If the US was not occupying central America, was the US only supplying the death squads.?

Question

The ones that now had reappeared in iraq.?

Answer 1

No. The U.S. "only" trained their leaders. Read up on the School of the Americas (SOA), recently rechristened Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). It was established in Panama in 1946, but was relocated to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984. It is estimated that over its 60-year history, the the SOA/WHINSEC has trained over 60,000 Latin American military personnel in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics.

Answer 2

I guess you mean the Contras. Up until 1979, the US backed the Somoza dynasty in Nicaragua. The Somozas turned the country into a personal plantation and released the hounds on dissidents. The United Fruit Company (Chiquita) lobbied the US government to continue the subsidy of many criminal dictators in the Caribbean basin in order to continue reaping huge profits from fertile lands and miserable wages.
In 1979, a revolution deposed the Somoza regime. The leaders of the revolution called themselves Sandinistas, after the early peasant revolutionary Sandino. Elections were set for 1984 and the country was put unto the socialist path.
At the time Reagan is elected he made a big fuzz about the Nicaraguan army being a threat to the US and how the Sandinistas were a week's march from Texas. Well, since the previous regime had been in the US payroll, and the secret police and army had been trained in the US, it goes without saying that when those counterinsurgency forces of the Somoza regime regrouped to attack the new government, the us was more than happy to pay for the whole thing.
There is a very good book about the whole thing. It is called "the culture of terror" by Noam CHomsky.
Well, it goes without saying that the lives of Nicaraguans are worth nothing to the US government and that the Contra rampage ended up in thousands of deaths, the blowing up of hospitals and schools. The thing was so horrendous that congress made it illegal to continue funding. So Reagan got his people into a seedy shenanigan called the Iran-Contra affair to keep funding them.

Anyhow, the US also funded state terrorism in Guatemala and EL Salvador.

Answer 3

the us hardly goes to war (at least with normal presidents). but what they always did is fund some crazy guys in torn countries to fight proxy-wars with the soviets (and vic-versa). hence they fostered the decline of some states pretty much on their own and normal democratic governments are occupied until today to clean up the mess. provided the us did not decide to keep on funding the bad guys (as the russians, the french, the brits, the chinese, etc do)

Answer 4

Death Squads. This is a new term for me. It has popped up a couple of times today. What are you talking about? U.S. Soldiers, Mercenaries, Foreign Soldiers?

Answer 5

You need to make your question a little more clear. What time frame are you referencing for Central America. We've had a huge presence there for a long time.