"YANQUI GO HOME!"
by Edward Kent, Ph.D.
Anyone who doubts the decency of Lori Berenson, and the injustice being done to her (imprisoned now for far too many years by the corrupt Fujimori regime in Peru for a "treason" charge by a masked military jury acting in secret) should read the NY Times article "Tapes Spy Chief Left Behind Scandalize Peru," <www.nytimes.com/2001/02/03/world/03PERU.html>. What Lori was protesting was a society with a government manifestly corrupted by greed, cruelty, and viciousness towards its poor and others that drew its ire.
To recall the details here: Lori, a person concerned with poverty and justice, had visited Peru. She was arrested and charged with collaboration with the Tupac Amaru (charges now reduced apparently to mere "association" with this lesser 'terrorist' group). From earlier reports in the Times, and as I understand it, the Tupac Amaru had been formed and led by a Peruvian labor leader in despair at finding lesser means to reform his corrupt society. His group's efforts had consisted of attacks on government targets, not on civilians such as those of the larger and vicious Peruvian terrorist group, the Shining Path, which did cause harm to innocent persons). For most of us, the Tupac Amaru's best-known effort was its much publicized occupation of the Japanese Embassy several years ago (after Lori's imprisonment), which ended with the total slaughter (not necessary) of all members of that group, including several teenage girls who were brutally shot down as they tried to surrender.
We Americans must never forget that we are fully implicated as a nation in the many social, economic, and political evils that have allowed such corrupt regimes as that in Peru to flourish. We have repeatedly sent US troops to intervene in social/economic conflicts in Latin and South America--more than 30 times over the past two centuries. Our support has ordinarily been mustered for the wealthy elites and our own business interests (e.g. the notorious United Fruit Company-- those Chiquita bananas) engaged in exploiting poor peoples through corruption of the sort reported today. Castro emerged in reaction to just such a brutal and corrupt regime, Batista's, installed by us in Cuba.
In our notorious and recently renamed School of the Americas, we trained the officers of juntas (Brazil, Argentina, Pinochet's Chile, etc.) who "disappeared" thousands of young people as "subversives" in these and other countries-frequently picking them up as they strolled on their own campuses-raping and torturing them before butchering and burying their bodies in unmarked graves or sometimes dumping them, alive or dead, into the oceans from US-funded helicopters. Panama's Noriega was one of its graduates. He now resides in an American jail as a consequence of our invasion of Panama and the charge that he was dealing drugs to us while cooperating with our CIA in the "fight against communism."
The Cold War is over. I hope the younger Bush will not use the old excuses (as did Reagan and Bush's father) to engage in further Latin American adventures. Colombia and surrounding countries are now being disrupted by our current "drug interventions" there with more than a billion of our tax dollars being spent for military helicopters to fight . . . ? This was a vast mistake by Clinton--and I hope it will not be exacerbated and expanded by Bush.
Our history of interventions south of our borders is a national disgrace. Ask anyone but a member of an elite group there who has benefited from our "expedition," and you will discover why the slogan "Yanqui go home!" resonates so.
Hopefully, Lori--who protested the Peruvian injustices--will someday be properly commended for her effort to redeem US national honor from our record of shame. In the meantime, she is still a martyr to the "corruption and sexual high-jinks of Peru's most powerful people."
--Edward Kent, Ph.D, teaches social, political, and legal philosophy at Brooklyn College, CUNY, has been a member of the CUNY faculty seminar on Balancing the Curriculum (gender, race, class, and sexual orientation), the ACLU Church-State Advisory Committee, and the Columbia University Faculty Seminar on Human Rights.