Salvador Allende, a Marxist and member of the Socialist Party of Chile, ran for the presidency in the 1952, 1958, and 1964 elections. In 1970, he finally won in a close three-way race. Upon assuming power he began to implement programs of nationalisation of industries including copper mining and banking, government administration of the health care & educational systems, free milk for children in the schools and shanty towns of Chile, and land redistribution.
Some of his policies included rights to social security granted to all part-time workers, 55,000 volunteers were sent to the south of the country to teach writing and reading skills and provide medical attention to a sector of the population that had previously been ignored, introduction of an obligatory minimum wage for workers of all ages including apprentices, a campaign against illiteracy, democratisation of univeristy education and establishment of the Women’s Secretariat to improve women’s rights & gender equality. These policies had a huge positive impact, for instance average real wages rose by 22.3% during 1971, an 89% rise in university enrollments between 1970 and 1973 and the proportion of children under the age of 6 with some form of malnutrition fell by 17%. Seehere for a comprehensive list.
A number of factors contributed to animosity in Chile, including racial tensions between the poor descendants of indigenous people - who supported Allende’s reforms - and the white elite, inflation, a severe fall in the price of copper (Chile’s largest export), a 24-day strike led by truckers, whom the Chileand economy was dependant upon, the domination of the Chilean congress by the Christian Democratic Party (who were becoming more and more right-wing), as well as CIA intervention and economic terrorism spearheaded by the US.
From 1962 through 1964, the CIA spent $3 million on anti-Allende propaganda. In 1970, Richard Nixon, then President of the USA (pictured above) authorised the spending of $10 million to stop Allende coming to power. The United States attempted to rig the 1970 election, financed opposition parties, encouraged the Chilean military to perform a coup & provided them with weapons and supported strikes to de-stabalise the Chilean economy. In addition ITT gave $700,000 to Allende’s conservative opponent, Jorge Alessandri, with help from the CIA on how to channel the money safely. ITT president Harold Geneen also offered $1 million to the CIA to help defeat Allende in the elections. In contrast to this, Soviet economic support to Chile included over $100 million in credit, three fishing ships which distributed 17,000 tons of frozen fish to the population, factories (as help after the 1971 earthquake), 3,100 tractors, 74,000 tons of wheat and more than a million tins of condensed milk.
Allende’s leftist policies and friendly relations with the Soviet Union were seen as a spread of communism to Latin America by the US. On September 11th, 1973 the democratically elected Allende was overthrown in the US-backed coup. Earlier that month, Allende had proposed solving the constitutional crisis with a plebiscite, however this was never seen through. His speech outlining such a solution was scheduled for 11th September, the day of the coup, but couldn’t be delivered. La Moneda Palace was shelled by artillery & missile fire, and Allende committed suicide with an assault rifle. 60 people died as a result of the fighting that day. Chilean security forces sustained 162 dead in the three following months as a result of continued resistance against the newly formed military dictatorship.
His successor, Augusto Pinochet (pictured above), was the head of a military dictatorship that lasted until 1990. During his rule 1,200-3,200 were murdered, 80,000 people were forcibly interned and as many as 30,000 were tortured. Trade Unions were banned along with all opposing political parties, social security was privatised, economic inequality & unemployment rose dramatically, GDP per capita dropped from ~$6,000 in 1973 to ~$4,200 in 1975, again dropping with the 1982 monetary crisis and only returning to pre-coup levels in 1987. 56% of people voted against his presidency in 1988, and by the time of his death in 2006 300 criminal charges were pending against him including human rigts violations, tax evasion and embezzlement of $28 million.
Question: will you write about the 1965-66 CIA-backed massacre in indonesia? or if you have i can't find it :(
Answer:
I stopped writing posts for calendar of imperialism cause it was really taking a toll on my mental health, but I plan on starting it again in the summer.
João Goluart (pictured above) was a left-wing president of Brazil, serving from 8 September 1961 until he was overthrown in a military coup on 1 April 1964. Throughout his political career, he faced constant opposition and attempts to prevent him from maintaining a life in politics. During his time as Minister of Labour the media and military demanded his resignation, he departed from political activites for weeks after attacks made by rivals, political and military elements called for his removal as Vice-President, and Congress was reluctant to declare him President.
During his presidency, he led plans to strenghten the economy & improve development and led the drive for nuclear disarmament in Latin America. Some of his reforms included:
Education reform - plans to combat adult illiteracy, university reform and a ban on private schooling.
Tax reform - profits by multinational companies would be re-invested into Brazil and income tax was to be proportional to personal profit.
Electoral reform - extension of voting rights to illiterate people and low-ranking military officers.
