Congress – undermining U.S. military training?

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA).

A congressman who supported Marxist guerrillas who killed American troops in the 1980s is now pushing to suspend US military training in the region – just as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is spreading political subversion throughout the hemisphere.

Congressman James P. McGovern (D-Mass., pictured) was a Capitol Hill staffer in the ’80s when he distinguished himself as a die-hard supporter of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla and terrorist organization backed by Cuba and the Soviet bloc. The FMLN committed thousands of atrocities in El Salvador, and singled out off-duty US Marine Embassy guards, American soldiers and an American Jesuit priest, Fr. Francisco Peccorini, for assassination.

Today, McGovern and a coalition of groups that include other FMLN partisans – including the Center for International Policy, Maryknoll Brothers and Sisters, Pax Christi and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) – is attacking the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the US Army-run school to train Latin American military officers.

McGovern circulated a letter on February 7 urging his colleagues to cosponsor a bill “to suspend operations” of the school pending an “investigation” into its counterinsurgency training programs. The Massachusetts congressmen and his friends at CISPES have been trying to shut down the school for years.

McGovern says he is concerned about the fact that of the thousands of officers who have gone through the training, some were human rights abusers. He would be more credible if he had opposed communist human rights violations in the hemisphere, including those of his friends in the FMLN, and made an issue of the human rights situations today in Cuba and Venezuela.

In 2001, McGovern joined a successful Cuban-backed political warfare campaign to force the US Navy to shut down its important military training facility in Vieques, Puerto Rico.

The fact that McGovern doesn’t seem to mind those abuses shows that his agenda today is the same as it was twenty years ago. It looks like Chavez has a reliable ally on Capitol Hill to undermine Latin American militaries from Washington while the Venezuelan dictator does his work down there on the ground.  Download rep_mcgovern_ltr_0702.pdf