By Steve Smith

WASHINGTON, March 9 (IslamOnline) - By supporting repressive and authoritarian regimes, the U.S. risks the same mistakes it made in Latin America during the Cold War with the former Soviet Union, says a long-time critic of the U.S. policy in Latin America.

''We keep having a nagging feeling that we've been here before,'' said Joy Olson, director of the Latin American Working Group (LAWG), which on Friday released a report arguing that as in Latin America, human rights already are being given a lower priority as Washington strikes new alliances with authoritarian governments and provides increasing training and arms to their military.

The Latin America Working Group (LAWG) is a coalition of over sixty religious, human rights, policy, grassroots and development organizations. Since 1983, the coalition has been striving for U.S. policies that promote peace, justice and sustainable development in the region, thought to be the monopoly of the U.S. foreign policy.

The United States' maintains a complex military relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean with dozens of programs and activities that the U.S. government carries out with the Western Hemisphere's security forces, such as arms transfers, training programs, exercises, deployments, counter-narcotics operations and military bases.

''It also doesn't give us confidence that some of the same players are in place in this administration as in the government which committed clear mistakes during the Cold War,'' Olson adds.

Oslon refers to U.S. officials who also occupied senior posts in the administration of former conservative, and sometimes hard-line, President Ronald Reagan. ''We have more confidence in Congress.''

The new report, entitled "We will be Known by the Company We Keep", introduces eight lessons that Washington should have learned from its Cold War knowledge in Latin America and could now apply to what it now calls its anti-terrorist war.

It is important to steer clear of backing oppressive regimes. ''People keep asking why the United States is hated abroad,'' the report says. ''Part of the answer lies in the company it has kept.''

LAWG is not the first to note the similarities between Washington's Cold War friendships and its global anti- terrorist endeavor that Bush says will shape his administration's relationships with other countries. ''Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists,'' he said in the first days of the campaign.

''What we've seen is a real paradigm shift in foreign policy in which the central organizing principle will be the effort against terrorism,'' says Thomas Donilon, then chief of staff to former Secretary of State Warren Christopher.

New military training deals have been launched or expanded for armies in Ethiopia Djibouti, Eritrea and Oman while the Pentagon has provided new military equipment and other support to several Central Asian states and Pakistan.

The Pentagon is also looking into requests from India, and Algeria, among others, to buy weapons and from Nepal to help its government in a long-standing civil war with self-described Maoist rebels.

The U.S. has taken fresh responsibilities has creating edginess in some circles, including the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which caution against forging intimate ties with offensive states, dictators and human rights violators.

In a resonance to LAWG's logic, the libertarian Washington-based think tank Cato Institute warned of comparable threats.

''If the United States has the same kind of tunnel vision about terrorism that it had about the fight against communism during the Cold War, it could be blindsided by disastrous unintended consequences," wrote Cato's senior defense policy analyst, Charles Pena, last December.

"Alliances with corrupt and repressive governments could do more to breed terrorism than to prevent it.''

Hugh Byrne, author of the LAWG report, agrees. ''What we learned from the U.S. experience in Latin America during the Cold War was, ''when there is one overriding goal, dangerous foreign-policy tunnel vision can develop.''

The consequence in Latin America, he says, was that Washington resisted ''all democratic movements for change as a Trojan Horse for communism.''

The report includes case studies of Washington's policy toward Chile and Guatemala, where Washington helped bed in military governments, which had removed democratically elected, reformist governments; El Salvador, where it provided gigantic help to an abusive military to preclude a guerrilla triumph; and Nicaragua, where it engaged in a clandestine war to eliminate the Sandinista government.

''What can be said is that U.S. policies had a substantial cost,'' states the report. ''They identified this country with dictatorship and repression, with corrupt regimes, and massive human rights violations.''

''Training military and police forces that would carry out massacres and death squad killings and organizing the intelligence services that would co-ordinate this violence contributed to enormous suffering; hundreds of thousands of lives were lost; people lived for decades under despotic regimes, with an unquantifiable human cost in freedom denied to millions of people,'' the report says.

Similar policies were applied outside Latin America, particularly in Africa, during the same period, it adds.