37. GUATEMALA 1962 to 1980s
A less publicized "final solution"
Indians tell harrowing stories of village raids in which
their homes have been burned, men tortured hideously and
killed, women raped, and scarce crops destroyed. It is
Guatemala's final solution to insurgency: only mass
slaughter of the Indians will prevent them joining a mass
uprising.{1}
This newspaper item appeared in 1983. Very similar stories have
appeared many times in the world press since 1966, for
Guatemala's "final solution" has been going on rather longer than
the more publicized one of the Nazis.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the misery of the
mainly-Indian peasants and urban poor of Guatemala who make up
three-quarters of the population of this beautiful land so
favored by American tourists. The particulars of their existence
derived from the literature of this period sketch a caricature of
human life. In a climate where everything grows, very few escape
the daily ache of hunger or the progressive malnutrition ...
almost half the children die before the age of five ... the
leading cause of death in the country is gastro-enteritis.
Highly toxic pesticides sprayed indiscriminately by airplanes, at
times directly onto the heads of peasants, leave a trail of
poisoning and death ... public health services in rural areas are
virtually non-existent ... the same for public education ...
near-total illiteracy. A few hundred families possess almost all
the arable land ... thousands of families without land, without
work, jammed together in communities of cardboard and tin houses,
with no running water or electricity, a sea of mud during the
rainy season, sharing their bathing and toilet with the animal
kingdom. Men on coffee plantations earning 20 cents or 50 cents
a day, living in circumstances closely resembling concentration
camps ... looked upon by other Guatemalans more as beasts of
burden than humans. A large plantation to sell, reads the
advertisement, "with 200 hectares and 300 Indians" ... this, then
was what remained of the ancient Mayas, whom the American
archeologist Sylvanus Morely had called the most splendid
indigenous people on the planet.{2}
The worst was yet to come.
We have seen how, in 1954, Guatemala's last reform
government, the legally-elected regime of Jacobo Arbenz, was
overthrown by the United States. And how, in 1960, nationalist
elements of the Guatemalan military who were committed to
slightly opening the door to change were summarily crushed by the
CIA. Before long, the ever-accumulating discontent again issued
forth in a desperate lunge for alleviation -- this time in the
form of a guerrilla movement -- only to be thrown back by a
Guatemalan-American operation reminiscent of the Spanish
conquistadores in its barbarity.
In the early years of the 1960s, the guerilla movement, with
several military officers of the abortive 1960 uprising prominent
amongst the leadership, was slowly finding its way: organizing
peasant support in the countryside, attacking an army outpost to
gather arms, staging a kidnapping or bank robbery to raise money,
trying to avoid direct armed clashes with the Guatemalan
military.
Recruitment amongst the peasants was painfully slow and
difficult; people so drained by the daily struggle to remain
alive have little left from which to draw courage; people so
downtrodden scarcely believe they have the right to resist, much
less can they entertain thoughts of success; as fervent
Catholics, they tend to believe that their misery is a punishment
from God for sinning.
Some of the guerrilla leaders flirted with Communist Party
and Trotskyist ideas and groups, falling prey to the usual
factional splits and arguments. Eventually, no ideology or
sentiment dominated the movement more than a commitment to the
desperately needed program of land reform aborted by the 1954
coup, a simple desire for a more equitable society, and
nationalist pride vis-ˆ-vis the United States. New
York Times, correspondent Alan Howard, after interviewing
guerrilla leader Luis Turcios, wrote:
Though he has suddenly found himself in a position of
political leadership, Turcios is essentially a soldier
fighting for a new code of honor. If he has an alter
ego, it would not be Lenin or Mao or even Castro, whose
works he has read and admires, but Augusto Sandino, the
Nicaraguan general who fought the U.S. Marines sent to
Nicaragua during the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations.{3}
In March 1962, thousands of demonstrators took to the
streets in protest against the economic policies, the deep-rooted
corruption, and the electoral fraud of the government of General
Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes. Initiated by students, the
demonstrations soon picked up support from worker and peasant
groups. Police and military forces eventually broke the back of
the protests, but not before a series of violent confrontations
and a general strike had taken place.
The American military mission in Guatemala, permanently
stationed there, saw and heard in this, as in the burgeoning
guerrilla movement, only the omnipresent "communist threat". As
US military equipment flowed in, American advisers began to prod
a less-alarmed and less-than-aggressive Guatemalan army to take
appropriate measures. In May the United States established a
base designed specifically for counter-insurgency training. (The
Pentagon prefers the term "counter-insurgency" to
"counter-revolutionary" because of the latter's awkward
implications.) Set up in the northeast province of Izabal,
which, together with adjacent Zacapa province, constituted the area of
heaviest guerrilla support, the installation was directed by a
team of US Special Forces (Green Berets) of Puerto Rican and Mexican
descent to make the North American presence less conspicuous.
The staff of the base was augmented by 15 Guatemalan officers trained
in counter-insurgency at the US School of the Americas at Fort
Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone.{4}
American counter-insurgency strategy is typically based on a
carrot-and-stick philosophy. Accordingly, while the Guatemalan
military were being taught techniques of ambush, booby-traps,
jungle survival and search-and-destroy warfare, and provided with
aircraft and pilot training, a program of "civil action" was
begun in the northeast area: some wells were built, medicines
distributed, school lunches provided etc., as well as promises of
other benefits made, all aimed at stealing a bit of the
guerrillas' thunder and reducing the peasants' motivation for
furnishing support to them; and with the added bonus of allowing
American personnel to reconnoitre guerrilla territory under a
non-military cover. Land reform, overwhelmingly the most
pressing need in rural Guatemala, was not on the agenda.
