Taking Note
MF
U.S. TROOPS OCCUPIED FOUR TOWNS ON . the Panamanian border with Costa Rica on January 14, a few days before death began to rain on Baghdad. They were apparently sent to keep an eye on the...
...The specter of Iraqi terrorism is played up with glee by politicians and press, egged on by the obliging handful who hurl Molotov cocktails at embassy walls...
...Communities like mine pay a higher price," he continued...
...Two of the first U.S...
...Eduardo Herrera Hassin: "The U.S...
...So much for the fantasy that the end of the Cold War would bring some relief...
...Vice President Arias saw it, I'm absolutely certain...
...The first U.S...
...No ambulance for him...
...They beat them, handcuff them and put them in trucks to be taken away...
...If the islands had oil, perhaps Uruguay would have harbored a half million troops, while the bombs rained on Buenos Aires...
...They were apparently sent to keep an eye on the forty-odd Palestinian and Lebanese merchants who live in Concepci6n, Bugaba, Cerro Punta and Volcdin...
...A week later, a death squad slaughtered fifteen peasants in the town of Ayutuxtepeque...
...Anti-war rallies were soon dwarfed by lines of young men ready to offer their lives...
...Panama was the dress rehearsal...
...Slowly, deliberately, and very precisely, he shoots the Panamanian in the back...
...The merchants called the deployment "a joke in bad taste...
...The evident parallels between Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and Argentina's adventure in the Malvinas failed to dampen Menem's enthusiasm...
...soldiers captured him in one of those makeshift slums that Panamanians call 'witches.' This one bears a name worthy of the bitter and bloody irony of the poor: Hollywood...
...At the funeral of Ismael Cotto on February 2, Cong...
...The camera zooms in on the wound...
...No matter that the Salvadoran high command continues to stymie prosecution of the officers accused of ordering the cold-blooded slaying of six Jesuit priests...
...He runs a few short and desperate steps, but he does it quickly, surprisingly quickly...
...They're running as fast as they can...
...We hear someone chewing gum and talking in English...
...But this film is not silent...
...Argentina's President Carlos Sadtl Menem, second only to Canada's Brian Mulroney in displaying craven loyalty to the Empire, took the compulsory mercenary service of the poor to new levels...
...Omar Torrijos is dead, because if he had watched that scene he would have howled like a wild beast...
...It looks a bit like a race in a silent film...
...The disease is said to have arrived by boat from Asia...
...soldier charged with murder--singled out by the Pentagon to pay for the thousands of civilian deaths-is Panamanian...
...On January 15 the Bush Administration announced its intention to restore the $42.5 million in military aid to El Salvador withheld by Congress...
...Fortunately Gen...
...casualties in the Gulf were Puerto Rican...
...We too feel impotent...
...We too are watching...
...efforts to restructure the region for the new order do not preclude bacteriological warfare...
...The workers who the day before were demonstrating for the right to survival...
...And now it seems U.S...
...On TV we see the soldiers throw the Colonel's people to the ground...
...The TV camera follows one of them...
...One detects a sense of foreboding, the suspicion that the distance is illusory, that the world has taken a giant step backward, the fear that the Empire's fury will be unleashed on them next...
...uprising led by Col...
...The collapse of the public health, water and sanitation systems and the nosedive in nutritional levels, all resulting from U.S.-sponsored and IMF-prescribed policies, are not mentioned as causes...
...But the reality of state-sponsored terrorism speaks louder...
...Cholera, which hadn't been seen in this hemisphere in a century, began killing Peruvians by the dozen in early February...
...He added that the fate of humanity should not be left "in the hands and up to the morality of the murderers of Grenada and Panama...
...Suddenly two of them jump from the truck and race off...
...He's soaked with blood and soon it's flowing out of his mouth...
...Jos6 Serrano of the Bronx called the all-volunteer army "the compulsory military service of the poor...
...I saw it, and I wanted to cry and I felt like the smallest and most impotent human being on earth...
...Chuchit's final column, which appeared in the Mexican paper ElDia, described the crushing of the December 5 anti-U.S...
...His flamboyant character so captivated Graham Greene that he became the real protagonist of Greene's book on Omar Torrijos, Getting to Know the General...
...We see him raise his head, seeking a way out, or air, or something to grab onto to keep from dying, and once again the blood floods out of his mouth...
...The new order looks even worse...
...Latin America and the Caribbean have not escaped the shadow cast by the war against Iraq...
...The bishop, Marcos McGrath, who at a mass declared that the invasion of Panama should be considered 'a liberation.' President Endara must have seen it on TV too...
...Someone tells us that the U.S...
...He's not used to running...
...The middle-class girl who was once photographed kissing one of the invading soldiers...
...soldier has kneeled down...
...Three Yankee soldiers lift him up like a sack of laundry and throw him in the back of the truck...
...The only U.S...
...soldier to die there was Peruvian...
...OSE DE JESUS MARTINEZ DIED SUDDENLY at his home in Panama the first week of February...
...Officials dismissed the rumor, but as Mexican leftist Cuauht6moc Cdrdenas pointed out, "Thousands of Mexicans are already in Saudi Arabia as members of an army and under a flag that are not our own...
...He leapt at the chance to send warships to the Gulf last summer, but refused to let them leave port until Kuwait had deposited millions in the central bank...
...Every Panamanian saw this scene...
...Chuchti" was one of Central America's personalities: philosopher, math professor, writer, pilot, radical...
...A rumor traveled with lightning speed in the first days of the war, from Colombia to Ecuador, Peru and Brazil: the Embassies were giving out green cards to anyone who would enlist...
...To be against the war, is to be in favor of the troops...
Vol. 24 • February 1991 • No. 5
