← Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals
Green & Red: Podcasts for Scrappy Radicals
ENCORE: State murders of Nuns in El Salvador and Black Panther Fred Hampton repression at home and abroad (G&R 444)
01:06:32
Loading summary
Transcript118 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hey there, this is Scott from the Green and Red Podcast. I want to tell you about this great podcast I came across called the False Positive Podcast. It's hosted by these four friends who live in New York and in 2016 they had a radio show they happened to be broadcasting live on the air the evening of November 2016 when Donald Trump had won the election. They were shocked and angry like many of us, and immediately decided to pivot to a podcast where they could laugh, scream and chat about the latest insanity.
- [00:32]
B
Coming out of the Trump administration.
- [00:34]
A
If you like politics but hate hearing the dress down version, this is a show for you. False positive streams wherever you get your podcasts.
- [00:44]
B
Welcome to Green and Red Scrappy Politics.
- [00:47]
C
For Scrappy People, a regular podcast on radical environmental and anti capitalist politics brought to you by Bob Bozanko and Scott Parkins.
- [00:58]
D
That was New York Governor Mario Cuomo at the 1984 Democratic Convention harshly condemning Ronald Reagan's foreign policy and ending with the powerful, powerful words they kill nuns and lie about it. It's rare to hear that kind of attack on foreign policy, but the events in El Salvador El Salvador were particularly brutal and today Green and Red Podcast will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the events that prompted Cuomo's harsh words. The December 2, 1980 murder of three nuns and the lay missionary by US backed military officers in El Salvador, and also the December 4, 1969 murder of black Panther leader Fred Hampton by Chicago police. The theme is clear state repression at home and abroad, the way the people who run the country will get rid of people who stand in the way of their interests. I'm Scott Parkin in Berkeley, California, and I'll be talking about Fred Hampton. But first we'll have Bob Bazenko discuss The events of December 2, 1980 in El Salvador in the largest context of the American role in bloodshed and terror in that country. Welcome to Greeting Red.
- [02:09]
C
Thanks, Scott. The great American novelist and Vietnam veteran Tim o', Brien, in one of his most famous short stories, said, a true war story is never moral. It does not instruct nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you've been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There's no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first Rule of thumb. Therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. And we're going to talk about a couple war stories per se today in the annals of American committed atrocities. Some are immense, like the Vietnam War that o' Brien wrote about. And some are more intimate, like the incident we're about to discuss. So whether it's millions of peasants or four church women killed, they represent the casual nature of repression and death in the US empire. It's a somber story. On December 2, 1980, in the northern province of Chalatenango in El Salvador, Mary Noel, Sisters Maura Clark and Ida Ford, along with Ursuline's sister Dorothy Kasel and lay missionary Jean Donovan, were raped and murdered by Salvadoran military forces amid a civil war and increasing terrorism by the government and associated militaries. Heinous and brutal crime that was supported and covered up by the American government. The people of Chalatenango were poor, rural, and they were suspected of siding with leftist groups in that region. They were frequently the target of bombings and massacres during a civil war that lasted about a dozen years. More than 50 massacres were reported in Chalatenango Province alone. In 1979, the Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, who will return to, requested that the Mary Knowles send more sisters to work in that region in impoverished and vulnerable area. So Sisters Clark and Ford came there. They led Bible study groups. They taught. Sister Cazel and lay missionary Donovan lived elsewhere, but they went to Chalatenango often. They brought food, medicine, and they sometimes would bring wounded children from these various attacks back to get medical attention and safety. Everybody knew it was dangerous in that area. In August of 1980, Jean Donovan wrote in her journal that she had been driving down the road and seen helicopters and trucks and soldiers, all this really massive military presence. And she said chalatenango is just absolutely civil war at the moment. A few weeks before she died, she talked about wanting to get out of El Salvador, but she felt that she had to stay because of the children, who she called the poor, bruised victims of this insanity. On December 2nd, sisters Clark and Ford were coming back from a conference in Managua of Maryknoll Religious. The Maryknoll Religious order. Managua, of course, had had a revolution just a year earlier which brought in a socialist government, the.
- [05:38]
Sandinista government. And immediately the United States took actions to try to get rid of the Sandinistas. So these nuns were kind of caught up in this larger context of this insurgency in Central America.
- [05:55]
So Ford and Clark were returning from this conference in Managua. Cazel and Donovan went to pick them up at the airport in San Salvador. The nuns were under surveillance by the National Guard. They had been for some time. And the commander of that unit ordered them to go out, change uniform, and then apprehend the nuns. The flight landed at about 9pm Witnesses said around 10pm.
- [06:23]
They saw a vehicle stopped. The guard took these women to a secluded area and beat them, raped them and murdered them. Later, peasants said that they saw the vehicle that the women were driving, a van on fire. And then the next day they were found. The four women were found in a ditch, dead and brutalized.
- [06:47]
Those murders occurred in a civil war that would become a revolution. And it was increasingly violent. The government and paramilitary forces were attacking in particular human rights workers like the sisters, peasants and anti government rebels. And they were working on behalf of the Salvadoran oligarchy, which was closely tied to U.S. interests. El Salvador, like much of Central America in the 70s and 80s, was really important to the United States, especially after late 1980. In El Salvador, General Carlos Humberto Romero, who was a military official, won an election in 1977, was fraudulent. And he and various police and security paramilitary forces repressed opposition groups, particularly those on the left, human rights workers and peasant groups and union groups and various political organizations, organizations. And they went after priests who were politically active on behalf of the poor and student groups and all these other various kind of groups on the left. And this in turn prompted more rebel groups to take up arms against the state. Romero himself was ousted in a coup in 1979 by what were considered moderate military forces who just continued the repression, ramped up the violence. And one of the main targets, and this is a very well known episode as well, was archbishops of San Salvador, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who had always been actually considered fairly conservative and was not really involved in politics other than kind of taking care of the poor and the kind of typical stuff. Remember when we talked to Jack Downey a few weeks ago about Catholic Worker? There was that tradition in the Catholic church. And.
