Contreras dispatched Michael Townley, an assassin trained in explosives, to Argentina. Townley planted a bomb under Prats’s car, detonating it on Sept. 30, killing Prats at the door and incinerating Prats’s wife who was trapped inside the car.
On Oct. 6, 1975, a gunman approached Chilean Christian Democratic leader Bernardo Leighton who was walking with his wife on a street in Rome. The gunman shot both Leighton and his wife, severely wounding both of them.
Operation Condor
In November 1975, the loose-knit collaboration among the Southern Cone dictatorships took on a more formal structure during a covert intelligence meeting in Santiago. Delegates from the security forces of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia committed themselves to a regional strategy against “subversives.”
In recognition of Chile’s leadership, the conference named the project after Chile’s national bird, the giant vulture that traverses the Andes Mountains. The project was called “Operation Condor.”
The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency confidentially informed Washington that the operation had three phases and that the “third and reportedly very secret phase of ‘Operation Condor’ involves the formation of special teams from member countries who are to carry out operations to include assassinations.”
The Condor accord formally took effect on Jan. 30, 1976, the same day George H.W. Bush was sworn in as CIA director.
In Bush’s first few months, right-wing violence across the Southern Cone of South America surged. On March 24, 1976, the Argentine military staged a coup, ousting the ineffectual President Isabel Peron and escalating a brutal internal security campaign against both violent and non-violent opponents on the Left.
The Argentine security forces became especially well-known for grisly methods of torture and the practice of “disappearing” political dissidents who would be snatched from the streets or from their homes, undergo torture and never be seen again.
Like Pinochet, the new Argentine dictators saw themselves on a mission to save Western Civilization from the clutches of leftist thought.
They took pride in the “scientific” nature of their repression. They were clinical practitioners of anticommunism – refining torture techniques, erasing the sanctuary of international borders and collaborating with right-wing terrorists and organized-crime elements to destroy leftist movements.
Later Argentine government investigations discovered that its military intelligence officers advanced Nazi-like methods of torture by testing the limits of how much pain a human being could endure before dying. Torture methods included experiments with electric shocks, drowning, asphyxiation and sexual perversions, such as forcing mice into a woman’s vagina.
The totalitarian nature of the anticommunism gripping much of South America revealed itself in one particularly bizarre Argentine practice, which was used when pregnant women were captured as suspected subversives.
The women were kept alive long enough to bring the babies to full term. The women then were subjected to forced labor or Caesarian section. The newborns were given to military families to be raised in the ideology of anticommunism while the new mothers were executed.
Many were taken to an airport near Buenos Aires, stripped naked, shackled to other prisoners and put on a plane. As the plane flew over the Rio Plata or out over the Atlantic Ocean, the prisoners were shoved through a cargo door, sausage-like, into the water to drown. All told, the Argentine war against subversion would claim an estimated 30,000 lives.
The 1976 Argentine coup d’etat allowed the pace of cross-border executions under Operation Condor to quicken.
On May 21, gunmen killed two Uruguayan congressmen on a street in Buenos Aires. On June 4, former Bolivian President Juan Jose Torres was slain also in Buenos Aires. On June 11, armed men kidnapped and tortured 23 Chilean refugees and one Uruguayan who were under United Nations protection.
A Grudge
Despite protests from human rights groups, Pinochet and his fellow dictators felt immune from pressure because of their powerful friends in Washington. Pinochet’s sense of impunity led him to contemplate silencing one of his most eloquent critics, Chile’s former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier, who lived in the U.S. capital.
Earlier in their government careers, when Letelier was briefly defense minister in Allende’s government, Pinochet had been his subordinate. After the coup, Pinochet imprisoned Letelier at a desolate concentration camp on Dawson Island, but international pressure won Letelier release a year later.
Now, Pinochet was chafing under Letelier’s rough criticism of the regime’s human rights record. Letelier was doubly infuriating to Pinochet because Letelier was regarded as a man of intellect and charm, even impressing CIA officers who observed him as “a personable, socially pleasant man” and “a reasonable, mature democrat,” according to biographical sketches.
By summer 1976, George H.W. Bush’s CIA was hearing a lot about Operation Condor from South American sources who had attended a second organizational conference of Southern Cone intelligence services.
These CIA sources reported that the military regimes were preparing “to engage in ‘executive action’ outside the territory of member countries.” In intelligence circles, “executive action” is a euphemism for assassination.
Meanwhile, Pinochet and intelligence chief Manuel Contreras were putting in motion their most audacious assassination plan yet: to eliminate Orlando Letelier in his safe haven in Washington, D.C.
In July 1976, two operatives from Chile’s intelligence service DINA – Michael Townley and Armando Fernandez Larios – went to Paraguay where DINA had arranged for them to get false passports and visas for a trip to the United States.
Townley and Larios were using the false names Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral and a cover story claiming they were investigating suspected leftists working for Chile’s state copper company in New York. Townley and Larios said their project had been cleared with the CIA’s Station Chief in Santiago.
A senior Paraguayan official, Conrado Pappalardo, urged U.S. Ambassador George Landau to cooperate, citing a direct appeal from Pinochet in support of the mission. Supposedly, the Paraguayan government claimed, the two Chileans were to meet with CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters.
An alarmed Landau recognized that the visa request was highly unusual, since such operations are normally coordinated with the CIA station in the host country and are cleared with CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Though granting the visas, Landau took the precaution of sending an urgent cable to Walters and photostatic copies of the fake passports to the CIA. Landau said he received an urgent cable back signed by CIA Director Bush, reporting that Walters, who was in the process of retiring, was out of town.
When Walters returned a few days later, he cabled Landau that he had “nothing to do with this” mission. Landau immediately canceled the visas.
The Assassination
It remains unclear what – if anything – Bush’s CIA did after learning about the “Paraguayan caper.” Normal protocol would have required senior CIA officials to ask their Chilean counterparts about the supposed trip to Langley.
However, even with the declassification of more records in recent years, that question has never been fully answered.
The CIA also demonstrated little curiosity over the Aug. 22, 1976, arrival of two other Chilean operatives using the names, Juan Williams and Alejandro Romeral, the phony names that were intended to hide the identity of the two operatives in the aborted assassination plot.
When these two different operatives arrived in Washington, they made a point of having the Chilean Embassy notify Walters’s office at CIA.
“It is quite beyond belief that the CIA is so lax in its counterespionage functions that it would simply have ignored a clandestine operation by a foreign intelligence service in Washington, D.C., or elsewhere in the United States,” wrote John Dinges and Saul Landau in their 1980 book, Assassination on Embassy Row. “It is equally implausible that Bush, Walters, Landau and other officials were unaware of the chain of international assassinations that had been attributed to DINA.”
Apparently, DINA had dispatched the second pair of operatives, using the phony names, to show that the initial contacts for visas in Paraguay were not threatening. In other words, the Chilean government had the replacement team of Williams and Romeral go through the motions of a trip to Washington with the intent to visit Walters to dispel any American suspicions or to spread confusion among suspicious U.S. officials.
But it’s still unclear whether Bush’s CIA contacted Pinochet’s government about its mysterious behavior and, if not, why not.
As for the Letelier plot, DINA was soon plotting another way to carry out the killing. In late August, DINA dispatched a preliminary team of one man and one woman to do surveillance on Letelier as he moved around Washington.
Then, Townley was sent under a different alias to carry out the murder. After arriving in New York on Sept. 9, 1976, Townley connected with Cuban National Movement leader Guillermo Novo in Union City, New Jersey, and then headed to Washington. Townley assembled a remote-controlled bomb that used pieces bought at Radio Shack and Sears.
On Sept. 18, joined by Cuban extremists Virgilio Paz and Dionisio Suarez, Townley went to Letelier home in Bethesda, Maryland, outside Washington. The assassination team attached the bomb underneath Letelier’s Chevrolet Chevelle.
Three days later, on the morning of Sept. 21, Paz and Suarez followed Letelier as he drove to work with two associates, Ronni Moffitt and her husband Michael. As the Chevelle proceeded down Massachusetts Avenue, through an area known as Embassy Row, the assassins detonated the bomb.
The blast ripped off Letelier’s legs and punctured a hole in Ronni Moffitt’s jugular vein. She drowned in her own blood at the scene; Letelier died after being taken to George Washington University Hospital. Michael Moffitt survived.
At the time, the attack represented the worst act of international terrorism on U.S. soil. Adding to the potential for scandal, the terrorism had been carried out by a regime that was an ostensible ally of the United States, one that had gained power with the help of the Nixon administration and the CIA.
Threat to Bush
Bush’s reputation was also at risk. As authors Dinges and Landau noted in Assassination on Embassy Row, “the CIA reaction was peculiar” after the cable from Ambassador Landau arrived disclosing a covert Chilean intelligence operation and asking Deputy Director Walters if he had a meeting scheduled with the DINA agents.
“Landau expected Walters to take quick action in the event that the Chilean mission did not have CIA clearance. Yet a week passed during which the assassination team could well have had time to carry out their original plan to go directly from Paraguay to Washington to kill Letelier. Walters and Bush conferred during that week about the matter.”
“One thing is clear,” Dinges and Landau wrote, “DINA chief Manuel Contreras would have called off the assassination mission if the CIA or State Department had expressed their displeasure to the Chilean government. An intelligence officer familiar with the case said that any warning would have been sufficient to cause the assassination to be scuttled. Whatever Walters and Bush did – if anything – the DINA mission proceeded.”
Within hours of the bombing, Letelier’s associates accused the Pinochet regime, citing its hatred of Letelier and its record for brutality. The Chilean government, however, heatedly denied any responsibility.
That night, at a dinner at the Jordanian Embassy, Senator James Abourezk, a South Dakota Democrat, spotted Bush and approached the CIA director. Abourezk said he was a friend of Letelier’s and beseeched Bush to get the CIA “to find the bastards who killed him.” Abourezk said Bush responded: “I’ll see what I can do. We are not without assets in Chile.”
A problem, however, was that one of the CIA’s best-placed assets – DINA chief Contreras – was part of the assassination. Wiley Gilstrap, the CIA’s Santiago Station Chief, did approach Contreras with questions about the Letelier bombing and wired back to Langley Contreras’s assurance that the Chilean government wasn’t involved.
Following the strategy of public misdirection already used in hundreds of “disappearances,” Contreras pointed the finger at the Chilean Left. Contreras suggested that leftists had killed Letelier to turn him into a martyr.
CIA headquarters, of course, had plenty of evidence that Contreras was lying. The Pinochet government had flashed its intention to mount a suspicious operation inside the United States by involving the U.S. Embassy in Paraguay and the deputy director of the CIA. Bush’s CIA even had in its files a photograph of the leader of the terrorist squad, Michael Townley.
Yet, rather than fulfilling his promise to Abourezk to “see what I can do,” Bush ignored leads that would have taken him into a confrontation with Pinochet. The CIA either didn’t put the pieces together or avoided the obvious conclusions the evidence presented.
