"Despite his aw shucks style,
Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.
The death toll was staggering --
an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly
20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about
200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some
100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala. The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part
from Ronald Reagan's White House."
****
"On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch representatives condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population. New York attorney Stephen L. Kass said these findings included proof that the government carried out
"virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents."
Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass said. Children were "thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed." [AP, March 17, 1983]
