Has Jimmy Carter ever apologized for providing military aid to El Salvador's brutal death squads in the 70's?

Answer 1

Jimmy Carter's appalling foreign policies haunt us to this day. Totally incompetent!

Answer 2

Or for practically doing away with the military here in this country to such an extent that when he sent someone to try to free the hostages, they were so green that they died in the attempt? Jimmy Carter is THE worst President in the history of the United States!

Answer 3

Uhh, I think you are a bit confused. That was Reagan and it was in the 80's..
The role of the U.S. in shoring up the right-wing governments before and during the Civil War became tremendously controversial after the rape and murder of four American churchwomen by a National Guard death squad on December 2, 1980. Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel were American nuns, and Jean Donovan was a young laywoman doing a Catholic relief mission to provide food, shelter, transportation, medical care and burial to the poor. As such, like Archbishop Romero eight months earlier, they were targeted for assassination.

At that time, there were officially only 19 American soldiers in El Salvador, sent there in January of 1980 by President Jimmy Carter to "train" El Salvador's military.[1] They would be joined in the early days of the Reagan Administration by 26 additional U.S. military "trainers." In addition, Salvadoran military were trained by the U.S. at the School of the Americas.

The U.S. sponsored the Salvadoran government with a $7 billion (U.S.) ten-year aid package which began in the Carter years and continued through the admnistrations of Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush. After the murder of the churchwomen, Carter suspended the program for a time; but funding was soon resumed. Reagan's foreign policy favored the regime even more strongly, and the supply of money, men, and material increased.

The slaughter of the four women, all American citizens, brought U.S. aid to the repressive regime into the public eye, and much controversy ensued. A second mass murder of clergy on November 16, 1989, nine years after the assassination of Bishop Oscar Romero and the four American churchwomen, re-ignited the controversy in the U.S. over the American women's deaths and fueled public demands regarding U.S. support of the Salvadoran regime. The 1989 victims were six Jesuit priests — Ignacio Ellacuria, Segundo Montes, Ignacio Martin-Baro, Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, Juan Ramon Moreno, and Amado Lopez — their housekeeper, Elba Ramos, and her daughter, Celia Marisela Ramos.

Long after the war, the families of the four churchwomen brought civil suit against two Salvadoran generals who had moved to Miami, Florida in the United States federal court there. The case was styled Ford v. Garcia. The jury did not find the generals, Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, former head of the National Guard and later Minister of Defense in the Duarte cabinet, and José Guillermo Garcia, responsible. The families lost again at the appellate level, and in 2003, the United States Supreme Court refused to take their final appeal.

A second case against the same two men in the same court was successful. The three plaintiffs in Ramagozo v. Garcia won a judgment over $54 million (U.S.) for the torture inflicted on them by the Salvadoran military during the civil war.

Answer 4

Jimmy Carter doesn't appologize for his mistakes he just keeps making them.

Answer 5

Probably for the same reason Reagan supported the Contras, and Saddam Hussein against Iran.

Answer 6

Oh yes, I had forgotten about this...another way Carter screwed up...and people have the nerve to say Bush is the worst president ever!

Answer 7

I guess he, will when Eisenhower apologize for putting Castro in Cuba.An for getting us into Vietnam.

Answer 8

I don't think so.How the hell did this buffoon win the Nobel Peace Prize anyway?

Answer 9

We heard the first time.