The year is 1954. Government agencies resurrect secret plans previously discarded until a more forceful administration comes to power. Behind the scenes, the CIA and State Department are fervently working in over time trying to engineer a government overthrow against a populist nationalist in their own backyard who has the dare audacity to threaten both US economic and geopolitical interest. Accusations of communism and Soviet penetration permeate the discourse and heat up the rhetoric; swift action must be taken to stabilize the hemisphere. Intervention by any means necessary. Exiled opposition leaders are paid off, trained, equipped, and installed. Propaganda transmits through jammed radio towers and warns the peasant population of invasion and liberation. Psychological warfare in conjunction with paramilitary covert operation is launched. The target—Guatemala, a third world poverty stricken country in which the fruits of revolution and conflict are as ripe as the bananas that dot the landscape. Such a riveting story could easily fill the pages of Tom Clancy’s next best-selling and fictional political thriller but instead, it is the true story unearthed through extensive investigation by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, who with Bitter Fruit, meticulously detail a thought provoking and well-documented historical account of the Guatemalan coup d’état. The sowing of the seeds, subsequent cultivation, and ultimately the dangerous harvest of these bitter fruits is the basis for this compelling chronicle of one of the most controversial and…
This article was about four former child soldiers in the Sierra Leon civil war that were interviewed by Newsweek. They each relive the horrors of their prior lives during the war and give us a walkthrough of just how savage these young boys were living at the time. The interview topics range from before the war, being forced into service, drug factors, atrocities, life after and future goals. The now teenage boys reminisce on their crusades of murder, amputations, tortures and rape in their younger days. This article is filled with individual stories of unthinkable evils these boys committed in a corrupted…
The massacre at El Mozote is a book about all the horrible series of events that occurred at El Mozote. When one looks at the massacre, it is obvious the United States aided in these events. The United States government chose turn its eye and pretended as if nothing happened. This book introduces one to the events in El Salvador in 1981. The author gives a reconstruction of the events and shows it importance. The massacre is not to be forgotten.…
Starting in 1932, labor leader Agustin Farabundo Marti lead a peasant revolt against ruling dictatorship and fourteen families, but, within a few weeks, the revolt was crushed in an enormous military retaliation called la matanza (Murphy 4/4/17), where an estimated 30,000 civilians were murdered, with the majority of whom were indigenous people. The Salvadoran military would rule the government for decades to come. Years later, the fight between the political left and right never ended, in the 1960s-1970s the left winged guerillas and the right-wing paramilitary death squads quarreled in a deadly spiral of political violence. El Mozote was a town that was seen as a last resort for escaping civilians, it was supposed to be a safe harbor, as the rebels and army would be doing…
The tensions between the classes, the halves and the halve-nots are therefore represented by the two warring factions. The harrowing events in Mark Danner’s Massacre at El Mozote investigates and questions three central issues; the Massacre, the role of American Policies in the region during the Cold War and the executive cover-up of the events as Propaganda. One of the concerns is what responsibility (if any) did the U.S. government have for the massacre at El Mozote?El Mozote was “uniquely” different from most villages because it had resisted the Liberation Theology taught by left-leaning Catholic Priests and according to the author was “as as stronghold of the Protestant evangelical movement” (pg 19) . The villagers of El Mozote had their own chapel and referred themselves as born-again Christians and as Danner states were known for “their anti-communism” (pg 19). The villagers of El Mozote did not support the guerillas. According to Danner the Massacre at El Mozote takes place when American trained Salvadoran Armed forces called the Atlacatl Batallion arrived at the village and began systematically killing men, women and children by various means such as torturing, hangings, decapitation, and shooting. The U.S government was responsible for the massacre at El Mozote for a plethora of reasons. First, The Reagan…
In Goldie Taylor’s piece, she noted an important concept in her experience: the systemic silencing of survivors. Our culture has denied her voice and that of other survivors, making them fearful of judgement or that it is their fault. The rape culture that has been created in our society makes it difficult for any person to come forward because we silence the survivor and culturally accept the actions of the perpetrator. The first thing that Taylor did that many survivors do is question how her identity and the identity of her perpetrator will affect how people believe her. She notes her identity as a black woman, and he as a white older man, a coach assured to be respected in their community.…