- [08:41]
On March 23, 1980.
- [08:45]
Romero gave a sermon and he was talking about the repression in El Salvador. And at the end he said, no soldiers obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God in his name, and in the name of our tormented people who have suffered so much and whose laments cry out to heaven, I implore you. And he screams, I beg you, I order you. Stop the repression. It's really powerful. And the next Day, as Romero was celebrating Mass, when he finished the sermon, a car stopped in front of the chapel. Gunmen jumped out and shot and killed him on the altar. So it's incredibly brutal.
- [09:24]
Now that seems really an amazing incident, but in fact, it wasn't as unusual. In Central America throughout the later 70s, the idea of liberation theology was gaining popularity throughout that region. It contained the idea that the gospel taught that the poor, the church should give the poor preferential treatment and it should resist the oppressive power of the wealthy. And that was a really important idea in the Sandinista Revolution of 1979. And in fact, the Sandinistas had two priests, Ernesto Cardinal and Miguel de Scoto in the cabinet. The Vatican and Washington D.C. were alarmed by the political nature of the church and attacked liberation theology as a communist ideology. Pope John Paul II reprimanded Romero before his murder. But then Romero was killed. And everything became a lot more intense.
- [10:24]
That fall. In October of 1980, the right wing terror was escalating. So several groups from the left joined together to create the fmln, which would be the force that really fought those next 12 years of revolution and civil war. The Farabundo Marti Liberacion Nacional, which was a Marxist group. It paid homage to Farabundo Marti, who had been a revolutionary who was murdered in a 1932 massacre where about 30,000 peasants were killed by Salvadoran planters.
- [10:57]
The FMLN was established in October, and then one of the pivotal days in this entire period was Tuesday, November 4, 1980. Because on that day, Ronald Reagan was elected president. And the US and the United States and Salvadoran oligarchs felt like they were unleashed. They were ecstatic, they were partying, they were joyful. And then just a few weeks later, the three nuns and Donovan were killed. And it was clear that these Catholic activists in El Salvador were being targeted. Jimmy Carter was in the last days of his presidency. He was kind of handcuffed by the hostage crisis in Iran, so wasn't really able to do much. He had cut off aid to San Salvador. The U.S. ambassador in El Salvador, who is kind of unique in this because it's a rare instance where an American official actually kind of comes across as a good guy, was Robert White, who had been a holdover from Carter. And he was aghast at what had happened. And he was aghast at the support that the oligarchs had given to Reagan. And they assumed that now they were free, they wouldn't have to worry about the kind of scolding that Carter was giving to them.
- [12:12]
And Reagan said, we believe that the government of El Salvador is on the front line in a battle that is really aimed at the very heart of the western hemisphere and eventually us.
- [12:25]
So Reagan is now throwing down and saying el Salvador is part of a larger rebellion that is aimed at the United States. El Salvador in the 1980s had a population of 5 million people. It's 8,000 square miles, which means it's about as big as New Jersey. So that was now kind of the centerpiece of this Latin American cold war. It was the place where the United States would show the Soviet Union that it was still the world's greatest power. Particularly loathsome in this also is one of Reagan's key foreign policy advisors, who then became the ambassador to the United Nations, Eugene Kirkpatrick. And if you live through the 80s, you remember Kirkpatrick well, Even after White described to her the situation in El Salvador and told them that the conflict was local, it was caused by government repression and these class problems with workers and peasants, Kirkpatrick and the Reagan administration continued to say it was government. It was outside interference from the Soviet Union, from Cuba, from the Sandinistas. And the new administration just didn't relent on anything White said. And they rejected any idea that it was a homegrown revolution. And Kirkpatrick went further. She actually blamed the four women for their murder. She said, it's a reminder that people who live by the sword die by the sword. The nuns were not just nuns. They were political activists. We ought to be a little more clear about this than we actually are. They were political activists on behalf of the Frente, and somebody who was using violence to oppose the Frente killed these nuns.
- [14:06]
When asked if the military and government was involved, she said, the answer is unequivocal.
- [14:11]
B
No.
- [14:11]
C
I don't think the government was at all responsible. Al Haig was Reagan's first secretary of state, and he said, you know, he excused it, too. He said perhaps the vehicle the nuns were riding in may have tried to run a roadblock, or maybe accidentally was perceived to have been doing so. And there may have been an exchange of gunfire. So the nuns were shooting as well. Right. El Salvador was soon receiving $2 billion in foreign aid, most of it military. It was this small country, as big as New Jersey, the third largest recipient of American largesse in that era. It had the third biggest embassy staff in the world by the early 1980s. Despite that, humanitarian groups and the Democrats, which had a spine at the time, were really outraged. And the Reagan administration Couldn't get political or public support. In February of 1981, the State Department put out a document called communist interference in el salvador. Documents demonstrating communist support of the salvadoran insurgency. It was called the white paper on el salvador. It laid the burden for the rebellion on Moscow, Havana and managua. And it was widely derided. Nobody bought it. Haig tried to get ambassador white, who was still there in san salvador, to say that there was no proof that the military had done the killings of the four church women and that the government was conducting a serious investigation, and white refused. White knew that two of the ranking military officers in el Salvador, General Jose garcia and a notorious, brutal, horrible individual, terrorist general. I'm sorry, Colonel Carlos vides casanova, who became really notorious throughout the the 1980s, were involved in planning the murder and covering it up. And they were in the higher echelons of the salvadoran military. Haig forced white's hand, so white resigned, which is rare, and on his way out, he said, I regard it as an honor to join a small group of officers who've gone out of the service because they refused to betray their principles. That doesn't happen very often. A few foreign service officers resigned in Vietnam. A few did at the beginning of the gulf war. But it's Anne Wright, notably, but it's not typical. Despite the killings of the nuns and continued massacres, the most notable occurred in 1981. Late 1981, at a village called amazote, the atlacato military battalion, which had been trained at the school of the americas, the notorious school of the assassins at Fort Benning, Georgia, saw slaughter in which 700 civilians were killed. Mazote wasn't a catholic area. It was not involved in liberation theology. It was not involved in the war. It was politically neutral. It was actually evangelical protestant. Still, the soldiers attacked the village, brutalized children, raped women, and slaughtered the entire village. Seven to 800 people were