Land reform - non-productive properties larger than 600 hectares would be expropriated and redistributed to the population.
His reforms were labelled a “socialist threat” by right-wing sectors of society and of the military, and Goulart himself was accused of being a communist.
The U.S. government had been covertly involved in Brazillian politics for years before the coup, with U.S. leaders deciding in 1962 to fund right-wing paramilitary groups in opposition to Goulart. For a time, the US government tried to “co-operate” with Goulart by seeking “to change the political and economic orientation of Goulart and his government” to align with Western interests. The US government corresponded with Brazillian military leaders in the days leading up to the coup, warning of Goulart’s “communist sympathies” and urging for arms to be sent at night via an unmarked submarine.
On the 1st April, the Brazillian military marched into the capital and declared the position of President ‘vacant’. Pascoal Ranieri Mazzilli was sworn in as President the next day - an action which went against the Constitution (ironic, given that the generals carrying out the coup used the defence of protecting the Constitution).
The coup brought a military dictatorship to Brazil which would rule for the next 21 years. After the coup, Goluart became a farmer in Uruguay, taking part in the Frente Ampla movement to restore democracy to Brazil through democratic means. Within two years, in accord with concessions promised to the U.S. government for its financial support of the overthrow, foreign companies gained control of about half of Brazilian industry.
Declassified transcripts of communications between U.S. ambassador Lincoln Gordon and the U.S. government show that U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized logistical materials to be in place and a US Navy fleet led by an aircraft carrier to support the coup against Goulart. These included ammunition, motor oil, gasoline, aviation gasoline and other materials to help in a potential civil war in US Navy tankers sailing from Aruba.
Salvadoran civillians tried to cross the Lempa River, fleeing the violence in El Salvador. They were gunned down by helicopters of the Salvadorn Armed Forces and between 150-600 were killed. At the time, El Salvador was ruled by the Revolutionary Government Junta, a US-backed military dictatorship. The US government had sent military aid and advisors to the junta.
It was the second massacre by the Salvadorans in a year, with the Sumpal River Massacre occuring the previous october.
Between 347–504 unarmed people were massacred by U.S. Army soldiers in Vietnam. Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of those killed were as young as four yeard old. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. Lieutenant William Calley Jr. was found guilty of killing 22 villagers and senteced to life imprisonment, but only served three and a half years under house arrest.
On the eve of the attack, at the Charlie Company briefing, Captain (CPT) Ernest Medina told his men that nearly all the civilian residents of the hamlets in Sơn Mỹ village would have left for the market by 07:00, and that any who remained would be NLF or NLF sympathizers. Some of those present, including platoon leaders, testified that the orders, as they understood them, were to kill all guerrilla and North Vietnamese combatants and “suspects” (including women and children, as well as all animals), to burn the village, and pollute the wells. He was quoted as saying:
They’re all VC, now go and get them … anybody that was running from us, hiding from us, or appeared to be the enemy. If a man was running, shoot him, sometimes even if a woman with a rifle was running, shoot her.
The village was designated as a free-fire zone, meaning US forces were permitted to employ gunfire, artillery bombardment and aerial bombardment freely.
When US soldiers entered the village they were not fired upon and no weapons were found in the village. The villagers, who were getting ready for a market day, at first did not panic or run away, and they were herded into the hamlet’s commons. Harry Stanley, a machine gunner from Charlie Company, said during the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division inquiry that the killings started without warning. He first observed a member of 1st Platoon strike a Vietnamese man with a bayonet. Then, the same trooper pushed another villager into a well and threw a grenade in the well. Next, he saw fifteen or twenty people, mainly women and children, kneeling around a temple with burning incense. They were praying and crying. They were all killed by shots in the head.
Other villagers were herded into groups and shot with assault rifles and grenade launchers. Huts were burned down and wells were poisoned. According to testimonies from US soldiers, women were saying “No VC” and were trying to shield their children. At Calley’s trial, one witness testified that he remembered Medina instructing to destroy everything in the village that was “walking, crawling or growing”.
Three U.S. servicemen who had tried to halt the massacre and rescue the hiding civilians (one of whom is pictured above) were shunned and denounced as traitors by several U.S. Congressmen.
13th March 1985: CIA financed propaganda regarding Nicaragua
Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, the US government supported the Nicaraguan Contras, anti-communist rebel groups infamous for their human rights violations and terrorist tactics. Part of their support involved a white propaganda campaign downplaying their activities and portraying them as “freedom fighters” (similair to the US media coverage of the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan War).
