Latin American Al Quaeda

I've often wondered aloud at the continuing sanctions and hatred of Cuba as national policy. Quite frankly, Castro hasn't really done anything negative towards the US since the Cuban Missile Crisis, unless you believe the Cuban/Mafia theory of the JFK assassination. Yet here we are, forty years later, still punishing the average Cuban.

--- Aside, I think we can all agree that after seeing inside the lifestyle of Saddam Hussein the past twelve years that sanctions only serve to punish the less fortunate of a society in direct proportion to their level of poverty. Cutting off the importation of medicine doesn't harm a regime, but it does lead to the deaths of alot of children.

Then today, I came across this historical summarization in an article about the horrible plight of women in today's Guatemala, (I would recommend this article highly.)

By the early 1950s, vast swathes of Guatemala lay in the hands of America's United Fruit Company. In 1954, when the country's left-leaning government started expropriating some of this land to distribute to the poor, the CIA, whose director had financial ties to the company, orchestrated a military coup. Land reform stopped, left-wing guerrilla groups began to form and the US-sponsored anti-insurgency campaign began. The 30-year cycle of repression that followed, reaching its bloodiest peak in the 1980s, was the most violent, though least reported, in Latin America. Large areas of the countryside were razed, their population, mostly Mayan Indian, massacred. Villagers were herded into churches and burnt, whole families sealed alive in wells. Political opponents were assassinated, women were raped before being mutilated and killed. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open and foetuses strung from trees. By the time the UN brokered a peace deal in 1996, over 200,000 had been killed, 40,000 "disappeared" and 1.3m had fled their homes, to leave the country or become internal refugees. This in a country with a population of little over 10m.

The parallel of this brief description of the source of the Guatemala intervention to the current Chavez hate that I also don't understand, after all, his big crime was to claim more oil revenue for health and education programs for his people, jumped out at me.

I don't think I'm being very clear.

The point I'm trying to make is this: After fifty years of intervention in Central/South America, are we due a little blowback?

Are Cuba/Venezuela, the "anti-drug" intervention in Columbia efforts to stop that blowback from becoming a reality? To deny an organizing base? Is that the fear that is driving this policy? If we could have intervened in say, Iranian, Saudi or Afghani politics years ago, could we have prevented the rise of "Violent Extremism?"

Oh, yeah, we did, and that was one of the sources of the problem.

So, the question is this: Why has there been no violent terror coming from Central/South America? Our interventions have been far deeper, and generally far more bloody, and we have supported the same types of stooge governments that we attempted to set up throughout the middle east.

I don't think it's the lack of a religious base for organization, after all, people have been organizing and dying for their political/economic beliefs for centuries. I think there may actually be something to that civilizations argument as Latin Americans under seige see themselves less as a single brotherhood than Muslims, and then there's the presence of Israel forced onto Arab territory acting as a unifying influence.

But even with all that, why is there no Latin American Al Queda?

Just rambling on a Sunday afternoon.