Former Leader of Guatemala Is Guilty of Genocide Against Mayan Group http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/w...ide.html?pagewanted=all&src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB General Rios Montt was an ally of the US during the cold war.
From the article: The American military had a close relationship with the Guatemalan military well into the 1970s before President Jimmy Carter’s administration cut off aid. When General Ríos Montt seized power in March 1982, President Ronald Reagan’s administration cultivated him as a reliable Central American ally in its battle against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and Salvadoran guerrillas. Those interests influenced the way American officials treated evidence of the massacres. They were quick to accept military explanations that guerrillas had carried out the killings, said Kate Doyle, a Guatemala expert at the National Security Archive, a Washington research group that works to obtain declassified government documents. By the end of 1982, however, the State Department had gathered evidence that the army was behind the massacres. But even then, the administration insisted that General Ríos Montt was working to reduce the violence. After a regional meeting, President Reagan described him as “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.” This still pisses me off.
There's no way to sugarcoat it. The US under the leadership of Ronald Reagan won the cold war, but whatever we might think of the final result -and I certainly was not a fan of the Soviet Union- there were lots of casualties involved, a lot of innocent people who paid the price for Reagan's cold war policies. Many of those innocent casualties were in Latin America, and the people don't forget. It's going to haunt the US for a long time.
Reagan and Thatcher supported and aided Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, even after it was known they'd killed a quarter of the population of Cambodia, as they didn't like the idea of communist Vietnam controlling the country. The cold war was definitely one in which other countries were used as pawns, without any sense of shame.
Reagan and Thatcher put the interests of democracy back 30-50 years in south and central America. Instead of supporting democratic movements, (some of which might have chosen left of centre governments given the choice), they supported the most repressive, fascist regimes that the people then had to get rid of. It's not just in that part of the world, either. Even now countries like Iran are suffering the consequences of the west's disastrous involvement in denying democracy and supporting lunatics and idiots similar to this Rios Montt guy.
Are we still selling weapons and giving aid to the Egypt military? The more things change...................