killed. And just a few days after the slaughter at el Mazote, Reagan certified that the salvadoran government is making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights, and it is achieving substantial control over elements of its own armed forces so as to bring an end to the indiscriminate torture and murder of salvadoran citizens. During the 80s, the media would often say the civil war in El Salvador has killed 80,000 people. Civil wars don't kill people. Militias and paramilitaries kill people. And the 80,000 or so killed were overwhelmingly, disproportionately victims of the paramilitaries in the government, not the FMLN forces. It wasn't close, but the media obviously created that false equivalency. So in the aftermath of those killings and the massacre, the Matanza at Almazote, Reagan continued to ramp up aid to the regimes in San Salvador. He was also obviously creating the Contras in Nicaragua and sending money to Honduras and Guatemala and elsewhere. So the entire area of Central America was under repression via American money and weapons and training. At Fort Benning in the 1980s there was a so called moderate government led by Jose Napoleon Duarte, who was American educated from Notre Dame, and then the vicious head of the ARENA party, Roberto Dobizan. Dobizan was one of the heads of paramilitaries during the 1980 coup. He had become active in the government. He led a party called arena and he was particularly known for his, you know, his paramilitaries were particularly known for being, you know, vicious and bloody. The violence still continued though. In November of 1989, almost 10 years after the nuns, soldiers attacked Central American university and murdered six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and a 15 year old daughter and then fired and destroyed a portrait of Archbishop Romero. In 1992 the FMLN and the government finally reached the ceasefire which was supported by George Herbert Walker Bush administration. And since then they've had elections in El Salvador and I believe the current government is led by somebody who had been part of the fml. At one point during the Obama years, the US sought to deport General Garcia and Vides Casanova who had fled to Miami. Like people from Cuba and Venezuela and elsewhere, the Latin American oligarchy tends to kill a lot of people and then go to Miami for refuge. And they were living in Florida. White, Robert White, came back and testified at their hearings and they were both deported. No one was ever convicted for the murder of the four nuns. But the UN had a truth commission for El Salvador and it concluded that far right politicians, including Dobison had given the order and that Garcia and Vides Casanova had been involved in it.
- [20:34]
It's a horrific, somber story. And the murder of these four Catholic activists offers I think, a lot of important lessons for today. No matter what one's role in society is, such as a Catholic human rights worker, nuns, state repression and murder are on the table. If the people who run these societies, in this case, the US and particularly the Reagan administration acting on behalf of the Salvadoran oligarchy, believe that you oppose their interest or you stand in the way of their interests somehow. And I think it's also important because as liberals have spent four years condemning Trump as this horrific departure from traditional norms. And you have, like the Lincoln Project say that he's not representative of what the Republican Party has traditionally stood for. The murder of the nuns and subsequent events like Amazote and the COVID up and the massive levels of American aid.
- [21:34]
Show that American presidents have in fact been war criminals just as a matter of national policy.
- [21:41]
So that's the way U.S. repression abroad takes place. And the same thing can happen here at home as well. And Scott, I know you have an equally bleak and somber but instructive tale to tell us.
- [21:57]
B
Yeah. So shifting to the, to the domestic front, to the home front, to repression at home. This week is the 51st, 51st anniversary of the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, who was also killed at the same time that Hampton was killed.
- [22:21]
Fred Hampton was a talented organizer. He was the head of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. He was only 21 years old and he had been an organizer in high school. And, you know, and he grew up in a town called Mayfield, Illinois. He had been actually part of NAACP organizing in his home community. He moved to Chicago and got involved with the Black Panther Party. He had actually been recruited by the person who had started the Chicago Black Panthers, which was Bobby Rush, who is actually now a congressman from Chicago. Hampton said a lot of notable things. He was a, he was a, you know, fiery speaker. He was a talented organizer. He could, like, move crowds. When Rush said that when he had met him, that.
- [23:17]
He knew that he was the person to get into the Chicago chapter, to the Illinois chapter because he was such a passionate and intelligent and powerful speaker and leader. Hampton, I'm just gonna say one of Hampton's quotes is, we don't think you fight fire with fire best. We think you fight fire with water best. We're gonna fight racism not with racism, but we're going to fight with solidarity. We say, you're not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism. We're going to fight it with socialism. We've stood up and said we're not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary states attorneys like this and reactionary states attorneys like Hannah Rand. With any other reactions on our part, we're going to fight their reactions with all of us getting together and having an international proletarian revolution. And besides being a Black Panther.
- [24:15]
Hampton was also a revolutionary socialist and very much brought that into his work in organizing in Chicago. He actually co founded an alliance of radical groups called the Rainbow Coalition. It was the original Rainbow Coalition and it included the Young Lords, which was a Puerto Rican group, included the Young Patriots, which was identified as a neo Confederate group. But it was predominantly like white people from Appalachia who had a radical analysis. It also included some street gangs which actually were a big part of life in the inner city in Chicago. Just to take it back a little bit, I'm gonna talk about the Black Panthers really quickly. Whereas the Chicago chapter was just one chapter, the Black Panthers actually originated, were founded here in Oakland, just a few miles from where I am right now. They originally called themselves the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Later changed names to just the Black Panther Party. They were founded in 1966 and it began as an open carry armed patrol in Oakland, monitoring the Oakland Police Department, which still has a notorious relationship reputation as for police brutality and police murder. But they began as an open carry armed patrol in Oakland, monitoring the Oakland Police Department and challenging police brutality.
- [25:45]
Just four years later. They had chapters across the US in the UK and Algeria. In 1970, at its height, the Black Panther Party had 68 offices across the US and other parts of the world and had thousands of members. Besides the self defense aspect of their work, they also instituted community programs like the free breakfast program. They opened up health clinics. The one in Oakland is actually still open and operating. Sarah Koster, who was on with us last week, actually mentioned that. But they had tests and treatments for things like sickle cell anemia, tuberculosis, and then later HIV and aids.
