MILITARY AID OR KILLER DEAL: U.S. WEAPONS TRADE AND MILITARY TRAINING IN THE CARIBBEAN, 1790 - 2001 Guest Speaker: Dr. Humberto Garcia Muñiz

DANGER TO DEMOCRACY

This is the conclusion of the lecture. If you see, the blue ones are the grants, the donations. The red are the sales on credit and on cash or the direct sales, You could see in the 50¹s the grants dominated. Œ60 to Œ69 the grants dominated--it is the period of counter-insurgency. They gave training, weapons -- whatever. As this thread disappears the sales started. The Vietnam period -- remember I mentioned the cost--the sales started. And you see the sales going up and the grants going down And this is today. You will probably see this go up in the coming years. But the surprising thing is the countries are purchasing too. So they seem to be....My conclusion in reality is that if you give equipment, training, money to these armies -- the U.S. Its policy usually is to give this while it has a threat -- a threat in the U.S. not the islands. When the threat disappears, the money disappears, the support , so you have the country left with a huge army, with weapons it has to maintain and which is a danger to its democracy.

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