Amidst the Trump administration’s shameless venality, vulgarity and viciously reactionary policies, many liberals on both sides of the Atlantic seem to view the Reagan-Bush years through rose-tinted spectacles. To his credit, Godfrey Hodgson’s obituary of the elder George Bush (Obituary, 3 December) provides a salutary reminder of some of the ugly realities of the time including the notorious “Willie Horton ad” from Bush’s 1988 presidential election campaign, an example of dog-whistle racism, which surely anticipated Trump’s appeal.
Curiously, however, the obituary omits mention of a particularly horrific feature of Bush’s time at the helm of the CIA. While Operation Condor, a clandestine initiative that unfolded over two decades across most of Latin America, predated Bush’s arrival, it was certainly at its bloodiest during his tenure in the mid-1970s. The US covertly poured millions into helping regimes including Pinochet’s Chile, the Argentinian junta, and military dictatorships in Brazil and Paraguay deal with “political dissent”. Credible estimates suggest that 60,000-80,000 leftists, trade union and peasant leaders, and human rights activists perished, while more than 400,000 others wound up as political prisoners across these and other countries in the region.
Simply business as usual for a patrician gentleman?
George Binette
London
• So George Bush Sr’s dubiously heroic war experience made him work for peace (‘A different command’: how George HW Bush’s war shaped his work for peace, theguardian.com, 2 December)? How can you call his years as CIA director and president suppressing popular uprisings abroad, supporting virulent regimes, and launching an imperialist war, which reverberates to this day, “working for peace”? And how peaceful was it to drum up white racist fear at home in order to beat his Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis?
Carole Ashley
New York, USA
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition
