I'd like to hear his views more about Latin America. Once Hillary is gone things might improve.

Ronald Reagan's Torture
By Robert Parry
September 8, 2009

Lost amid the attention given George W. Bush’s “war on terror” torture policies was the CIA’s cryptic admission that it also engaged in interrogation abuses during Ronald Reagan’s anti-leftist wars in Central America, another era of torture and extra-judicial killings.

~snip~
The Reagan Bloodbath

As brutal as the Guatemalan security forces were in the 1960s and 1970s, the worst was yet to come. In the 1980s, the Guatemalan army escalated its slaughter of political dissidents and their suspected supporters to unprecedented levels.

Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of President Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.

The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Patricia Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" – tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders – then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should “walk a mile in the moccasins” of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. [For details, see Martin Edwin Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]

More:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/090809.html

I've always considered it one of his greatest actions.

You headline says halting. Your article says reducing. Do you really believe that the US was a force for good in Latin America in the late 70's?

I agree it was not as bad.

But anyway, there is no point in talking about it with you as with you every single person is either 100% good or 100% evil, when in reality almost everyone is somewhere in-between.

Took a moment to look for another link, found this:

A timeline explores more than 50 years of violent suppression and revolving dictatorships in the country and the role played by the U.S. -- By María José Calderón

~snip~
Mass Exodus
1970–1983

In November 1970, Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio, a conservative military commander was elected president. Campaigning to restore law and order as fighting raged between right- and left-wing paramilitaries, he immediately suspended civil liberties and placed the country in a state of siege. The siege lasted a year and in the countryside, where the bloodiest fighting was taking place, he gave the military total control to squash the violence. By March 1971, there had been more than 700 political killings. The victims included labor leaders, students and politicians.

By the mid-1970s, repression in rural areas had intensified, and in 1977, President Jimmy Carter passed a bill to cut off military aid and credit to Guatemala.

More:
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/guatemala704/history/timeline.html#

I said Latin America, not Guatemala. I agree with you on Guatemala and Carter.

Oh I forgot though, everyone is either 100% good or 100% evil. There is no nuance.

This man was light years ahead of FORD. Now I realize why the GOP hated this man. He did to much GOOD to the GOP doing to much EVIL.

It is so good to know that all the GOP leaders are pushing up grass and dead so their EVIL is DEAD.

in the last 100 years in the Americas.

Carter had a truly hard time getting any help accomplished whatsoever, with filthy bigots like Jesse Helms fighting him like madmen every step of the way from the Senate and the House, yet he did struggle throughout it all.

Good will win, in the end, no matter what the right-wing does to prevent it.

Welcome to D.U., ROBROX.

I hope US will soon have more like him and Roosevelt.

next is Chile.

God, I hate/love this period of the semester. I get to open my students' eyes, but I'm monumentally depressed at the same time.

firmly in place as their new president, with his history of atrocities intact and uncompensated.

I'm sure you know about Jennifer Harbury, but I'll link her Wikipedia. I was lucky enough to read imput by a DU'er, Say_What, at another message board long before DU was formed, when she introduced Harbury's name and experience to readers. Very, very powerful, and tragic, and I never forgot her name after that:

Jennifer Harbury

Jennifer K. Harbury (born 1951) is an American lawyer, author, and human rights activist. Her personal story, writing, and activism are significant in revealing the complicity of the CIA in human rights abuses, particularly in Central America.

Harbury grew up in Connecticut, graduating from Harvard Law School and Cornell University. In 1990, Harbury met her husband Efraín Bámaca Velásquez[1] (whose nom de guerre was Commandante Everardo). Bámaca was a Mayan commandante of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) during Guatemala's civil war,[2] a period of brutal repression and genocide against Guatemala's indigenous populations at the time.[3][4][5][6]

In 1992 Bámaca was "disappeared" by the Guatemalan government. As a U.S. citizen and lawyer, Harbury set out to find her husband's whereabouts by protesting and through legal action despite receiving threats on her life and safety for these efforts.[1][2][7] Among the actions she took were two hunger strikes in Guatemala, one in front of the White House, and a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the CIA.[1][2]

