The Kennedy-Yarborough strategy

"Every individual who in one or another manner supports the goals of the enemy must be considered a traitor and treated in that manner," a 1963 military manual prescribed, as the Kennedy initiatives were moving into high gear. Since the official goals of the guerrillas are social democratic, the circle of treachery targeted for terror operations is wide. In the years that followed, the Kennedy-Yarborough strategy was developed and applied broadly in "our little region over here," as the Western hemisphere was described by FDR's Secretary of War Henry Stimson when he was explaining why the US was entitled to control its own regional system while all others were to be dismantled. Violent repression spread throughout Latin America, beginning in the southern cone and reaching its awesome peak in Central America in the 1980s as the stern disciplinarian of the North responded with extreme violence to efforts by the Church and other "subversives" to confront a terrible legacy of misery and repression.