In fighting the "Shining Path" insurgency (read terrorists) President Fujimori stepped over the line and when indicted, he returned to Peru to face the music. At the same time, it looks like his daughter, legislator Keiko Fujimori, is going to run for President of Peru in 2011. She is one of the front runners.
Keiko Fujimori, a popular lawmaker, said many voters in Peru will start flocking to her family's party to protest the 25-year prison sentence her father received on Tuesday. He was found guilty of ordering two massacres that killed 25 people in the 1990s, when he was battling Maoist insurgents.But, back to Cuba and Castro and Congress.
Despite the verdict, polls show a third of Peruvians still support the man credited with defeating the Shining Path guerrillas and enacting free-market economic reforms that helped generate years of growth.
"This sentence, which was so extreme, will be like a boomerang for people who think the Fujimori movement has been defeated," Keiko Fujimori, 33, told Peru's foreign press club.
A "very healthy, very energetic" Fidel Castro asked visiting Congressional Black Caucus members what Cuba could do to help President Barack Obama improve bilateral relations during his first meeting with U.S. officials since falling ill in 2006.I guess that since Mr Castro didn't relinquish power through the electoral process and since he was teamed up with that popular psychopath and homophobe Ernesto "Che" Guevara, he gets a pass.
Caucus leader Rep. Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California, said the ailing former Cuban president talked for nearly two hours with her and two other delegation members on Tuesday in a meeting seen as signaling Cuba's willingness to discuss better relations with the United States.
The nice thing about our form of government is that we have separation of powers. On the other hand, it allows individual pockets within the government to do silly things. I am for opening full relations with Cuba. I would just like our elected officials to recognize that the passing of decades doesn't mean that President Fidel Castro is now innocent of murder and imprisonment of those who didn't agree with him.
I am just asking for a little historic balance here—or at least recognition of Peru for being a much better government nation than poor Cuba.
Regards — Cliff
4 comments:
The list of murderously corrupt foreign leaders with whom we've allied ourselves is a lot longer than Fidel Castro's arm. (If we're limiting ourselves to just island despots we could start with Ferdinand Marcos). General Juan Miguel del Aguila, chief of the Peruvian national police (in addition to others) confirmed that US intelligence agents were the de facto eyes and ears of the Fujimora jungle campaigns against the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru, as well as urban operations like the state-sponsored bombing of a downtown Lima bank made to look as if it was the work of "terrorists".
As for Castro's Cuba, I'd hardly characterize it worse than Qaddafi's Libya or many others with whom we've had active dialogues, so what's the beef?
Actually, I think it might be worse than Colonel Qaddafi's Libya, although blowing up an airliner does move Libya into the big leagues. And, while Peru is currently on the democratic side of the ledger, Cuba is more on the dictatorship/kleptocracy side of the ledger. But, my real beef is that there are those in this nation who make distinctions that obscure the sins of some regimes for ideological reasons—on both sides of the spectrum.
Regards — Cliff
We incarcerate more of our citizens than Cuba, and they maintain a more consistent level of basic services (e.g. universal healthcare) than most countries, too, including ours. Not trying to apologize for their faults, but absolutely trying to point out that our demonization of them, while ignoring other regimes' faults, like Marcos', is one of the reasons they insist on their contrary positions. It's also worth pointing out that they have never been party to an invasion of Florida, unlike our shame at la Bahia de Puercos.
We propped up Noriega, and he was no better than Castro, and, in many ways, far worse. Why do we find it so impossible to engage with Havana? It's disingenuous to continue to insist that somehow this one regime is different than all the others with whom we've gotten into bed. I say let's drop the rhetoric, and the long memory of long past sins, (of which we have plenty of our own for which to atone) and deal with what is here and now. They're quite a different state than they were 40 years ago. Why can't we be?
I am all for recognition of Cuba. My plan, 20 years ago, was for the US President to call in the Commissioner of Baseball and tell him that he needed to put one new team in DC and two new teams in Cuba and put another new one wherever it was profitable for Major League Baseball. That would have been my first step. Then I would have lifted the embargo and offered diplomatic relations. But, that doesn't mean that we should then have showered President for almost ever Fidel Castro with love—just an offer of commerce and free travel. The business of America is business. Sometimes we forget that.
And yes, FM was a problem for the Republic of the Phillipines, but when democracy came, we supported it. One of my cousins lead a flight of F-4Es out of Clark Air Base that pushed a flight of insurgent PAF fighter aircraft away when they threatened to bomb the Malacanang Palace, after the free election of Corazón Aquino, to replace Ferdinand Marcos. We sometimes do the right thing.
Regards — Cliff
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