vrijdag 17 maart 2006

Amerikaanse Doodseskaders










Dit zijn de lijken van vier Amerikaanse nonnen die in 1980 door het Salvadoraanse leger in koele bloede werden vermoord. Deze militairen werden door de Verenigde Staten opgeleid en gefinancierd om het terreurbewind in El Salvador in het zadel te houden. Daarbij verloren tenminste 75.000 burgers het leven en raakten 300.000 kinderen en volwassenen invalide. Momenteel strijden troepen uit El Salvador in Irak voor 'de verspreiding van de democratie en de mensenrechten' en zijn dus strikt genomen onze bondgenoten in het Midden Oosten. In januari 2005 berichtte Newsweek: '''The Salvador Option.'' The Pentagon may put Special-Forces-led assassination or kidnapping teams in Iraq. What to do about the deepening quagmire of Iraq? The Pentagon’s latest approach is being called "the Salvador option"—and the fact that it is being discussed at all is a measure of just how worried Donald Rumsfeld really is. "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go on as we are," one senior military officer told NEWSWEEK. "We have to find a way to take the offensive against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And we are losing." Last November’s operation in Fallujah, most analysts agree, succeeded less in breaking "the back" of the insurgency—as Marine Gen. John Sattler optimistically declared at the time—than in spreading it out. Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")' Lees verder: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6802629/site/newsweek/ Amnesty International schrijft over het door Washington gefinancierde terrorisme in El Salvador het volgende: 'During the counter-insurgency campaigns, women, children and the elderly often fell victim to death squads. Most men and many women who were unburdened by children or elders were able to escape, hide in the hills and join the guerillas for safety. more...
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, women organizers and activists were routinely silenced through torture, disappearances and extrajudicial killings. Women union leaders who were protesting economic exploitation in factories were targeted as well as political activists. Female members of a teachers’ union were arrested, tortured and raped in the mid-1980s for protesting teachers’ low salaries. While in prison, the women suffered extreme physical abuse and starvation as well.' Lees verder: http://www.womenwarpeace.org/elsalvador/elsalvador.htm

Geen opmerkingen:

Peter Flik en Chuck Berry-Promised Land

mijn unieke collega Peter Flik, die de vrijzinnig protestantse radio omroep de VPRO maakte is niet meer. ik koester duizenden herinneringen ...