The Cover-up
Indeed, the CIA didn’t seem to want any information that might implicate the Pinochet regime. On Oct. 6, a CIA informant in Chile went to the CIA Station in Santiago and relayed an account of Pinochet denouncing Letelier.
The informant said the dictator had called Letelier’s criticism of the government “unacceptable.” The source “believes that the Chilean Government is directly involved in Letelier’s death and feels that investigation into the incident will so indicate,” the CIA field report said. [See Kornbluh, The Pinochet File.]
But Bush’s CIA chose to accept Contreras’s denials and even began leaking information that pointed away from the real killers.
Newsweek’s Periscope reported in the magazine’s Oct. 11, 1976, issue that “the Chilean secret police were not involved. …. The [Central Intelligence] agency reached its decision because the bomb was too crude to be the work of experts and because the murder, coming while Chile’s rulers were wooing U.S. support, could only damage the Santiago regime.”
Similar stories ran in other newspapers, including the New York Times.
Despite the lack of help from Washington, the FBI’s legal attaché in Buenos Aires, Robert Scherrer, began putting the puzzle together only a week after the Letelier bombing.
Relying on a source in the Argentine military, Scherrer reported to his superiors that the assassination was likely the work of Operation Condor, the assassination project organized by the Chilean government.
Another break in the case came two weeks after the Letelier assassination on Oct. 6, 1976, when anti-Castro terrorists planted a bomb on a Cubana Airlines DC-8 before it took off from Barbados. Nine minutes after takeoff, the bomb exploded, plunging the plane into the Caribbean and killing all 73 people on board including the Cuban national fencing team.
Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who had left the plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named two prominent anti-Castro extremists, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, as the architects of the attack.
A search of Posada’s apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents. Although Posada was a CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veteran and stayed in close touch with some former CIA colleagues, senior CIA officials again pleaded ignorance.
For the second time in barely two weeks, Bush’s CIA had done nothing to interfere with terrorist attacks involving anticommunist operatives with close ties to the CIA. [For more on Posada, see Consortiumnews.com's "Bush's Hypocrisy: Cuban Terrorists."]
But the Cubana Airlines bombing put federal investigators on the right track toward solving the Letelier assassination. They began to learn more about the network of right-wing terrorists associated with Operation Condor and its international Murder Inc. However, CIA Director Bush continued to assert the innocence of Pinochet’s regime.
On Nov. 1, 1976, the Washington Post cited CIA officials in reporting that “operatives of the present Chilean military Junta did not take part in Letelier’s killing.” The Post added that “CIA Director Bush expressed this view in a conversation late last week with Secretary of State Kissinger.”
Regarding the Letelier murder, George H.W. Bush was never pressed to provide a full explanation of his actions.
When I submitted questions to Bush in 1988 – while he was Vice President and I was a Newsweek correspondent preparing a story on his year as CIA director – Bush’s chief of staff Craig Fuller responded, saying “the Vice President generally does not comment on issues related to the time he was at the Central Intelligence Agency and he will have no comment on the specific issues raised in your letter.”
My editors at Newsweek subsequently decided not to publish any story about Bush’s year at the CIA though he was then running for President and citing his CIA experience as an important element of his resumé.
The Carter Interregnum
After Jimmy Carter became President in 1977, federal investigators cracked the Letelier case, successfully bringing charges against Townley and several other conspirators.
Prosecutor Eugene Propper told me that Bush’s CIA did provide some information about the background of suspects, but didn’t volunteer the crucial information about the Paraguayan gambit or supply the photo of the chief assassin, Townley. “Nothing the agency gave us helped us break this case,” Propper said.
Though U.S. prosecutors grasped the criminal nature of the Pinochet government, the wheels of justice turned slowly. Before the prosecutors could climb the chain of command in Chile, the Republicans had returned to power in 1981, with George H.W. Bush serving as Vice President and acting as a top foreign policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
Despite the mounting evidence of Pinochet’s guilt in a terrorist act on U.S. soil, the dictator emerged from his pariah status of the Carter years to regain his position as a favored ally under Bush and Reagan.
When help was needed on sensitive projects, the Reagan administration often turned to Pinochet. For instance, in 1982, after Reagan decided to tilt Iraq’s way during the Iran-Iraq War, one of Pinochet’s favored arms dealers, Carlos Cardoen, manufactured and shipped controversial weapons to Saddam Hussein’s army.
Regarding these Iraqi arms shipments, former National Security Council aide Howard Teicher swore out an affidavit in 1995 detailing Reagan’s decision and describing the secret roles of CIA Director William Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates, in shepherding the military equipment to Iraq.
Teicher said the secret arming of Iraq was approved by Reagan in June 1982 as part of a National Security Decision Directive. Under it, Casey and Gates “authorized, approved and assisted” delivery of cluster bombs and other materiel to Iraq, Teicher said.
Teicher’s affidavit corroborated earlier public statements by former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe and Iranian-born businessman Richard Babayan, who claimed first-hand knowledge of Gates’s central role in the secret Iraq operations.
In his 1992 book Profits of War, Ben-Menashe wrote that Israeli Mossad director Nachum Admoni approached Gates in 1985 seeking help in shutting down unconventional weapons, especially chemicals, moving through the Chilean arms pipeline to Iraq.
Ben-Menashe wrote that Gates attended a meeting in Chile in 1986 with Cardoen present at which Gates tried to calm down the Israelis by assuring them that U.S. policy was simply to ensure a channel of conventional weapons for Iraq.
Though Gates denied Ben-Menashe’s and Babayan’s allegations in 1991 – when Gates underwent confirmation hearings to be CIA director – he has never been asked to publicly respond to Teicher’s affidavit which was filed in a Miami court case in 1995.
Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee were aware of the discrepancies between the Teicher and Gates accounts when Gates appeared at a Dec. 5, 2006, confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Defense, but no one asked Gates to respond to Teicher’s sworn statement.
A source at the United Nations also has told me that some of the documents captured in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 shed light on the Cardoen arms pipeline, but those records have never been made public.
Key Leads
Other potential avenues for understanding Pinochet’s covert role in supporting anticommunist strategies in the Reagan-Bush era opened recently, as former DINA chief Contreras turned on his old boss.
In a court document filed in early July 2006, Contreras implicated Pinochet and one of his sons in a scheme to manufacture and smuggle cocaine to Europe and the United States, explaining one source of Pinochet’s $28 million fortune.
Contreras alleged that the cocaine was processed with Pinochet’s approval at an Army chemical plant south of Santiago during the 1980s and that Pinochet’s son Marco Antonio arranged the shipments of the processed cocaine. [NYT, July 11, 2006]
At the time of this alleged cocaine smuggling, Pinochet was a close ally of the Reagan administration, providing help on a variety of sensitive intelligence projects, including shipping military equipment to Nicaraguan contra rebels who also were implicated in the exploding cocaine trade to the United States. [For details on the contra-cocaine scandal, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]
Contreras said Eugenio Berrios, a chemist for Chile’s secret police, oversaw the drug manufacturing. Berrios also was accused of producing poisons for Pinochet to use in murdering political enemies. Berrios disappeared in 1992. [For details on the Berrios mystery, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Pinochet’s Mad Scientist.”]
As this drip-drip-drip of evidence accumulated implicating Pinochet and his American allies in serious crimes and international intrigue, it fell to the second generation of George Bush presidents to put a finger in the dike.
Near the end of the Clinton presidency in 2000, an FBI team reviewed new evidence that had become available in the Letelier case and recommended the indictment of Pinochet.
But the final decision was left to the incoming Bush administration – and George W. Bush, like his father, chose to protect Pinochet. In doing so, the younger George Bush also protected his father’s reputation and the legacy of the Bush Family.
Freed from Washington’s legal pressure, Pinochet was able to fend off intermittent attempts in Chile to bring him to justice during the last half dozen years of his life.
“Every day it is clearer that Pinochet ordered my brother’s death,” human rights lawyer Fabiola Letelier told the New York Times on the 30th anniversary of the Letelier-Moffitt assassinations. “But for a proper and complete investigation to take place we need access to the appropriate records and evidence.” [NYT, Sept. 21, 2006]
Ultimately, Pinochet escaped a formal judgment of guilt for his many crimes, dying on the afternoon of Dec. 10, 2006, at the Military Hospital of Santiago from complications resulting from a heart attack.
As Pinochet took his last breath, the Bush Family, too, had reason for a sigh of relief.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Monday, December 11, 2006
Routine and systematic torture is at the heart of America's war on terror by George Monbiot
"I have met the enemy, and he is us"
- Pogo
In the fight against cruelty, barbarism and extremism, America has embraced the very evils it claims to confront
George Monbiot
Tuesday December 12, 2006
The Guardian
After thousands of years of practice, you might have imagined that every possible means of inflicting pain had already been devised. But you should never underestimate the human capacity for invention. United States interrogators, we now discover, have found a new way of destroying a human being.
Last week, defence lawyers acting for José Padilla, a US citizen detained as an "enemy combatant", released a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk - taking him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down the prison corridor.
Is Padilla really that dangerous? Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive that he could be mistaken for "a piece of furniture". The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime under which he had lived for more than three years: total sensory deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had had no human contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost his mind. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind is no longer there.
The forensic psychiatrist who examined him says that he "does not appreciate the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him, is unable to render assistance to counsel, and has impairments in reasoning as the result of a mental illness, ie, post-traumatic stress disorder, complicated by the neuropsychiatric effects of prolonged isolation". José Padilla appears to have been lobotomised: not medically, but socially.
If this was an attempt to extract information, it was ineffective: the authorities held him without charge for three and half years. Then, threatened by a supreme court ruling, they suddenly dropped their claims that he was trying to detonate a dirty bomb. They have now charged him with some vague and lesser offences to do with support for terrorism. He is unlikely to be the only person subjected to this regime. Another "enemy combatant", Ali al-Marri, claims to have been subject to the same total isolation and sensory deprivation, in the same naval prison in South Carolina. God knows what is being done to people who have disappeared into the CIA's foreign oubliettes.
That the US tortures, routinely and systematically, while prosecuting its "war on terror" can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability Project (DAA), a coalition of academics and human-rights groups, has documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantánamo Bay. This, it says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse themselves, forced to maintain "stress positions", and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.
The New York Times reports that prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep. The Washington Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were "commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep" while kept, like Padilla and the arrivals at Guantánamo, "in black hoods or spray-painted goggles".
Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the photographs released from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq reflect standard CIA torture techniques: "stress positions, sensory deprivation, and sexual humiliation". The famous picture of the hooded man standing on a box, with wires attached to his fingers, shows two of these techniques being used at once. Unable to see, he has no idea how much time has passed or what might be coming next. He stands in a classic stress position - maintained for several hours, it causes excruciating pain. He appears to have been told that if he drops his arms he will be electrocuted. What went wrong at Abu Ghraib is that someone took photos. Everything else was done by the book.