- [26:32]
The open carry part of their work actually led to the 1967 Mulford act, which was a gun control act passed.
- [26:41]
D
In response to the Black Panthers.
- [26:43]
B
A lot of people talk about gun control today and it's in response to like right wing shoot, mass shootings and increasingly like mass, you know, right wingers carrying guns at protests and things like that, or counter protests. But the actual first, some of the early gun control in California was passed in response to the Black Panthers. They had actually crashed the California legislature fully armed, which sort of like was able to make the legislation move a lot faster. And it was actually signed into, into law by Ronald Reagan, who we just spoke about. You know, Ronald Reagan's fine with arming people as long as they believe in his politics, but not.
- [27:25]
Not in arming people if they don't agree with his politics. J. Edgar Hoover, who was the head of the FBI, who was the head of the FBI for 50 years, described the Black Panther Party as the greatest internal threat to the security of the nation. Richard Nixon had an enemies list and he put the Black Panthers at The top of it.
- [27:45]
And so what happens in response to their organizing, to their radical politics, to them in many ways, advocating like for armed self defense is that J. Edgar Hoover creates a program called cointelpro or the counterintelligence program to wage war against the Black Panther Party. He also uses against the new left and other radical groups, including the Brown Beret, which was a Chicano radical group, and AIM or the American Indian movement. I'm going to talk actually a little bit more about COINTEL in a minute. The one thing I do want to say is that COINTELPRO waged war against the Black Panthers, fomenting internal division, fomenting inter movement division. He tried to pit radical groups against each other, but they also used assassination, like with Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and then also like really aggressive prosecutions. I actually looked it up and there's still 19 black radicals as of, as of 2018. There were 19 black radicals from this period, whether in the Black Panthers or other offshoot groups, who are still in prison over 40 years later, 50 years later, who were arrested for violent acts related to the black liberation structure, struggle. Excuse me. I'll say that in 1970 when I talked about the sort of height is that we had 68 offices around the world. We had thousands of members by 1980, after a decade of COINTELPRO waging war on the Black Panthers.
- [29:21]
By the end of the 70s they saw their Oakland, Chicago and Seattle, which were the last of the chapters, fold. And by 1980 there were only 27 members remaining.
- [29:33]
To shift to Fred Hampton. Like I said, Fred Hampton was this talented organizer who rose quickly through the ranks of the Black Panther. Right before his assassination. He had actually been moved into like national leadership of the Black Panther Party because he was such a dynamic, powerful leader. I'll say part of this is because of his work with the Rainbow Coalition, the original Rainbow Coalition, which actually united.
- [30:01]
These different radical groups from different ethnic backgrounds under a anti racist class conscience based alliance. They worked on poverty, corruption, police brutality, housing. They had agreements in Chicago that if members were arrested, all groups contribute to the bail fund. If members were assaulted or killed by police, all members responded with nonviolent action. And so it was. And then they also began to make alliances with the sort of street gangs of Chicago, most notably the Blackstone Nation or the Blackstone Rangers. And part of what Hampton's strategy there was was to actually bring peace to these sort of like warring criminal street gangs. And that alarmed the FBI greatly because, you know, that could actually lead to.
- [30:52]
What we would call today like autonomous zones, like zones where we don't need police, where we don't need the government coming in and telling us what to do, because the community is governing itself. And that was very alarming. That sets a very concerning precedent for.
- [31:10]
People in power. So cointelpro, the FBI, working with the Chicago Police Department, and there was a special unit run by this guy, Hannah Wren, that Hampton talked about called the Racial Matters Special Prosecution Unit, was also an extrajudicial.
- [31:33]
Police unit. We talk about paramilitaries. This is in some ways the equivalent of a paramilitary in the streets of Chicago. In Chicago has a long history of that. Chicago, even in recent days that's been exposed that they've run these sort of extrajudicial, you know, police military style operations which has included torture chambers. But they decided they wanted to take out Fred Hampton. There was actually an informant in, an FBI informant in Hampton's inner circle named William o'.
- [32:07]
D
Neill.
- [32:08]
B
And so the night of Hampton's murder.
- [32:14]
They were living in a four bedroom apartment in this neighborhood in Chicago. There were a number of people who were staying in the apartment, including Hampton and his eight month pregnant fiance, Deborah Johnson, who now goes by Akua and Jerry. But o' Neill made the dinner and he actually drugged Hampton's drink with barbiturates. Now, the other thing to note about Hampton is that he never drank or used drugs. And when I'm going to get into the kind of assassination. Some of the details of the assassination here in a moment, but like two autopsies afterwards found. Two different autopsies found barbiturates in Hanson's system even though he never drank or used drugs. The night of the raid, 14 police officers bused into the house, eight in the front, six in the back. They actually, Mark Clark was actually standing guard with a shotgun, sitting in a chair with a shotgun in his lap. They shot and killed him. They went into Hampton's room, shot through the walls, shot Hampton while he was asleep. He did not awaken during the raid, which, you know, further evidence that he was drugged so he wouldn't put up any resistance. They dragged his fiance out of the room. She overheard the police saying that he's alive, he's barely alive, he'll probably survive. And so then she heard two, two more shots. And then she heard one of the police officers say, he's good and dead now. And so it wasn't. And what the police put out afterwards was that he had resisted, that he had exchanged gunfire, where in truth, he wasn't even able to awaken. And that they just killed him cold blooded in his bed.
- [34:00]
I want to say that.
