Guatemala

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</div><div>Sister Dianna Ortiz—US nun who survived Guatemala torture and became human rights champion—dies at 62</div><div>
</div><div> Common Dreams February 22, 2021</div><div>   </div><div>Sister Dianna Ortiz, a Catholic nun from New Mexico whose 1989 abduction, rape, and torture by U.S.-backed Guatemalan forces led to her becoming an outspoken peace, human rights, and anti-torture activist, died Friday in Washington, D.C. at the age of 62 after battling cancer.Ortiz—who wanted to be a nun since she was a little girl—joined the Ursuline Sisters of Mount Saint Joseph, part of a 400-year-old Roman Catholic order dedicated to the education of girls and the care of the sick and needy, when she was still a teenager. She taught kindergarten for a decade before moving to Guatemala in 1987 at the age of 28.</div><div>
</div><div>Years later Ortiz explained that she wanted "to teach young indigenous children to read and write... and to understand the Bible in their culture."</div><div>
</div><div>It was dangerous work at a dangerous time. Guatemala was ravaged by decades of civil war that followed a 1954 CIA coup deposing Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically-elected progressive president. U.S.-backed right-wing military dictatorships, some of which perpetrated genocidal violence against the country's Mayan population, followed.</div><div>
</div><div>The 36-year civil war left over 200,000 Guatemalans dead, more than 600 villages destroyed, and countless people—mostly Mayan campesinos—displaced.</div><div>
</div><div>"Every family in San Miguel had people who had been tortured, disappeared, or killed," Mary Elizabeth Ballard, an Ursuline sister who had arrived in Guatemala a year before Ortiz, told the literary magazine Agni in a 1998 interview. "No family was untouched."</div><div>
</div><div>By early 1989 Ortiz was receiving threatening letters imploring her to leave Guatemala. She eventually did depart, traveling to the Urusline motherhouse in Kentucky. But only for a short while.</div><div>
</div><div>"She had a great love for the Guatemalans," explained Luisa Bickett, another Ursuline sister who worked in San Miguel.</div><div>
</div><div>"I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.'"</div><div>—Ortiz</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz returned to Guatemala in September 1989. By the following month, she was receiving death threats. For her safety, Ortiz decided to seek refuge at Posada de Belén, a convent and religious retreat 170 miles (270 km) from San Miguel in Antigua.</div><div>
</div><div>On November 2, Ortiz was reading in the convent's garden when her life was forever changed. In an interview with Kerry Kennedy, she recalled that:</div><div>
</div><div>I heard a man's deep voice behind me: 'Hello, my love,' he said in Spanish. 'We have some things to discuss.' I turned to see the morning sunlight glinting off a gun held by a man who had threatened me once before on the street. He and his partner forced me onto a bus, then into a police car where they blindfolded me.</div><div>We came to a building and they led me down some stairs. They left me in a dark cell, where I listened to the cries of a man and woman being tortured. When the men returned, they accused me of being a guerrilla and began interrogating me. For every answer I gave them, they burned my back or my chest with cigarettes. Afterwards, they gang-raped me repeatedly.</div><div>Ortiz was then moved to another room with another woman prisoner. Some men returned with a video camera and a machete, which Ortiz thought would be used to torture her. Instead, she says she was forced to kill the other woman.</div><div>
</div><div>"What I remember is blood gushing, spurting like a water fountain... and my cries lost in the cries of the woman," she recalled. Her captors then threatened to release video of her attacking the woman if she refused to cooperate. Then:</div><div>
</div><div>I was lowered into a pit full of bodies—bodies of children, men, and women, some decapitated, all caked with blood. A few were still alive. I could hear them moaning... A stench of decay rose from the pits. Rats swarmed over the bodies... I passed out and when I came to I was lying on the ground beside the pit, rats all over me.</div><div>Ortiz said that a North American man her torturers called "Alejandro" was present during her ordeal. When he realized she was an American, he helped her get dressed and drove her away while apologizing. "He said he was... working to liberate [Guatemala] from communism," Ortiz recalled.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Darleen Chmielewski, a Franciscan nun who was one of the first people to see Ortiz after her escape, described her friend as in "a state of shock." The two women went to the home of the the Vatican representative in Guatemala City, who had offered Ortiz refuge.</div><div>
</div><div>"Diana wanted to take a bath," Chmielewski recalled. "I helped her wash and saw all the cigarette burns... she just cried and took baths."</div><div>
</div><div>Two days later, Ortiz was back in the United States. "After escaping from my torturers, I returned home to New Mexico so traumatized that I recognized no one, not even my parents," she told Kennedy. "I had virtually no memory of my life before my abduction; the only piece of my identity that remained was that I was a woman who was raped and forced to torture and murder another human being."</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz also felt forced to do something unimaginable for many nuns. "I got pregnant as a result of the multiple gang rapes," she told Kennedy. "Unable to carry within me... what I could only view as a monster, I turned to someone for assistance and I destroyed that life."</div><div>
</div><div>"I felt I had no choice," explained Ortiz. "If I had had to grow within me what the torturers left me I would have died."</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz's torment continued as she sought—and was denied—justice. U.S. embassy officials accused her of staging her abduction in a bid to thwart the George H.W. Bush administration's military aid to Guatemala. Cigarette burns—111 of them, according to a U.S. doctor who examined her—told a different story.</div><div>
</div><div>"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves."</div><div>—Ortiz</div><div>
</div><div>In a bizarre twist, Guatemalan officials claimed Ortiz faked her kidnapping to cover up a violent lesbian affair, a rumor subsequently spread by U.S. officials. Previously, the Reagan administration had undertaken a similar effort to discredit another Ursuline nun, Dorothy Kazel of Cleveland, Ohio, who along with three other American churchwomen was kidnapped, raped, and executed in El Salvador by U.S.-backed troops in 1980.</div><div>
