I'm on my way to Costa Rica tomorrow with my spouse to spend 12 days with our daughter who is just finishing up a study abroad there in environmental policy. Via Atlanta, GA (changing planes there). I'm a Unitarian and I recall some connection with UU and the "School of the Americas."

I don't know what I was doing/thinking in the 1980s when a lot of the American-caused shenanigans were going on in Central and South America. I plan to bone up on my history while there!

Thanks for your timely post!

Otto Reich, right-wing reactionary Cuban "exile" who headed the Office of Public Diplomacy for Ronald Reagan, kept a huge amount of pressure on the US corporate media, then, both print and tv journalists. Sometimes they were harassed, and sometimes they became his targets for dirty campaigns to undermine their standing, making up whoppers about their personal lives, even accusing them of promiscuity with people in Central America while they were there trying to write their stories. He was filthy.

He was also found guilty of creating illegal propaganda, condemned severely by Congress, etc. Didn't hold him back. He became a Latin America affairs official in the State Department for George W. Bush, accomplished through a recess appointment conducted when Congress was out, after the Senate had refused to approve his nomination by George Bush to the State Department.

The result was most U.S. Americans were totally in the dark about those events at the time they were happening, so you shouldn't feel it's your fault. People went out of their way to make sure the public didn't know what their tax dollars were doing to precious poor, helpless human beings in the Americas.

From everything I've heard, Costa Rica is absolutely beautiful. Hope your trip is terrific! Best wishes.

It is not only difficult to be well-informed, given our staggeringly bad corporate news media, but also much information has been buried--the sort of stuff that reporters are supposed to dig out--and you have to be determined to overcome the obstacles.

There are a lot of good sources, many originating outside the U.S. I'd recommend Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" for starters--for an overview of the goals and effects, and brutality, of recent and current U.S. economic policy in Latin America. There are U.N. reports on the Guatemala massacres and other such events. The internet is a great boon, in this regard. There are many web sites that very helpful. Upsidedown World and Colombia Reports are both informative, as you have demonstrated. In fact, one need only check out your posts here at DU for excellent counter-corporate news and opinion sources.

I am amazed at myself, too, for what I DIDN'T know about U.S. involvement in Central and South America in the 1980s. I knew some things, but not nearly the scale and the horror of crimes that were perpetrated by U.S.-funded and U.S. 'trained' operatives, or by U.S. personnel directly.

For instance, I knew there had been murders in Guatemala but I didn't know that TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND Mayan villagers had been slaughtered by U.S. 'trained' forces and a U.S.-backed fascist dictatorship. As Judy Lynn points out, below, the scale and the horror were deliberately kept from us--we who were paying for it with our tax dollars--by the corporate media, which serves only the "military-industrial-prison complex," transglobal corporations and the filthy rich, and not us ordinary citizens.

It is a very good thing to seek the truth. It helps you understand what is happening NOW, and also alerts you to the 'black holes' where information should be, and the disinformation, in the corporate media NOW, because both U.S.-funded, 'trained' & armed fascist operatives are STILL murdering people--and robbing and displacing them--mostly in Central America and in Colombia.

Also, in the many countries in South America who have elected leftist governments and have actively fought U.S. interference, U.S. interference nevertheless still occurs--attempted interference in elections, support and 'training' of fascist candidates and thugs, staging phony elections, funding of fascist propaganda, and financial and political pressures of many kinds (for instance, the economic sanctions on Cuba, and threatened sanctions against Venezuela), not to mention outright, known U.S. support for and participation in attempted fascist coup d'etats against democratic governments (successful coups in Honduras and Paraguay, unsuccessful in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador).

This recent interference was not at all subtle in Honduras, and has become slightly less gross in Colombia, where the Bushwhacks used Colombia's long civil war to murder thousands of people--trade union leaders, peasant farmer leaders and others, to brutally displace FIVE MILLION peasants from their lands, and to terrorize the country, as prep for U.S. "free trade for the rich." Since Obama signed this abominable treaty, I can only hold him complicit. Now that the work of terrorizing the country has been largely accomplished (although it is not over), the Obama administration seems to be at least tacitly supporting the government peace talks with the FARC rebels. And they yanked the gangster Alvaro Uribe from the presidency and installed a new guy, Manual Santos, who decided to engage in the peace talks. But things are still bad on many fronts, and the beneficiaries will be U.S. transglobal corporations and the very rich.

And what sort of reporting do we have from corporate media on these and other bad to horrible U.S. activities, past and current, in Latin America? It has been almost unbelievably defective--no information, disinformation and outright lies. This is the same as during the Reagan juggernaut--even worse, in fact. We really need to be aware of this--that we are being LIED TO, time and again, about Latin America--and seek out alternative news venues. No news venue is without bias, but we can at least seek out the perspective of the poor majority and its leaders, to balance the utter rot we are bombarded with from even the 'better' corporate venues.

It can be depressing, even overwhelming, to find out how bad U.S. actions have been in Latin America, and how badly informed we and other U.S. citizens are. But don't let it paralyze you. At the least, help out with spreading better information, if you can't do more. Again, I greatly applaud you for pledging to become better informed!