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Terrorism's Tenacious Roots in Latin America
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11156 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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3 / 1986 |
2,373 Words |
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L. Charles Franklin
L. Charles Franklin is a Washington, D.C.-based write whose
career has spanned assignments in the Soviet Union, Latin
America, and Europe. |
Terrorism runs deep in Latin America. Even before Columbus and the first conquistadors came from Spain almost five centuries ago, Inca, Aztec, and other Indian societies systematically used terror as a form of coercion, both within their own population and against others.
Since then, revolutionaries with an aggregation of causes, bands of the disaffected, the military, and governments in many guises have done the same. In the name of liberty nationalism, various forms of sectarianism, and just plain greed, terrorism has sunk twisting, tenacious roots in both stony and fertile soil. Hardy, pernicious Lianas, often twining from country to country, have sprung up during the last 25 years.
The Venezuelan Story
In the early 1960s, guerrillas with Communist catechisms took to the mountains in Venezuela, and made forays into the cities, too, killing, kidnapping for ransom and political effect, and robbing banks. Newly installed Fidel Castro in Cuba, less than a thousand miles to the northwest, vowed to help destabilize the democratic government only recently wrested from a long reign of dictatorship.
But the Robin Hood cum Marxist aura the insurgents sought to foster was definitively rent after they kidnapped a high official of the Institute de Seguros Socials--the social security agency. The rebels tortured him brutally, distributed gruesome photos of their handiwork to the press, and left the man dead in a car abandoned in Caracas.
An almost visible
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