Neither the military nor the civilian authorities have broken much sweat in investigating these crimes. A few very small fish have been imprisoned; a few others have been fined or reduced in rank; in most cases the authorities have either failed to investigate or failed to prosecute. The DAA points out that no officer has yet been held to account for torture practised by his subordinates. US torturers appear to enjoy impunity, until they are stupid enough to take pictures of each other.
But Padilla's treatment also reflects another glorious American tradition: solitary confinement. Some 25,000 US prisoners are currently held in isolation - a punishment only rarely used in other democracies. In some places, like the federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on end. They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have been kept in solitary confinement in the US for more than 20 years.
At Pelican Bay in California, where 1,200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are confined to tiny cells for 22 and a half hours a day, then released into an "exercise yard" for "recreation". The yard consists of a concrete well about 3.5 metres in length with walls 6 metres high and a metal grille across the sky. The recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone.
The results are much as you would expect. As National Public Radio reveals, more than 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican Bay are now in the psychiatric ward, and there's a waiting list. Prisoners in solitary confinement, according to Dr Henry Weinstein, a psychiatrist who studies them, suffer from "memory loss to severe anxiety to hallucinations to delusions ... under the severest cases of sensory deprivation, people go crazy." People who went in bad and dangerous come out mad as well. The only two studies conducted so far - in Texas and Washington state - both show that the recidivism rates for prisoners held in solitary confinement are worse than for those who were allowed to mix with other prisoners. If we were to judge the US by its penal policies, we would perceive a strange beast: a Christian society that believes in neither forgiveness nor redemption.
From this delightful experiment, US interrogators appear to have extracted a useful lesson: if you want to erase a man's mind, deprive him of contact with the rest of the world. This has nothing to do with obtaining information: torture of all kinds - physical or mental - produces the result that people will say anything to make it end. It is about power, and the thrilling discovery that in the right conditions one man's power over another is unlimited. It is an indulgence which turns its perpetrators into everything they claim to be confronting.
President Bush maintains that he is fighting a war against threats to the "values of civilised nations": terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked his nation's interrogators to discover where these evils are hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have succeeded.
www.monbiot.com
The Atrocities of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and the United States By ROGER BURBACH
The Condor Model
In Santiago on September 11, 1973 I watched as Chilean air force jets flew overhead. Moments later I heard explosions and saw fireballs of smoke fill the sky as the presidential palace went up in flames. Salvador Allende, the elected Socialist president of Chile died in the palace.
As an American the death of General Augusto Pinochet brings back many memories of the military coup and the role played by my government in the violent overthrow of Allende. From the moment of his election in September, 1970 the Nixon administration mounted a covert campaign against him. Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's National Security adviser, declared: "I don't see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." Weeks later the pro-constitutionalist head of the army, General Rene Schneider, was assassinated in a failed attempt to stop the inauguration of Allende.
For the next three years CIA-backed terrorist groups bombed and destroyed state railroads, power plants and key highway arteries to create chaos and stop the country from functioning. The goal was to "make the economy scream" as Nixon ordered. US corporations such as IT&T also participated in the efforts to destabilize the country.
In the midst of this struggle for control of Chile, Allende insisted, almost stubbornly, on maintaining the country's democratic institutions. He enjoyed immense popular support from below, even in the waning days of his government when the economy was in shambles and virtually everyone believed a confrontation was imminent. I'll never forget the last major demonstration on September 4, 1973, when the Alameda, the major avenue of downtown Santiago, was packed with tens of thousands of marchers, all intent on passing by the presidential palace where Allende stood on a balcony waving to the crowd. This was no government-orchestrated demonstration in which people were trucked in from the barrios and countryside. These people came out of a deep sense of commitment, a belief that this was their government and that they would defend it to the end.
In the aftermath of the coup over three thousand people perished, including two American friends of mine, Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi. The United States knowing of these atrocities, rushed to support the military regime, reopening the spigot of economic aid that had been closed under Allende. When the relatives of Horman and Terrugi made determined inquires about their disappearances and deaths, the US embassy and the State Department stonewalled along with the new military junta. Four weeks after the coup, I fled across the Andes, returning to the United States to do what I could to denounce the crimes of Pinochet and my government.
I returned to Chile for the 1988 plebiscite that finally forced Pinochet out of office after seventeen long and brutal years. But for eight more years his dark hand hung over Chile as he continued in his role as the commander in chief of the army. Finally as a result of years of hard work by the international human rights movement, Pinochet was detained in London in October 1998 for crimes against humanity. Five hundred days later he was sent back to Chile, allegedly for health reasons. There the Chilean courts lead by Judge Juan Guzman squared off with the general's right wing supporters and the military, stripping him of his immunity from prosecution as "Senator-for-Life," a position he bestowed on himself when he retired from the army.
As the proceedings against Pinochet advanced, new reports of US complicity in the coup and the repression began to surface, particularly about the role of Kissinger. The Chilean courts tried to compel Kissinger to testify, but they received no cooperation from the US Justice Department. French courts also issued orders for the interrogation of Kissinger, making him realize that he like Pinochet did not enjoy international impunity from prosecution. Small wonder that Kissinger wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, decrying the use of the principle of 'universal jurisdiction' by courts to bring human rights violators to justice.
In Chile President Michele Bachelet whose father died in prison under Pinochet has refused to grant the ex-dictator a state funeral. Only military bands will play at his interment. Eduardo Contreras, a Chilean human rights lawyer, declared, "Pinochet should be buried as a common criminal," adding, "The dictator died on December 10, the International Day of Human Rights. It is as if humanity chose this special moment to weigh in with its final judgment, declaring 'enough' for the dictator."
The burial of Pinochet comes at a moment when the current Bush administration is being scrutinized for its atrocities and crimes against humanity that are even more appalling than those of the former Chilean dictator. It is another irony of history that Pinochet died on Donald Rumsfeld's last full day as Secretary of Defense. Like Pinochet and Kissinger, Rumsfeld may very well spend the rest of his life trying to escape the grasp of domestic and international courts. Eleven Iraqi prisoners held in Abu Ghraib and a Saudi detained in Guantanamo are filing criminal charges in German courts against Rumsfeld and other US civilian and military officials, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. And on last Friday as Rumsfeld was making a farewell speech to his cohorts at the Pentagon, attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a Washington D.C. federal court that Rumsfeld and three senior military officials should be held responsible for the torture of Iraqi and Afghani detainees.
The Pinochet affair has shaped a whole new generation of human rights activists and lawyers. They are determined to end the impunity of public officials, including that of the civilian and military leaders in the United States who engage in state terrorism and human rights abuses while violating international treaties like the Geneva Conventions.
Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is co-author with Jim Tarbell of "Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire," His latest book is: "The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice."
In Santiago on September 11, 1973 I watched as Chilean air force jets flew overhead. Moments later I heard explosions and saw fireballs of smoke fill the sky as the presidential palace went up in flames. Salvador Allende, the elected Socialist president of Chile died in the palace.
As an American the death of General Augusto Pinochet brings back many memories of the military coup and the role played by my government in the violent overthrow of Allende. From the moment of his election in September, 1970 the Nixon administration mounted a covert campaign against him. Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's National Security adviser, declared: "I don't see why we need to stand idly by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people." Weeks later the pro-constitutionalist head of the army, General Rene Schneider, was assassinated in a failed attempt to stop the inauguration of Allende.
For the next three years CIA-backed terrorist groups bombed and destroyed state railroads, power plants and key highway arteries to create chaos and stop the country from functioning. The goal was to "make the economy scream" as Nixon ordered. US corporations such as IT&T also participated in the efforts to destabilize the country.
In the midst of this struggle for control of Chile, Allende insisted, almost stubbornly, on maintaining the country's democratic institutions. He enjoyed immense popular support from below, even in the waning days of his government when the economy was in shambles and virtually everyone believed a confrontation was imminent. I'll never forget the last major demonstration on September 4, 1973, when the Alameda, the major avenue of downtown Santiago, was packed with tens of thousands of marchers, all intent on passing by the presidential palace where Allende stood on a balcony waving to the crowd. This was no government-orchestrated demonstration in which people were trucked in from the barrios and countryside. These people came out of a deep sense of commitment, a belief that this was their government and that they would defend it to the end.
In the aftermath of the coup over three thousand people perished, including two American friends of mine, Charles Horman and Frank Terrugi. The United States knowing of these atrocities, rushed to support the military regime, reopening the spigot of economic aid that had been closed under Allende. When the relatives of Horman and Terrugi made determined inquires about their disappearances and deaths, the US embassy and the State Department stonewalled along with the new military junta. Four weeks after the coup, I fled across the Andes, returning to the United States to do what I could to denounce the crimes of Pinochet and my government.
I returned to Chile for the 1988 plebiscite that finally forced Pinochet out of office after seventeen long and brutal years. But for eight more years his dark hand hung over Chile as he continued in his role as the commander in chief of the army. Finally as a result of years of hard work by the international human rights movement, Pinochet was detained in London in October 1998 for crimes against humanity. Five hundred days later he was sent back to Chile, allegedly for health reasons. There the Chilean courts lead by Judge Juan Guzman squared off with the general's right wing supporters and the military, stripping him of his immunity from prosecution as "Senator-for-Life," a position he bestowed on himself when he retired from the army.
As the proceedings against Pinochet advanced, new reports of US complicity in the coup and the repression began to surface, particularly about the role of Kissinger. The Chilean courts tried to compel Kissinger to testify, but they received no cooperation from the US Justice Department. French courts also issued orders for the interrogation of Kissinger, making him realize that he like Pinochet did not enjoy international impunity from prosecution. Small wonder that Kissinger wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, decrying the use of the principle of 'universal jurisdiction' by courts to bring human rights violators to justice.
In Chile President Michele Bachelet whose father died in prison under Pinochet has refused to grant the ex-dictator a state funeral. Only military bands will play at his interment. Eduardo Contreras, a Chilean human rights lawyer, declared, "Pinochet should be buried as a common criminal," adding, "The dictator died on December 10, the International Day of Human Rights. It is as if humanity chose this special moment to weigh in with its final judgment, declaring 'enough' for the dictator."
The burial of Pinochet comes at a moment when the current Bush administration is being scrutinized for its atrocities and crimes against humanity that are even more appalling than those of the former Chilean dictator. It is another irony of history that Pinochet died on Donald Rumsfeld's last full day as Secretary of Defense. Like Pinochet and Kissinger, Rumsfeld may very well spend the rest of his life trying to escape the grasp of domestic and international courts. Eleven Iraqi prisoners held in Abu Ghraib and a Saudi detained in Guantanamo are filing criminal charges in German courts against Rumsfeld and other US civilian and military officials, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. And on last Friday as Rumsfeld was making a farewell speech to his cohorts at the Pentagon, attorneys from the American Civil Liberties Union argued in a Washington D.C. federal court that Rumsfeld and three senior military officials should be held responsible for the torture of Iraqi and Afghani detainees.
