真實筆記

In response to the arugument put forward by the reader " York ", the following artilce may help us to know who is to be blamed for the disaester taken place in the third World. Of course, I don't mean the regimes of the third World themselves are innocent, but the West cannot claim their hands are clean too. The ghost of imperialism is still there, though it has taken a different form, as the other reader Ahchoi points out.


DERRICK Z. JACKSON
A lesson unlearned in El Salvador
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist | April 26, 2006

First of two parts
AS AUXILIARY bishop of San Salvador, Gregorio Rosa Chavez wonders if the United States learned anything from its murderous meddling in his nation. He remembers reading a magazine article shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, about how Americans surround themselves with information but much of it ''frivolous and superfluous." He said the article talked about how such shallow knowledge leads to US foreign policy being based on the moment, ''only looking at our navel as if the world ended at the border with Mexico."

Rosa Chavez wondered if the attacks would wake up the United States to look beyond the navel. He wondered if Americans would truly begin to ponder the question of ''Why do they hate us?" After the unprovoked invasion of Iraq under false pretenses in 2003, the answer was a terrible no.

''Pope John Paul called the war a 'defeat for humanity,' " Rosa Chavez said. ''The pope gave his condolences to the American people for Sept. 11. But we also needed to enter a new understanding that we are one world where we only have a future together if we get rid of barriers and walls. Preemptive war makes no sense . . . I worry the US will have to ask again, 'Why do they hate us?' "

Rosa Chavez was in Cambridge last week to receive the Romero Truth Award from Centro Presente, a Latino immigrant advocacy organization. The award is named for Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop who was assassinated in 1980, presumably by a right-wing death squad. The assassination was part of a 1980-1992 civil war between leftist guerrillas and a US-backed right-wing government that resulted in at least 75,000 deaths and thousands more disappeared.

Rosa Chavez said Iraq means that El Salvador is a lesson unlearned. The Reagan and first Bush administrations gave the Salvadoran government $6 billion in economic and military aid during the war. Rosa Chavez and the Catholic church condemned atrocities on both sides but was often threatened by the government because its pleas for human rights for peasants were seen as too far to the left.

No amount of killings mattered to anti-communist hard-liners in Washington, not even the murders of four Maryknoll nuns from the United States and six Jesuit priests. One such hard-liner was then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Intelligence documents released in 1993 indicated that Cheney opposed attempts by members of Congress to withhold military aid to El Salvador during that government's slothful investigation of the murder of the priests. In a 1989 appearance on ABC's ''This Week with David Brinkley," Cheney claimed there was ''no indication at all" that the Salvadoran government or the army were involved.

Documents and soldier confessions in the mid- and late-1990s showed that the killings of the priests and nuns were directly tied to the military, and the Reagan administration suppressed and overlooked intelligence on state-sponsored terror links. As late as 1990, US military officers were training well-to-do Salvadorans linked to death squads.

A decade later, Vice President Cheney turned that legacy upside down, trumping up discredited intelligence to invade Iraq. In the 2004 vice presidential debate, he had the nerve to use El Salvador as an example of what would happen in Afghanistan and Iraq. He boasted, ''we held free elections. I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress. . . . And today El Salvador is a whale of a lot better because we held free elections."

This is after he refused to ''observe" how we sponsored so many of the 75,000 deaths over the 12 years of the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

Rosa Chavez, part of the religious vanguard that risked life for peace and elections, remembers a whale of a lot more than Cheney, enough to fear for the future of Iraq. He remembers US ambassadors denying witness protection and cruelly interrogating courageous people who came forward with information on the state-sponsored terror. ''It was really terrible because (US) politics were not based on values and human rights," he said. ''During the war, I had to receive many US delegations, and frequently I got the impression they really did not care about the people. It was painful.

''I would say the Salvadoran case is even worse than Iraq. In Iraq, the US sent its army. In the Salvadoran case, the arms came from outside, but the deaths are all Salvadorans."


DERRICK Z. JACKSON
In El Salvador, an invasion of American agriculture
By Derrick Z. Jackson | April 29, 2006

Second of two parts

WHEN THE US-backed government and military of El Salvador brutally repressed their people in the 1980-92 civil war that took 75,000 lives, Gregorio Rosa Chavez was one of those who pleaded to the outside world, ''We don't need bullets; we need beans."

Today, he still pleads for the beans.

To understand why, one can start with a 2003 article by the US Department of Agriculture, titled ''El Salvador Offers a Balmy Climate for US Agricultural Exports." Written as the United States pushed for the Central American Free Trade Agreement, it said, ''Some 20 percent of El Salvador's population regularly purchases US food items. . . . With more women joining the labor force and fewer domestic employees to assist in food preparation, the demand for convenience and fast foods is increasing. . . .

''Generally, people living in urban areas consume more bread and meats than tortillas and beans. Urban Salvadorans are very familiar with US-style food, and most US fast-food franchises have outlets in El Salvador. Food courts in shopping malls are popular and viewed as a perfect place to socialize. . . . US foods such as hot dogs and hamburgers are preferred by the younger generation."

Rosa Chavez, the auxiliary bishop of San Salvador, said this is not his idea of globalization.

''It is taking away our identity," he said last week in Cambridge, where he received an award from the Latino immigration advocacy group Centro Presente. He spoke through an interpreter. ''I talked to a girl recently who was born in the US but whose parents are from El Salvador. She told me that she felt at home on her first visit to El Salvador because she saw McDonald's. I see it as a symbol of how globalization promises so much economically, but impoverishes us by stealing our soul. Right now, the culture of globalization is more about having stuff just for pleasure, hedonism, and power."

El Salvador was the first nation to implement CAFTA, which was not surprising because of our continued long reach into its affairs. It has adopted the dollar as its national currency. President Tony Saca won office in 2004 with haunting support from the United States. US envoy Otto Reich -- notorious for his covert propaganda in Iran-Contra -- warned Salvadoran journalists that he was ''concerned" what a leftist presidency would do to the ''economic, commercial, and migratory relations with the United States."

El Salvador is the last Latin American nation to still have troops in Iraq, 380 of them. Its reward is an invasion of American agriculture. Under CAFTA, tariffs are eliminated on one of the staples of fast food, frozen fries. Tariffs on red beans, black beans, and peas will be phased out over 15 years. ''We are going to have many peasants who do traditional Salvadoran farming who will be driven off their farms and forced into factories because of American goods," Rosa Chavez said.

In return, President Bush says Salvadorans will benefit with cheaper and better US goods and industrial investments. But 48 percent of the people remain in poverty, the cost of living has gone up, and the gap between rich and poor is widening, according to data from the Congressional Research Service and even the US Agency for International Development. That poverty would be worse if Salvadorans were not receiving nearly $3 billion a year in remittances from relatives in the United States. That cash accounts for 17 percent of the nation's Gross Domestic Product, according to the State Department.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, 28 percent of adults in El Salvador receive remittances from the United States. During the civil war, the United States spent an average of about $500 million a year to prop up a regime that a United Nations-sponsored truth commission judged responsible for 85 percent of the deaths. Today, we give a mere $40 million a year to help that country come to life.

Rosa Chavez called this a ''diabolical cycle." Many Salvadorans fled the instability at our hands to work in the United States at high legal risk, often on dangerous jobs and at poverty wages to provide the high life for Americans and a higher life for Salvadorans at home.

''Globalization might help some people," Rosa Chavez said, ''but we also have Salvadorans in the US who never buy new clothes, go to the worst schools, and who send money home to people who purchase the most expensive shoes, and shop for the biggest televisions in the malls in El Salvador. It ends up being poor dollars sent by poor people, and for what?"