Who were The Contras?

Who were "The Contras"?

Reagan called them "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers".  But Oliver North's aide in the field, Robert Owen, sent him a memo in March of 1986, reminding the brash Lt. Colonel that their leader, Adolfo Calero, is "a creation of the United States government", and he warned North that those around Calero,

"Unfortunately, they are not first rate people; in fact they are liars and greed and power motivated. They are not the people to rebuild a new Nicaragua. In fact, the FDN has done a good job of keeping competent people out of the organization. If it hasn't, then Nicaragua is lost forever with the type of leadership that has emerged ..."

 

Remember, this is the assessment of a young American know-it-all, member of the clique that rejected all forms of Latin American government that dared to put the welfare of its people before the demands of Wall Street.  To give a voice to the alternative view, let me quote the consummate playwright of his day, the heir of Samuel Beckett, himself the heir of James Joyce, I speak of Harold Pinter, who was also an activist of considerable note.  In his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, he said: 

" I should remind you that at the time President Reagan made the following statement: 'The Contras are the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.'

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren't perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilised. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighbouring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador."

I strongly urge truth seekers to watch the entire Nobel speech:

The point Pinter is making here is, Wall Street does not intend to allow any Latin American country to increase the cost of labor in any way.  The reason Jean-Bertrand Aristide, President of Haiti, was carried off bodily by US Marines to the Central African Republic is the same reason as Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State presided over the deposing of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya — both of these leaders raised the minimum wage for their starving people.

Wall Street knows full well that any such rise in the cost of labor will spread to every other country in the region.  And Wall Street tells the Marines what to do, don't think they don't.  And they tell Hillary and Obama what to do.  And they get precious little resistence from either one.

This might be an appropriate time to mention where the US policy of treating Latin America like slave colonies began.  The Reagan team sprang from the Eisenhower team, which was dominated by Sec'y of State John Foster Dulles and brother Allen Dulles, Director of Central Intelligence.

Here you see the painting "Glorious Victory" by the great Mexican artist Diego Rivera, depicting Foster shaking the hand of the fawning new Guatemalan dictator, Col. Carlos Castillo Armas, shortly after the overthrow of the populist hero Jacobo Arbenz in 1954.  Arbenz had the temerity to nationalize vast tracts of unused land belonging to United Fruit Co., now Chiquita, to provide subsistence farmland for his people.  United Fruit was a client of Sullivan and Cromwell, still the biggest law firm on Wall Street, of which Foster was a partner, and Allen a working lawyer.

You can see also the face of Ike on the bomb, Allen resting his chin on Foster's shoulder, the bananas which represented the only value in the land to them, the sellout bishops and clergy, the sellout military, the poor crushed by the labor and killed by the Secret Armies sent in even then.

Anyone wishing to be familiar with this subject should watch Bill Moyers's masterpiece from 1987, The Secret Government - the Constitution in Crisis.

Better yet, watch it four times.