As matters were to materialize, the attempt at "winning the
hearts and minds" of the peasants proved to be as futile in
Guatemala as it was in southeast Asia. When all the academic
papers on "social systems engineering" were in, and all the
counter-insurgency studies of the RAND Corporation and the other
think-tanks were said and done, the recourse was to terror:
unadulterated, dependable terror. Guerrillas, peasants,
students, labor leaders, and professional people were jailed or
killed by the hundreds to put a halt, albeit temporarily, to the
demands for reform.{5}
The worst was yet to come.
In March 1963, General Ydigoras, who had been elected in 1958 for
a six-year term, was overthrown in a coup by Col. Enrique Peralta
Azurdia. Veteran Latin American correspondent Georgie Anne Geyer
later reported that "Top sources within the Kennedy
administration have revealed the U.S. instigated and supported
the 1963 coup." Already in disfavor with Washington due to
several incidents, Ydigoras apparently sealed his fate by
allowing the return to Guatemala of Juan José
Arévalo who had led a reform government before Arbenz and still had a
strong following. Ydigoras was planning to step down in 1964,
thus leaving the door open to an election and, like the Guatemalan
army, Washington, including President Kennedy personally,
believed that a free election would reinstate Arévalo to
power in a government bent upon the same kind of reforms and
independent foreign policy that had led the United States to
overthrow Arbenz.{6} Arévalo was the author of a book
called The Shark and the Sardines in which he pictured the US as
trying to dominate Latin America. But he had also publicly
denounced Castro as "a danger to the continent, a menace".{7}
The tone of the Peralta administration was characterized by
one of its first acts: the murder of eight political and trade
union leaders, accomplished by driving over them with rock-laden
trucks.{8} Repressive and brutal as Peralta was, during his
three years in power US military advisers felt that the
government and the Guatemalan army still did not appreciate
sufficiently the threat posed by the guerrillas, still were
strangers to the world of unconventional warfare and the
systematic methods needed to wipe out the guerrillas once and for
all; despite American urging, the army rarely made forays into
the hills.
Peralta, moreover, turned out to be somewhat of a
nationalist who resented the excessive influence of the United
States in Guatemala, particularly in his own sphere, the
military. He refused insistent American offers of Green Beret
troops trained in guerrilla warfare to fight the rebels,
preferring to rely on his own men, and he restricted the number
of Guatemalan officers permitted to participate in American
training programs abroad.
Thus it was that the United States gave its clear and firm
backing to a civilian, one Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro, in the
election held in March 1966. Mendez won what passes for an
election in Guatemala and granted the Americans the free hand
they had been chafing at the bit for. He served another
important function for the United States: as a civilian, and one
with genuine liberal credentials, Mendez could be pointed to by
the Johnson administration as a response to human rights critics
at home.
However, whatever social conscience Julio Cesar Mendez may
have harbored deep within, he was largely a captive of the
Guatemalan army, and his administration far exceeded Peralta's in
its cruelty. Yet the army did not trust this former law school
professor -- in the rarefied atmosphere of Guatemala, some
military men regarded him as a communist -- and on at least two
occasions, the United States had to intervene to stifle a coup
attempt against him.
Within days after Mendez took office in July, US Col. John
D. Webber, Jr. arrived in Guatemala to take command of the
American military mission. Time magazine later described
his role:
Webber immediately expanded counterinsurgency training
within Guatemala's 5,000-man army, brought in U.S. Jeeps,
trucks, communications equipment and helicopters to give
the army more firepower and mobility, and breathed new
life into the army's civic-action program. Towards the
end of 1966 the army was able to launch a major drive
against the guerrilla strongholds ... To aid in the drive,
the army also hired and armed local bands of "civilian
collaborators" licensed to kill peasants whom they
considered guerrillas or "potential" guerrillas. There
were those who doubted the wisdom of encouraging such
measures in violence-prone Guatemala, but Webber was not
among them. "That's the way this country is," he said.
"The communists are using everything they have including
terror. And it must be met."{9}
The last was for home consumption. There was never any
comparison between the two sides as to the quantity and cruelty
of their terror, as well as in the choice of targets; with rare
exceptions, the left attacked only legitimate political and
military enemies, clear and culpable symbols of their foe; and
they did not torture, nor take vengeance against the families of
their enemies.
Two of the left's victims were John Webber himself and the
US naval attaché, assassinated in January 1968. A bulletin
later issued by a guerrilla group stated that the assassinations
had "brought to justice the Yanqui officers who were teaching
tactics to the Guatemalan army for its war against the
people".{10}
In the period October 1966 to March 1968, Amnesty
International estimated, somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000
Guatemalans were killed by the police, the military, right-wing
"death squads" (often the police or military in civilian clothes,
carrying out atrocities too bloody for the government to claim
credit for), and assorted groups of civilian anti-communist
vigilantes. By 1972, the number of their victims was estimated
at 13,000. Four years later the count exceeded 20,000, murdered
or disappeared without a trace.
