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Blood on the Border | Associated Articles 1
On Columbus Day: Big Lies and U.S. Imperialism
by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
from the Monthly Review Webzine
Most people think of the U.S.-sponsored war against the Sandinistas (that came to be called, simply, the "Contra War") as having taken place on the northern border of western Nicaragua and Honduras and on the southern border with Costa Rica. But there was a third front in that war, in the mostly indigenous region of northeastern Nicaragua.
In the same years the Reagan administration began sponsoring counterinsurgency against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, the United States was busy buttressing the Spanish-speaking military oligarchy in nearby Guatemala against a rebellion by the majority of the population -- the Maya indigenous peoples. The Mayans were slaughtered by the thousands, their fields and homes torched, half the population driven into the Mexican Mayan zone as refugees, and thousands more into internal relocation camps under a military general, Rios-Montt, who was a raving Christian Protestant evangelical.
While the U.S. had helped to suppress the Mayan resistance in Guatemala, the newly created Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the Caribbean used the language of that same resistance movement in its propaganda machine for the Nicaraguan counterinsurgency, in an attempt to overthrow the leftist Sandinistas who had taken power in Nicaragua in 1979. This disinformation campaign effectively hooked not only the media, but also many leftists, anarchists and libertarians, anthropologists, Vietnam vets, missionaries, assorted anti-communists, and, most tragically, some indigenous leaders and organizations in North America -- splitting the American Indian Movement, already weakened by the 1970s FBI counterinsurgency program COINTELPRO.…
To read the full text of the article, please visit http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/dunbarortiz121005.html
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