Frank Newgent:
"Don't know if anyone has mentioned yet that Reagan presided over the third-longest economic expansion in American history, behind Clinton, then Kennedy and Johnson (a wartime expansion)."
It is worth looking at a top secret memo produced by the National Security Council in August 1954; NSC 5432, Memorandum for the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (McGeorge Bundy)
It`s plain from this memo that the US hierarchy feared "the trend in Latin America toward nationalistic regimes" and the "popular demand for immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses" ie a domestic policy of their own. This ran counter to US interests which were based on "encouraging a climate conducive to private investment," and a desire for these countries "to base their economies on a system of private enterprise, and, as essential thereto, to create a political and economic climate conducive to private investment of both domestic and foreign capital," and for the "opportunity to earn and in the case of foreign capital to repatriate a reasonable return."
US policy in South America wasn`t based on any nobel anti-communist idealogy, it was based on exploitation of natural resources for capitalist corporations and woe betide any nationalist or popular movements that got in their way.
Just look at the figures during Reagan`s watch:
El Salvador-70,000 deaths
Guatemala-100,000 deaths
Nicaragua-30,000 deaths
Secretary of State Alexander Haig claimed he had "overwhelming and irrefutable" evidence that South Ameican guerrillas had outside support and of course this is where the old "reds under the bed" myth rears its ugly head again.
This point about the Cold War being a charade for achieving US corporate control over 3rd world economies and resouces, using all manner of violence against nationalist movements, can't be stressed enough.
I strongly recommend "Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II" by William Blum.
