| Submit your comments on this article |
| Iraq-Jordan |
| Troops to stay in Iraq, El Salvador tells U.S. |
| 2004-11-13 |
| BRAVO! El Salvador assured U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday it will keep its elite troops in Iraq, where it is Washington's only Latin American ally. El Salvador has 380 special-forces soldiers serving in Iraq, and although the contingent is fairly small, it has real symbolic value for the Bush administration because the Iraq war is deeply unpopular across most of Latin America. U.S. officials have repeatedly paid tribute to Salvadoran President Tony Saca's conservative government, and Mr. Rumsfeld visited the country this week to reinforce the close alliance. Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic sent troops to Iraq but later withdrew them. El Salvador has held firm despite being threatened with retaliation by Islamic militant groups. "You can be sure that Salvadoran soldiers will continue to serve just causes in whatever part of the world humanity requires them," Defence Minister General Otto Romero said yesterday. Mr. Rumsfeld was to travel to Nicaragua yesterday, where he was to push for the destruction of about 2,000 shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles used by the former Marxist government during a civil war against U.S.-backed rebels in the 1980s. In El Salvador, Mr. Rumsfeld met with Mr. Saca and Mr. Romero. At a national commando school, he presented U.S. military Bronze Star medals for valour to six Salvadoran soldiers. On March 5, they saved the lives of six U.S. members of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the body that preceded Iraq's interim government, when a convoy from Baghdad to the city of Najaf came under attack from heavily armed insurgents. The Salvadorans fought their way through the attack. "They risked their lives so that others might live, and so that a people long brutalized might live in freedom," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "It is an honour for me, and it shows we are capable of fulfilling any mission given to us. We have warrior roots," said Lieutenant Carlitos Enrique Echeverria, one of the Salvadoran commandos awarded a Bronze Star. The United States backed a series of right-wing governments with heavy military aid during El Salvador's civil war against guerrillas in the 1980s, when Central America was a Cold War battleground. Washington aided Contra rebels fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua during the same period. Although Nicaragua's civil war ended in 1990 and it has been run by conservative governments since then, it still has about 2,000 anti-aircraft missiles that were sent to the Sandinistas by Cuba and the Soviet Union. Washington now wants them destroyed, and Mr. Rumsfeld was to push the issue in Nicaragua. |
| Posted by:Mark Espinola |
| #2 Interesting point. Since in the 80s he was on the side of the left wing terrorists and the communist government of Nicaragua (including visiting Ortega), I suspect relations would be a little cool. |
| Posted by: jackal 2004-11-13 7:51:27 PM |
| #1 What they would have told Kerry's SecDef? |
| Posted by: Mrs. Davis 2004-11-13 8:14:45 AM |