- [34:06]
Hampton murder had a huge impact on the community and there was a huge, there was a huge, I would call it a backlash. And not just like in radical circles in Chicago, but also in what we would consider more mainstream liberal circles that also happened nationally. One other kind of note I want to put in here before I get into some of the aftermath is that on November 23, 1969, Hampton actually spoke at the University of Illinois and event organized by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. And one of the people in attendance was a gentleman named Luis Kutner. Kutner was a lawyer and he is a, even though this is disputed, a co founder of Amnesty International, as Amnesty admits that he was involved with them early on. But they say he was not a co founder in a rather defensive press release they put out earlier this year. But Cutner was also an FBI informant who had reported on the meeting to his FBI handler and claimed that Hampton was ranting and raving and said Nixon was a member of the capitalistic establishment. Nixon must die. Cutner said that he was telling the FBI this because it's possible violation of federal law. A few days later, you know, within two weeks later is when the FBI assassinates Hampton. So you know, there's, there's some possibility that there was, you know, Cutner, who was champion like liberal human rights causes as part of Ammunition International, was also, you know, a participant in the state violence against Fred Hampton. I just.
- [35:54]
I just want to flag that this wasn't just like a sort of right wing element within the Chicago police or it wasn't just J. Edgar Hoover, but there's also the whole complicity here.
- [36:06]
The aftermath to Hampton's assassination is they began.
- [36:13]
Black leaders in Chicago began demanding an independent investigation. This included the naacp, the Congress on Racial Equality, the American Jewish Committee. There was actually an Afro American.
- [36:27]
Patrolman's association who also joined in the call for.
- [36:32]
Independent investigation as well as the United Auto Workers. This after the assassination of Hampton, there's actually a lot of like what I would call like struggle and response from the community. Over 5,000 people attended Hampton's funeral. We saw protests in New York and Chicago from like new left groups. There were national mobilizations and support of the Chicago Black Panther Party. And then there was also national black leadership began to call for the, for an investigation which led to actually a tour of Hampton's apartment and.
- [37:09]
A large well attended town hall community members with black members of Congress which included like Adam Clayton Powell. Who was like a, who was the congressman from Harlem and who, you know, was a leader in the, in the, in the community at the time. They also, Bobby Rush, who's now a Congressman, who was also a co founder of the black, the Chicago Panthers with, with Hampton was actually arrested. And so when he turned, he negotiated with his lawyer to turn himself in and a crowd of 5,000 joined him when he went and turned himself in. And so this, this has led to a lot of stories over the last 50 years. There's actually a, a documentary from the early 70s called the The Murder of Fred Hampton which actually plays out the forensics and all the sort of facts and proofs that Hampton did not exchange gunfire, that he wasn't even awake and that the police, the Chicago Police cold blooded murdered him. The other part I want to just mention.
- [38:09]
I don't want to just mention, I want to talk about this with this, is that it wasn't just a Chicago Police Department operation. It wasn't just this special unit in the Chicago Police, the Race Matters.
- [38:23]
Unit, but it was also an FBI unit, an FBI operation. And so you know, the FBI had actually, through cointelpro, had actually used.
- [38:35]
A lot of tactics to foment division. They really did things like release racist cartoons designed to alienate white activists from the Black Panthers. They ran a whole disinformation campaign against the Rainbow Coalition. They actively fomented violence between the Black Panthers and other radical groups. And as well also in the period leading up to Hampton's death, we also saw firefights between the Chicago Panthers and the Chicago Police where there were deaths on both sides. And so there was a lot of violence being instigated by the FBI. And this is a story, the COINTEL story is something we can tell.
- [39:15]
C
In.
- [39:15]
B
A wider sort of way. I don't want to get into it too much, but it's like we can do a whole other episode on it and probably will or multiple episodes. But the one thing I'll say about the Chicago, about the Chicago Police FBI assassination of Fred Hampton is that, is that there was a burglary in Pennsylvania a few years after this where some anti war activists were actually able to steal a whole bunch of files which actually exposed cointelpro because up until then it was secret. And on the, on the Fred Hampton front they actually found in the files floor plans of Hampton's apartment and evidence of a deal brokered between the FBI and the Deputy Attorney General, someone from the Nixon Justice Department who actually they wanted to conceal the FBI's involvement because it would have been too scandalous, especially in the aftermath, especially with national attention being shown on the assassination of Hampton.
- [40:15]
The other thing I'll say is the legacy of Hampton is that he is still a cultural icon in Chicago. There's all through particularly black neighborhoods in Chicago, there's memorials to Hampton, there's statues, there's busts.
- [40:29]
And Hampton, just like kind of reading through the sort of cultural legacy, groups like Rage against the Machine, Gil Scott Heron, all basically sing in their music about Fred Hampton. Then I would also say in the last couple of decades and in the last decade in particular, as we've seen the sort of rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and.
- [40:52]
Radical militant movements in support of black lives, is that Fred Hampton is very much lifted up as a sort of figure to look towards and what the state did to him as well. And so it's. You know, that was 1969, when. December 4, 1969, when the Nixon administration conspired with the Chicago police to have him assassinated. And still today, when we look at Trump and we actually even look what happened during the Obama years, as we saw a lot of FBI activities trying to disrupt the, you know, these, you know, black liberation movements.
- [41:30]
D
And it's.
- [41:31]
B
It's ties very sadly, it ties very neatly in with, like, what we also see abroad.
- [41:41]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think we keep going back to this theme where the. The ruling class, the oligarchy, whatever you want to call it, will destroy anybody who seems to get in the way. And, you know, Hampton is kind of easier for them to villainize because he represents this Black Panther Party, which was considered a major domestic enemy. And.
- [42:07]
Black Panthers emerged in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, which was practice nonviolence, led by this Nobel Prize winner, Martin Luther King. And then you have this shift to black power and a Black Panther movement and these guys walking around in black leather and berets and carrying weapons. So, you know, the public made a very dramatic shift as well, so it was easier to turn them into kind of villains. But, you know, and you would think, well, you can't do that to four nuns. But in fact, in El Salvador, they did. And listen to what Gene Kirkpatrick said. I mean, it wasn't really significantly different than what people like Hanrahan were saying about the Black Panthers as well. I mean, the nuns were more like their dupes. But still, the idea there is that these nons were actually enemies of the regime there, a regime that was receiving all this support from the United States.
