AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973 ----Episode 13

           REAGAN'S FOREIGN POLICY IN CENTRAL 
       AMERICA WAS CRUEL AND HE LIED ABOUT
       IT 

    Reagan met with Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cardova, who was waging his own U.S.-backed counterinsurgency war. According to the Los Angeles Times, the meeting occurred in a "drab building" at "a heavily guarded military airport in eastern Honduras. Soldiers manned anti-aircraft guns in the sugar cane field bordering the runway, and military helicopters patrolled overhead . . . The weather was hot and humid, and the pinstripe suites worn by White House officials looked conspicuously out of place."  Secretary of State George Shulz whispered to one reporter, "This is the strangest thing I've ever seen." 

   The trip had its share of unscripted moments. In Costa Rica, Sergio Erick Ardon head of the People's Revolutionary Movement, rose in the balcony of the National Theater and loudly indicted the U.S. president and his "militarization of Central America." 

   In Columbia, Reagan was blindsided by President Belisario Betancur Cuartas, who used his toast to criticize Reagan's efforts to "isolate" and "exclude" Cuba and Nicaragua from hemispheric peace and development efforts while tolerating murder by right-wing governments : "Our responsibility as heads of state does not allow us to remain unmoved by the daily opening of gravesites in the ground of our common geography : 30,000 graves in El Salvador, to mention only one nation, shock the conscience of leaders." The Reagan entourage was furious with this attack. Nor were they pleased with the riots and demonstrations in downtown Bogota or the crowds lining the streets greeting Reagan's speeding motorcade with shouts of "Fuera!" or "Yanqui go home." Unable to get all the "individual countries" straight, Reagan insulted his hosts in Brazil by saluting "the people of Bolivia." 

   Reagan's sorry spectacle of giving absolution to murderous dictators did not go unremarked back home. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis began an op-ed piece, appropriately titled "Howdy Genghis," with "Under the name of 'Anti-communism,' the President of the United States has just had a friendly meeting with a tyrant who makes a policy of mass murder. This is what has happened, in Ronald Reagan's administration, to Americans' belief that their country stands for basic human decency in the world." Lewis described reports of Guatemalan soldiers descending on rural villages in helicopters, hacking women to death with machetes, torching huts, and gouging out eyes as part of a campaign to take the countryside back from the guerillas. Lewis quoted the Boston Globe's assessment of this antiguerilla campaign as falling somewhere between a pogrom and genocide." He noted the fact that Reagan's embrace of "torturers and murderers" extended beyond the leaders of Guatemala and El Salvador to include recent visits to Washington from the dictators of South Korea and the Philippines and an upcoming one from Muhummad Zia -ul-Haq of Pakistan, who since taking power in 1977 "has eliminated the political opposition and resorted regularly to torture." Lewis ended with a poignant reminder that has rung true throughout all the decades of the American Empire : "The shame marks us all. When the economic follies of the Reagan Administration have been forgotten, its insensitivity to human cruelty will stain the name of the United States." 

   The sense of outrage so eloquently expressed by Lewis was reinforced by reports released by Amnesty International, Americas Watch, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and other human rights groups, detailing the ongoing murders and atrocities, and by remarks by a Guatemalan Jesuit priest, Reverend Ricardo Falla, S.J., at a press conference arranged by the American Anthropological Association. Falla, who was trained at Georgetown, charged that the purpose of organized massacres of Indians was to leave "no survivors" and hence "no memory" of what happened. He elaborated, "That is why babies and children are killed. It's really incredible. These children, if they survive, will avenge the death of their parents . . . These little ones are slit open with knives, or their heads are broken against rocks or beams of houses." Father Falla described a massacre at San Francisco de Nenton, which transpired over an eight-hour period and included a break for dinner : "After killing the women and children, they stopped to eat the steaks which they had roasted from a bull they killed shortly after their arrival. They laughed at the old people who cried out like sheep when the blunt knives did not cut their throats. They sang while they listened to the radios they stole from the Indians later in the evening, when the massacre was finished."