An unclassified CIA document dated for 13 March 1985 included specific plans for the propaganda campaign. Consultants were hired to produce CIA propaganda op-ed pieces for The New York Times and Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal that ran a piece on Nicaraguan arms build-up with the help of CIA staff, and news stories were broadcast portraying the Contras as “freedom fighters”.
Operation Northwoods was a proposed false flag operation which called for US government operatives to commit acts of terrorism against American civilians and military targets, blaming it on the Cuban government, and using it to justify a war against Cuba. Plans included assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. It was rejected by John F. Kennedy and details of the plan were made public by the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Review Board (the government committee investigating JFK’s assassination).
Project Mockingbird is a program mentioned in a de-classified CIA report, part of the wider Operation Mockingbird which attempted to manipulate news media for propaganda purposes.
According to the report:
Project Mockingbird, a telephone intercept activity, was conducted between 12 March 1963 and 15 June 1963, and targeted two Washington based newsmen who, at the time, had been publishing news articles based on, and frequently quoting, classified materials of this Agency and others, including Top Secret and Special Intelligence.
The wiretap was authorized by CIA director John A. McCone, “in coordination with the Attorney General (Mr. Robert Kennedy), the Secretary of Defense (Mr. Robert McNamara), and the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (Gen. Joseph Carroll).”
12th March 1947: Truman Doctrine Announced to Congress
The Truman Doctrine was focused around countering the spread of Soviet influence during the Cold War. It led to the formation of NATO in 1949.
Under the Truman Doctrine the U.S. supported the Royalists in the Greek Civil War, known for their killing of peaceful protestors and political repression, which involved killing thousands of leftists who had recently liberated parts of the country from Axis occupation, as well as imprisoning 80,000 people on the isle of Makronisos “to fight the spread of communism”. The U.S. also sent millions of dollars of economic and military aid to the highly supressive and undemocratic government of Turkey (including the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt) in order to prevent Soviet shipping through the Turkish straits.
The Truman Doctrine set the precedent for later American foreign policy, leading to such interventions as in Vietnam and Korea. The rhetoric Truman used of “freeing” people has persisted even to the present day, leading to CIA-backed coups and massacres in Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, the Congo and Bolivia (to name but a few), as well as the invasions of Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan.
The First Battle of Bud Dajo, a.k.a Moro Crater Massacre, was a U.S. counter-insurgency campaing led against the native Moro inhabitants of Jolo island in the Philippines. Reported by some sources to be a ‘battle’, the percentage of Moros killed at the event is higher than the percentage of Native Americans killed at the Wounded Knee Massacre. Only 6 out of an estimated 1,000+ Moros were left alive, with U.S. artillery, mountain guns and naval gunfire significantly overwhelming the villagers of Bud Dajo, who were armed with traditional Moro swords and spears. Corpses were piled five feet deep (1.5 meters), and many of the bodies were wounded multiple times.
The event, when publicised, received severe criticism for the use of indiscriminate machine-gun fire and glory-seeking of the commanding officers. Mark Twain criticised the event, saying the U.S. army “[butchered] helpless people”, and the Moro National Liberation Front published an open letter to then U.S. President Barack Obama reminding him of the massacre and asking why U.S. troops still maintained a presence in the Philippines.
3rd March 1959: 11 detainees of Hola detention camp were clubbed to death by British Guards, and a further 77 were left with permanent injuries. The British government denied the killings (saying the prisoners had died from drinking foul water), and as recently as 2016 Kenyans were still seeking compensation for British actions.
Radio Liberty (shortened to RL) is a United States government-funded broadcasting organisation. Overseen by the U.S. government, it was originally founded to broadcast anti-communist propaganda in the Soviet Union along with it’s counterpart Radio Free Europe, which broadcast to Eastern Bloc countries (RFE was founded two years earlier).
RFE & RL received significant CIA funding until 1972, and policy directives were issued by the US government. The programs employed several former Nazi agents who had been involved in the Ostministerium (an organisation set up to propagate Nazi propaganda and fund anti-Soviet groups and implement Nazi policies in occupied Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltics) during World War II. Radio Liberty also broadcast from Taiwan (under control of the KMT, infamous for its repression) and Spain (which was under the rule of fascist dictator Francisco Franco at the time).
By December 1954, RL was broadcasting 6 to 7 hours a day in 17 languages. During the Hungarian Revoltion, RFE broadcast that Western aid to the rebels was imminenent. This was untrue. During the Velvet Revolution, RFE/RL reported that a student - Martin Šmíd - had been killed during the clashes. The report later turned out to be false – Šmid was alive and well.
RFE/RL was utilised by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin during and after the 1991 August coup, and Yeltsin later expressed his gratitude by allowing it to operate a permanent bureau in Moscow.