- [42:57]
D
So.
- [43:00]
C
I think sometimes we forget the role that Coercion and force and violence play and repressing dissent, because there's a lot of. The ruling class has countless strategies to do that. It has the media, it has culture, it has all kinds of things to do, but it also has violence. And we kind of saw that played out recently when the activists from Portland, Michael Reinhold, was killed, where federal agents just apparently walked up and just blew him away.
- [43:29]
And that was what they did to Fred Hampton. And that's what happened to the nuns in El Salvador. And so you have this really kind of casual approach to getting rid of people you consider problematic. You know, and whether it be in My Lai or Elma Sotte or wherever. Drone striking a wedding party in Pakistan. It's just kind of a casual way of approaching this. Like Fred Hampton or. And Mark Clark or any of the. I mean, I think something like 30 Black Panthers were killed during that period by federal agents or local police forces.
- [44:07]
B
Joint task force on the joint task force now. Yeah, but that's what it was then as well. You know, the other thing I would say is that the, you know, activist nuns in El Salvador or the Chicago Black Panthers represent this disruption to, you know, ruling class goals. And that is, you know, that is a response. I don't, I don't want to compare it to what we've seen like, you know, sectors of the ruling class saying about Trump, because I feel like it's very different. But, but anything that disrupts, you know, the bottom line, you know, stability.
- [44:47]
You bring. You bring liberation into the. Into the conversation, and they're going to. They're going to respond. It's like, you know, there's limits. Like, we're happy for people to, you know, get rights and be able to have jobs as long as they can buy our products. But if they start talking about, you know, true liberation or even, like, things like revolutionary socialism, something they're like, definitely, like, marked for. Marked by the ruling class and it's all its institutions.
- [45:14]
C
I mean, the nuns act. I mean, there were a threat, you know, I. Liberation theology was. Was a threat to. To America's interest in that region. You know, generally, the Catholic Church has never been a force for. For progress. You know, it's always been reactionary. But there was this moment, you know, especially in the 70s and into the early 80s, where in Latin America these priests began giving this preferential tribute to the. I mean, there were priests carrying guns. There were priests who were validly Marxist in some of these villages in El Salvador and Nicaragua. And like I said, Cardinal and Descotto were in the Cabinet, and. And, I mean, that was a force. The Vatican was upset, as upset as the US Government. Romero, who was very conservative by nature, was. Was chastised by John Paul II when he started to. And so Romero's was. Really came out of that Catholic activist tradition. Like when we talked about Dorothy Dayes, that same thing. Romero's wasn't a socialist or anything like that.
- [46:07]
D
Not at all.
- [46:08]
C
And they murdered him on the altar, which is really, you know, I mean, the symbolism of that is really staggering. And, you know, the US Just did nothing. And Kirkpatrick's words, you know. You know, they. You know, these women were acting on behalf of the Frente, and they tried to run a. They tried to run a blockade, and there was an exchange of gunfire. It's just unreal. It's staggering that they would do that. But.
- [46:35]
It was funny, when you were talking about. Even though she wasn't a political figure per se, I thought of Breonna Taylor when you talked about how they burst into Hampton's apartment, because that's all too frequent, but that's kind of what happened to Breonna Taylor. They just started shooting. And, you know, she wasn't necessarily targeted, but there was a casual. And I think that's the key thing here. There's just a casual indifference.
- [46:57]
D
They don't care.
- [46:59]
B
Absolutely.
- [47:04]
C
You talked about the legacy, too, I thought, you know, like, Mumia Abu Jamal joined the Black Panthers when he was like, a young teenager. And Geronimo Pratt, is he still in prison? He was a Black Panther leader. He wasn't released. I believe he was in, but he'd been in for 40 some years, you know, and the recent Chicago 7 film highlighted Bobby Seale and Hampton's role in that. And I think. And this would speak, I think, to your world a little more as an activist. You know, I'm struck by how many, like, young people, like this summer, during the rebellions in June especially, you know, there were just, like, these random people on the streets who were invoking Fred Hampton. And there were, you know, it was just stunning that, you know, 50 years later, that that meant something. That doesn't happen very often, especially on the left, because we try to suppress that. Right. History suppresses that. Intellectual suppress it. Professors suppress it. Politicians suppress it. Right. So to break through is really, really remarkable. And Hampton, really, I think, in your world, really still means a lot, doesn't he?
- [48:04]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I feel like. I hear. I actually feel like people quote and talk about Fred Hampton more than they do Bobby Seale. Or Huey Newton. Yeah.
- [48:16]
He definitely represents, first of all, he represents a shining light that was snuffed out too soon. But then he also represents this sort of like, you know, multiracial class based alliance which he was trying to build in Chicago and the Midwest, which, you know, definitely was a threat to.
- [48:41]
The ruling class and the FBI, et cetera. And.
- [48:48]
I think that really speaks to like, you know, a lot of people we saw in the streets this summer.
- [48:52]
D
It's not.
- [48:52]
B
It wasn't just like, just wasn't. It wasn't just like black activists. It was, you know, it was multiracial. It was multi generational as well.
- [48:59]
A
And.
- [49:00]
B
And I think Hampton, like, really sort of like symbolizes that in a lot of ways.
- [49:05]
C
Yeah, I think, I mean, the Black Panther leadership was. These guys had an ideology. They were sharp. They were able to kind of like, kind of explain this. But I think Hampton and Stokely Carmichael, Kwame Ture stood out for having kind of this more comprehensive, revolutionary idea. But I think the role of the state is really interesting here too, because like in Chicago, they use informants in El Salvador, the Guardia in Chalatenanga is keeping surveillance on these church women. So.
