"That government was also set up by the Empire"

When Herod understood that the wise men had tricked him he got very furious and he ordered the slaughter of every child two years or under who lived in and around Bethlehem. 

A girl said:  "The same thing happened up north when Catalino appeared:  Since they didn't know him well or even which one he was, they killed all the farmers around there."

Old THOMAS PENA:  "Herod ordered the kids killed since he wanted to reign forever and didn't want a liberator.  Of course, when he heard 'There was a king'  he said: 'There's no king but me, I better kill him.'  And then he tried to figure how to kill him,  but as Jesus Christ was more powerful than he was, he couldn't kill him."

Young OSCAR:  "That Herod was a coward.  It was because he was a coward that he committed all those murders.  A lousy coward."

Young ALEJANDRO:  "It's the same thing nowadays:  As soon as they see the first signs of anything new, they get scared and begin to murder, as happened with this child.  It's because these people are cowards,  and it's cowardice that makes them kill defenseless people like Herod who didn't kill armed soldiers but poor children."  

A Protestant who had come from the coast opposite:  "They persecuted Jesus, but he wasn't in opposition to any government."

FELIPE:  "He came as the king of the Jews.  What more opposition do you want?"

Another young man:  "Herod, of course that millionaire, with his power he had everybody crushed.  And the same thing happens here and in other places, wherever they're screwing the people.  The innocent.  Because the ones they're killing are the innocent, the ones who are dying, like that boy in the mountains up north. In all these cases they're killing the child that they don't want to see grow up.  Back then something like that occurred.  Herod was the Somoza of that region,  and when he heard that that child had been born, he went after all the children.  As soon as they glimpse a sprig of liberation anywhere, they do what Herod did."

LAUREANO:  "And not only that, because Herod killed them after they were born;  now they kill them before they're born with all their famous Family  Planning;  they kill the children before they're born for fear that later there'll be a people that they won't be able to control." 

I said that was very true, and that there are clinics set up through the country where they sterilize women without their consent.  This is a campaign that the United States is waging throughout Latin America.  They have population experts throughout Latin America, in charge of seeing that the population doesn't increase.  President Johnson once said in a speech that bringing up a Latin American cost the United States two hundred dollars, while stopping him from being born cost only five dollars.  And as an economist has said:  If births decrease, funds for investment will increase.

Another young man:  "Herod was less cruel than these people."

WILLIAM:  "That government was also set up by the Empire."

I said that in fact Herod had been put in power by the Roman intervention, and Rome allowed him to call himself "king,"  although he had very little power.  I said also that this slaughter of the innocents, although it seems unlikely, was not so in the case of Herod who slaughtered many families, and even his own children and his favorite wife.  An historian of the period says that his anger was boundless.  And it is said that he tried to arrange on the day of his death children would be slaughtered in Jerusalem so that there would be lots of mourning.  The slaughter of children in a village, that could have been like our little town of Belen, in Rivas, or like Colon, or San Miguelito (there were probably not many children),  it wouldn't be a cruelty very worthy of attention for historians, especially if Herod was involved.  But those children under two years of age in that village (there might have been twenty of them) represent all the innocents that have died for the cause of Jesus, for liberation, in the whole world. 

It is impressive how many things about this in 1972 are relevant to 2018, how many of the things they said about Herod they could say about Trump, though then there was no complication of the American administration being vassals of the Putin regime or the other regimes that Trump and his gangsters have sold out the United States to.

It's also instructive to see how, from the point of view of these recipients of North American wisdom in the form of family planning, out of their wider experience of North American foreign and military policy saw that as part of the same thing.  How Lyndon Johnson's appealing to the monetary interests of American tax-payers sounds a lot different to people who have every right to consider it to mean that Americans could save $195 if they had prevented them from being born.  Especially as the American government was financing and sponsoring their slaughter, their enslavement, maintaining a school to train Central American terrorists to carry out that economically advantageous slaughter.  Americans might miss such things said by American presidents, swamped in the news stream and entertainment that swamps us, the people who American presidents say such things about hear it and pay attention, knowing it could very easily become their reality, especially in small countries where people have brown skin.

Who can blame them for being skeptical of the motives of those American sponsored programs?  It reminds me of the problems the CIA cause for the program of  trying to eradicate polio when they decided to use a vaccination campaign as cover in the hunt for Osama bin Ladin.