The stories of the former members of the BAC speak of an operational environment in which the patrolling activities to create a secure and stable environment interlinked with the sensitivity and compassion over the suffering of the Haitian people. Their stories clearly show how performing efficiently their role as blue helmets implied an ambiguity between the soldier role and the variety of civic actions that in the end they carried out to avoid the use of force. The military were seeking professional recognition in a complex domestic scenario marked by the processes of democratization and demilitarization. Although the civic actions gave them a positive self-image, more in keeping with the “Argentine” way of being, that is, kind, generous and compassionate, it also reinforced the image of the “civilian” soldier, which they saw as a threat. Additionally, the operational flexibility contributed to the ambiguity that challenged the traditional warrior role. They sought recognition as military professionals, and were against the civilianization of the armed forces.…
At 8:15, Japanese time, August 6, 1945 the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. About a hundred thousand people were killed by the inhumane act of those Americans. John Hersey tells the story of six lucky survivors: Miss Toshinki Sasaki, Dr. Masakazu Fuji, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Terfumi Sasaki, and the Reverend Tanimoto. This book tells about how the lives of these six people changed forever.…
In I, Rigoberta Menchú, Menchú, an Indian woman from Guatemala, explains the repression of Indians in Guatemala and the subsequent formation of a resistance movement. One of the most memorable parts of the book is her description of the Indian peasants’ 1980 occupation of the Spanish Embassy, in which at least 36 government officials and peasants, including her father, died. In her account, she helps the readers to understand the event through the perspective of the affected Guatemalan population. Though her depiction of this event is likely accurate, it is completely different than the portrayal of the event in The New York Times. Differences between the descriptions of the participants, purpose, and unfolding of events in these two accounts…
Imagine living during the reign of Trujillo’s oppressing regime in the Dominican Republic. The events the occurred during this time were horrific, whether it was torture, or the assassination of innocent people Trujillo and his men were always instating fear in the people of the Dominican Republic.…
On the evening of October 2,1968 in Tlatelolco, Mexico located the at La Plaza de Tres Culturas the mexican police forces along with army squads had opened fire at a student demonstration along with residents. Which had led to the streets of Mexico being plagued baths of blood and bodies littering the Plaza floor as others tried to escape the firestorm of bullets raining upon the protestors. The tally of death had been marked by the government as four dead , twenty wounded , whilst many eye-witnesses claimed hundreds were dead; the few protesters that had managed to escape were arrested. An estimate of one thousand protesters were arrested by police forces and military troops, the act of ultraviolence had put an extent shock around the government upon hearing acts of violence. The Tlatelolco massacre is not labeled as a ,“genocide” for it’s events have not shown many of the stages of a genocide, the events shadows a rebellion that grew and was shortly eliminated so the government could still remain in power. The behavior of the mexican government in 1968 was a very closed democracy which the people of mexico wanted a more open…
At the root of this system of institutionalized violence lay the fear of an indigenous uprising “coming down from the highlands”; the uprising of the early 1980s came closer than any other experience to realizing that great fear” (p.364). During this time, although the genocide had concluded…the ambition of ridding out the communist within the Mayan society was still continuing, especially from 1983-1990s. It was because of this that the Mayas were forced: to serve in the PACS (the self-defense patrol), to live in modern villages under military control, and to be overseen by the militarily administration in a constant effort to establish martial law which was all supervised by the General Victores. It was during this effort that the PACS were forced to kill villagers, the army used the essence of hunger to establish social control, and the ladino army felt it had the rights to control the Maya civilization of the highlands. Therefore… although the genocide itself was concluded…the efforts to control the Mayan society continued until 1990 when the war finally was concluded through the Guatemalan Peace…
The EZLN fights against the exploitation of the indigenous people of Chiapas but that is overseen. The message that the main stream media feeds to the public is that the EZLN are terrorist. They much publicized the armed uprising of the EZLN on New Year ’s Day 1994. The EZLN took arms against seven municipalities in Chiapas that day. It was not their first choice to use violent means to address the problem but it was “a last resort but just”. “A last resort against poverty,…
In addition to this, during the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, many people were killed because they went against the government or when they knew truth how fierce the government was. The citizens lived like hell during Khmer Rouge regime because there was they got little amount of food to eat while they work the whole day for the government, live in dirty places and have no freedom. People lived with depressed because they cannot find their families members after the war (Nigel et al, 2011). “The literature on the psychological effects on the offspring of Holocaust survivors has set a precedent for examining trans generational effects of trauma stemming from genocide and large-scale organized violence.”(Nigel et al, 2011). This suggests that the…
A good practice when giving any presentation, impromptu or not, is to decide what your ________________ is going to be.…