Our government has agreed to give $3.2 in military aid to the government of Guatemala, which was one of the more egregious violators of human rights in the hemisphere in the 1980s. This may have something to do with the fact that Guatemala has just signed on to the so-called Central American Free Trade Agreement, in spite of violent protests in that country during which at least one person was killed.
I would have thought our military contractors had enough demand for their products, what with their hardware getting used up/blown up in Iraq every day. Can't ever have too many helicopters though, can you? And what in the world does a country like Guatemala need a military to fight against? Peasants? Disaffected sweatshop workers? Excuse me, internal subversion.
Exactly.
And so the noose gets pulled a little tighter. Read "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins. His writing style is a bit odd, and he spends way too much time telling us how very guilty he felt doing what he was doing--but he does pull a lot of threads together in a very readable way, and hearing it in the context of a memoir (/confession) gives an immediacy to the story that you wouldn't get from a more impersonal analysis.
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