Comments by "MarcosElMalo2" (@MarcosElMalo2) on "James Ker-Lindsay" channel.

  1.  @JamesKerLindsay  He’s confusing the Contras of Salvador (anti-revolutionary, anti-communist) with the Sandinistas of Nicaragua (revolutionary, communist). Major face palm. It was the CIA that was using Panama (and to a lesser extent Costa Rica) as a base to support brutal anti-communist dictators in Central America. The Soviets used Cuba as their staging area to smuggle weapons, and they used Cuban agents to subvert what were originally nationalist movements. I think we should also keep in mind the Cold War Context. The U.S. wasn’t just effing around for the sake of effing around. The policies might have been bad, but there was a serious reason for them.
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  2. I’m pretty sure (99.9999%) that Trump is just trying to get people to talk about him. Same with his talk about buying Greenland. There are no plans to do either one. Sadly, it works. Trump is the President-Elect and we can’t ignore his words, even if we know it’s just a lot of talk. Nor can we forget the effect his words have on the world stage. We’ve elected a world class a-hole with a limited capacity to control his impulses to say whatever comes into his head, and who is incapable of telling the truth, because eggs were too expensive.
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  3.  @maxb4074  How else do you suppose it would be accomplished? I’m not at all saying it’s a serious threat, but it’s absolutely an implied threat. I think there are two things going in here. Primarily Trump is playing domestic politics, trying to stay on the “front page” of the news and to keep his nutcase base of support happy with bellicose rhetoric. The second thing Trump is trying to accomplish with his aggressive talk is posturing in advance of negotiations. This sometimes can work, but the problem is if someone calls your bluff.
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  4. I think you’ve got a big gap in your knowledge with what you said about the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. What you must be thinking of is Panama being used as a staging area for support to the Contras, the paramilitary organization(s) in El Salvador fighting against the rebels there (who were mainly terrorizing the populace). The U.S. didn’t support the Sandinistas. The Soviets were able to support the various Central American insurgencies, usually channeling their limited efforts through Cuba, not Panama. Incidentally, the Sandinistas did conduct fair elections, at least the first time around, and the Nicaraguan people elected Victoria Chamorra, who was a pro-Western conservative. I’ll give the Sandinistas full credit for that. Unfortunately, the Sandinistas themselves suffered a split between the nationalist faction and the corrupt socialist faction that was led by Ortega. Ortega has been a disaster for Nicaragua on the whole, but it should be stated that Nicaragua has fared better than Salvador or Honduras over the past 30 years. Most of the immigrants fleeing Central America are from those countries with very few fleeing Nicaragua. As a side notice, it’s illuminating to note that the current border “crisis” on the U.S. Mexico border is largely due to U.S. policies in Central America during the Cold War. This is what is known as blowback, the unforeseen long term consequences to poorly thought out strategies. Still, in fairness to the U.S., it was acting during the Cold War and in response to Soviet shenanigans in Latin America.
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  5. Noriega used his status as CIA agent to protect his criminal empire. He convinced the CIA and the U.S. government to look the other way until the first George Bush couldn’t ignore the problem anymore. By that time it would be fair to say that Noriega had gone rogue.
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