Radio Liberty broadcast a pro-US message in Iraq in the years leading up to the invasion of Iraq by NATO in 2003, and today it still operates in many areas of Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East (countries where it operates are pictured above).
An anti-government uprising was violently suppressed by the Kuomintang-led Republic of China government, which killed thousands of civilians, with an estimated death count of 10,000. The massacre marked the beginning of the White Terror in which tens of thousands of other Taiwanese went missing, died or were imprisoned.
Taiwan was given to the Kuomintang after Japan’s surrender in World War Two. Local inhabitants became resentful of what they saw as high-handed and frequently corrupt conduct on the part of the Kuomintang (KMT) authorities, their arbitrary seizure of private property and their economic mismanagement. Under KMT leadership a large black market arose out of runaway inflation and food shortages, and many commodities were compulsorily bought cheaply by the KMT administration and shipped to Mainland China to meet the Civil War shortages where they were sold at very high profit, furthering the general shortage of goods in Taiwan.
The flashpoint came on 27 February 1947 in Taipei, when KMT soldiers confiscated cigarettes from a 40 year old widow named Lin Jiang-mai. One of the men beat her with a pistol and fired into the crowd, killing a bystander. The next morning, the violence intensified and the native Taiwanese had taken over the administration of the town and military bases by the 4th March.
The Taiwanese set up a civillian government which was relatively co-ordinated and organised. Public order was upheld by volunteer citizens, and local leaders formed a Settlement Committee where they published 32 demands which included greater autonomy, free elections, and an end to governmental corruption.
Upon its arrival on March 8, a group of KMT troops launched a crackdown. The New York Times reported, “An American who had just arrived in China from Taihoku said that troops from the mainland China arrived there on March 7 and indulged in three days of indiscriminate killing and looting. For a time everyone seen on the streets was shot at, homes were broken into and occupants killed. In the poorer sections the streets were said to have been littered with dead. There were instances of beheadings and mutilation of bodies, and women were raped, the American said.”
During the protest, martial law was declared which would not be lifted until 1987, during which 140,000 civillians were imprisoned and many were interrogated.
The town of Wounded Knee was occupied for 71 days by Oglala and American Indian Movement activists. The protestors met at the town to protest Oglala tribal chairman Richard Wilson’s administration, calling for his impeachment, and criticized the United States government’s failure to fulfill treaties with Native American people, demanding the reopening of treaty negotiations. The U.S. government law enforcement, including FBI agents, surrounded Wounded Knee the same day with armed reinforcements.
John Sayer, a Wounded Knee chronicler, wrote that:
The equipment maintained by the military while in use during the siege included fifteen armored personnel carriers, clothing, rifles, grenade launchers, flares, and 133,000 rounds of ammunition, for a total cost, including the use of maintenance personnel from the National Guard of five states and pilot and planes for aerial photographs, of over half a million dollars.
The data gathered by other historians largely concur:
…barricades of paramilitary personnel armed with automatic weapons, snipers, helicopters, armored personnel carriers equipped with .50-caliber machine guns, and more than 130,000 rounds of ammunition … federal marshals, FBI agents, and armored vehicles.
One eyewitness and journalist described “sniper fire from federal helicopters”, “bullets dancing around in the dirt”, and “sounds of shooting all over town.”
The US government cut off electricity, water and food supplies to Wounded Knee and prohibited the entry of the media. AIM says that “the government tried starving out the [occupants]”, and that its activists smuggled food and medical supplies in past roadblocks. Keefer, the Deputy U.S. Marshal at the scene, said that the federal marshals’ firepower would have killed anyone in the open landscape.
U.S. Marshal Lloyd Grimm was shot early in the conflict and suffered paralysis from the waist down. Frank Clearwater was shot in the head while resting on 17th April, within 24 hours of his arrival, and died in hospital on 25th April. Lawrence “Buddy” Lamont, a local Oglala Lakota, was killed by a shot from a government sniper on 26th April. Ray Robinson, a black civil rights activist who went to South Dakota to join the Wounded Knee occupation, was killed at the reservation on the 25th April, although his body was never found. Both sides agreed to disarm on the 5th May.
Public opinion polls revealed widespread sympathy for the Native Americans at Wounded Knee. Actor Marlon Brando asked Sacheen Littlefeather (pictured above), an Apache actress, to speak at the 45th Academy Awards on his behalf, as he had been nominated for his performance in The Godfather. She appeared at the ceremony in traditional Apache clothing. When his name was announced as the winner, she said that he declined the award due to the “poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry” in an improvised speech. She was told she could not give the original speech given to her by Brando and was warned that she would be physically taken off and arrested if she was on stage for more than a minute. Angela Davis, a prominent political activist aligned with the Communist Party USA and the Black Panther Party, was denied entry to the town by Federal forces.