The Pinochet affair has shaped a whole new generation of human rights activists and lawyers. They are determined to end the impunity of public officials, including that of the civilian and military leaders in the United States who engage in state terrorism and human rights abuses while violating international treaties like the Geneva Conventions.
Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA) and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He is co-author with Jim Tarbell of "Imperial Overstretch: George W. Bush and the Hubris of Empire," His latest book is: "The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice."
Death of a Pig - Poetic Justice for Pinochet By RON JACOBS
Look around--there's only one thing of danger for you here--poetry.
Pablo Neruda, during a search of his home and grounds after the September 11, 1973 fascist coup in Chile
Let's get it straight. Augusto Pinochet ordered the deaths of perhaps 4000 people, if not more. He did this after violently overthrowing a legally elected government in the sovereign nation of Chile. Of course, he had a little help in this endeavor from Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Anaconda Copper, IT&T, and that always friendly-to-dictators bureaucracy -- the Central Intelligence Agency. That's another story, however, and one that would also be dealt with if there were true justice on this planet.
One of the most moving times I ever heard Joan Baez sing was in Washington, D.C. at a funeral procession for Orlando Letelier and Ronnie Moffitt. These two individuals were killed by Pinochet's secret police -- the DINA -- by a car bomb in the middle of the U.S. capital city. As Joan sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," fascist demonstrators threw dirt and insults at those of us who had gathered to commemorate these two individuals and condemn the governments responsible for the murder. Business as usual. The men directly responsible for the car bomb were eventually arrested, tried and jailed, (after years of intense pressure from several governments and individuals), but their leaders weren't.
I was living in New York when the coup occurred. There were protests downtown and the Weather Underground bombed IT&T's Latin American Division offices in Manhattan. Pablo Neruda died of prostate cancer a week or two after the coup. Funeral processions were banned but thousands of Chileans defied the fascist government and marched in memory of Neruda and against the fascist coup. Phil Ochs organized a concert for the disappeared the following spring. We were pissed off in the way that seemingly hopeless despair makes one. A genuine hope for a humanistic future had been destroyed by the forces of evil right in front of our eyes and most of our countrymen didn't give a shit. Business as usual, you know. What can you do about it?
There's a place in Berkeley, CA. called La Pena Cultural Center. The front of it is covered by a mural done by O'Brien Thiele, Osha Neuman, Ray Patlan and Anna DeLeon. A panorama of the popular struggles of the peoples of Latin America, the first thing about it that catches your eye is the bas-relief sculpture of the Chilean folk and protest singer Victor Jara. Jara was killed by the forces of repression during the 1973 coup. The popular story goes is that first the assassins cut of one hand and then the other before they killed him. Like Woody Guthrie's guitar that killed fascists, Victor Jara's songs threatened the living bejesus out of those Chileans carrying the fascist mantle.
Augusto Pinochet escaped earthly justice, but I get the feeling he isn't going to enjoy his afterlife. Him and Jeanne Kirkpatrick in one week. Maybe there is a god. But, then again, if there is then why the hell is Henry Kissinger still around giving his deadly advice?
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs' essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's new collection on music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. He can be reached at: rjacobs3625@charter.net
Litvinenko poisoning scandal yet another neo-con perverse display of its parallel intelligence structures.
December 11, 2006 -- SPECIAL REPORT. Litvinenko poisoning scandal yet another neo-con perverse display of its parallel intelligence structures.
The more confusing the Litvinenko poisoning affair becomes, the more it appears to be yet another example of the dangerous neo-con global network of spies, weapons smugglers, far right-wing politicians, Russian-Israeli mafia businessmen, and Islamic mujaheddin false flag provocateurs. Litvinenko's death from polonium-210 radioactive isotope poisoning has actually helped to cast light on this international network, which has its fingerprints on the false intelligence that propelled the United States into an impending military defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan; the false flag operations of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington; and countless other operations, including political operations in Ukraine, Georgia, and Poland, among other nations.
Litvinenko, far from being some sympathetic figure battling the Kremlin, was a central player in a global crime, disinformation, and terrorism network. He had contacts with a right-wing British political party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (which advocates the UK leaving the European Union, abolition of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, has links to the fascist British National Front, and wants a strong commitment to NATO); the mujaheddin movements of Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan, including the Georgia Pankisi Gorge-based "Al Qaeda" branch (Al Ansar) led by the Jordanian terrorist Faris Yusef Amirat, aka "Abu Hafs"; the Russian-Israeli criminal syndicate of wanted Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky and his accomplices; and other bad actors involved in a host of illegal and dubious activities around the world. Litvinenko defected to Britain through Turkey, a major hub for the Russian-Israeli Mafia. He has also been linked to Georgia-based Chechen operations in Turkey and Japan. Litvinenko was also reportedly close to the widow of Chechen President Dzhokar Dudayev, killed by an air-to-surface Russian missile attack in 1996. Litvinenko also had close links to exiled and wanted Russian oligarch Leonid Nevzlin, now exiled in Tel Aviv, and Erinsys, Ltd., a British mercenary firm with ties to Iraqi con man Ahmad Chalabi, whose nephew Salem is a business partner of Jerusalem-based Marc Zell, Douglas Feith's former law partner.
One of Litvinenko's associates, who at first claimed to also have been poisoned by polonium but has now been proven to be "Curveball"-grade prevaricator, is Mario Scaramella, a self-styled Italian spy who has charged that Italy's current Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, was a KGB spy. Scaramella has not only been dismissed as a neo-con tool by the Russian and Italian governments, but has been criticized as an insignificant "soap bubble" by Oleg Gordievski, the highest-ranking officer to have ever defected from the KGB. Italians, who witnessed Rome being used as a central location for the disinformation used to promote the invasion of Iraq -- including the infamous Niger "yellow cake" documents (involving another dubious Italian information broker named Rocco Martino), know Scaramella as a swindler and a braggart. Scaramella has also been under investigation by Italian authorities in Naples for weapons smuggling.
So who is Scaramella and what are his connections to the right-wing? Scaramella has been a longtime provocateur who has tried to link European progressive politicians and the Russian government with Cold War misdeeds. He is also linked to the Forza Italiana party of former (and indicted) Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a figure having his own ties to organized crime. Scaramella and Forza Italiana Senator Paolo Guzzanti, coordinated a political attack against Prodi aimed at proving the progressive leftist leader was a KGB spy. Prodi has threatened a lawsuit over the charge. Berlusconi, a major media tycoon, has, like his fellow right-wing media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, used his media holdings to advance a number of right-wing conspiracy theories about leftist and progressive political leaders in Italy and abroad.
Italy has been wracked by an investigation of a 2003 CIA kidnapping and rendition of Abu Omar, a Milan-based imam, via Germany to Egypt for torture. Arrest warrants have been issued for a number of CIA agents suspected of being involved in the kidnapping. Italian authorities are also investigating the assassination by U.S. or U.S.-controlled forces in Baghdad of General Nicola Calipari, the deputy chief of the Italian SISMI intelligence service. Although ruled an "accident" by US authorities, there is increasing evidence that Calipari was a threat to the neo-con network because of what he knew about the CIA kidnappings, the source of the yellowcake documents, and Scaramella's activities. Rather than CIA agents, informed sources now believe the Americans involved with Italian intelligence in secret operations were members of Pentagon intelligence chief Stephen Cambone's parallel intelligence and special operations network, a network that was set up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to compete with the CIA.
Nicolo Pollari, Calipari's immediate boss, was fired last month as the head of SISMI. An Italian magistrate is now seeking indictments for 26 Americans and five senior Italian intelligence officials, including Pollari and his one-time deputy, Marco Mancini, for the kidnapping of Omar. Mancini was arrested by Italian authorities in the case. Informed Italian intelligence sources have linked Scaramella to the Pollari-Mancini network of neo-cons in SISMI.
Scaramella was a consultant for the Mitrokhin Committee, a body set up by the Italian right-wing-controlled Parliament in 2003 to investigate leftist Italian politicians for their links to the Soviets. The committee was a ruse designed to damage the reputations of Italian progressive leaders. Guzzanti was the committee chairman and another Scaramella friend, Senator Lucio Malan, also of Forza Italiana, served as a member. Italian sources report that Guzzanti told Scaramella that the "Capo," meaning Berlusconi, was going to be pleased with damaging information Litvinenko could pass on about Prodi. Scaramella also reportedly told Italian right-wing politicians of support from a top-level contact in or close to the U.S. government. That has been taken to mean the CIA, but our Italian sources believe it is likely someone associated with the neo-con network in either the Pentagon or National Security Council of the White House. Even more intriguing is a report from a confidential Italian source that Scaramella received funding from a French environmental group "front" activity, a possible link between the Italian agent of influence and a huge neo-con false flag operation involving French Interior Minister and presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, himself, has been accused of receiving illegal funds through dubious bank accounts in Luxembourg and some of those funds have Russian-Israeli mafia fingerprints written all over them.
The Mitrokhin Committee neo-cons and neo-fascists attempted to link the Italian left to the kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981. We now know from history that Moro was kidnapped and assassinated by Red Brigades in the employment of the Italian fascists, particularly agents associated with the fascist P-2 secret Masonic lodge and the similarly fascist Opus Dei as retaliation for Moro's plans to bring the Communists into a grand coalition. We also now know that Mehmet Ali Agca, the would-be killer of the Pope, was a member of Turkey's far right Gray Wolves and the plot was carried out to lay blame on the Russian KGB and Bulgaria's secret intelligence service.
Sergei Stepashin, former Russian Prime Minister and chief of the Federal Security Service (FSB), said, "It is apparent that those who wanted to tarnish the current Russian authorities, and primarily the president, killed Litvinenko." Two Russian business associates of Litvinenko, Dmitri Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi (a former agent with the KGB's 9th Directorate, which protected Russian nuclear weapons caches), who met Litvinenko at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London, have reportedly been affected by exposure to polonium-210 and seven bartenders who worked at the bar have tested positive for contamination with polonium-210. The Itsu sushi bar in :Picadilly where Litvinenko met Scaramella is now not assumed to be the location where Litvinenko was poisoned. Trace of polonium-210 were found at the restaurant but focus is on the Pine Bar at the Millenium as the scene of the poisoning.
Perhaps not surprisingly, FBI agents have been dispatched to London to investigate the Litvinenko death, even though the United States lacks jurisdiction in the case, since no Americans are involved. However, since even before 9/11, the FBI has covered for the international global mafia of terrorists and smugglers, and agents for this network who have been caught in the United States, including Israeli "art students," office and home furniture "movers," and "tourists" photographing sensitive U.S. installations have merely been deported by the FBI back to Israel. Many of the Israelis also possessed passports from Russia and Ukraine. The FBI's interest in the case may be to cover-up the United States as a source of the polonium-210.
What is now even more intriguing is where traces of polonium have also been detected in the case. The British embassy in Moscow and two British Airways Boeing 767a used on the Moscow-London route have tested positive for polonium-210. Kotvun and Lugovoi met the deputy British ambassador at the British embassy in Moscow prior to their trip to London and Lugovoi is claiming that someone, perhaps the British government, is now involved in trying to frame him. A car used by Kotvun in Hamburg on October 31, the night before he left for London, has also tested positive for polonium-210. However, traces of polonium-210 were also found on a Finnair plane that traveled to Moscow from Berlin via Helsinki.
