GO rD hIll 500 Years of Indigenous resistancement. U.S. Special Forces troopers were not only in Southeast Asia, they
were also quite busy in Central America, training death squads and di-
recting massacres. As part of an overall counterinsurgency campaign, the
militarization precipitated an upward spiral of violence. In Guatemala
alone, between 1966–68, some 8,000 people were slaughtered by Gua-
temalan soldiers under the direction of U.S. Green Beret advisors; U.S.
pilots flew U.S. planes on bombing missions. Paramilitary groups/death
squads hunted down “subversives” in collaboration with the government,
military, multinationals, and land-owners.^44 The main targets of this cam-
paign, dubbed “Operation Guatemala”, were the Mayan peoples.
Another aspect of the counter-insurgency plans was that of population
control. Primarily the focus of U.S. state-funding, the Agency for Interna-
tional Development (AID) was established in 1961. Using the false pre-
text of “over-population problem”, instead of imperialism, as the cause of
mass poverty and starvation, population control came to be championed as
the most important dilemma facing the “modern world”. Under the guise
of “family planning”, AID began funding for a wide-range of public and
private organizations, foundations, and churches who provided training,
equipment, and clinics for birth control programs. Between 1968 and 1972,
“funds earmarked for population programs through legislation and obligat-
ed by AID amounted to more than $250 million”.^45 South America received
the largest percentage of this funding. Besides educational material, birth
control pills, IUDs, and other pharmaceuticals developed by a profitable
gene and biotechnology industry in the imperialist centres, the main thrust
of population control remains sterilization. Between 1965–71, an estimated
1 million women in Brazil had been sterilized.^46 In Puerto Rico, 34% of all
women of child-bearing age had been sterilized by 1965.^47 Between 1963–
65, more than 40,000 women in Colombia had been sterilized.^48 In contrast
to these programs in the “Third World”, the imperialist centres see restric-
tions on abortion and struggles for women’s reproductive choice. But even
here there is a double standard for non-European women:
- Tom Barry, Deb Preusch, and Beth Wood, Dollars and Dictators, Grove Press
Inc., New York, 1983, pg. 122. - Bonnie Mass, The Political Economy of Population Control in Latin America, Edi-
tions Latin America, Montreal, 1972, pg. 8. - Ibid, pg. 19.
- Ibid, pg. 41.
- “Growing Fight Against Sterilization of Native Women”, Akwesasne Notes Vol. 11
No. 1, Winter 1979, pg. 29.