Following the end of the incident, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation had a higher rate of internal violence. Residents complained of physical attacks and intimidation by Richard Wilson’s followers. More than 60 opponents of the tribal government died violently during this period.
25th February 1968: 135 unarmed women, children and elders were killed by South Korean Marines in the Hà My massacre. After the massacre, the South Korean Marines bulldozed a shallow grave and buried the victims’ bodies en masse.
US Senator and former Navy SEAL Bob Kerrey (pictured above) led a swift-boat raid on the isolated peasant village of Thanh Phong, targeting a Viet Cong leader.
According to Kerrey, his team were fired on from the village and returned fire. He said in 1998:
The thing that I will remember until the day I die is walking in and finding, I don’t know, 14 or so, I don’t even know what the number was, women and children who were dead. I was expecting to find Vietcong soldiers with weapons, dead. Instead I found women and children.
Gerhard Klann, a member of Kerrey’s SEAL team, gave a different version independently supported by a separate interview with Vietnamese woman Pham Tri Lanh. According to Klann, the team rounded up the women and children from their shelters and decided to “kill them and get out of there”, for fear that they would alert enemy soldiers. Kerrey was awarded a Bronze Star for the raid on Thanh Phong. The citation for the medal reads, “The net result of his patrol was 21 Viet Cong killed, two hooches destroyed and two enemy weapons captured.”
A display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City is based on the incident. It includes several photos and a drain pipe, which it describes as the place where three children hid before they were found and killed. The display reads:
From 8PM to 9PM February 25th, 1969, a group of Seal Rangers [sic] (one of the most selective rangers of U.S. Army) led by Lieutenant Bob Kerry [sic] reached for Hamlet 5, Thanh Phong Village, Thanh Phu District, Ben Tre Province. They cut 66 year-old Bui Van Vat and 62 year-old Luu Thi Canh’s necks and pulled their three grandchildren out from their hiding place in a drain and killed two, disembowelled one. Then, these rangers moved to dug-outs of other families, shot dead 15 civilians (including three pregnant women), disembowelled a girl. The only survivor was a 12-year-old girl named Bui Thi Luom who suffered a foot injury. It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public.
Since Ghana’s independence in 1957 it had been ruled by the Convention People’s Party with pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah (pictured above) as president. The CPP had led Ghana to independence, modernised the country with industrialisation and energy projects, developed the education system, and promoted national and pan-African culture.
The coup was carried out by elite government beareaucrats working with the Ghanian military. A month prior to the coup on the 2nd January 1964 a police officer shot at Nkrumah and killed his bodyguard. The police were thus disarmed and one branch was placed under civillian control.
The coup planners had all received training in Britain, either at Metropolitan Police College or at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Many Ghanian generals perceived British culture as an indicator of status and disapproved of Ghana’s developmenmt as a socialist country.
Retired CIA officer John Stockwell wrote in 1978:
This is the way the ouster of Nkrumah was handled in Ghana, 1966. The 40 Committee had met and rejected an agency proposal to oust Nkrumah. The Accra station was nevertheless encouraged by headquarters to maintain contact with dissidents of the Ghanaian army for the purpose of gathering intelligence on their activities. It was given a generous budget, and maintained intimate contact with the plotters as a coup was hatched. So close was the station’s involvement that it was able to coordinate the recovery of some classified Soviet military equipment by the United States as the coup take place. The station even proposed to headquarters through back channels that a squad be on hand at the moment of the coup to storm the Chinese embassy, kill everyone inside, steal their secret records, and blow up the building to cover the fact. This proposal was quashed, but inside CIA headquarters the Accra station was given full, if unofficial credit for the eventual coup, in which eight Soviet advisors were killed. None of this was adequately reflected in the agency’s written records.
Memoranda released in 2001 suggest that the United States and United Kingdom discussed a plan “to induce a chain reaction eventually leading to Nkrumah’s downfall.” The US and UK had previously plotted to overthrow Nkrumah. Ghanian Finance Minister K.A. Gbedemah secured CIA and State Department support for a coup but was detected by the Ghanian National Intelligence Service. On February 6, 1964, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk asked McCone to study the possibility of a government takeover led by J.A. Ankrah. McCone indicated on February 11 that such a policy might be pursued in cooperation with the British.
A U.S. National Security Council memo from Robert Komer (pictured above) to McGeorge Bundy stated:
McGB—
FYI, we may have a pro-Western coup in Ghana soon. Certain key military and police figures have been planning one for some time, and Ghana’s deteriorating economic condition may provide the spark.