Anyone attempting to organize a union or other undertaking
to improve the lot of the peasants, or simply suspected of being
in support of the guerrillas, was subject ... unknown armed men
broke into their homes and dragged them away to unknown places
... their tortured or mutilated or burned bodies found buried in
a mass grave, or floating in plastic bags in a lake or river, or
lying beside the road, hands tied behind the back ... bodies
dropped into the Pacific from airplanes. In the Gual n
area, it was said, no one fished any more; too many corpses were
caught in the nets ... decapitated corpses, or castrated, or
pins stuck in the eyes ... a village rounded up, suspected of
supplying the guerrillas with men or food or information, all
adult males takenaway in front of their families, never to be
seen again ... or everyone massacred, the village bulldozed
over to cover the traces ... seldom were the victims actual
members of a guerrilla band.
One method of torture consisted of putting a hood filled
with insecticide over the head of the victim; there was also
electric shock -- to the genital area is the most effective; in
those days it was administered by using military field telephones
hooked up to small generators; the United States supplied the
equipment and the instructions for use to several countries,
including South Vietnam where the large-scale counter-insurgency
operation was producing new methods and devices for extracting
information from uncooperative prisoners; some of these
techniques were finding their way to Latin America.{11}
The Green Berets taught their Guatemalan trainees various
methods of "interrogation", but they were not solely classroom
warriors. Their presence in the countryside was reported
frequently, accompanying Guatemalan soldiers into battle areas;
the line separating the advisory role from the combat role is
often a matter of public relations.
Thomas and Marjorie Melville, American Catholic missionaries
in Guatemala from the mid-1950s until the end of 1967, have
written that Col. Webber "made no secret of the fact that it was
his idea and at his instigation that the technique of
counter-terror had been implemented by the Guatemalan Army in the
Zacapa and Izabal areas."{12} The Melvilles wrote also of Major
Bernard Westfall of Iowa City who:
perished in September 1967 in the crash of a Guatemalan
Air Force jet that he was piloting alone. The official
notices stated that the US airman was "testing" the
aeroplane. That statement may have been true, but it is
also true that it was a common and public topic of
conversation at Guatemala's La Aurora air base that the
Major often "tested" Guatemalan aircraft in strafing and
bombing runs against guerrilla encampments in the
Northeastern territory.{13}
F-51(D) fighter planes modified by the United States for use
against guerrillas in Guatemala ... after modification, the
planes are capable of patrolling for five hours over a limited
area ... equipped with six .50-calibre machine guns and wing
mountings for bombs, napalm and 5-inch air-to-ground rockets.{14}
The napalm falls on villages, on precious crops, on people ...
American pilots take off from Panama, deliver loads of napalm on
targets suspected of being guerrilla refuges, and return to
Panama{15} ... the napalm explodes like fireworks and a mass of
brilliant red foam spreads over the land, incinerating all that
falls in its way, cedars and pines are burned down to the roots,
animals grilled, the earth scorched ... the guerrillas will not
have this place for a sanctuary any longer, nor will they or
anyone else derive food from it ... halfway around the world in
Vietnam, there is an instant replay.
In Vietnam they were called "free-fire zones"; in
Guatemala, "zonas libres": "Large areas of the country have been
declared off limits and then subjected to heavy bombing.
Reconnaissance planes using advanced photographic techniques fly
over suspected guerrilla country and jet planes, assigned to
specific areas, can be called in within minutes to kill anything
that moves on the ground."{16}
"The military guys who do this are like serial killers. If
Jeffrey Dahmer had been in Guatemala, he would be a general by
now." ... In Guatemala City, right-wing terrorists machine-gunned
people and houses in full light of day ... journalists, lawyers,
students, teachers, trade unionists, members of opposition
parties, anyone who helped or expressed sympathy for the rebel
cause, anyone with a vaguely-leftist political association or a
moderate criticism of government policy ... relatives of the
victims, guilty of kinship ... common criminals, eliminated to
purify the society, taken from jails and shot. "See a Communist,
kill a Communist", the slogan of the New Anticommunist
Organization ... an informer with hooded face accompanies the
police along a city street or into the countryside, pointing
people out: who shall live and who shall die ... "this one's a
son of a bitch" ... "that one ... " Men found dead with their
eyes gouged out, their testicles in their mouth, without hands or
tongues, women with breasts cut off ... there is rarely a witness
to a killing, even when people are dragged from their homes at
high noon and executed in the street ... a relative will choose
exile rather than take the matter to the authorities ... the
government joins the family in mourning the victim ...{17}
One of the death squads, Mano Blanca (White Hand), sent a
death warning to a student leader. Former American Maryknoll
priest Blase Bonpane has written:
I went alone to visit the head of the Mano Blanca and asked
him why he was going to kill this lad. At first he denied
sending the letter, but after a bit of discussion with him
and his first assistant, the assistant said, "Well, I know
he's a Communist and so we're going to kill him."
"How do you know?" I asked.
