U.S. intervention

Press, 20 December 1986, Page 20

U.S. intervention

Sir,—According to an article by Alex Brummer, of the “Guardian” (December 18), the Americans want to make “an idealistic effort to end the bloody chaos in Central America, the race wars in southern Africa and the authoritarianism in the Far East.” I do not know to which Americans Brummer was referring, but it cannot have been their Government. The truth is that the United States Government is causing the bloody chaos in Central America by sustaining the contras in Nicaragua; is prolonging the so-called “race wars” in southern Africa by refusing to break links with the apartheid regime in Pretoria and, by backing Right-wing bandits in Angola and Mozambique; and is upholding authoritarianism in the East by supporting governmments like those in South Korea and Taiwan. It dumped Marcos. in the Philippines and Duvalier in Haiti, after propping them, both up for decades; not for the generous reasons Brummer implies, but because it had become clear that the populations of those countries were about to do so anyway. — Yours, etc., TERRY COGGAN. December 18, 1986.