The plotters are keeping us briefed, and State thinks we’re more on the inside than the British. While we’re not directly involved (I’m told), we and other Western countries (including France) have been helping to set up the situation by ignoring Nkrumah’s pleas for economic aid. The new OCAM (Francophone) group’s refusal to attend any OAU meeting in Accra (because of Nkrumah’s plotting) will further isolate him. All in all, looks good. RWK
The coup itself was carried out while Nkrumah was out of the country on a diplomatic visit in China (he had been encouraged to leave the country by the US). A group of 600 soldiers stationed in the northern part of the country were ordered to start moving south to Accra, a distance of 435 miles. The soldiers were told that Nkrumah planned to deploy them to the Vietnam war (this was untrue) and were split up into groups to capture key government buildings. General Charles Barwah was shot to death when he refused to cooperate with the coup, and the soldiers met resistance from the Presidential Guard.
The coup leaders informed the public of the regime change over the radio at dawn on February 24, 1966. Colonel Kokota (pictured above) gave a statement over the radio which was as follows:
Fellow citizens of Ghana, I have come to inform you that the military, in cooperation with the Ghana Police, have taken over the government of Ghana today. The myth surrounding Nkrumah has been broken. Parliament is dissolved and Kwame Nkrumah is dismissed from office. All ministers are also dismissed. The Convention People’s Party is disbanded with effect from now. It will be illegal for any person to belong to it.
Soldiers arrested CPP ministers as fighting with the Presidential Guard continued. When Colonel Kokota threatened to bomb the presidential residence if resistance continued after 12PM, Nkrumah’s wife Fathia Nkrumah advised the Guards to surrender and they did.
A CIA telegram informed Washington of the coup, and said, “The coup leaders appear to be implementing the plans they were reported earlier to have agreed on for the immediate post-coup period.” According to the military, 20 members of the presidential guard had been killed and 25 wounded. Others suggest a death toll of 1,600. Nkrumah biographer June Milne stated: “whatever the death toll, it was far from the ‘bloodless coup’ reported in the British press.”
After the coup the NLC suspended the constitution, outlawed the CPP, took hundreds of people into “protective custody”, and privatised many of the country’s state corporations (at the behest of international finance organisations).
The Bangkok plot was an international conspiracy to overthrow Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia (pictured above). It was initiated by right-wing Cambodian politicians, with involvement from the governments of Thailand, South Vietnam and, allegedly, the US.
Cambodian intelligence services uncovered the plot on February 21st 1959 and alleged that the US intended to destabilise Cambodia, which had established relations with the People’s Republic of China.
On the 10th February 1986 Robert Owen wrote to Oliver North (picture above) about a plane used to carry “humanitarian aid” to the contras. This plane had belonged to Vortex, a Miami-based company owned by Michael Palmer - one of the biggest drug traffickers in the US at the time. The plane itself was known to have previously transported drugs. Palmer received over $300,000 from the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Aid Office (NHAO) which was overseen by Oliver North.
On the 16th March 1986 the San Francisco Examiner published a report on the “1983 seizure of 430 pounds of cocaine from a Colombian freighter” in San Francisco which indicated that a “cocaine ring in the San Francisco Bay area helped finance Nicaragua’s Contra rebels.” Carlos Cabezas, convicted of conspiracy to traffic cocaine, said that the profits from his crimes “belonged to… the Contra revolution.” He told the Examiner, “I just wanted to get the Communists out of my country.” Julio Zavala, also convicted on trafficking charges, said “that he supplied $500,000 to two Costa Rican-based Contra groups and that the majority of it came from cocaine trafficking in the San Francisco Bay area, Miami and New Orleans.”
9th February 1951: 719 unarmed civillians were killed by the South Korean Army 11th Division in the Geochang Massacre. The victims included 385 children.
Shin Chung-mok, the lawmaker who originally reported on the massacre, was arrested and sentenced to death. Investigations into the massacre were hampered by the South Korean Army. The South Korean government has refused to pay reperations to the victims’ families.
An jeong-a, a researcher for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was fired for revealing government documents showing that the massacre had been done under official South Korean Army order to annihilate citizens living in the area.
7th February 1951: 705 unarmed civillians were killed by the South Korean Army 11th Division in the Sancheong-Hamyang Massacre. 85% of the victims were women, children and elderly people. The 11th Division also conducted the Geochang massacre two days later.
