CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Israel’s Crimes Against Humanity in the Americas

Gloriosa victoria, mural by Diego Rivera

“They will try to tell us that democracy, international law, human rights, and human dignity exist and are alive and well; that the genocide against the Palestinian people was merely an aberration, an exception within the global democratic oasis . . . – Mexican journalist Sasi Alejandre “Latin America has experienced the same tactics of state terrorism that Palestine faces at the hands of regimes armed, trained and advised by Israel.” –Jack McGrath, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs

“They will try to tell us that democracy, international law, human rights, and human dignity exist and are alive and well; that the genocide against the Palestinian people was merely an aberration, an exception within the global democratic oasis . . .

– Mexican journalist Sasi Alejandre

“Latin America has experienced the same tactics of state terrorism that Palestine faces at the hands of regimes armed, trained and advised by Israel.”

–Jack McGrath, Washington Report On Middle East Affairs

There might never even have been an Israel without arms shipments from the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua to the Zionist paramilitary Haganah in 1939 during the British Mandate over Palestine. Nine years after that helping hand was extended, the Haganah, with assistance from the Irgun and Lehi, erased Palestine from the map, building the state of Israel literally on top of where Palestine had been while recruiting Nazis from Europe to help the fledgling Jewish state build up enough weapons. Not long after that, Israel took charge of assisting bloody repression in Latin America.

Israel actually trained the army of Castillo Armas that overthrew Guatemalan democracy in 1954, later shoring up repression across the entire Southern Cone by providing the same training and arms to the military dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay. It also financed Colombian paramilitaries and developed the tactics and weapons used in Mexico’s “Dirty War,” which included forced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings, carried out against student protesters, political dissidents and campesinos.

The Central America connection was established early on. Israel started sending automatic weapons, tanks, and military planes to the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua in the 1950s, later increasing its support when the dictatorship faced an ultimately successful popular revolution in the 1970s. Israel was Nicaragua’s sole source of arms after Jimmy Carter belatedly cut off military aid to Somoza in 1978, who killed tens of thousands of people in his last two years in power, ultimately using Israeli planes to bomb Managua in a final paroxysm of futile violence. After the Sandinista revolution took power, Israel acted as a conduit to arm and train cocaine-trafficking mercenaries (the........

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