Washington’s Tolerance of Death Squad “Democracies”

(Ted Galen Carpenter) The U.S. government has had a long, dishonorable history of forging and sustaining close relations with murderous dictatorships – as long as they supported Washington’s foreign policy. Such authoritarian US allies as the Shah of Iran, Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, the Saudi royal family, and a succession of South Korean and Guatemalan military rulers (among others) were confirmation of that cynical approach throughout the Cold War. US administrations (especially Ronald Reagan’s administration) also looked the other way or even offered quiet support as the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina executed brutal, indiscriminate crackdowns.

Related Archbishop Viganò Warns of Coming Ecological Dictatorship

Source – Activist Post

by Ted Galen Carpenter, May 21st, 2022

Matters have not improved all that much since the end of the Cold War. Washington lavishes weapons on Saudi Arabia and Egypt, despite their continuing, flagrant human rights abuses at home. Indeed, the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have even aided Riyadh’s genocidal war of aggression against the people of Yemen through arms transfers and other measures.

The human rights violations that such autocratic regimes have committed are extensive, and they sometimes reach legendary levels. For example, pro-U.S. military dictatorships in Guatemala were responsible for some 93 percent of human rights abuses (mostly murders) that occurred during fighting that took the lives of 200,000 people over a 36-year period from the early 1960s to the mid-1990s. Washington’s guilt in that slaughter was enhanced because the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had orchestrated a successful coup in 1954 to remove a democratic (albeit, leftist) government and put such monsters in power. The same was true of the coup that US and British intelligence agencies conducted the previous year in Iran to put the Shah back on the throne. Again, the outcome was a horrific record of imprisoning, torturing, and murdering political opponents. Today, a similar result is taking place in Egypt as Abdel Fattah El-Sisi conducts a reign of terror, with US leaders acting as enablers.

The willingness of multiple American administrations to collaborate with overtly nasty dictatorships has attracted considerable attention and condemnation over the decades. A more subtle form of Washington’s guilt, though, has received somewhat less attention and criticism. Several ostensibly democratic regimes that Washington has supported have abused, terrorized, and murdered civilians with nearly as much alacrity as their outright authoritarian counterparts.

During the late 1980s, the Reagan administration enthusiastically endorsed and assisted the government of Jose Napoleon Duarte in El Salvador. Washington’s primary motive was to block the prospect of Soviet influence expanding from the new Sandinista regime in Nicaragua to the rest of Central America. As part of that strategy, the administration poured extensive military and economic aid into El Salvador. However, despite the democratic façade, rogue security forces, as well as death squads affiliated with the government, continued the approach of the country’s prior, authoritarian governments, wreaking havoc and killing thousands. Yet Reagan had effusive praise for Duarte as a democratic model for all of Central America.

A more recent and even more unsettling example has been the track record of the Philippines’ current elected president, Rodrigo Duterte. Under Duterte’s rule, death squads (with the government’s blessing and assistance) have run amok. Estimates generally range from 6,000 to 30,000 victims. According to Duterte and his allies, the individuals who were executed without trial were slimy drug traffickers, so the lack of due process really shouldn’t matter. Even if one endorsed such an amoral rationale, there is strong evidence that the regime has used the “drug trafficker” excuse as a cover to eliminate political critics. Yet, the Philippines has remained a functioning democracy. Indeed, an election for a new president has just taken place – although the victory of a ticket consisting of Marcos’s son and Duterte’s daughter is unsettling. Throughout all of this, Washington’s complaints against Duterte have been modest, and they have focused far more on his periodic geopolitical flirtation with Beijing than on his horrid human rights record.

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Source:

https://www.activistpost.com/2022/05/washingtons-tolerance-of-death-squad-democracies.html