Three Men Separated by Two Points in Nicaragua

~snip~
In the 1980s, the US, Britain and their NATO allies promoted terror and dictatorship around the world. The British and US ruling elites and their governments supported apartheid South Africa, helping the government in Pretoria fund, train and arm terrorist movements like Renamo in Mozambique and Unita in Angola. Likewise, they supported the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and, until the Malvinas War, the military junta in Argentina. They abetted Israel's invasion of Lebanon and its refusal to abide by UN resolutions supporting the Palestinians. The pretext was the "war on communism" : the priority was maximising corporate profits.

Likewise, they helped dictators like the Duvaliers in Haiti, Marcos in the Philippines, Mobutu in Zaire, and Suharto in Indonesia and East Timor. They provided chemical and biological weapons capabilites to Saddam Hussein in Iraq's war against Iran. In Afghanistan they trained, armed and funded fundamentalist militias to terrorise civilians loyal to the Soviet-backed secular government in Kabul. Osama bin Laden was their protege.

Most of these activities were funded both overtly and covertly. The covert operations required an illicit, multi-tentacled financial base loyal to the CIA and its sister European intelligence services. That base was the US$10 billion fraud bank - BCCI. Over a decade ago, John Kerry's US Senate investigation into the BCCI affair concluded, among many other things, that the refusal of the British government to release papers held by their intelligence services effectively obstructed their investigation.

Negroponte tipped the wink to murder. Diana cheered it along.

BCCI facilitated part of Oliver North's narcotics-tainted Iran-Contra deals, complementing John Negroponte's efforts as US ambassador in Honduras to mislead the US Congress about President Reagan's support for the Nicaraguan Contra. Negroponte forcefully supported Honduran armed forces chief Alvarez Martinez when Martinez set up the death squad Battalion 3-16. His embassy programs diverted resources to assist the Contra despite congressional prohibition on doing so.

In 1986 the International Court of Justice found the US guilty of organising terrorist attacks against Nicaragua. It was the terror policy fomented by John Negroponte, among many others in the Reagan administration, that they condemned. Equally, when the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found Honduras guilty of forced diappearances in 1988, the crimes they condemned resulted directly from actions approved by John Negroponte.

When former Sandinista hero Eden Pastora's ARDE Contra battalion attacked Cardenas in 1983, they were machine gunning and mortaring families with children and infants who took shelter wherever they could among the wooden shacks that lined the town's sandy streets. Cardenas was lucky. Absurdly outnumbered, the town's lightly-armed civilian militia held off the attack long enough for the Sandinista army to come to their aid.
(snip/...)

I read Jesse Helms was quite taken with Edén Pastora, who seems to have a secret appetite for high drama.