Created: Los Angeles Collective, 1960s
Medium: Paper Mâché Puppet
Dimensions: 10′ tall
Looking back through our posters, government documents, and books written about President’s Reagan’s legacy, “making war” defined his Presidency. He propagated war, political repression, death squads in in Central America, Chile, and Argentina where US backed dictators murdered their citizens with impunity. Nowhere was more pain and death inflicted than in Central America. Rejecting overtures by the Sandinistas to normalize their government’s relationship with the US in the early 1980s, he chose to fund a 10-year war that caused an estimated 20,000 deaths, mostly civilians. In El Salvador, despite the murderous nature of the military dictatorship, Reagan poured in money, weapons, military advisers, and the CIA to help it wage war against the FSLN. In the process, he provided training to one of the deadliest death squads ever seen in Latin America, the Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran Army.
Image: Photograph of a paper mâché street puppet in a Los Angeles demonstration against President Reagan’s orchestration of the wars in Central America.
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