Similar atrocities occurred in neighboring El Salvador, where US trained troops stabbed de-capitated, raped and machine gunned 767 civilians in the village of El Mozote in late 1981, including 358 children under age 13. Congress ended up funneling almost $6 billion to this tiny country making it the largest recipient of US foreign aid per capita in the world. Wealthy landlords were running the right-wing death squads that murdered thousands of suspected leftists. The death toll from the war reached 70,000.
Reagan defended the covert war by saying in 1984: The Nicaraguan people are trapped in a totalitarian dungeon by a dictatorship made all the more dangerous by the unwanted presence of thousands of Cuban, Soviet block and radical Arab helpers. He went so far as to call the Contras the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. His moral equivalence were responsible for most of the deaths of the 20 to 30,000 Nicaraguan civilians during the war.
US troops invaded Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island with 100,000 inhabitants. Reagan claimed it was a Soviet-Cuban colony being readied as a major military bastion to export terror and undermine democracy. As in one of his old Westerns, he sent 7,000 american soldiers into battle. Then in media, supposedly for their own safety, he offered government footage instead. The entire op was bungled from the start. 19 soldiers died and more than 100 were wounded, as a small force of poorly armed Cuban construction workers resisted. 9 helicopters were lost. The invasion from a military POV was a farce.
Appreciating Gorbachev's extraordinary effort, the leading Soviet expert on US warned his American counterparts: We will do the most horrible thing to you. We will leave you without an enemy. Unfortunately, he was wrong.
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