Litvinenko linked to Al Qaeda/Al Ansar Jordanian chief Abu Hafs, a close confidant of Osama bin Laden, killed by Russian forces in Chechnya. In fact, Litvinenko is but one of many links between the Russian-Israeli Mafia, leading neo-con operatives, and the provocateur organization, "Al Qaeda."
If Britain's intelligence service is involved in the plot to set up Putin by using two unsuspecting Russian businessmen, it means that the Russian-Israeli global mafia has as many links and resources inside British intelligence as it does inside the FBI and U.S. intelligence. And that is a problem that would make James Bond tender his resignation.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has cleared Russia as the source of any illegal radioactive materials shipments. No shipments of polonium have been made by Russia to the UK since 2001.
WMR was the first to report on why polonium was possibly selected as the radioactive weapon of choice. Polonium was discovered by Marie Curie, a champion of Polish independence. The present neo-con government of Poland is a now a favorite base for the Russian-Israeli mafia. It is governed by two far right twins -- the Kaczynski brothers (Lech Kaczynski, the President, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the Prime Minister -- and includes a noted neo-con, Radek Sikorksi, formerly of the American Enterprise Institute as Defense Minister. Sikorksi is a vitriolic critic of the Russian-Germany undersea Baltic gas pipeline who has made no secret of his dislike for Putin and Gazprom pipeline consortium chief Gerhard Schroeder, the former Social Democratic Chancellor of Germany who is enjoying a rise in popularity at the expense of Christian Democratic Chancellor Angela Merkel, his successor. Any attempt to smear Putin also affects Schroeder, a close friend.
[Note: It is always interesting how the neo-con Mafia reacts when someone gets close to their sordid actions. A web site that appears to be quite close to the fake progressive web site Democratic Underground had a fit with the exposure of the Litvinenko case}.
Poland's right-wing government, like Italy's under Berlusconi, is now engaged in a major program to "out" leading Polish politicians linked to Poland's Cold War-era Communist regime. The process, called "lustration," has also been used by Czech right-wingers to embarrass and ruin progressive political leaders. Poland's lustration law, pushed through by the Kacynskis, resulted in dirt being cast out on former Polish President Aleksandr Kwasniewski, whose attempt to replace Kofi Annan as UN Secretary General was cleverly derailed as a result of the accusations. South Korea's suspected Sun Myung Moon/Unification Church adherent, Ban Ki-moon, was elected with the strong support of US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, a close friend of Sikorski and his neocon Polish government colleagues, the Kaczynskis. However, one of the "incriminating" documents found on Kwasniewski was a Polish security service document that stated Kwasniewksi, while the Communist government's Sports Minister, was a head security agent on Poland's Olympic team that competed in the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. Kwasniewski would have reported on any attempts to get members of the team to defect by U.S. intelligence officers or agents of the host country, South Korea. At the time of the Olympics, Ban was First Secretary of the South Korean embassy in Washington and maintained close links to the Reagan-Bush intelligence infrastructure, an infrastructure that was promoting a revolt in Eastern Europe using emigre groups that included those affiliated with Sun Myung Moon's organization.
However, Poland's lustration process appears to be more of an attempt to change the subject amid a major political scandal involving one of the Polish right-wing coalition partners -- the League of Polish Families which has the Education Minister portfolio held by Roman Giertych. Photos of a League of Polish Families meeting have surfaced in the Polish press showing swastikas and members giving the "Seig Heil" salute. As with the UK Independence Party, the Italian neo-fascists, and French right-wing parties, the Russian-Israeli Mafia has no problem dealing with Nazis, fascists, or anyone else that can provide it influence. The Russian-Israeli Mafia has also shown itself adept at destroying its political enemies. Our Italian sources also report that Naples, where Scaramella maintained ties to the local Mafia's weapons smuggling operations, is a hotbed of activity for the Russian-Israeli Mafia. It is also a major center for the Mafia to recruit local Italian police and prison guards for various "services." The mysterious death of Litvinenko may yet expose the Mafia's true leadership and aims.
The more confusing the Litvinenko poisoning affair becomes, the more it appears to be yet another example of the dangerous neo-con global network of spies, weapons smugglers, far right-wing politicians, Russian-Israeli mafia businessmen, and Islamic mujaheddin false flag provocateurs. Litvinenko's death from polonium-210 radioactive isotope poisoning has actually helped to cast light on this international network, which has its fingerprints on the false intelligence that propelled the United States into an impending military defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan; the false flag operations of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington; and countless other operations, including political operations in Ukraine, Georgia, and Poland, among other nations.
Litvinenko, far from being some sympathetic figure battling the Kremlin, was a central player in a global crime, disinformation, and terrorism network. He had contacts with a right-wing British political party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (which advocates the UK leaving the European Union, abolition of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, has links to the fascist British National Front, and wants a strong commitment to NATO); the mujaheddin movements of Chechnya, Ingushetia, and Dagestan, including the Georgia Pankisi Gorge-based "Al Qaeda" branch (Al Ansar) led by the Jordanian terrorist Faris Yusef Amirat, aka "Abu Hafs"; the Russian-Israeli criminal syndicate of wanted Russian businessman Boris Berezovsky and his accomplices; and other bad actors involved in a host of illegal and dubious activities around the world. Litvinenko defected to Britain through Turkey, a major hub for the Russian-Israeli Mafia. He has also been linked to Georgia-based Chechen operations in Turkey and Japan. Litvinenko was also reportedly close to the widow of Chechen President Dzhokar Dudayev, killed by an air-to-surface Russian missile attack in 1996. Litvinenko also had close links to exiled and wanted Russian oligarch Leonid Nevzlin, now exiled in Tel Aviv, and Erinsys, Ltd., a British mercenary firm with ties to Iraqi con man Ahmad Chalabi, whose nephew Salem is a business partner of Jerusalem-based Marc Zell, Douglas Feith's former law partner.
One of Litvinenko's associates, who at first claimed to also have been poisoned by polonium but has now been proven to be "Curveball"-grade prevaricator, is Mario Scaramella, a self-styled Italian spy who has charged that Italy's current Prime Minister, Romano Prodi, was a KGB spy. Scaramella has not only been dismissed as a neo-con tool by the Russian and Italian governments, but has been criticized as an insignificant "soap bubble" by Oleg Gordievski, the highest-ranking officer to have ever defected from the KGB. Italians, who witnessed Rome being used as a central location for the disinformation used to promote the invasion of Iraq -- including the infamous Niger "yellow cake" documents (involving another dubious Italian information broker named Rocco Martino), know Scaramella as a swindler and a braggart. Scaramella has also been under investigation by Italian authorities in Naples for weapons smuggling.
So who is Scaramella and what are his connections to the right-wing? Scaramella has been a longtime provocateur who has tried to link European progressive politicians and the Russian government with Cold War misdeeds. He is also linked to the Forza Italiana party of former (and indicted) Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a figure having his own ties to organized crime. Scaramella and Forza Italiana Senator Paolo Guzzanti, coordinated a political attack against Prodi aimed at proving the progressive leftist leader was a KGB spy. Prodi has threatened a lawsuit over the charge. Berlusconi, a major media tycoon, has, like his fellow right-wing media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, used his media holdings to advance a number of right-wing conspiracy theories about leftist and progressive political leaders in Italy and abroad.
Italy has been wracked by an investigation of a 2003 CIA kidnapping and rendition of Abu Omar, a Milan-based imam, via Germany to Egypt for torture. Arrest warrants have been issued for a number of CIA agents suspected of being involved in the kidnapping. Italian authorities are also investigating the assassination by U.S. or U.S.-controlled forces in Baghdad of General Nicola Calipari, the deputy chief of the Italian SISMI intelligence service. Although ruled an "accident" by US authorities, there is increasing evidence that Calipari was a threat to the neo-con network because of what he knew about the CIA kidnappings, the source of the yellowcake documents, and Scaramella's activities. Rather than CIA agents, informed sources now believe the Americans involved with Italian intelligence in secret operations were members of Pentagon intelligence chief Stephen Cambone's parallel intelligence and special operations network, a network that was set up by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to compete with the CIA.
Nicolo Pollari, Calipari's immediate boss, was fired last month as the head of SISMI. An Italian magistrate is now seeking indictments for 26 Americans and five senior Italian intelligence officials, including Pollari and his one-time deputy, Marco Mancini, for the kidnapping of Omar. Mancini was arrested by Italian authorities in the case. Informed Italian intelligence sources have linked Scaramella to the Pollari-Mancini network of neo-cons in SISMI.
Scaramella was a consultant for the Mitrokhin Committee, a body set up by the Italian right-wing-controlled Parliament in 2003 to investigate leftist Italian politicians for their links to the Soviets. The committee was a ruse designed to damage the reputations of Italian progressive leaders. Guzzanti was the committee chairman and another Scaramella friend, Senator Lucio Malan, also of Forza Italiana, served as a member. Italian sources report that Guzzanti told Scaramella that the "Capo," meaning Berlusconi, was going to be pleased with damaging information Litvinenko could pass on about Prodi. Scaramella also reportedly told Italian right-wing politicians of support from a top-level contact in or close to the U.S. government. That has been taken to mean the CIA, but our Italian sources believe it is likely someone associated with the neo-con network in either the Pentagon or National Security Council of the White House. Even more intriguing is a report from a confidential Italian source that Scaramella received funding from a French environmental group "front" activity, a possible link between the Italian agent of influence and a huge neo-con false flag operation involving French Interior Minister and presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy. Sarkozy, himself, has been accused of receiving illegal funds through dubious bank accounts in Luxembourg and some of those funds have Russian-Israeli mafia fingerprints written all over them.
The Mitrokhin Committee neo-cons and neo-fascists attempted to link the Italian left to the kidnapping and murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978 and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981. We now know from history that Moro was kidnapped and assassinated by Red Brigades in the employment of the Italian fascists, particularly agents associated with the fascist P-2 secret Masonic lodge and the similarly fascist Opus Dei as retaliation for Moro's plans to bring the Communists into a grand coalition. We also now know that Mehmet Ali Agca, the would-be killer of the Pope, was a member of Turkey's far right Gray Wolves and the plot was carried out to lay blame on the Russian KGB and Bulgaria's secret intelligence service.
Sergei Stepashin, former Russian Prime Minister and chief of the Federal Security Service (FSB), said, "It is apparent that those who wanted to tarnish the current Russian authorities, and primarily the president, killed Litvinenko." Two Russian business associates of Litvinenko, Dmitri Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi (a former agent with the KGB's 9th Directorate, which protected Russian nuclear weapons caches), who met Litvinenko at the Pine Bar of the Millennium Hotel in London, have reportedly been affected by exposure to polonium-210 and seven bartenders who worked at the bar have tested positive for contamination with polonium-210. The Itsu sushi bar in :Picadilly where Litvinenko met Scaramella is now not assumed to be the location where Litvinenko was poisoned. Trace of polonium-210 were found at the restaurant but focus is on the Pine Bar at the Millenium as the scene of the poisoning.