- [49:39]
The idea, like, now we have a lot of people, even on the left, we're saying, oh, Covid is ushered in a surveillance state. Man, that ship is passed. I mean, the technology is obviously way different today, but that's a constant throughout US History. And the state clearly infiltrated these groups. And the state doesn't hesitate to use people to divide these people in the case. I mean, and even, I mean, in El Salvador, it was kind of clear cut. You didn't have a whole lot of people defending, well, outside of the Reagan types defending what happened there. But there was also this sense that, you know, like from liberals, like, well, they shouldn't be there. You know, why were they there in the first place? And you heard that this summer, you know, like when police might pepper spray a 9 year old kid and people would say, well, why did they bring their kid to the protest? So there's still this kind of liberal tendency to say, you shouldn't be in that situation, so it's kind of your fault. And what struck me, like you mentioned Bobby Rush. Bobby Rush is horrible now. I mean, he's kind of this hacked Democrat. Look at Clyburn from South Carolina who said, defund the police is as bad as Burn baby, burn. And they're hurting themselves. So there's still this ability to get these liberals to act against you. And look at now, I mean, no one will, even the squad won't publicly really talk about like Venezuela or Bolivia or Cuba. If they do, it's in the most temperate, timid ways.
- [51:09]
B
That's why I brought in the anecdote about Cutner, about Lewis Louise Kutner, is that the liberal complicity in the, in state violence is, is there. And like, even though, you know, Adam Clayton Powell and, and, and other kind of more liberal leaning members of the establishment joined in, the outcry around Hampton's death is that there is liberal complicity in this. Whether it's they're allowing it to happen and they don't say anything or they say, or they say you should have been there in the first place. That sort of dad scolding sort of thing is like, I think that's like an important thing to kind of like.
- [51:51]
C
Recognize, you know, it's also, you know, I pointed out that, you know, that this kind of nostalgia for the old Republican Party, this Lincoln Project bs, you know, you know, shows, I mean, you know, in terms of foreign policy, Trump's not as bad as these guys were. But it also shows that there was a time when the Democrats had a little bit of, of spine. You know, in the aftermath of cointelpro, Frank Church and Otis pike conducted really major and fruitful investigations into what the CIA was doing, which would just utterly be impossible to do. I mean, look at the ridiculous, absurd Mueller investigation and the Ukraine impeachment. Those things were just insanely farcical. They were utterly politically impotent and pointless. Look at the Church committee stuff. It's striking. I mean, they did their work. And then I'll never Forget, in the 80s, you know, there was a real Democratic resistance to what Ray Reagan was doing in Central America. Jim Wright, who was the speaker of the House briefly, he got canned because of some kind of book deal that today nobody would care about. But he was on a Sunday talk show talking about the Sandinistas and they were pitching the whole, the whole theme of Central America in the 80s was that the Soviet Union and Castro and the Sandinistas were responsible for all this. Couldn't be these people. What would these people have to complain about? So it's outside forces which we hear all the time. And Jim Wright essentially said, well, you know, these people have been repressed for so long by people who the US Supports. Why wouldn't they have a revolution? Can you imagine Nancy Pelosi putting down her Dove bar and closing her $24,000 refrigerator door and taking off her kente cloth and saying that today.
- [53:37]
There was a time when there really was this kind of outcry. And this is one of the, I think the biggest problems we have with the left today.
- [53:44]
For what it's worth, I mean, I think what we saw this summer was inspiring with groups like Black Lives Matter and Antifa. But there's still this anti imperialism element of it, which I think was really prevalent for a long time, like in the 60s, into the 80s, and it kind of went away. And if you're going to have some kind of alternative movement to challenge this state, I think it has to take on both of these. It has to take on what happened to Friday Hampton and what happened to these nuns. They're the same thing. They're part of the two halves of the same walnut, as people used to say. And you can't talk about how horrible it was to kill this guy in his bed, Fred Hampton, or how horrible it was that they did to these poor nuns. They're the same. You can't just talk about one separate from the other. And as activists, I think that's important as well. The ruling class is organized transnationally. They're connected all over the globe. The American ruling class and the Salvadoran ruling class had interest, commercial interest, agricultural interest. The Salvadoran military was trained at Fort Benning, at the School of the Assassins. People have to have those same kinds of transnational alliances because their interests are far closer and more closely connected as well.
- [55:02]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, in a sense there's no international. There's no international solidarity movement. There's like small pockets where people talk about Iran or Venezuela or, or etc. But like we're, you know, maybe, maybe it was 9, 11, maybe it was something else. But definitely like there's like no appetite for that in like what we would say are left move. Like the left movements that we saw kind of grow up in the 2000 and tens, like the Occupy Ferguson, Sandy Rock movements. And those were important and those were powerful, sort of like moved steps forward.
- [55:40]
D
It's like.
- [55:41]
B
But we don't see that on the international front at all. There's no international solidarity.
- [55:46]
C
No, I mean, you know, if you study, for instance, the role of labor, you know, which is supposed to be a progressive force.
- [55:52]
D
Right.
- [55:53]
C
I did my MA thesis on this organized labor. The afl, the cio, the radical CIO was part of this too. Has always been. Cooperated closely.
- [56:06]
With the government, with the State Department and the Department of Defense. They used to joke that it was the afl, CIA. They supported the Cold War, they supported the Vietnam war. In the 80s, there were kind of unions that broke. There's a group called the American Institute for Free Labor Development, and they were actually active in Central America. But even the labor movement was divided on what was clearly a fairly easy situation to describe in El Salvador. There's not a lot of nuance there. You have this repressive state machinery. You have people like Dobison and Vidas Casanova who are killing. We kill nuns and we lie about it. I remember watching that speech and being struck by. By the power of it. And Cuomo is by no means a left icon, but that's a really moving speech, a really powerful speech. And for him to bring that up in those kind of stark terms and to get kind of response to it will stick with you. This was a national argument in the 80s, and I haven't really seen anything like that since. I mean, the Iraq war, there were elements in the early 2000s where the country was becoming very divided over Iraq. But.
