I was listening to some talk-radio show early yesterday morning (yeah, my headaches are my own fault, I know), and the host was going on and on about some human rights atrocities that prompted the US invasion of Grenada.
Specifically, he said some story about how a number of people were executed and then others were forced to bury the dead (and many who survived) in a trench. Then he went on about how liars in the media distorted the image of the invasion.
Then there was a nice segway into how happy he would be when the generation of ‘flower power’ and the 1960s dies. Happy stuff for your morning commute :rolleyes: . I can’t trust anyone with that big a chip on their shoulder.
I’m wondering: Were there human rights atrocities that took place in Grenada before the US invasion, and what sort of atrocities were there?
I was 20 when the US invaded Grenada and I don’t recall any claims being made about atrocities. The justification for the attacks was that the Grenadan government was supposedly threatening to hold some American college students in captivity and that Cuban troops were in the country.
You can read the Wikipedia article about the Grenada invasion here. Your friendly neighbourhood talk show host might have been referring to the execution of the Soviet-friendly but still pro-free enterprise Maurice Bishop and seven of his supporters by the supporters of the more dogmatically Marxist Bernard Coard, as part of the coup that was the primary impetus for the U.S. invasion. I haven’t been able to corroborate any stories of burying the dead in a trench, but then I haven’t looked very hard either.
Sounds like he was talking about the massacre at Ft. Rupert; thanks for the info and links!
…It appears not to have been used as a human rights reason for the invasion by Reagan; the sites I’ve visited seem to say he used the presence of American medical students and security risk of the Cuban-built airport as justification.
Humorous note: I once worked for a man who was involved in some delicate “media ops” in grenada. Specifically, they “borrowed” a popular DJ and had him do his radio show as normal, thus fooling a great many people into thinking things were normal, and avoiding a massive crush of panicked civvies.
I remember Clint Eastwood played a gruff sergent character in some 80’s movie where he snuff’s a wounded Cuban soldier. There was a 30 second media spate about the war-crime being committed on film (Eastwood seems to like to inject an odd anti-social scenes in his films–*Million Dollar Baby * is another one). But that’s about the extent of American attrocities on Grenada that I’m aware of…
My offtopic anecdote is that I grew up in the LA suburb of Granada Hills and when I was in college, during the invasion people on my dorm floor came by and asked me if my parents were safe.
I remember it as if it were yesterday. That’s exactly what the rationale was. On a strategic basis, it was a rollback of the Soviet’s sphere of influence, and served notice on Moscow that the U.S. would not stand by while it’s backyard was overrun with Marxist states at the point of a gun. But yes, the casus belli for the invasion was the protection of the medical students and the construction of a runway large enough to land Soviet heavy airlift. Grenada was basically about the violent coup of a country by Marxists with the support of Cuba (back when Cuba had power), and U.S. refusal to let that stand.
It was a little late to worry about Marxists taking over Grenada. They’d been there since 1979. The 1983 coup led by Deputy Prime Minister Coard to overthrow Prime Minster Bishop replaced one pro-Soviet pro-Cuban Marxist government with another. Kind of a “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”
Hey let’s name names, it was Lee Rodgers on KSFO 560 AM San Francisco.
He used to be more libertarian sounding in his phone-in show days. I think caller quality started diminishing in the '90s, he must have agreed with me cause he gave up callers and got a sidekick.
I may be wrong about this (it happened when I was 2) but wasn’t the “new boss” rather shockingly violent? The odl ones were pro-Soviet, but hasn’t really been bastards in the same way that some of the others Commies were. The new guy was basically killing everyone who might be a threat.
The new guy killed the guy he deposed and a handful of that guy’s staff (as already noted in prior posts). The students were never in danger (and the Reagan administration never even petitioned Grenada to allow the students to leave, most of whom reported that they were not aware of any danger until they saw bunches of U.S. troops waving M-16s.
(While not justified by anything more than a desire to let the U.S. beat its chest, it should be pointed out that it was not a direct attempt to bury the news of the Beirut Marines barracks bombing which took place only two days earlier. The planning (such as there was) for the Grenada invasion obviously began much earlier.)