Perhaps not surprisingly, FBI agents have been dispatched to London to investigate the Litvinenko death, even though the United States lacks jurisdiction in the case, since no Americans are involved. However, since even before 9/11, the FBI has covered for the international global mafia of terrorists and smugglers, and agents for this network who have been caught in the United States, including Israeli "art students," office and home furniture "movers," and "tourists" photographing sensitive U.S. installations have merely been deported by the FBI back to Israel. Many of the Israelis also possessed passports from Russia and Ukraine. The FBI's interest in the case may be to cover-up the United States as a source of the polonium-210.
What is now even more intriguing is where traces of polonium have also been detected in the case. The British embassy in Moscow and two British Airways Boeing 767a used on the Moscow-London route have tested positive for polonium-210. Kotvun and Lugovoi met the deputy British ambassador at the British embassy in Moscow prior to their trip to London and Lugovoi is claiming that someone, perhaps the British government, is now involved in trying to frame him. A car used by Kotvun in Hamburg on October 31, the night before he left for London, has also tested positive for polonium-210. However, traces of polonium-210 were also found on a Finnair plane that traveled to Moscow from Berlin via Helsinki.
Litvinenko linked to Al Qaeda/Al Ansar Jordanian chief Abu Hafs, a close confidant of Osama bin Laden, killed by Russian forces in Chechnya. In fact, Litvinenko is but one of many links between the Russian-Israeli Mafia, leading neo-con operatives, and the provocateur organization, "Al Qaeda."
If Britain's intelligence service is involved in the plot to set up Putin by using two unsuspecting Russian businessmen, it means that the Russian-Israeli global mafia has as many links and resources inside British intelligence as it does inside the FBI and U.S. intelligence. And that is a problem that would make James Bond tender his resignation.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has cleared Russia as the source of any illegal radioactive materials shipments. No shipments of polonium have been made by Russia to the UK since 2001.
WMR was the first to report on why polonium was possibly selected as the radioactive weapon of choice. Polonium was discovered by Marie Curie, a champion of Polish independence. The present neo-con government of Poland is a now a favorite base for the Russian-Israeli mafia. It is governed by two far right twins -- the Kaczynski brothers (Lech Kaczynski, the President, and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the Prime Minister -- and includes a noted neo-con, Radek Sikorksi, formerly of the American Enterprise Institute as Defense Minister. Sikorksi is a vitriolic critic of the Russian-Germany undersea Baltic gas pipeline who has made no secret of his dislike for Putin and Gazprom pipeline consortium chief Gerhard Schroeder, the former Social Democratic Chancellor of Germany who is enjoying a rise in popularity at the expense of Christian Democratic Chancellor Angela Merkel, his successor. Any attempt to smear Putin also affects Schroeder, a close friend.
[Note: It is always interesting how the neo-con Mafia reacts when someone gets close to their sordid actions. A web site that appears to be quite close to the fake progressive web site Democratic Underground had a fit with the exposure of the Litvinenko case}.
Poland's right-wing government, like Italy's under Berlusconi, is now engaged in a major program to "out" leading Polish politicians linked to Poland's Cold War-era Communist regime. The process, called "lustration," has also been used by Czech right-wingers to embarrass and ruin progressive political leaders. Poland's lustration law, pushed through by the Kacynskis, resulted in dirt being cast out on former Polish President Aleksandr Kwasniewski, whose attempt to replace Kofi Annan as UN Secretary General was cleverly derailed as a result of the accusations. South Korea's suspected Sun Myung Moon/Unification Church adherent, Ban Ki-moon, was elected with the strong support of US ambassador to the UN John Bolton, a close friend of Sikorski and his neocon Polish government colleagues, the Kaczynskis. However, one of the "incriminating" documents found on Kwasniewski was a Polish security service document that stated Kwasniewksi, while the Communist government's Sports Minister, was a head security agent on Poland's Olympic team that competed in the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. Kwasniewski would have reported on any attempts to get members of the team to defect by U.S. intelligence officers or agents of the host country, South Korea. At the time of the Olympics, Ban was First Secretary of the South Korean embassy in Washington and maintained close links to the Reagan-Bush intelligence infrastructure, an infrastructure that was promoting a revolt in Eastern Europe using emigre groups that included those affiliated with Sun Myung Moon's organization.
However, Poland's lustration process appears to be more of an attempt to change the subject amid a major political scandal involving one of the Polish right-wing coalition partners -- the League of Polish Families which has the Education Minister portfolio held by Roman Giertych. Photos of a League of Polish Families meeting have surfaced in the Polish press showing swastikas and members giving the "Seig Heil" salute. As with the UK Independence Party, the Italian neo-fascists, and French right-wing parties, the Russian-Israeli Mafia has no problem dealing with Nazis, fascists, or anyone else that can provide it influence. The Russian-Israeli Mafia has also shown itself adept at destroying its political enemies. Our Italian sources also report that Naples, where Scaramella maintained ties to the local Mafia's weapons smuggling operations, is a hotbed of activity for the Russian-Israeli Mafia. It is also a major center for the Mafia to recruit local Italian police and prison guards for various "services." The mysterious death of Litvinenko may yet expose the Mafia's true leadership and aims.
Tinker Bell, Pinochet And The Fairy Tale Miracle Of Chile by Greg Palast
Sunday, Dec. 10, 2006
Chile’s former military dictator General Augusto Pinochet died today at the age of 91.
Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Tinker Bell and General Augusto Pinochet had much in common.
All three performed magical good deeds. In the case of Pinochet, he was universally credited with the Miracle of Chile, the wildly successful experiment in free markets, privatization, de-regulation and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds spread from Valparaiso to Virginia.
But Cinderella’s pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. The Miracle of Chile, too, was just another fairy tale. The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.
Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende - who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.
In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.
In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.
Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.
Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor. Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.” Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.” Friedman’s sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase of what supply-side economics can do.”
It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of de-regulation gone berserk.
The Chicago Boys persuaded the junta that removing restrictions on the nation’s banks would free them to attract foreign capital to fund industrial expansion.
Pinochet sold off the state banks - at a 40% discount from book value - and they quickly fell into the hands of two conglomerate empires controlled by speculators Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat. From their captive banks, Vial and Cruzat siphoned cash to buy up manufacturers - then leveraged these assets with loans from foreign investors panting to get their piece of the state giveaways.
The bank’s reserves filled with hollow securities from connected enterprises. Pinochet let the good times roll for the speculators. He was persuaded that Governments should not hinder the logic of the market.
By 1982, the pyramid finance game was up. The Vial and Cruzat “Grupos” defaulted. Industry shut down, private pensions were worthless, the currency swooned. Riots and strikes by a population too hungry and desperate to fear bullets forced Pinochet to reverse course. He booted his beloved Chicago experimentalists. Reluctantly, the General restored the minimum wage and unions’ collective bargaining rights. Pinochet, who had previously decimated government ranks, authorized a program to create 500,000 jobs. In other words, Chile was pulled from depression by dull old Keynesian remedies, all Franklin Roosevelt, zero Reagan/Thatcher. New Deal tactics rescued Chile from the Panic of 1983, but the nation’s long-term recovery and growth since then is the result of - cover the children’s ears - a large dose of socialism.
To save the nation’s pension system, Pinochet nationalized banks and industry on a scale unimagined by Communist Allende. The General expropriated at will, offering little or no compensation. While most of these businesses were eventually re-privatized, the state retained ownership of one industry: copper.
For nearly a century, copper has meant Chile and Chile copper. University of Montana metals expert Dr. Janet Finn notes, “Its absurd to describe a nation as a miracle of free enterprise when the engine of the economy remains in government hands.” Copper has provided 30% to 70% of the nation’s export earnings. This is the hard currency which has built today’s Chile, the proceeds from the mines seized from Anaconda and Kennecott in 1973 - Allende’s posthumous gift to his nation.
Agribusiness is the second locomotive of Chile’s economic growth. This also is a legacy of the Allende years. According to Professor Arturo Vasquez of Georgetown University, Washington DC, Allende’s land reform, the break-up of feudal estates (which Pinochet could not fully reverse), created a new class of productive tiller-owners, along with corporate and cooperative operators, who now bring in a stream of export earnings to rival copper. “In order to have an economic miracle,” says Dr. Vasquez, “maybe you need a socialist government first to commit agrarian reform.”
So there we have it. Keynes and Marx, not Friedman, saved Chile.
But the myth of the free-market Miracle persists because it serves a quasi-religious function. Within the faith of the Reaganauts and Thatcherites, Chile provides the necessary genesis fable, the ersatz Eden from which laissez-faire dogma sprang successful and shining.
In 1998, the international finance Gang of Four - the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Bank for Settlements - offered a $41.5 billion line of credit to Brazil. But before the agencies handed the drowning nation a life preserver, they demanded Brazil commit to swallow the economic medicine that nearly killed Chile. You know the list: fire-sale privatizations, flexible labor markets (i.e. union demolition) and deficit reduction through savage cuts in government services and social security.
In Sao Paulo, the public was assured these cruel measures would ultimately benefit the average Brazilian. What looked like financial colonialism was sold as the cure-all tested in Chile with miraculous results.
But that miracle was in fact a hoax, a fraud, a fairy tale in which everyone did not live happily ever after.
******
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Armed Madhouse”. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com
Chile’s former military dictator General Augusto Pinochet died today at the age of 91.
Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Tinker Bell and General Augusto Pinochet had much in common.
All three performed magical good deeds. In the case of Pinochet, he was universally credited with the Miracle of Chile, the wildly successful experiment in free markets, privatization, de-regulation and union-free economic expansion whose laissez-faire seeds spread from Valparaiso to Virginia.
But Cinderella’s pumpkin did not really turn into a coach. The Miracle of Chile, too, was just another fairy tale. The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.
Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende - who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.
In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.
In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.
Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.
Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor. Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.” Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.” Friedman’s sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase of what supply-side economics can do.”
It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of de-regulation gone berserk.
The Chicago Boys persuaded the junta that removing restrictions on the nation’s banks would free them to attract foreign capital to fund industrial expansion.
Pinochet sold off the state banks - at a 40% discount from book value - and they quickly fell into the hands of two conglomerate empires controlled by speculators Javier Vial and Manuel Cruzat. From their captive banks, Vial and Cruzat siphoned cash to buy up manufacturers - then leveraged these assets with loans from foreign investors panting to get their piece of the state giveaways.
The bank’s reserves filled with hollow securities from connected enterprises. Pinochet let the good times roll for the speculators. He was persuaded that Governments should not hinder the logic of the market.