During this period, both the Guatemalan and United States governments claimed they had no knowledge of Bámaca's whereabouts. However, as a consequence of Harbury's actions, U.S. State Department official Richard Nuccio ultimately became a whistleblower and revealed the fact that not only did the CIA know of his whereabouts, but that it had a close working relationship with the Central American death squads that were involved with his disappearance.[7] It was revealed that on March 12, 1992, the local Guatemalan army captured Efraín Bámaca Velásquez alive, that the army had secretly detained and tortured Bámaca for over a year before killing him in September 1993 without trial, and that his torturers and murderers were paid CIA informants.[1][2] For his whistle blowing, Mr. Nuccio was stripped of his security clearance and effectively purged from the CIA and the State Department.[8][9]

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Harbury

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Jennifer K. Harbury Knows American Torture Starts at the Top, and It Has for Decades

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

What's happened is what has happened in the past. Very low level people, such as, in this case, the MPs who were ordered to carry out those tortures, are held up to the public as scapegoats, put on trial, and sent to jail. Whereas, Rumsfeld, Gonzales and Tenet, who are in clear violation of two felony statutes within the United States which prohibit torture abroad by any U.S. official, or conspiracy to do so, or ordering or condoning such actions – these people have remained completely free. Why are they free with no charges brought against them? Because the person who would decide to indict them would be the Attorney General – formerly Mr. Ashcroft, now Mr. Gonzales. We have a clear breakdown of the checks and balances system here. They should be under indictment, but they're not, so their crimes are continuing. And that, in fact, is going to greatly increase the risks of more attacks against our country.

[center]* * * [/center]
When it comes to torture, Jennifer Harbury knows of what she speaks. The man she loved, known as Everard by his admirers and his adversaries, was its victim at the hands of U.S-trained interrogators in Guatemala. In her latest book, Truth, Torture and the American Way, Harbury takes the reader on a journey as to how we arrived at Abu Ghraib. The book documents our path from Vietnam to Latin America to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo -- a chilling chronicle that gives the lie to the "few bad apples" assesment. We can only hope that the facts she presents will help bring this nightmare of abuses to an end.

[center]* * * [/center]
BuzzFlash: You came to this topic through the torture of your husband and his murder. Could you summarize for our readers what happened to your husband, the circumstances, and the U.S. involvement?

Jennifer K. Harbury: I'm an attorney, and I had been doing human rights work in South Texas with a number of different groups for a number of years and became familiar with the refugee community, especially the Guatemalans. After doing human rights work in Guatemala from 1985 on, I ended up marrying Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a Mayan resistance leader. As I'm sure you know, the socioeconomic situation in Guatemala is very similar to the old South Africa, in that the indigenous people there, the Mayans, are the majority – they're 80%. But they are completely disenfranchised, suffer from an extremely high malnutrition level, 80% illiteracy, and the second-highest rate of infant mortality in the hemisphere, second only to Haiti, by way of background.

My husband was picked up by the Guatemalan military. He was captured alive in 1992. Then they falsely stated that he had been killed in combat. I found out six months later that he was, in fact, still alive, that they had faked his death in order to torture him long term, with medical assistance to avoid accidentally killing him, so that he would break psychologically and reveal all of his information to them. I then went on a series of hunger strikes to try to obtain his release to the courts of law for a fair trial, as opposed to his torture and extra-judicial execution. I was going back to the United Nations, the State Department, the OAS, and, of course, Capitol Hill. Congress was trying very hard to assist me. The Ambassador and high-level State Department officials kept responding to me and to Congress that they had no information whatsoever about him.

More:
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/08/int05036.html

[center]

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-qRXod5EaQ5o/TZtYE9KCF8I/AAAAAAAAAA8/hpK0sM25j-w/s1600/Efrain+.jpg

Efraín Bámaca Velasquez

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Getting some truthful information regarding the events of the overthrow of Chile's elected, popular President Allende should be critically important to your students. Hope they have not been crippled by misinformation prior to your class. Of course getting the truth in is so much harder when they have been closed and sealed by deliberate lies implanted by propaganda.

You have chosen a heavy challenge to tackle, but it is deeply important.