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Exporter of Revolution
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13846 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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12 / 1988 |
3,644 Words |
| Author
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Constantine Menges
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In April 1959, only four months after taking power, Fidel Castro sent a guerrilla squad to destabilize Panama. The Organization of American States (OAS) investigated the incursion and the guerrillas were captured. This abortive action against Panama marked the beginning of nearly 30 years of Cuban aggression against free nations through both armed and unarmed subversion.
Two months later, in June 1959, Castro sent an armed guerrilla group to begin operating in Nicaragua. Dictator Anastasio Somoza's National Guard captured them, and the OAS again condemned Cuba's subversive aggression. In the summer of 1959 Castro began a decade-long guerrilla and terrorist war against the fragile new Social Democratic government of Romulo Betancourt in Venezuela, which only a year before had replaced the military dictatorship of Marcos Perez Jimenez. After confirming and condemning this act of aggression, in 1964 the OAS voted sanctions against Cuba and declared that its armed subversion had constituted illegal aggression. In that same year, the OAS stated:
"The Republic of Venezuela has been the target of a series of actions sponsored and directed by … Cuba … to overthrow the democratic government of Venezuela through terrorism, sabotage, assault and guerrilla warfare, and … [the OAS] resolves to declare that the acts … are considered an aggression of Cuba in the internal affairs of Venezuela, which affect all member states. "
With help from the United States and other democracies, Venezuela's democratic leaders eventually contained and isolated the guerrillas. In the context of the 1980s, only a small number of Marxist-Leninist terrorists (mostly affiliated with rebels in neighboring Colombia) operate against one of Latin America's most successful democracies.
In 1961 Castro armed and trained terrorists who worked to undermine the Manuel Prado government of Peru, as the OAS subsequently confirmed. A left wing military junta overthrew civilian President Fernando Belaunde Terry in 1968 and ruled until the return of democracy in 1980, when Belaunde resumed the presidency. Since that time two Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organizations—the Cuba-supported Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement and the Maoist shining path movement—have conducted an ever-expanding series of terrorist actions. In this instance, Castro supplies the Tupac Amaru terrorists while simultaneously maintaining apparently friendly relations with the current leftist government of president Alan Garcia.
The year 1961 continued to be an active one for Cuba: Colombia accused Cuba of arming and supporting Marxist-Leninist guerrillas in that country, which had emerged four years earlier from a decade of brutal civil war. The OAS confirmed the charge and excluded the Castro government from further participation in the inter-American system. Although Colombia had managed for 20 years to isolate and contain the various Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organizations, increased support from Cuba and Libya in recent years has allowed the insurgent coalition to build up its strength to about 10,000.
In a 1984 raid on a jungle drug-processing laboratory, Colombian authorities captured the largest amount of narcotics ever seized. Communist guerrillas had provided security for this particular narcotics factory in exchange for payoffs and political support from the traffickers. This and similar
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