By 1982, the pyramid finance game was up. The Vial and Cruzat “Grupos” defaulted. Industry shut down, private pensions were worthless, the currency swooned. Riots and strikes by a population too hungry and desperate to fear bullets forced Pinochet to reverse course. He booted his beloved Chicago experimentalists. Reluctantly, the General restored the minimum wage and unions’ collective bargaining rights. Pinochet, who had previously decimated government ranks, authorized a program to create 500,000 jobs. In other words, Chile was pulled from depression by dull old Keynesian remedies, all Franklin Roosevelt, zero Reagan/Thatcher. New Deal tactics rescued Chile from the Panic of 1983, but the nation’s long-term recovery and growth since then is the result of - cover the children’s ears - a large dose of socialism.
To save the nation’s pension system, Pinochet nationalized banks and industry on a scale unimagined by Communist Allende. The General expropriated at will, offering little or no compensation. While most of these businesses were eventually re-privatized, the state retained ownership of one industry: copper.
For nearly a century, copper has meant Chile and Chile copper. University of Montana metals expert Dr. Janet Finn notes, “Its absurd to describe a nation as a miracle of free enterprise when the engine of the economy remains in government hands.” Copper has provided 30% to 70% of the nation’s export earnings. This is the hard currency which has built today’s Chile, the proceeds from the mines seized from Anaconda and Kennecott in 1973 - Allende’s posthumous gift to his nation.
Agribusiness is the second locomotive of Chile’s economic growth. This also is a legacy of the Allende years. According to Professor Arturo Vasquez of Georgetown University, Washington DC, Allende’s land reform, the break-up of feudal estates (which Pinochet could not fully reverse), created a new class of productive tiller-owners, along with corporate and cooperative operators, who now bring in a stream of export earnings to rival copper. “In order to have an economic miracle,” says Dr. Vasquez, “maybe you need a socialist government first to commit agrarian reform.”
So there we have it. Keynes and Marx, not Friedman, saved Chile.
But the myth of the free-market Miracle persists because it serves a quasi-religious function. Within the faith of the Reaganauts and Thatcherites, Chile provides the necessary genesis fable, the ersatz Eden from which laissez-faire dogma sprang successful and shining.
In 1998, the international finance Gang of Four - the World Bank, the IMF, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Bank for Settlements - offered a $41.5 billion line of credit to Brazil. But before the agencies handed the drowning nation a life preserver, they demanded Brazil commit to swallow the economic medicine that nearly killed Chile. You know the list: fire-sale privatizations, flexible labor markets (i.e. union demolition) and deficit reduction through savage cuts in government services and social security.
In Sao Paulo, the public was assured these cruel measures would ultimately benefit the average Brazilian. What looked like financial colonialism was sold as the cure-all tested in Chile with miraculous results.
But that miracle was in fact a hoax, a fraud, a fairy tale in which everyone did not live happily ever after.
******
Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller, “Armed Madhouse”. Read his reports at www.GregPalast.com
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Apocalypto: The Cinematic Logic of Genocide (How the Maya view the racism of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto)
Apocalypto: The Cinematic Logic of Genocide
Written by Xiuhcoatl
Dec 08, 2006 at 10:21 AM
Apocalypto: The Cinematic Logic of Genocide
by Juan Santos
Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is not a mere adventure tale, it’s not just another excruciatingly brutal portrayal of apocalyptic violence for its own sake, and the Village Voice is dead wrong when it says that unlike Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto is “unburdened by nationalist or religious piety,”— that it's “pure, amoral sensationalism.”
Despite its extreme brutality Apocalypto isn’t just Gibson’s latest snuff film with a religious theme. The film is a morality play, and there are only two things one needs to remember to get a hint of the ugly moral intent behind Mel Gibson’s depiction of the Maya.
The first is that, despite Gibson’s vile portrayal of the Maya as a macabre cult of deranged killers straight out of Apocalypse Now!, there is no evidence that the Mayan people ever practiced widespread human sacrifice, and they certainly didn’t target the innocent hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists Gibson chooses to portray as the victims of a Mayan death cult.
Gibson knows better. He studied the terrain in depth and had no practical limit to the funds he could expend on research. His portrayal is a conscious lie, one he uses to justify the premise that the Mayan city states collapsed because they deserved to collapse, and that they deserved to be replaced by a “superior” culture in the genocide known as the Conquest.
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within," is how Gibson puts it. In other words the Conquest was not genocide but a moral comeuppance; the civilization didn’t fall, in the final analysis, from climate change or inadvertent soil depletion or even war – it was conquered in god’s wrath against the forces of evil. And Gibson’s made sure you see the ancient Maya as a force of profound evil.
Here’s a taste of the standards Gibson used in conjuring his image of the Maya. The LA Times quotes production designer Tom Sanders:
"We had an archeologist, Dr. Richard Hansen, onboard," said Sanders. "It was really fun to say, 'Is there any proof they didn't do this?' When he said, 'There is no proof they didn't do that,' that gives you some license to play.” And “play” they did. Rex Reed calls the racist portrayal of the Maya Gibson’s “huge cast of spear-carriers from the Oom-Gawah-Bwana School of Dramatic Art.”
In a stunning interview with Chris Garcia of the Austin American Statesman, Julia Guernsey, an expert on Mayan culture at the University of Texas says of Gibson’s agenda, "’We got the Jews last time (in 'The Passion of the Christ'), now we'll get the Maya.’ And to highlight that point there's a lot of really offensive racial stereotyping. They're shown as these extremely barbaric people, when in fact, the Maya were a very sophisticated culture… I hate it. I despise it. I think it's despicable. It's offensive to Maya people. It's offensive to those of us who try to teach cultural sensitivity…”
The other hint you might need to remember is this. No matter what happens in this film, the Spanish don’t show up at the end, at the collapse of the Mayan civilization, to “save” anything at all.
Hundreds of years would pass between the collapse of the Mayan city states and the American Holocaust. For the sake of empire the Spanish would sacrifice 95% of the population in Mexico, a horror they would achieve in a mere 100 years. Hitler’s holocaust, with its 20 million dead, pales: the Conquest of the Americas by Europe would claim 100 million lives. There is no more savage genocide in the history of civilization.
But if you’re looking for savagery, the holocaust against the Mayan people doesn’t stop there. The most recent wave ended a mere decade ago. A quarter of a million innocent Maya were slaughtered in Guatemala by a death squad regime backed by the Gibson’s cohorts on the Christian Right, including Ronald Reagan and apocalyptic fanatics like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. It’s called “The Silent Holocaust” by those who know of it.
The Maya have suffered a modern apocalypse more brutal than anything in Gibson’s sadistic imagination, more brutal than even he would dare bring to the screen. It’s a tale he would refuse: its demons aren’t “savage” Mayans in horror movie drag, they’re Christian death squads backed by fundamentalist leaders using old school Spanish methods. A British anti-war organization writes:
”Working methodically across the Mayan region, the army and its paramilitary teams, including 'civil patrols' of forcibly conscripted local men, attacked 626 villages. Each community was rounded up, or seized when gathered already for a celebration or a market day. The villagers, if they didn't escape to become hunted refugees, were then brutally murdered; others were forced to watch, and sometimes to take part. Buildings were vandalised and demolished, and a 'scorched earth' policy applied: the killers destroyed crops, slaughtered livestock, fouled water supplies, and violated sacred places and cultural symbols.
”Children were often beaten against walls, or thrown alive into pits where the bodies of adults were later thrown; they were also tortured and raped. Victims of all ages often had their limbs amputated, or were impaled and left to die slowly. Others were doused in petrol and set alight, or disemboweled while still alive. Yet others were shot repeatedly, or tortured and shut up alone to die in pain. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open. Women were routinely raped while being tortured. Women - now widows - who lived could scarcely survive the trauma: The presence of sexual violence in the social memory of the communities has become a source of collective shame.”
Gibson hasn’t told the story of the hunted refugees fleeing Christian death squads a decade ago. His ancient hunters are nothing more than figments of his imagination, racist stereotypes of ancient Mayans who existed nowhere but in his own delirium tremens. They are his own demons chasing his imaginary hero / victim / alter ego, Jaguar Paw, through a “savage” jungle.
The framework of the story is deeply embedded in Gibson’s extreme right wing religious and political views. He casts Mayan priests and leaders as demonically malevolent at a time when interest is growing world wide in Mayan politics – the Zaptistas – and in Mayan spirituality and prophecy. The subtext of the film and its social context involve the Mayan prophecies of the end of an age of destruction, and the beginning of another around 2012 C.E., an age that can lead to harmony between humanity and the Earth.
The biblical counter-vision is of a righteous world-destruction carried out by a vengeful god who destroys all living creatures, a vision embedded in the Apocalypse of Saint John, the Book of Revelations, which was the inspiration for the film’s title.
The Maya who survived the killing in Guatemala and elsewhere kept their spiritual traditions alive - including their prophecies of the end of this age - despite 500 years of intensive efforts to eradicate them. Right wing Christians see hell-driven New Age plots at every turn, and understand attacking other culture’s spiritual traditions not as cultural genocide but as legitimate “spiritual warfare” at a time of approaching apocalypse.
Gibson brought Apocalypto to life on the propaganda front of a spiritual war, a deadly serious culture war between those who would protect and defend the Earth’s ability to live and those on the Christian Right who want to “bring on” Armageddon.
The larger stakes are the future of life on planet Earth in a time when the industrial civilization of the West is seen by many as on the brink of collapse and when the world’s most respected scientists see Earth as on the verge of ecological destruction, a sentiment that is deeply shared by the living Mayan wisdom keepers whose indigenous spiritual tradition Gibson has chosen to paint as evil.
The survivors of the most recent wave of genocide haven’t seen Apocalypto yet – no Maya has, not even those who had the bit parts Gibson reserved for them, or who worked as extras and maids.
One can’t help but wonder how Apocalypto will play to Guatemalan audiences, but one thing is a sure bet: Mayans will be deeply disturbed to see their culture portrayed as a madhouse of killing, while those who supported the death squad regime of the Christian fascist Efraín Ríos Montt will take solace: their view of the Maya as subhuman will be “justified” by the film, and so will their genocidal reign of terror.
Racist stereotypes, after all, serve one function and one function only – they serve as a story, a script that justifies the use of violence against a targeted group, whether the weapons of the oppressor are the sword and cannon, the gas chamber, the M16, a lynch mob’s rope, or a camera.
One viewer understood and embraced Gibson’s intent in its entirety, saying Apocalypto:
“Pretty much precisely describes the whole point of the civilizations of such “noble savages” as the Mayans, if you ask us. There isn’t one, there wasn’t one, and there never will be one. Those bloodthirsty mongrels and many others before and after them were brutal, savage, cruel and entirely without redeeming qualities, and the best thing that ever happened to this planet was when they were wiped out, never to be heard of again.
In fact, we owe the Spanish Conquistadores an eternal debt of gratitude for having wiped that blood-curdlingly bestial, brutal blight upon humanity off the face of the planet because, had they not done it, we would have had to do so ourselves.”