5th February 1975: Operativo Independencia, start of Argentina's "Dirty War"
The launch of Operativo Indpendencia (Operation Independence) marked the beginning of the Argentine Dirty War. Operativo Independencia was a military campaign to wipe out ERP militants, for whom support was gradually building. It utilised “counter-revolutionary warfare” tactics including terrorism, kidnappings, forced disappearances and concentration camps where hundreds of guerrillas and their supporters in Tucumán (a province in northwestern Argentina) were tortured and murdered. The operation was supported by US intelligence services.
The “Dirty War” was part of a wider US program named Operation Condor, in which Argentine military and security forces, alongside right-wing death squads (mainly the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), hunted down any kind of political dissident as well as anyone believed to be associated with socialism, or contrary to the neoliberal policies dictated by Operation Condor.
Around 30,000 people were forcibly disappeared, many of whom were kept in detention centers, all of which incorporated some form of torture. US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (pictured above) congratulated the Argentine military junta, saying:
…the government of Argentina had done an outstanding job in wiping out terrorist forces.
3rd February 1969: Eduardo Mondlane (pictured above), founder and chairman of the Mozambique Liberation Front, allegedly killed by Portuguese secret service agent Casimiro Monteiro.
#calendar of imperialism #eduardo mondlane #mozambique liberation front
The Phoenix Program was intended to identify and “neutralize” the infrastructure of the Viet Cong via infiltration, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination. Many members or suspected supporters of the Viet Cong were captured and tortured in an attempt to gain intelligence on Viet Cong activities. It was carried out mainly by the CIA and US military, lasted until 1972 and resulted in the deaths of between 26,000-41,000 people, many of whom were civillians.
The program was explicitly targeted at civillians in order to reduce support for the Viet Cong.
Methods of reported torture that author Douglas Valentine wrote were used at the interrogation centers included:
Rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electric shock (‘the Bell Telephone Hour’) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; the 'water treatment’; the 'airplane’ in which the prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back, and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; the use of police dogs to maul prisoners (quoted in Blakely).
Military intelligence officer K. Barton Osborne reports that he witnessed the following use of torture:
The use of the insertion of the 6-inch dowel into the canal of one of my detainee’s ears, and the tapping through the brain until dead. The starvation to death (in a cage), of a Vietnamese woman who was suspected of being part of the local political education cadre in one of the local villages…The use of electronic gear such as sealed telephones attached to…both the women’s vaginas and men’s testicles [to] shock them into submission.
American Marines would also kill people by throwing them out of helicopters, forcing others to watch.
Units involved in targeted killings operated on a shoot-first basis, and as a result many innocent civillians were killed. Lieutenant Vincent Okamoto, an intelligence-liaison officer for the Phoenix Program said the following:
The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It’s not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where’s Nguyen so-and-so?’ Half the time the people were so afraid they would not say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen’s house scratch your head.’ Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, 'April Fool, motherfucker.’ Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they’d come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people.
After immense public pressure stemming from negative publicity, the program was officially shut down but was de facto continued under the name Plan F-6.
After the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide (pictured above), a liberation theologist, pro-democracy campaigner and Haiti’s first democratically elected President, european nations suspended government assistance to Haiti and the U.S. Congress banned any U.S. assistance from being channeled through the Haitian government.
Between 2001 - 2004 right-wing paramilitary groups violently targeted activists and government officials aligned with Aristide. Freedom of Information Act documents have shown how paramilitary forces received support from sectors of Haiti’s elite as well as from sectors of the Dominican military and government at the time. It is also believed that they had contact with U.S. and French intelligence.
At the same time, the United States Government funded and implemented training operations for a group of 600 anti-Aristide paramilitary soldiers, with the approval of the Dominican Republic’s president, Hipolito Mejia. This training was carried out by roughly 200 members of the US Special Forces. Among the soldiers trained during this operation were known human-rights violators Guy Philippe and Louis-Jodel Chamblain.
The Ottowa Initiative was a conference hosted by the Canadian government on 31 January and 1 February 2003, to decide the future of Haiti’s government, though no Haitian government officials were invited.
On February 4, 2004, the paramilitary groups led by Buteur Metayer, Guy Philippe, and Louis-Jodel Chamblain began marching on the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince. On February 22, the rebels captured the country’s second-largest city, Cap-Haïtien. By February 25, nearly the entire north was in rebel hands, and the rebels were threatening to attack the capital, Port-au-Prince. On February 29, Aristide resigned under intense pressure from the United States Government and an impending attack from rebel groups and was flown involuntarily and without knowledge of his destination, out of Haiti, accompanied by US security personnel.