He said, "I know he's a Communist because I heard him say
he would give his life for the poor."{18}
Mano Blanca distributed leaflets in residential areas
suggesting that doors of left-wingers be marked with a black
cross.{19}
In November 1967, when the American ambassador, John Gordon Mein,
presented the Guatemalan armed forces with new armored vehicles,
grenade launchers, training and radio equipment, and several
HU-1B jet powered helicopters, he publicly stated:
These articles, especially the helicopters, are not easy
to obtain at this time since they are being utilized by
our forces in defense of the cause of liberty in other
parts of the world [i.e., southeast Asia]. But liberty
must be defended wherever it is threatened and that
liberty is now being threatened in Guatemala.{20}
In August 1968, a young French woman, Michele Kirk, shot herself
in Guatemala City as the police came to her room to make
"inquiries". In her notebook Michele had written:
It is hard to find the words to express the state of
putrefaction that exists in Guatemala, and the permanent
terror in which the inhabitants live. Every day bodies
are pulled out of the Motagua River, riddled with bullets
and partially eaten by fish. Every day men are kidnapped
right in the street by unidentified people in cars, armed
to the teeth, with no intervention by the police patrols.{21}
The US Agency for International Development (AID), its Office of
Public Safety (OPS), and the Alliance for Progress were all there
to lend a helping hand. These organizations with their
reassuring names all contributed to a program to greatly expand
the size of Guatemala's national police force and develop it into
a professionalized body skilled at counteracting urban disorder.
Senior police officers and technicians were sent for training at
the Inter-American Police Academy in Panama, replaced in 1964 by
the International Police Academy in Washington, at a Federal
School in Los Fresnos, Texas (where they were taught how to
construct and use a variety of explosive devices - see Uruguay
chapter), and other educational establishments, their instructors
often being CIA officers operating under OPS cover. This was
also the case with OPS officers stationed in Guatemala to advise
local police commands and provide in-country training for
rank-and-file policemen. At times, these American officers
participated directly in interrogating political prisoners, took
part in polygraph operations, and accompanied the police on
anti-drug patrols.
Additionally, the Guatemala City police force was completely
supplied with radio patrol cars and a radio communications
network, and funds were provided to build a national police
academy and pay for salaries, uniforms, weapons, and riot-control
equipment.
The glue which held this package together was the standard
OPS classroom tutelage, similar to that given the military, which
imparted the insight that "communists", primarily of the Cuban
variety, were behind all the unrest in Guatemala; the students
were further advised to "stay out of politics"; that is, support
whatever pro-US regime happens to be in power.
Also standard was the advice to use "minimum force" and to
cultivate good community relations. But the behavior of the
police and military students in practice was so far removed from
this that continued American involvement with these forces over a
period of decades makes this advice appear to be little more than
a self-serving statement for the record, the familiar
bureaucratic maxim: Cover your ass.{22}
According to AID, by 1970, over 30,000 Guatemalan police
personnel had received OPS training in Guatemala alone, one of
the largest OPS programs in Latin America.{23}
"At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from
top to bottom with CIA people," disclosed John Gilligan, Director
of AID during the Carter administration. "The idea was to plant
operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government,
volunteer, religious, every kind."{24}
By the end of 1968, the counter-insurgency campaign had all but
wiped out the guerrilla movement by thwarting the rebels' ability
to operate openly and casually in rural areas as they had been
accustomed to, and, through sheer terrorization of villagers,
isolating the guerrillas from their bases of support in the
countryside.
It had been an unequal match. By Pentagon standards it had
been a "limited" war, due to the absence of a large and overt US
combat force. At the same time, this had provided the American
media and public with the illusion of their country's
non-involvement. However, as one observer has noted: "In the
lexicon of counterrevolutionaries, these wars are "limited" only
in their consequences for the intervening power. For the people and
country under assault, they are total."{25}
Not until 1976 did another serious guerrilla movement arise,
the Guatemalan Army of the Poor (EGP) by name. Meanwhile, others
vented their frustration through urban warfare in the face of
government violence, which reached a new high during 1970 and
1971 under a "state of siege" imposed by the president, Col.
Carlos Arana Osorio. Arana, who had been close to the US
military since serving as Guatemalan military attachç in
Washington, and then as commander of the counter-insurgency
operation in Zacapa (where his commitment to his work earned him
the title of "the butcher of Zacapa"), decreed to himself
virtually unlimited power to curb opposition of any stripe.{26}
Amnesty International later stated that Guatemalan sources,
including the Committee of the Relatives of Disappeared Persons,
claimed that over 7,000 persons disappeared or were found dead in
these two years. "Foreign diplomats in Guatemala City," reported
Le Monde in 1971, "believe that for every political
assassination by left-wing revolutionaries fifteen murders are
committed by right-wing fanatics."{27}
During a curfew so draconian that even ambulances, doctors
and fire engines reportedly were forbidden outside ... as
American police cars and paddy wagons patrolled the streets day
and night ... and American helicopters buzzed overhead ... the
United States saw fit to provide further technical assistance and
equipment to initiate a reorganization of Arana's police forces
to make them yet more efficient.{28}
"In response to a question [from a congressional investigator in
1971] as to what he conceived his job to be, a member of the US
Military Group (MILGP) in Guatemala replied instantly that it was
to make the Guatemalan Armed Forces as efficient as possible.
The next question as to why this was in the interest of the
United States was followed by a long silence while he reflected
on a point which had apparently never occurred to him."{29}
As for the wretched of Guatemala's earth ... in 1976 a major
earthquake shook the land, taking over 20,000 lives, largely of
the poor whose houses were the first to crumble ... the story was
reported of the American church relief worker who arrived to help
the victims; he was shocked at their appearance and their living
conditions; then he was informed that he was not in the
earthquake area, that what he was seeing was normal.{30}
"The level of pesticide spraying is the highest in the
world," reported the New York Times in 1977, "and little
concern is shown for the people who live near the cotton fields"
... 30 or 40 people a day are treated for pesticide poisoning in
season, death can come within hours, or a longer lasting liver
malfunction ... the amounts of DDT in mothers' milk in Guatemala
are the highest in the Western world. "It's very simple,"
explained a cotton planter, "more insecticide means more cotton,
fewer insects mean higher profits." In an attack, guerrillas
destroyed 22 crop-duster planes; the planes were quickly replaced
thanks to the genius of American industry{31} ... and all the
pesticide you could ever want, from Monsanto Chemical Company of
St. Louis and Guatemala City.
During the Carter presidency, in response to human-rights
abuses in Guatemala and other countries, several pieces of
congressional legislation were passed which attempted to curtail
military and economic aid to those nations. In the years
preceding, similar prohibitions regarding aid to Guatemala had
been enacted into law. The efficacy of these laws can be
measured by their number. In any event, the embargoes were never
meant to be more than partial, and Guatemala also received
weapons and military equipment from Israel, at least part of
which was covertly underwritten by Washington.{32}
As further camouflage, some of the training of Guatemala's
security forces was reportedly maintained by transferring it to
clandestine sites in Chile and Argentina.{33}
Testimony of an Indian woman:
My name is Rigoberta Menchú Tum. I am a representative of the
"Vincente Menchú" [her father] Revolutionary Christians ... On
9 December 1979, my 16-year-old brother Patrocino was captured
and tortured for several days and then taken with twenty other
young men to the square in Chajul ... An officer of [President]
Lucas Garcia's army of murderers ordered the prisoners to be
paraded in a line. Then he started to insult and threaten the
inhabitants of the village, who were forced to come out of
their houses to witness the event. I was with my mother, and
we saw Patrocino; he had had his tongue cut out and his toes
cut off. The officer jackal made a speech. Every time he
paused the soldiers beat the Indian prisoners.
When he finished his ranting, the bodies of my brother and the
other prisoners were swollen, bloody, unrecognizable. It was
monstrous, but they were still alive.
They were thrown on the ground and drenched with gasoline.
The soldiers set fire to the wretched bodies with torches
and the captain laughed like a hyena and forced the inhabitants
of Chajul to watch. This was his objective -- that they should
be terrified and witness the punishment given to the
"guerrillas".{34}
In 1992, Rigoberta Menchú Tum was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.
Testimony of Fred Sherwood (CIA pilot during the overthrow of the
Arbenz government in 1954 who settled in Guatemala and became
president of the American Chamber of Commerce), speaking in
Guatemala, September 1980:
Why should we be worried about the death squads? They're
bumping off the commies, our enemies. I'd give them more
power. Hell, I'd get some cartridges if I could, and
everyone else would too ... Why should we criticize them?
The death squad -- I'm for it ... Shit! There's no
question, we can't wait 'til Reagan gets in. We hope
Carter falls in the ocean real quick ... We all feel that
he [Reagan] is our saviour.{35}
The Movement for National Liberation (MLN) was a prominent
political party. It was the principal party in the Arana regime.
An excerpt from a radio broadcast in 1980 by the head of the
party, Mario Sandoval Alarcon ...
I admit that the MLN is the party of organized violence.
Organized violence is vigor, just as organized color is
scenery and organized sound is harmony. There is nothing
wrong with organized violence; it is vigor, and the
MLN is a vigorous movement.{36}
Mario Sandoval Alarcon and former president Arana ("the
butcher of Zacapa") "spent inaugural week mingling with the stars
of the Reagan inner circle", reported syndicated columnist Jack
Anderson. Sandoval, who had worked closely with the CIA in the
overthrow of Arbenz, announced that he had met with Reagan
defense and foreign-policy advisers even before the election.
Right-wing Guatemalan leaders were elated by Reagan's victory.
They looked forward to a resumption of the hand-in-glove
relationship between American and Guatemalan security teams and
businessmen which had existed before Carter took office.{37}
Before that could take place, however, the Reagan
administration first had to soften the attitude of Congress about
this thing called human rights. In March 1981, two months after
Reagan's inaugural, Secretary of State Alexander Haig told a
congressional committee that there was a Soviet "hit list ... for
the ultimate takeover of Central America". It was a "four phased
operation" of which the first part had been the "seizure of
Nicaragua". "Next," warned Haig, "is El Salvador, to be followed
by Honduras and Guatemala."{38}
This was the kind of intelligence information which one
would expect to derive from a captured secret document or KGB
defector. But neither one of these was produced or mentioned,
nor did any of the assembled congressmen presume to raise the
matter.
Two months later, General Vernon Walters, former Deputy
Director of the CIA, on a visit to Guatemala as Haig's special
emissary, was moved to proclaim that the United States hoped to
help the Guatemalan government defend "peace and liberty".{39}
During this period, Guatemalan security forces, official and
unofficial, massacred at least 2,000 peasants (accompanied by the
usual syndrome of torture, mutilation and decapitation),
destroyed several villages, assassinated 76 officials of the
opposition Christian Democratic Party, scores of trade unionists,
and at least six catholic priests.{40}
19 August 1981 ... unidentified gunmen occupy the town of
San Miguel Acatan, force the Mayor to give them a list of all
those who had contributed funds for the building of a school,
pick out 15 from the list (including three of the Mayor's
children), make them dig their own graves and shoot them.{41}
In December, Ronald Reagan finally spoke out against
government repression. He denounced Poland for crushing by
"brute force, the stirrings of liberty ... Our Government and
those of our allies, have expressed moral revulsion at the
police-state tactics of Poland's oppressors."{42}
Using the loopholes in the congressional legislation, both
real and loosely interpreted, the Reagan administration, in its
first two years, chipped away at the spirit of the embargo: $3.1
million of jeeps and trucks, $4 million of helicopter spare
parts, $6.3 million of other military supplies.{43} These were
amongst the publicly announced aid shipments; what was
transpiring covertly can only be guessed at in light of certain
disclosures: Jack Anderson revealed in August 1981 that the
United States was using Cuban exiles to train security forces in
Guatemala; in this operation, Anderson wrote, the CIA had
arranged "for secret training in the finer points of
assassination".{44} The following year, it was reported that the
Green Berets had been instructing Guatemalan Army officers for
over two years in the finer points of warfare.{45} And in 1983,
we learned that in the previous two years Guatemala's Air Force
helicopter fleet had somehow increased from eight to 27, all of
them American made, and that Guatemalan officers were once again
being trained at the US School of the Americas in Panama.{46}
In March 1982, a coup put General Efrain Rios Montt,
a "born-again Christian" in power. A month later, the Reagan
administration announced that it perceived signs of an
improvement in the state of human rights in the country and took
the occasion to justify a shipment of military aid.{47} On the
first of July, Rios Montt announced a state of siege. It
was to last more than eight months. In his first six months in
power, 2,600 Indians and peasants were massacred, while during his
17-month reign, more than 400 villages were brutally wiped off
the map.{48} In December 1982, Ronald Reagan, also a Christian, went
to see for himself. After meeting with RÁos Montt, Reagan,
referring to the allegations of extensive human-rights abuses,
declared that the Guatemalan leader was receiving "a bad
deal."{49}
Statement by the Guatemalan Army of the Poor, made in 1981 (by
which time the toll of people murdered by the government since
1954 had reached at least the 60,000 mark, and the sons of
one-time death-squad members were now killing the sons of the
Indians killed by their fathers):
The Guatemalan revolution is entering its third decade.
Ever since the government of Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown
in 1954, the majority of the Guatemalan people have been
seeking a way to move the country towards solving the
same problems which were present then and have only
worsened over time.
The counterrevolution, put in motion by the U.S. Government
and those domestic sectors committed to retaining every
single one of their privileges, dispersed and disorganized
the popular and democratic forces. However, it did not
resolve any of the problems which had first given rise to
demands for economic, social and political change. These
demands have been raised again and again in the last quarter
century, by any means that seemed appropriate at the time,
and have received each time the same repressive response as in
1954.{50}
Statement by Father Thomas Melville, 1968:
Having come to the conclusion that the actual state of violence,
composed of the malnutrition, ignorance, sickness and hunger of the
vast majority of the Guatemalan population, is the direct result of a
capitalist system that makes the defenseless Indian compete against
the powerful and well-armed landowner, my brother [Father Arthur
Melville] and I decided not to be silent accomplices of the mass
murder that this system generates.
We began teaching the Indians that no one will defend their
rights, if they do not defend themselves. If the government and
oligarchy are using arms to maintain them in their position of
misery, then they have the obligation to take up arms and defend
their God-given right to be men. We were accused of being
communists along with the people who listened to us, and were
asked to leave the country by our religious superiors and the
U.S. ambassador [John Gordon Mein]. We did so.
But I say here that I am a communist only if Christ was a
communist. I did what I did and will continue to do so because
of the teachings of Christ and not because of Marx or Lenin.
And I say here too, that we are many more than the hierarchy
and the U.S. government think. When the fight breaks out more
in the open, let the world know that we do it not for Russia,
not for China, nor any other country, but for Guatemala. Our
response to the present situation is not because we have read
either Marx or Lenin, but because we have read the New
Testament.{51}
Postscript, a small sample:
1988: Guatemala continues to suffer the worst record of
human-rights abuses in Latin America, stated the Council on
Hemispheric Affairs in its annual report on human rights in the
Western Hemisphere.{52}
1990: Guatemalan soldiers at the army base in Santiago
Atitl n opened fire on unarmed townspeople carrying white
flags, killing 14 and wounding 24. The people had come with
their mayor to speak to the military commander about repeated
harassment from the soldiers.{53}
1990: "The United States, said to be disillusioned because
of persistent corruption in the government of President Vinicio
Cerezo Arevalo, is reportedly turning to Guatemala's military to
promote economic and political stability ... even though the
military is blamed for human rights abuses and is believed to be
involved in drug trafficking."{54}
This was reported in May. In June, a prominent American
businessman living in Guatemala, Michael DeVine, was kidnapped
and nearly beheaded by the Guatemalan military after he
apparently stumbled upon the military's drug trafficking and/or
other contraband activities. The Bush administration, in a show
of public anger over the killing, cut off military aid to
Guatemala, but, we later learned, secretly allowed the CIA to
provide millions of dollars to the military government to make up
for the loss. The annual payments of $5 to $7 million apparently
continued into the Clinton administration.
1992: In March, Guatemalan guerrilla leader, Efrain Bamaca
Velasquez, was captured and disappeared. For the next three
years, his American wife, attorney Jennifer Harbury, waged an
impassioned international campaign -- including public fasts in
Guatemala City (nearly to death) and in Washington -- to pressure
the Guatemalan and American governments for information about her
husband's fate. Both governments insisted that they knew
nothing. Finally, in March 1995, Rep. Robert Torricelli of the
House Intelligence Committee revealed that Bamaca had been
tortured and executed the same year of his capture, and that he,
as well as DeVine, had been murdered on the orders of Col. Julio
Roberto Alpírez, who had been on the CIA payroll for
several years. (Alpírez thus becoming another illustrious
graduate of Fort Benning's School of the Americas). The facts
surrounding these cases were known early on by the CIA, and by
officials at the State Department and National Security Council
at least a few months before the disclosure. Toricelli's
announcement prompted several other Americans to come forward
with tales of murder, rape or torture of themselves or a relation
at the hands of the Guatemalan military. Sister Dianna Ortiz,
a nun, related how, in 1989, she was kidnapped, burned with
cigarettes, raped repeatedly, and lowered into a pit full of
corpses and rats. A fair-skinned man who spoke with an American
accent seemed to be in charge, she said.{55}
NOTES
The details of the events and issues touched upon in this chapter
through 1968 were derived primarily from the following sources:
a) Thomas and Marjorie Melville, Guatemala -- Another Vietnam?
(Great Britain, 1971) Chapters 9 to 16; particularly for the
conditions of the poor, and US activities in Guatemala. Published
in the United States the same year in a slightly different form
as Guatemala: The Politics of Land Ownership.
b) Eduardo Galeano, Guatemala, Occupied Country (Mexico, 1967;
English translation: New York, 1969) passim; for the politics of
the guerrillas and the nature of the right-wing terror; Galeano
was a Uruguayan journalist who spent some time with the guerrillas.
c) Susanne Jonas and David Tobis, editors, Guatemala (Berkeley,
California, 1974) passim; particularly "The Vietnamization of
Guatemala: U.S. Counter-insurgency Programs" pp. 193-203, by
Howard Sharckman; published by the North American Congress on Latin
America (NACLA, New York and Berkeley).
d) Amnesty International, Guatemala (London, 1976) passim; for
statistics about the victims of the terror. Other AI reports
issued in the 1970s about Guatemala contain comparable
information.
e) Richard Gott, Rural Guerrillas in Latin America (Great
Britain, 1973, revised edition) Chapters 2 to 8; for the
politics of the guerrillas.
1. The Guardian (London), 22 December 1983, p. 5.
2. The plight of the poor: a montage compiled from the sources
cited herein.
3. New York Times Magazine, 26 June 1966, p. 8.
4. US counter-insurgency base: El Imparcial (Guatemala City
conservative newspaper) 17 May 1962 and 4 January 1963, cited in
Melville, pp. 163-4.
5. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The
Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (New York, 1982),
p. 242.
6. Georgie Anne Geyer: Miami Herald, 24 December 1966. Also see:
New York Herald Tribune, 7 April 1963, article by Bert Quint,
section 2, p. 1; Schlesinger and Kinzer, pp. 236-44.
7. Galeano, p. 55.
8. Ibid., pp. 55-6.
9. Time, 26 January 1968, p. 23.
10. Ibid.
11. Atrocities and torture: compiled from the sources cited
herein; also see A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors (New York, 1978)
pp. 139, 193 for US involvement with the use of the field
telephones for torture in Brazil.
12. Melville, p. 292.
13. Ibid., p. 291.
14. Washington Post, 27 January 1968, p. A4, testimony of Rev.
Blase Bonpane, an American Maryknoll priest in Guatemala at the
time.
15. Panama: revealed in September 1967 by Guatemalan
Vice-President Clemente Marroquin Rojas in an interview with the
international news agency Interpress Service (IPS), reported in
Latin America, 15 September 1967, p. 159, a weekly published in
London. Eduardo Galeano, p. 70, reports a personal conversation
he had with Marroquin Rojas in which the vice-president related
the same story. Marroquin Rojas was strongly anti-communist, but
he apparently resented the casual way in which the American planes
violated Guatemalan sovereignty.
16. Norman Diamond, "Why They Shoot Americans", The Nation (New
York), 5 February 1968. The title of the article refers to the
shooting of John Webber.
17. Opening quotation: Clyde Snow, forensic anthropologist, cited
in Covert Action Quarterly, spring 1994, No. 48, p. 32.
Right-wing terrorism: compiled from the sources cited herein.
18. Washington Post, 4 February 1968, p. B1. The historic
dialogue in Latin America between Christianity and Marxism, begun
in the 1970s, can be traced in large measure to priests and nuns
like Bonpane and the Melvilles and their experiences in Guatemala
in the 1950s and 60s.
19. Galeano, p. 63.
20. El Imparcial (Guatemala City), 10 November 1967, cited in
Melville, p. 289.