As I recall, the old guy was a socialist with Marxist leanings, but Grenada stayed rather independent under him. The new guy ‘invited’ the cuban military onto the island, started building defensive hard points and machine gun emplacements and anti-aircraft missiles, etc. It looked like Cuba II was brewing. And that was intolerable to U.S. interests.
Bishop, “the old guy” was a Cuban ally and it was he who had invited the Cubans in to build an airfield (the construction began seven months before the Coard coup). The Cuban military presense in Grenada consisted of 43 people. If they had really been aiming to take 600 American students hostage, they’d have had their hands full.
The reality is that Grenada had a government that was unfriendly to the United States. But while we didn’t like each other, we did recognize Bishop’s regime as the legitimate government. When Coard overthrew Bishop and executed him, there was no serious change in the political climate, but it gave the United States a window to step in and overthrow an “illegitimate” regime.
Cite? There were something like 700 Cuban ‘construction workers’ there, who happened to be armed and fought under control of 53 Cuban military ‘advisors’. It’s also believed that there was a unit of Soviet Spetznaz special forces on the island. In addition, the PRA of Grenada had 1200 to 1500 soldiers, and another 3,000 were drafted into the militia.
When the U.S. won the conflict, it was spun by the left as being a trivial exercise, but in fact the U.S. faced pretty severe resistance. 19 Americans were killed and a larger number wounded. In fact, early resistance was so strong that the invasion was almost called off. When the C-130’s came in to drop rangers on the airfield, they found that the ‘construction workers’ were trained to operate AAA guns, and they put up a pretty good barrage. When Point Salinas was taken, the Americans captured 200 Cubans and a large cache of weapons.
The same cite also says that one of the major security threats to the U.S. was the fact that Grenada would have put Cuba’s MiG-23’s within range of Trinidad and Venezuela, both which have significant oil reserves. Grenada, with its runway big enough for Soviet heavy airlift, would have been a significant security threat to the U.S. and other countries in the region.
784 Cubans, including 636 construction workers and 43 military personnel
49 Soviets
24 North Koreans
16 East Germans
14 Bulgarians
3 or 4 Libyans
They also place the Grenadan military strength at 1200.
I’m going to assume they’re correct that most of the Cubans who were present were indeed construction workers - they were after all in Grenada to build an airbase and construction workers are usually more useful for that kind of thing than infantrymen are.
Sam, it’s Grenada. Where exactly would you expect to find the Grenadan Army?
And finally, I’ll point out that Grenada is a sovereign nation and there’s no reason they can’t have Cuban and Soviet troops in their country if they want to. They could have joined the Warsaw Pact and had an entire Front of the Red Army stationed there if they had wanted to. It would have sucked but that’s international law for you.
I wasn’t suggesting that the Grenadan army should be anywhere else, I was just pointing out that the U.S. didn’t face just token resistance. It was a pretty good fight.
As for the construction workers, I always assumed that they were basically dual-use personnel - military personal trained in construction, kind of like the U.S. Seabees. After all, they were armed, and knew how to use heavy equipment like AAA. The ‘advisors’ were probably regular army unit commanders and specialists.
Getting into GD territory here, where we’ve been before on this, but the difficulty of the first few days of fighting for the US just conceivably have had more to do with the haste and lack of preparation of the operation than the fierce fighting qualities of the typical Cuban construction worker. The reason for such haste might well have been what looks for all the world like a dog-wag. tomndebb points out that the operation had been contemplated for a while, but there is no evidence of a planned date or a Go decision prior to the Beirut bombing just 48 hours earlier. There are plans for the invasion of Canada on the shelf, too. One would like to think that a serious plan would have included just a modicum of intelligence about the facts on the ground, too - it wasn’t that hard to contact the medical students, was it?
The runway was completed afterward, using *US taxpayer * dollars instead, and now serves the local tourist industry, according to its apparent original primary planned use. Yes, it is physically possible that Soviet bombers could have used it, but that’s true of a lot of airports.
