Taking Note
POOR GEORGE ORWELL. WITH THE YEAR just two months old, every camp from neoconservative to Marxist has been trying to appropriate the pessimistic English socialist as its own. But...
...they are being coached by masters of the art...
...If ever a country deserved the title of Airstrip One, which Orwell bestowed on Great Britain in 1984, it is surely Honduras, which has become the home base for CIA and contra assaults on the Sandinista government and the site of at least seven improved airstrips-four more than Congress approved funding for...
...The evident objective was to have this removal filmed and photographed, and subsequently shown abroad, creating the image that nuns and priests are persecuted here...
...In one of an enterprising series of articles from Bob McCartney of The Washington Post, Strachan denied the presence of U.S...
...History has never been produced in the South...
...policy hostage to the very dictators and oligarchies that block all avenues to change save violent revolution...
...But sometimes the temptation to invoke him is irresistible...
...PACCA's authors remind us of Kissinger's long-standing contempt for Latin America...
...Nothing important can come from the South...
...military installations of Palmerola, San Lorenzo and Choluteca...
...Santamaria is, by the way, a devotee of the Mooniebacked CAUSA Internacional, whose leaders were enthusiastically welcomed into Honduras last year to stage their extravagant anti-communist media seminars...
...Foolish Hondurans...
...One group which recently failed to make it any further than the airstrip was a coalition of 150 North American churchwomen who tried to enter Honduras in early December to pray for peace at the U.S...
...The breathtaking ignorance of the Honduran government, like its subservience to what it imagines to be Washington's desires, appears to know no bounds...
...One contingent failed even to board their SAHSA flight at New Orleans...
...One does not have to be very imaginative," declared Santamaria, "or have a doctorate in propaganda to understand that their] essential objective [was] to block the highway and make it necessary for the police to forcibly remove them...
...In view of all this, he concluded, the nuns "consciously or unconsciously, were coming to help the expansionist objectives of international totalitarianism...
...military intervention in El Salvador or Nicaragua...
...they will jump to conclusions...
...troops in the border zone: "'We have no military personnel that have been out there...
...The Kissinger Commission Report has finally woken up to the unpalatable fact that history of great importance is being made in the South...
...After banning the entry of the religious women, official government spokesman Amilcar Santamaria provided an explanation worthy of Orwell's Ministry of Truth...
...But it is riddled with the fear of revolution that has left U.S...
...The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo...
...Logically enough: to justify any action in the name of anti-communism is a local mirror image of Reagan Administration attitudes toward Central America...
...From now on," read the document, "it is prohibited to transport the nuns of the Jesuit religion or Maryknoll to the Republic of Honduras...
...helicopter pilot Jeffry C. Schwab on the Honduras-Nicaragua border turned up one gem from Col...
...As he told Chilean Christian Democrat leader -then Foreign Minister--Gabriel Valdes in Washington in 1969, "You come here speaking of Latin America, but this is not important...
...commitment to defeat revolution has been equated with fighting the Soviets, the very notion of the Left winning is viewed as the equivalent to a major Soviet victory...
...the reality of 1984 outdoes Orwell, and nowhere more so than in Central America...
...James Strachan, who performs the thankless task of public affairs officer for U.S...
...Not only were there no Maryknoll members on the delegation, but Jesuit nuns...
...Thus the nation faces a tragic choice of its own making-a self-proclaimed defeat of major proportions or a direct U.S...
...Nor is there any sign that those attitudes will change in an Administration that has replaced knowledgeable diplomats with crisis managers...
...As the PACCA Blueprint puts it: "Since U.S...
...Chalk one up for democracy...
...the other was prevented from disembarking at Toncontin airport in Tegucigalpa...
...that's a no-no.' He suggested that the [local] residents had seen Americans wearing military fatigues and assumed they were soldiers...
...Where Kissinger frames the conflict in terms of an East-West power play, PACCA's "Blueprint for Peace" stresses its local origins and its North-South significance...
...FINALLY, BACK TO HONDURAS...
...While Kissinger offers misperceptions that will lead inevitably to wrong prescriptions and military escalation, a number of scholars with wide experience of regional realities have come together to form a group called Policy Alternatives for the Caribbean and Central America (PACCA...
...Investigations of the death of U.S...
...Their report, a kind of "AntiKissinger," provides a clear-headed and logical set of options to current policy...
...What happens in the South is of no importance...
...THIS KIND OF INANITY HAS BECOME THE dominant discourse of politics in contemporary Honduras, as it has long been in El Salvador and Guatemala...
...Airline officials read them an extraordinary banning order issued hours earlier by the Honduran government...
...Southern Command in Tegucigalpa...
...THE HONduran authorities do not need to make up doublethink and newspeak for themselves...
...The Kissinger Commission Report, unveiled with much pomp and ceremony in January, constructs an elaborate "bipartisan" rationale for more of the same-unworkable policies centered on a military defeat of the Left...
Vol. 18 • March 1984 • No. 2