- [57:19]
You know, the Central American and, you know, that falls in line with the long history there. Guatemala, you know, with the Arbenz coup. And I mean, the two, I think most important events leading up to the El Salvador civil war were obviously the coup in Guatemala in 1954 and then the Sandinista revolution. The United States had a major role in both. It engineered, it helped engineer the coup in Guatemala for united fruit and then in 1979, and most people aren't really aware of this. Jimmy Carter, who's done wonderful things since he's left the White House, was an American imperial war criminal president. And Carter did not want the Sandinistas to take over.
- [57:58]
The Americans kept putting conditions on aid to these various groups. The Sandinistas actually left a coalition they were part of before the revolution. Because of that, when it was clear the Sandinistas were going to win, Carter went to the Organization of American States to try to get them to create a coalition government and actually send in a military force to not allow the Sandinistas, the fsln, to take over.
- [58:23]
As the ruling regime. And then Carter actually authorized the first aid to.
- [58:30]
Opposition forces in Nicaragua, which eventually became the Contra. So, I mean, Carter's fingerprints are on the creation of, of the Contras and the mujahideen in Pakistan, which became Al Qaeda and the Taliban. So like you said before, there's a liberal element to all of this stuff as well. And these two events, I mean, it's a somber. I mean, you know, this is like, usually we banter and we have fun, but there's no way you can do that. These are so somber and just like going back and remembering the, the murders of these four church women. I actually met Donovan's parents some years ago. They were in Houston.
- [59:09]
Father Jerry Kelly, I forget what his church was in Houston, had them there and it was really powerful. I think one of the nuns brother is an attorney who's still been working on that. But I mean, to his credit, Obama did deport Garcia and Viz. Casanova and Robert White really stood out. I mean, you don't find many diplomats who will kind of do the right thing and White did. I mean, there's really no counterpoint. Although I was surprised when you mentioned that the Chicago African American policeman, you know, kind of, you know, stood up for Fred Hampton. I wasn't aware of that, so.
- [59:44]
B
And it did mention actually also a number of like Chicago aldermen as well, like five or six of them.
- [59:49]
C
Really. Yeah, I mean that's, you know, because they were part of the Daily Machine, you know, I mean, when you mentioned, I was thinking like, you know, it's not that much of a stretch to look at Daily and Dobie San in the same way, you know.
- [60:00]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
- [60:02]
You know, are there any final things that you want to say about this anniversaries this week?
- [60:08]
C
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's just bleak. But, you know, I don't think we can pretend this stuff doesn't happen and that it isn't real and that it's not still occurring today. And I mean, 2020 has shown that, you know, police, you know, I mean, you know what George Floyd was, you know, in many ways more horrific. Right. Because Floyd is just a bystander. He just by bad luck happened to be in the same space as, as, you know, Darren Chauvin and ended up with a knee on his neck for almost nine minutes. So, you know, just again, the casual nature. You bust into somebody's apartment and you shoot him 14 times or you, you run these nuns off the road and you brutalize them and then kill them. So I think we have to be aware that.
- [61:00]
Trump, as odious as he is, fits well into a framework that includes you can't find people, I think, more different personally, more ex presidents, more different than like Carter and Trump. But as presidents, they're kind of working the same game. And I think you would say the same thing about, you know, a guy who was active in the Amnesty International creation and Anrahan and Daley, you know.
- [61:31]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that's an important thing, is that there's a framework and they all work within that framework, whether they're nice people who go build houses for homeless people, or whether they're billionaire reality TV stars who don't care about themselves.
- [61:51]
C
It also speaks one last thing, because I was thinking about this when we were talking, because in the 60s and 70s, especially with regard to the Vietnam War, there were these concepts that were really talked and discussed a lot called either revolutionary violence or revolutionary morality. I think that the left is often caught up into this, and this kind of comes from the Martin Luther King, Malcolm X dynamic as well, where it has to denounce any group that is not acting in what it considers the proper way. And I know, like a lot of people, you know, would denounce the military, but then they would obviously denounce the FMLN as well. And they would say, like I said earlier, the Civil War killed 80,000 people. The government killed probably 70 or 75,000 of those people. And so I think that that issue of revolutionary morality is really important there because not everybody has the same standards and is in the same dynamic. And so what the Black Panthers were doing, and notice they were called the Black Panther Party for Self defense, is very different. I think the left and liberals have to understand that too, that you can't have these blanket denunciations of people who are living in these incredibly dire and terrifying and dangerous circumstances. And so, you know, in El Salvador and in Chicago and in Louisville and in Minneapolis and Portland, Charlottesville, Charlottesville, there are some really ugly, violent right wing groups out there. And we can't just say, you have to.
- [63:26]
You know what I mean?
- [63:27]
B
So Trump's comments after Charlottesville, after the murder of Heather Hires, where he's like, there's good people on both sides talking about anti fascists and fascists is like that false equivalent after Michael, I mean.
- [63:40]
C
He was giddy after Michael Reinhold was just ambushed and killed by my federal agents rather than without any warning. So, yeah, I think people have to understand the nature of violence and not all violence, not all violence. I mean, people in those movements will say this isn't really violence. But I think there is this kind of concept of revolutionary morality that we have to kind of contemplate as well, because, you know, Trump will be gone, but the problems aren't going away. I mean, the circumstances, the conditions aren't changing really at all.
- [64:11]
D
So.
- [64:12]
C
But I hope people, you know, kind of think about this and, you know, contemplate it a little bit. It's somber, it's bleak, it's terrifying. But it's reality and we ignore it at our own peril.
- [64:24]
B
So, hey, folks, you've been listening to the Green and Red podcast with Scott Parkin and Bob Bozenko talking about repression abroad, the history of repression abroad, and the history of repression at home on this, you know, somber anniversary of December 2nd and December 4th. If you want to follow us, please, on social media, please go to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Just do a search for Green, Red podcasts and you'll find us. We're also on YouTube. Please go to our YouTube page and hit subscribe. And if you want to become a donor, go to our patreon page@patreon.com greenredpodcast.
- [65:06]
And then if you want to just make a one time donation, go to our website@greenandredpodcast.org it's been good talking to you. Hope everyone is doing well.
- [65:17]
D
Thank.
- [65:42]
B
You.