Guatemala (catch all)

[ganulv]

I guess they hadn't invented "pop-centric" yet.

Well, Rios Montt did have the beans (for those toeing the government line) or bullets (for everyone else) thing. The civil war might have been shortened if he had been as dedicated to keeping the first part of the promise as he was to keeping the second.

It seems to me that history is telling us that the absolutely ruthless ways that the Guatemalan and Sri Lankan governments took to counterinsurgency are more likely to be successful than any post-9/11 COIN 2.0. And both of those still took decades!

But wait, isn't this the guy that Saint Ronald of Reagan said was "totally dedicated to Democracy"?

One of the things an Estonian friend of mine and I share in common is time spent in Guatemala. He once told me, "You know how much I love Reagan and how much I appreciate what he did for my country, but he was dead wrong on Central America."

[Dayuhan]

One of the things an Estonian friend of mine and I share in common is time spent in Guatemala. He once told me, "You know how much I love Reagan and how much I appreciate what he did for my country, but he was dead wrong on Central America."

Coming from another place where Reagan had it dead wrong, it was a bit jarring to encounter Eastern Europeans who thought he was absolutely wonderful. Eventually realized, of course, that different places have different perspectives, and policies that were disastrous in one place may have been effective in others.

I vividly remember the day when (then VP) Bush I praised Ferdinand Marcos for his adherence to democracy and to democratic principles. I introduced myself as a Canadian for a while.