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Terrorism's Tenacious Roots in Latin America
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11156 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1986 |
2,373 Words |
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L. Charles Franklin
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Terrorism runs deep in Latin America. Even before Columbus and the first conquistadors came from Spain almost five centuries ago, Inca, Aztec, and other Indian societies systematically used terror as a form of coercion, both within their own population and against others.
Since then, revolutionaries with an aggregation of causes, bands of the disaffected, the military, and governments in many guises have done the same. In the name of liberty nationalism, various forms of sectarianism, and just plain greed, terrorism has sunk twisting, tenacious roots in both stony and fertile soil. Hardy, pernicious Lianas, often twining from country to country, have sprung up during the last 25 years.
The Venezuelan Story
In the early 1960s, guerrillas with Communist catechisms took to the mountains in Venezuela, and made forays into the cities, too, killing, kidnapping for ransom and political effect, and robbing banks. Newly installed Fidel Castro in Cuba, less than a thousand miles to the northwest, vowed to help destabilize the democratic government only recently wrested from a long reign of dictatorship.
But the Robin Hood cum Marxist aura the insurgents sought to foster was definitively rent after they kidnapped a high official of the Institute de Seguros Socials--the social security agency. The rebels tortured him brutally, distributed gruesome photos of their handiwork to the press, and left the man dead in a car abandoned in Caracas.
An almost visible shock wave ran through the country. The guerrillas had banked on it; they were getting desperate. An unspoken divide had been crossed in this long-running battle with the authorities. Itchy trigger fingers and wild machete blows were one thing in Latin America. Where machismo and frontier conditions often prevailed; torture publicly revealed and murder of a civilian figure with no direct connection to the fighting was another.
The message was clear--nobody was safe. But government forces stepped up their actions, and soon began to prevail. Safe havens in the countryside disappeared. For the first time, army troops occupied Central University in Caracas, with loss of life, seizing a large cache of arms and ammunition in undermining what the government called "a terrorist base of operations for armed subversion."
Today, in a twist of historic irony, stability is so pronounced that one of the guerrilla masterminds, Teodoro Petkoff, now is number two of the Movimiento al Socialismo, the third-ranked political party. He regularly appears on television talk shows in a suit and tie and sonorous largest opponent.
Terrorism remains a harsh fact of life, however, in many other places. In Central America, intense internal fighting continues in Nicaragua and El Salvador, where terrorists last year shot up an outdoor café to kill unarmed, off-duty U.S. Marine embassy guards and others out for the evening. Guatemalans drew uneasy breaths with a newly-elected president. Death squads on the Left and the Right have literally dumped thousands of bodies of tortured victims by the side of the road and in garbage
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