>
> So? Is it a bad thing they did? Does this justify Reagan's wars?
>
> Doug
Oy vey. Not by any means. But, at the time I always found it disingenuous, whether from left-liberal Democrats or marxists like James Petras in his piece in The Nation taking apart the Reagan State Dept. White Paper (similiar to Izzy Stone doing the same to a LBJ admin. State Dept. paper in '65 on the NVA, NLF, PRC and USSR) to deny that the FSLN was giving material and military aid to the FMLN. Central American revolutionaries had every right to (esp. given the historical context of El Salvador from the time of the massacre of the early 30's, the Matanza, when the Right killed tens of thousands telescoping forward to the crushing of the electoral reformist social democratic and Christian Democratic left by the ARENA extreme right from '72 onwards when Ungo and Duarte won the elections to the formation/unification of the FDR-FMLN under Cuban prodding) and it wasn't credible for pwoggies and radicals here in the belly of the beast to say otherwise.
Reading books such as, "Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After The End of the Cold War, " by Jorge Castenada and talking with Salvadorean leftist exiles via CISPES contacts (in competing military-politico compoinent orgs. of the FMLN) in the 90's, and memories of arguments w/ CISPES comrades of the eighties over the assasination of Roque Dalton as some sort of dual CIA/KGB agent, or the killing of FMLN commandante Anaya Montes of the FPL stabbed 80 times by another cadre of the FPL Central Command) reinforced my sense that Central American leftists were and are more honest about the internal ideological contradictions and conflicts and tragedies inherent in their struggles to overthrow neo-fascist oligarchies, than many AmeriKKKan pwoggies, then and now who either tend to euphamize and equivocate (if they are Xtian left-libs) or if Leninists offer Mao's bromides on broken eggs and dinner parties to explain away the murderous acts of Leninists towards other Leninists, peasants or workers. -- Michael Pugliese