21. Richard Gott, in the Foreword to the Melvilles' book, p. 8.
22. AID, OPS, Alliance for Progress:
a) "Guatemala and the Dominican Republic", a Staff Memorandum
prepared for the US Senate Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere
Affairs, Committee on Foreign Relations, 30 December 1971, p. 6;
b) Jonas and Tobis, pp. 199-200;
c) Galeano, pp. 72-3;
d) Michael Klare, War Without End (Random House, New York, 1972)
pp. 241-69, for discussion of the OPS curriculum and philosophy;
e) Langguth, pp. 242-3 and elsewhere, for discussion of OPS
practices, including its involvement with torture; the author
confines his study primarily to Brazil and Uruguay, but it
applies to Guatemala as well;
f) CounterSpy magazine (Washington), November 1980-January 1981,
pp. 54-5, lists the names of almost 300 Guatemalan police
officers who received training in the United States from 1963 to 1974;
g) Michael Klare and Nancy Stein, "Police Terrorism in Latin
America", NACLA's Latin America and Empire Report (North American
Congress on Latin America, New York), January 1974, pp. 19-23,
based on State Department documents obtained by Senator James
Abourezk in 1973;
h) Jack Anderson, Washington Post, 8 October 1973, p. C33.
23. AID figure cited in Jenny Pearce, Under the Eagle: U.S.
Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean (Latin American
Bureau, London, updated edition 1982) p. 67.
24. George Cotter, "Spies, strings and missionaries", The
Christian Century (Chicago), 25 March 1981, p. 321.
25. Eqbal Ahmad, "The Theory and Fallacies of Counter-insurgency",
The Nation (New York), 2 August 1972, p. 73.
26. Relationship of Arana to US military: Joseph Goulden, "A Real
Good Relationship", The Nation (New York), 1 June 1970, p. 646;
Norman Gall, "Guatemalan Slaughter", N.Y. Review of Books, 20 May
1971, pp. 13-17.
27. Le Monde Weekly (English edition), 17 February 1971, p. 3.
28. New York Times, 27 December 1970, p. 2; New York Times
Magazine, 13 June 1971, p. 72.
29. US Senate Staff Memorandum, op. cit.
30. New York Times, 18 February 1976.
31. Ibid., 9 November 1977, p. 2.
32. Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, Jane Hunter, The
Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in
the Reagan Era (South End Press, Boston, 1987), chapter V,
passim; The Guardian (London), 9 December 1983; CounterSpy, op. cit.,
p. 53, citing Elias Barahona y Barahona, former press secretary
at the Guatemalan Ministry of the Interior who had infiltrated
the government for the EGP.
33. CounterSpy, op. cit. (Barahona) p. 53.
34. Pearce, p. 278; a book was published later which transcribed
Mench£'s own account of her life, in which she recounts many
more atrocities of the Guatemalan military: Elisabeth Burgos-Debray,
ed., I ... Rigoberta Mench£: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (London,
1984, English translation).
35. Pearce, p. 176; Sherwood's role in 1954: Schlesinger and
Kinzer, pp. 116, 122, 128. His statement is partially quoted in
Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Doubleday, New York, 1984), p.
238, citing CBS News Special, 20 March 1982: "Update: Central
America in Revolt".
36. Washington Post, 22 February 1981, p. C7, column by Jack
Anderson; Anderson refers only to an "official spokesman" of the
MLN; the identity of the speaker as Sandoval comes from other
places -- see, e.g., The Guardian (London), 2 March 1984.
37. Washington Post, ibid. For a discussion of the many ties
between American conservatives and the Guatemalan power
structure, see the report of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
(Washington), by Allan Nairn in 1981.
38. New York Times, 19 March 1981, p. 10.
39. Washington Post, 14 May 1981, p. A16.
40. Ibid.; New York Times, 18 May 1981, p. 18; Report issued by
the Washington Office on Latin America (a respected human-rights
lobby which has worked in liaison with the State Department's
human-rights section), 4 September 1981.
41. Washington Office on Latin America report, op. cit.
Presumably it was the traditional right-wing fear of the poor
being educated which lay behind this incident.
42. New York Times, 28 December 1981.
43. Ibid., 21 June 1981; 25 April 1982; The Guardian (London), 10
January 1983.
44. San Francisco Chronicle, 27 August 1981, p. 57.
45. Washington Post, 21 October 1982, p. A1.
46. The Guardian (London), 10 January 1983; 17 May 1983.
47. New York Times, 25 April 1982. p. 1.
48. Ibid., 12 October 1982, p. 3 (deaths, citing Amnesty
International); Los Angeles Times, 20 July 1994, p. 11 (villages,
citing "human rights organizations"). For the gruesome details
of death squads, disappearances, and torture in Guatemala during the
early 1980s, see Guatemala: A Government Program of Political
Murder (Amnesty International, London, 1981) and Massive
Extrajudicial Executions in Rural Areas Under the Government of
General EfraÁn RÁos Montt (AI, July 1982).
49. New York Times, 6 December 1982, p. 14.
50. Contemporary Marxism (San Francisco), No. 3, Summer 1981.
51. The National Catholic Reporter (Kansas City, Missouri
weekly), 31 January 1968.
52. Los Angeles Times, 25 December 1988.
53. Occurred on 2 December 1990; Report, Summer 1991, from
Witness for Peace, Washington, a religious-oriented human-rights
organization concerned with Central America.
54. Los Angeles Times, 7 May 1990.
55. DeVine and Bamaca cases: New York Times, 23 March 1995, p.
1; 24 March, p. 3; 30 March, p. 1; Los Angeles Times, 23 March 1995,
p. 7; 24 March, p. 4; 31 March, p. 4; 2 April, p. M2; Time
magazine, 10 April 1995, p. 43.
This is a chapter from Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by William Blum