Wednesday, July 11, 2007

How Israel helps Global Repression

Excerpt from "Israel, the 'lobby,' and the United States"
March-April 2007
Article by Sherry Wolf
http://www.isreview.org/issues/52/israellobby.shtml

When the exposure of human rights abuses in countries like Guatemala made it politically untenable domestically for the U.S. to continue to back this murderous regime, it outsourced the job to Israel. From the 1970s to the 1990s,

"a civil war pitted a populist but, in this case, mainly Indian left against a mainly European oligarchy protected by a brutal Mestizo Army. As Guatemalan President Carlos Arana said in 1971, 'If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so.' The Israelis supplied Guatemala with Galil rifles, and built an ammunition factory for them, as well as supplying armored personnel carriers and Arava planes. Behind the scenes, they were actively involved in the bloodiest counter-insurgency campaign the hemisphere has known since the European conquest, in which at least 200,000 (mostly Indians) were killed."
[ Source: Jeremy Bigwood, "Israel's Latin American trail of terror," June 5, 2003, http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Israel/Israel_LAmer_TrailTerror.html]

In the past Israel has supplied arms and training to: the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia for its genocide of 200,000 East Timorese; the Nicaraguan contras for its killing of at least 50,000 oppositionists; Chile's Pinochet dictatorship; the military dictatorships of Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, and the list goes on.
[ Source: Lance Selfa, ed., The Struggle for Palestine (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2002), page 34 ]

"I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel, and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements," wrote the former (and now deceased) head of the largest right-wing paramilitary group in Colombia, Carlos Castaño. As recently as 2002, the Guatemala-based Israeli company GIRSA supplied Colombian death squads with 3,000 Kalashnikov rifles and 2.5 million rounds of ammunition.
[ Source: Jeremy Bigwood, "Israel's Latin American trail of terror," June 5, 2003,
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Israel/Israel_LAmer_TrailTerror.html ]
_________________________________

No comments: