The idea that President Reagan stood for freedom, peace and disarmament would be an especially tough sell to the people of Central America. His election in November 1980 was widely, and correctly, seen as offering a green light for right-wing terrorism. The region was deeply troubled by long-standing internal problems, but the Reagan administration saw it only as a cold war battleground where it hoped to score easy victories against the USSR. That view was basically false and the “victories” imaginary, but the cost to the people who lived there was all too real. [8]
From its first day in office, the Reagan team conspired to destroy the Nicaraguan revolution. At that time, the new Sandinista government had achieved major progress against illiteracy and the ills of extreme poverty, as attested by both UNESCO and WHO. The rural poor, released from the Somoza dictatorship, enjoyed new hope that their lives could be better. But led by the “great liberating spirit” (Diggins) of Ronald Reagan, the United States rejected peaceful coexistence with Nicaragua and subjected its people to devastating economic warfare and years of bloody terrorism from the CIA’s “contra” army, a campaign that cost at least 50,000 lives. The CIA even intervened directly, violating international law by mining Nicaragua’s harbors. When Congress objected to all this, the Reagan team secretly sold missiles to Iran and used the payments, together with drug-running profits, to continue funding the counterrevolution. Ronald Reagan called the contras “freedom fighters” and compared them to US founding fathers, but the US attacks and proxy war were condemned by the World Court of Justice, which ordered the United States to halt its aggression and pay Nicaragua billions of dollars in reparations. The UN General Assembly also overwhelmingly repudiated the US intervention. Those judgments, representing basic international law and world opinion, were contemptuously ignored by Mr. Reagan’s government.
Elsewhere in the region, the United States intervened with massive military and economic support to prop up the ruling military-led junta in El Salvador. “Disarmament” indeed! The Reagan team repeatedly lied about appalling massacres and murders there to keep the aid flowing after Congress demanded that abuses be controlled. Honduras and Guatemala were encouraged to become “national security states” where military and police ruled arbitrarily with little concern for law or human rights. Even in Costa Rica, the United States undermined the democracy it claimed to admire, trying to involve that nation in the US campaign against Nicaragua. In the name of anti-communism, Mr. Reagan’s government backed highly repressive regimes throughout the Americas, and hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives at the hands of military and paramilitary forces financed and armed, and sometimes also organized and trained, by the United States.
The Central American wars were only one ugly facet of the Reagan administration’s world impact, but they were hardly an exception to the overall trend. Whatever Professor Diggins and the others believe was in Ronald Reagan’s heart and mind, during his years in office, the United States stood for “freedom, peace, [and] disarmament” only in the administration’s rhetoric. The reality – the spectrum of actual policies behind that image – was tragically different. The Reagan legacy must be remembered as it really was – so that its crimes will not be repeated. (Posted by (Bulatlat.com))
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Notes:
[1] “The Reagan Diaries” (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), reviewed by Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker of May 28, 2007.
[2] “Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom and the Making of History” (Norton, 2007). I have read parts of the book plus a summary article by Diggins himself in “The Chronicle of Higher Education” (“The Review,” February 2, 2007). Diggins’s conclusion that Ronald Reagan was a “truly great president” is not supported by his book’s factual content.
[3] See Russell Baker, “Reconstructing Ronald Reagan,” The New York Review of Books, March 1, 2007. Time magazine added to the confusion with its cover story of 3/26/07.
[4] “The Age of Reagan: A History 1974-2008” (HarperCollins, 2008).
[5] May 12, 2008, pages 36-38. While Wilentz certainly counts as a liberal in US political terms, he hardly represents “the Left.”
[6] See Reagan’s New York Times obituary, June 6, 2004, page 1.
[7] Donald Regan, “For the Record: From Wall Street to Washington” (Harcourt, 1988).
[8] For example, see the author’s “What Are We Afraid Of? An Assessment of the ‘Communist Threat’ in Central America” (South End Press, 1988).
John Lamperti is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Dartmouth College. He is the author of several books on the theory of probability and on random processes. Since 1985 one of his main interests has been Central America and what the United States has been doing there. He is the author of “Enrique Alvarez Cordova: Life of a Salvadoran Revolutionary and Gentleman” (MacFarland, 2006).
