Why Latin America took a stand
Why Latin America took a stand
Aug 13, 2014
The impunity with which Israel has killed civilians and the support it receives from the US remind many Latin Americans of the atrocities committed by right-wing Latin American military dictatorships with similar US backing
On July 29, Brazil, Chile, Peru, El Salvador and Ecuador recalled their ambassadors from Tel Aviv, whilst denouncing the disproportionate use of Israeli military force in Gaza in which civilians, including women and children, have been killed in bombings on military targets as also schools and hospitals.
Chile has suspended trade talks with Israel. During the Mercosur Summit on July 29, the Presidents of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela issued a joint statement condemning Israel and calling for lifting the siege in Gaza. Venezuela issued an even stronger statement on behalf of the nine-member ALBA (Bolivarian alternative) group. Bolivian President Evo Morales called Israel as a “terrorist state” and appealed to the UNHCR (UN Human Rights Commission) to consider these attacks “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” by Israel. Civil society has jointed in: Latin American Nobel prize winners Pérez Esquivel of Argentina and Rigoberta Menchú of Guatemala have called for a military embargo against Israel as done against South Africa during apartheid.
This is not the first time that Latin Americans have reacted to Israeli offensives in Gaza. In 2009, Venezuela and Bolivia had cut off diplomatic relations and Nicaragua followed suit in 2010 after the last Israeli offensives. Cuba had done it in 1973 as part of its ideological support to the Palestine cause.
The vocal criticism and strong language used by Latin America has a reason: the impunity with which Israel has killed over 1,898 (both Palestinians and Israeli) civilians and the support it receives from the US, remind many Latin Americans of the atrocities committed by Right-wing Latin American military dictatorships with similar US backing.
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, a pragmatic and respected Latin American leader, has likened her political exile in Europe during the Pinochet dictatorship to the plight of Palestinian refugees denied the right to return home. This memory has triggered Latin American governments to react strongly, and go beyond the response of many countries around the world.
Latin America is no stranger to Jews and Israel — or to Palestine. Chile has the largest Palestine community of around 400,000, followed by Honduras with 200,000. Mexico has 100,000 and other countries have smaller numbers. But most of these people of Palestine origin are Christians and have not stood up in any significant way for the Palestine cause.
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http://www.asianage.com/columnists/why-latin-america-took-stand-897
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Ratlines (World War II aftermath)
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Ratlines[needs IPA] were a system of escape routes for Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe at the end of World War II. These escape routes mainly led toward havens in South America, particularly Argentina, Paraguay, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Bolivia. Other destinations included the United States, Great Britain, Canada and the Middle East. There were two primary routes: the first went from Germany to Spain, then Argentina; the second from Germany to Rome to Genoa, then South America; the two routes "developed independently" but eventually came together to collaborate.[1]
One ratline, made famous by the Frederick Forsyth thriller The Odessa File, was run by the ODESSA (Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen; "Organization of Former SS-Members"
network organized by Otto Skorzeny.
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US intelligence involvement[edit]
If at first US intelligence officers had been mere observers of the Draganović ratline, this changed in the summer of 1947. A now declassified US Army intelligence report from 1950 sets out in detail the history of the people smuggling operation in the three years to follow.[20] According to the report, from this point on US forces themselves had begun to use Draganović's established network to evacuate its own "visitors". As the report put it, these were "visitors who had been in the custody of the 430th CIC and completely processed in accordance with current directives and requirements, and whose continued residence in Austria constituted a security threat as well as a source of possible embarrassment to the Commanding General of USFA, since the Soviet Command had become aware that their presence in US Zone of Austria and in some instances had requested the return of these persons to Soviet custody".[20]
These were suspected war criminals from areas occupied by the Red Army which the US was obliged to hand over for trial to the Soviets. The US reputedly was reluctant to do so, partly due to a belief[citation needed] that fair trial could hardly be expected in the USSR (see Operation Keelhaul), and at the same time, their desire to make use of Nazi scientists and other resources.[citation needed] The deal with Draganović involved getting the visitors to Rome: "Dragonovich [sic] handled all phases of the operation after the defectees arrived in Rome, such as the procurement of IRO Italian and South American documents, visas, stamps, arrangements for disposition, land or sea, and notification of resettlement committees in foreign lands".[20] United States intelligence used these methods in order to get important Nazi scientists and military strategists, to the extent they had not already been claimed by the Soviet Union, to their own centres of military science in the US. Many Nazi scientists were employed by the US, retrieved in Operation Paperclip.[citation needed]
More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratlines_(World_War_II_aftermath)
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Nazis Were Given ‘Safe Haven’ in U.S., Report Says
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Left and center, Dave Dieter/The Huntsville Times, via AP; C.H. Pete Copeland/Plain Dealer, via AP
Dr. Josef Mengele in 1956, left. Arthur Rudolph, center, in 1990, was a rocket scientist for Nazi Germany and NASA.
John Demjanjuk in 2006.
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: November 13, 2010[/font]
WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad. The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.
It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible.
The report catalogs both the successes and failures of the band of lawyers, historians and investigators at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, which was created in 1979 to deport Nazis. Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.
The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.
The report also documents divisions within the government over the effort and the legal pitfalls in relying on testimony from Holocaust survivors that was decades old. The report also concluded that the number of Nazis who made it into the United States was almost certainly much smaller than 10,000, the figure widely cited by government officials.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14nazis.html?pagewanted=all