Many international politicians, including members of the U.S. congress and the Jamaican Prime Minister, expressed concern that the United States had interfered with Haiti’s democratic process by removing Aristide with excessive force. Jamaican Prime Minister P. J. Patterson released a statement saying “we are bound to question whether his resignation was truly voluntary, as it comes after the capture of sections of Haiti by armed insurgents and the failure of the international community to provide the requisite support. The removal of President Aristide in these circumstances sets a dangerous precedent for democratically elected governments anywhere and everywhere, as it promotes the removal of duly elected persons from office by the power of rebel forces.” CARICOM (The Caribbean Community) governments denounced the removal of Aristide from government and questioned the legality of the new government.
24th January 1996: Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual (1983) declassified
content warning: rape, torture
The Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual was given to the U.S.-trained Honduran Battalion 3-16, a group responsible for political assassinations and torture of suspected political opponents. The document contains advice on ‘Coercive Techniques’ including:
arresting suspects in such a way as to cause 'the maximum amount of mental discomfort’
deprivation of sensory stimuli
threats and fear
methods of inducing pain such as maintaining rigid positions for a long period of time
use of placebo drugs to create an 'excuse for compliance’
persistent manipulation of time and other disortientations such as disrupting sleep and serving meals at odd times
Ines Consuelo Murillo, who spent 78 days in Battalion 3-16’s secret jails in 1983, said she was given no food or water for days, and one of her captors entered her room every 10 minutes and poured water over her head to keep her from sleeping.
The documents were declassified in response to a Freedom of Information request filed by the Baltimore Sun. The documents were released only after the Baltimore Sun had threatened to sue the CIA.
The Baltimore Sun interviewed two former members of Battalion 3-16:
Caballero said CIA instructors taught him to discover what his prisoners loved and what they hated, “If a person did not like cockroaches, then that person might be more cooperative if there were cockroaches running around the room”
…former Battalion 3-16 member Jose Barrera said he was taught interrogation methods by U.S. instructors in 1983: “The first thing we would say is that we know your mother, your younger brother. And better you cooperate, because if you don’t, we’re going to bring them in and rape them and torture them and kill them.”
The massacre occured as a reaction to an uprising led, in part, by Agustín Farabundo Martí (pictured above) and the Communist Party of El Salvador. The massacre has been classified as ethnocide, with 40,000 people being killed by the US-backed Salvadoran government.
The uprising occured due to several factors:
Massive social & economic inequality; with 90 percent of the country’s land in the hands of 14 families who farmed coffee to be sold & exported rather than crops to feed the population
Poor working conditions; workers’ pay consisted of two tortillas and two spoonfuls of beans at the beginning and end of each day
Dictatorship and lack of political freedom; just one month earlier Maximiliano Hernández Martínez had seized power during a palace coup and his reign was marked by severe laws and punishments and active supression of political opponents
In the weeks prior to the massacre, many peasents rebelled against the government, however these rebellions lacked organisation and thus were easily put down by the government. Rebelling peasents were executed, as were public officials who collaborated with them in any way.
The event which sparked the uprising was electoral corruption. The Communist Party of El Salvador had put forward candidates for the January 1932 elections, however after accusations of fraud and corrupt electoral practices (including one’s vote having to be registered with the authorities) led the Communist Party to abandon the elections and choose the path of uprising instead.
The uprising itself involved peasants attacking haciendas (estates owned by the wealthy elite) and military barracks armed with machetes. In total the peasant uprising killed no more than 100 people, with only 50 confirmed deaths.
One account states:
The use of superior armament was the decisive element in the confrontation and the stories speak of “waves of Indians, blown away by machine guns.” This was followed by extreme suppression, executed by units of the Army, Police, and National Guard, as well as volunteers organized into “civil guards.
Canadian and U.S. warships were sent to ports in the country, and the crews were prepared to assist the government in the massacre. The chief of operations in El Salvador stated:
I am pleased to announce that peace in El Salvador is restored, that the communist offensive has been completely suppressed and dispersed, and that complete extermination will be achieved.
After the rebellion, peasant leader Francisco Sánchez was hanged. His counterpart, Feliciano Ama, was lynched and his body was later hung in the town square while schoolchildren were forced to attend. In some areas, anyone found carrying a machete or who exhibited “indigineous features” were shot in groups of 50. Some were forced to dig mass graves, which they were thrown into after being shot. The houses of those found guilty were burned and the surviving inhabitants were shot.
The period following the uprising was one of severe repression. The government utilised the voting registry to exterminate any opponents of the government. Indigenous people abandoned their traditional dress, languages and cultures out of fear. The majority of the Pipil-speaking population were wiped out, leading to a near total loss of the language. Today there are only 500 native speakers.
In the town of Izalco, the uprising is commemorated on every January 22.
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