The son of a Holocaust denier, Gibson defended his father in a 2004 interview, and, in the wake of his recent drunken tirades against Jews, Gibson can ill afford charges of propagating racism against Indians. The film’s PR campaign has carefully skirted potential opposition and negative exposure. Despite that effort Mayan activists who’ve seen nothing more than the film’s trailer denounced the film the day before it opened.
Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation, said "Gibson replays, in glorious, big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact needed, rescue."
The Indians who’ve seen the film itself have been a carefully chosen crew; Apocalypto, for all its epic pretensions, premiered in an Oklahoma casino, and certainly not for an audience of American Indian Movement activists. The initial Latino audience was chosen just as carefully. A Beverly Hills-based PR man arranged screenings of the film for the Los Angeles Latin Business Association – not for Mexican and Central American migrants who know the Maya, not for indigenous minded Chican@s, and certainly not for LA’s substantial community of Mayan refugees.
The Latin Business Association obligingly gave Gibson their "Visionary” Award. But it’s too late for Gibson to hide behind such contrived honors. Even the LA Times pointedly noted, “ it's one thing to acknowledge a work's… merits and quite another to proclaim Gibson a ‘visionary,’ especially at a time when the immigration debate has reminded Latinos that virulent racism is only a few drinks away.”
Genocide is even closer than that. Ask the Spanish. Ask the death squads. Ask Mel, behind the camera or behind a small glass. It’s just a shot away.
________
Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays from 2006 can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/. He can be reached at: JuanSantos@Mexica.net.
Written by Xiuhcoatl
Dec 08, 2006 at 10:21 AM
Apocalypto: The Cinematic Logic of Genocide
by Juan Santos
Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto is not a mere adventure tale, it’s not just another excruciatingly brutal portrayal of apocalyptic violence for its own sake, and the Village Voice is dead wrong when it says that unlike Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ, Apocalypto is “unburdened by nationalist or religious piety,”— that it's “pure, amoral sensationalism.”
Despite its extreme brutality Apocalypto isn’t just Gibson’s latest snuff film with a religious theme. The film is a morality play, and there are only two things one needs to remember to get a hint of the ugly moral intent behind Mel Gibson’s depiction of the Maya.
The first is that, despite Gibson’s vile portrayal of the Maya as a macabre cult of deranged killers straight out of Apocalypse Now!, there is no evidence that the Mayan people ever practiced widespread human sacrifice, and they certainly didn’t target the innocent hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists Gibson chooses to portray as the victims of a Mayan death cult.
Gibson knows better. He studied the terrain in depth and had no practical limit to the funds he could expend on research. His portrayal is a conscious lie, one he uses to justify the premise that the Mayan city states collapsed because they deserved to collapse, and that they deserved to be replaced by a “superior” culture in the genocide known as the Conquest.
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within," is how Gibson puts it. In other words the Conquest was not genocide but a moral comeuppance; the civilization didn’t fall, in the final analysis, from climate change or inadvertent soil depletion or even war – it was conquered in god’s wrath against the forces of evil. And Gibson’s made sure you see the ancient Maya as a force of profound evil.
Here’s a taste of the standards Gibson used in conjuring his image of the Maya. The LA Times quotes production designer Tom Sanders:
"We had an archeologist, Dr. Richard Hansen, onboard," said Sanders. "It was really fun to say, 'Is there any proof they didn't do this?' When he said, 'There is no proof they didn't do that,' that gives you some license to play.” And “play” they did. Rex Reed calls the racist portrayal of the Maya Gibson’s “huge cast of spear-carriers from the Oom-Gawah-Bwana School of Dramatic Art.”
In a stunning interview with Chris Garcia of the Austin American Statesman, Julia Guernsey, an expert on Mayan culture at the University of Texas says of Gibson’s agenda, "’We got the Jews last time (in 'The Passion of the Christ'), now we'll get the Maya.’ And to highlight that point there's a lot of really offensive racial stereotyping. They're shown as these extremely barbaric people, when in fact, the Maya were a very sophisticated culture… I hate it. I despise it. I think it's despicable. It's offensive to Maya people. It's offensive to those of us who try to teach cultural sensitivity…”
The other hint you might need to remember is this. No matter what happens in this film, the Spanish don’t show up at the end, at the collapse of the Mayan civilization, to “save” anything at all.
Hundreds of years would pass between the collapse of the Mayan city states and the American Holocaust. For the sake of empire the Spanish would sacrifice 95% of the population in Mexico, a horror they would achieve in a mere 100 years. Hitler’s holocaust, with its 20 million dead, pales: the Conquest of the Americas by Europe would claim 100 million lives. There is no more savage genocide in the history of civilization.
But if you’re looking for savagery, the holocaust against the Mayan people doesn’t stop there. The most recent wave ended a mere decade ago. A quarter of a million innocent Maya were slaughtered in Guatemala by a death squad regime backed by the Gibson’s cohorts on the Christian Right, including Ronald Reagan and apocalyptic fanatics like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. It’s called “The Silent Holocaust” by those who know of it.
The Maya have suffered a modern apocalypse more brutal than anything in Gibson’s sadistic imagination, more brutal than even he would dare bring to the screen. It’s a tale he would refuse: its demons aren’t “savage” Mayans in horror movie drag, they’re Christian death squads backed by fundamentalist leaders using old school Spanish methods. A British anti-war organization writes:
”Working methodically across the Mayan region, the army and its paramilitary teams, including 'civil patrols' of forcibly conscripted local men, attacked 626 villages. Each community was rounded up, or seized when gathered already for a celebration or a market day. The villagers, if they didn't escape to become hunted refugees, were then brutally murdered; others were forced to watch, and sometimes to take part. Buildings were vandalised and demolished, and a 'scorched earth' policy applied: the killers destroyed crops, slaughtered livestock, fouled water supplies, and violated sacred places and cultural symbols.
”Children were often beaten against walls, or thrown alive into pits where the bodies of adults were later thrown; they were also tortured and raped. Victims of all ages often had their limbs amputated, or were impaled and left to die slowly. Others were doused in petrol and set alight, or disemboweled while still alive. Yet others were shot repeatedly, or tortured and shut up alone to die in pain. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open. Women were routinely raped while being tortured. Women - now widows - who lived could scarcely survive the trauma: The presence of sexual violence in the social memory of the communities has become a source of collective shame.”
Gibson hasn’t told the story of the hunted refugees fleeing Christian death squads a decade ago. His ancient hunters are nothing more than figments of his imagination, racist stereotypes of ancient Mayans who existed nowhere but in his own delirium tremens. They are his own demons chasing his imaginary hero / victim / alter ego, Jaguar Paw, through a “savage” jungle.
The framework of the story is deeply embedded in Gibson’s extreme right wing religious and political views. He casts Mayan priests and leaders as demonically malevolent at a time when interest is growing world wide in Mayan politics – the Zaptistas – and in Mayan spirituality and prophecy. The subtext of the film and its social context involve the Mayan prophecies of the end of an age of destruction, and the beginning of another around 2012 C.E., an age that can lead to harmony between humanity and the Earth.
The biblical counter-vision is of a righteous world-destruction carried out by a vengeful god who destroys all living creatures, a vision embedded in the Apocalypse of Saint John, the Book of Revelations, which was the inspiration for the film’s title.
The Maya who survived the killing in Guatemala and elsewhere kept their spiritual traditions alive - including their prophecies of the end of this age - despite 500 years of intensive efforts to eradicate them. Right wing Christians see hell-driven New Age plots at every turn, and understand attacking other culture’s spiritual traditions not as cultural genocide but as legitimate “spiritual warfare” at a time of approaching apocalypse.
Gibson brought Apocalypto to life on the propaganda front of a spiritual war, a deadly serious culture war between those who would protect and defend the Earth’s ability to live and those on the Christian Right who want to “bring on” Armageddon.
The larger stakes are the future of life on planet Earth in a time when the industrial civilization of the West is seen by many as on the brink of collapse and when the world’s most respected scientists see Earth as on the verge of ecological destruction, a sentiment that is deeply shared by the living Mayan wisdom keepers whose indigenous spiritual tradition Gibson has chosen to paint as evil.
The survivors of the most recent wave of genocide haven’t seen Apocalypto yet – no Maya has, not even those who had the bit parts Gibson reserved for them, or who worked as extras and maids.
One can’t help but wonder how Apocalypto will play to Guatemalan audiences, but one thing is a sure bet: Mayans will be deeply disturbed to see their culture portrayed as a madhouse of killing, while those who supported the death squad regime of the Christian fascist Efraín Ríos Montt will take solace: their view of the Maya as subhuman will be “justified” by the film, and so will their genocidal reign of terror.
Racist stereotypes, after all, serve one function and one function only – they serve as a story, a script that justifies the use of violence against a targeted group, whether the weapons of the oppressor are the sword and cannon, the gas chamber, the M16, a lynch mob’s rope, or a camera.
One viewer understood and embraced Gibson’s intent in its entirety, saying Apocalypto:
“Pretty much precisely describes the whole point of the civilizations of such “noble savages” as the Mayans, if you ask us. There isn’t one, there wasn’t one, and there never will be one. Those bloodthirsty mongrels and many others before and after them were brutal, savage, cruel and entirely without redeeming qualities, and the best thing that ever happened to this planet was when they were wiped out, never to be heard of again.
In fact, we owe the Spanish Conquistadores an eternal debt of gratitude for having wiped that blood-curdlingly bestial, brutal blight upon humanity off the face of the planet because, had they not done it, we would have had to do so ourselves.”
The son of a Holocaust denier, Gibson defended his father in a 2004 interview, and, in the wake of his recent drunken tirades against Jews, Gibson can ill afford charges of propagating racism against Indians. The film’s PR campaign has carefully skirted potential opposition and negative exposure. Despite that effort Mayan activists who’ve seen nothing more than the film’s trailer denounced the film the day before it opened.
Ignacio Ochoa, director of the Nahual Foundation, said "Gibson replays, in glorious, big budget Technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserved, in fact needed, rescue."
The Indians who’ve seen the film itself have been a carefully chosen crew; Apocalypto, for all its epic pretensions, premiered in an Oklahoma casino, and certainly not for an audience of American Indian Movement activists. The initial Latino audience was chosen just as carefully. A Beverly Hills-based PR man arranged screenings of the film for the Los Angeles Latin Business Association – not for Mexican and Central American migrants who know the Maya, not for indigenous minded Chican@s, and certainly not for LA’s substantial community of Mayan refugees.
The Latin Business Association obligingly gave Gibson their "Visionary” Award. But it’s too late for Gibson to hide behind such contrived honors. Even the LA Times pointedly noted, “ it's one thing to acknowledge a work's… merits and quite another to proclaim Gibson a ‘visionary,’ especially at a time when the immigration debate has reminded Latinos that virulent racism is only a few drinks away.”
Genocide is even closer than that. Ask the Spanish. Ask the death squads. Ask Mel, behind the camera or behind a small glass. It’s just a shot away.
________
Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays from 2006 can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/. He can be reached at: JuanSantos@Mexica.net.
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