AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973---Episode 14

          CONTINUING ON WITH THE REAGAN YEARS

    In January 1983, Reagan ended the embargo on military aid to Guatemala. He authorized sales of military hardware. But Congress's resistance forced Guatemala to rely on military aid primarily from from close U.S. allies Israel and Taiwan. Israel was also providing aid to El Salvadore and the Nicaragua contras.  CIA support for the Guatemalan military continued unabated. In August 1983, Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores overthrew Rios Montt in a coup, ending the period known as "La Violencia" but not the violence itself. Following the coup, the CIA and State Department reported an increase in political killings and abductions. In February 1984, Ambassador Frederic Chapin cabled Washington about what he called "the horrible human rights realities in Guatemala." The very next day, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliot Abrams and two other State Department officials approved a secret report urging Congress to resume military aid to Guatemala in light of its improved human rights record. 

   In 1986, in a secret report, the State Department acknowledged a systematic campaign by "security forces and rightist paramilitary groups" to kidnap and murder potential rural social workers, medical personnel, and campesinos dating back to 1966 and peaking in1984. Guatemala's official Historical Clarification Commission issued a report in 1999 detailing 626 massacres of Mayan villages carried out by the Guatemalan army,which it termed a "genocide ." It charged the CIA and other U.S. agencies with providing direct and indirect support for the Guatemalan slaughter, whose death toll it estimated at 200,000. 

   The United States was perpetrating atrocities of a different sort in Nicaragua. Former members of Somoza's thuggish Nicaraguan national guard had been gathering across the border in Honduras, where, with CIA Director Casey's assistance, they plotted a return to power. They called themselves the contra-revolucionarios, or "contras" for short. Here, as elsewhere, Casey transformed Carter's rudimentary covert operations into a massive undertaking.  He set up a Central America Task Force to run things. He installed Duane Clarridge to head the Latin America division. Clarridge was the perfect foil. He knew nothing about Latin America, never having worked in the region,and spoke no Spanish. 

   U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua Anthony Quainton pinpointed the start of the war for an interviewer : "The secret war began on March 15, 1982, when the CIA, using Nicaraguan agents, blew up the bridges that connected Nicaragua with Honduras." It had actually begun earlier. That December, Congress banned the use of government funds to overthrow the Sandinista government. In the administration, moderates like Shulz had little voice as hard-line right wingers increasingly set a ruthless foreign policy in Nicaragua and beyond. REAGAN LIED TO CONGRESS ABOUT WHAT THE CIA WAS UP TO. Casey lied repeatedly, deliberately misleading the House and Senate select intelligence committees. According to Gates, "Casey was guilty of contempt of Congress from the day he was sworn in." Shulz later said that he had complained to National Security Advisor Frank Carlucci in January 1987 : "I told him I had no confidence in the intelligence community, that I had been misled, lied to, cut out." Congress nonetheless significantly expanded the intelligence budget, with much of the appropriation going to the CIA.