</div><div>Even though she was back in the relative safety of the United States, Ortiz received menacing phone calls and anonymous packages, one containing a dead mouse wrapped in a Guatemalan flag. However, undaunted, she made three trips to Guatemala to testify against the government there.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz tasted victory, albeit of a largely symbolic nature, in April 1995, when a federal judge in Boston ordered Gen. Héctor Gramajo, the Guatemalan defense minister who had tried to discredit Ortiz, to pay her and eight other torture victims a combined $47.5 million.</div><div>
</div><div>In 1996 Ortiz held a five-week fasting vigil in front of the White House, where she demanded that the U.S. government declassify all documents about human rights abuses in Guatemala since the 1954 coup. Hillary Clinton, then first lady, invited Ortiz to her office. During their meeting, Clinton did not rule out the possibility that "Alejandro" was a past or current U.S. operative.</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz's relentless pursuit of justice eventually compelled the United States to declassify long-secret documents revealing details of U.S. cooperation with Guatemalan security forces before, during, and after the time of her abduction, including an admission that the U.S. embassy was in contact with members of a death squad.</div><div>
</div><div>The documents also showed that Gen. Gramajo had been trained in counterinsurgency tactics at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), where military and police officials from Latin American allies—many of them dictatorships—were instructed in counterinsurgency and democracy suppression using course manuals that advocated the torture and execution of civilians.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The files also proved that the U.S. was supporting Guatemalan forces guilty of perpetrating genocide. In 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized to the Guatemalan people for the U.S. role in the bloodshed, terror, and repression.</div><div>
</div><div>"The U.S. government funded, trained, and equipped the Guatemalan army's death squads—my torturers themselves," Ortiz later wrote. "The United States was the Guatemalan army's partner in a covert war against a small opposition force, a war the United Nations would later declare genocidal."</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz's suffering left her with an acute awareness of human rights issues and a desire to work in service of those rights. In 1998 she founded Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC), and in 2002 published The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth. In the 2000s Ortiz was a vocal opponent of the George W. Bush's torture program in the so-called War on Terror.</div><div>
</div><div>Last year, she was named deputy director of Pax Christi USA, part of an international Catholic peace movement.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Recently, Ortiz worked for nuclear disarmament and led Pax Christi's work commemorating the 75th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.</div><div>
</div><div>As for her recovery, Ortiz wrote in The Blindfold's Eyes that despite years of therapy at Chicago's Marjorie Kovler Center for torture survivors, "no one ever fully recovers" from torture, "not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."</div><div>
</div><div>Ortiz never not stopped searching for the whole truth of what happened to her back in 1989.</div><div>
</div><div>"No one ever fully recovers, not the one who is tortured, and not the one who tortures."</div><div>—Ortiz</div><div>
</div><div>"I demand the right to a future built on truth and justice," she told Kennedy. "My torturers were never brought to justice. It is possible that, individually, they will never be identified or apprehended. But I cannot resign myself to this fact and move on. I have a responsibility to the people of Guatemala and to the people of the world to insist on accountability where it is possible."</div><div>
</div><div>"I know what it is to wait in the dark for torture, and what it is to wait in the dark for the truth," said Ortiz. "I am still waiting."</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Ursuline Sister Larraine Lauter was with Ortiz when she passed away on Friday. Lauter called her friend "unfailingly good."</div><div>
</div><div>"Dianna walked through the very worst of hell and came out with love," she told the Catholic Standard. "It's hard to believe that bad things happen to good nuns, but they do. Her legacy is for us to be nonviolent. Her legacy is a witness to nonviolence and to love in the face of evil and to redemption. That's her legacy, to teach us that that's possible."</div><div>
</div><div>FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES</div><div>Why Democrats must make a firm break from the CIA's horrifying ... ›</div><div>RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB</div><div>Sister Dianna Ortiz, OSU: Sept. 2, 1958-Feb. 19, 2021 – Ursuline ... ›</div><div>Human rights advocate Sister Dianna Ortiz dies - Catholic Standard ... ›</div><div>Dianna Ortiz, American Nun Tortured in Guatemala, Dies at 62 - The ... ›</div><div>Dianna Ortiz - Wikipedia ›</div></div><div>=</div>=1120 ewlarge landslide caused by torrential rains during Hurricane Eta buried half a small village's residents, leaving the other half searching for family members and neighbors in Guatemala on Tuesday, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/guatemala-landslide-could-be-final-resting-place-for-many/2020/11/09/e8817342-2307-11eb-9c4a-0dc6242c4814_story.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">The Washington Post</a> reported.<div class="rebellt-item col1" id="rebelltitem1" data-id="1" data-reload-ads="false" data-is-image="False" data-href="https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-refugees-eta-guatemala-2648862911.html?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1" data-basename="particle-1" data-post-id="2648862911" data-published-at="1605122669" data-use-pagination="False" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Officials deemed Queja, a farming community of a few hundred residents, "uninhabitable," and ended rescue operations, calling for the survivors to abandon the area now mostly covered in tons of rock and mud. 99 people were reported missing, with 44 confirmed deaths.Mayor Ovidio Choc, representing the San Cristobal Verapaz region, including Queja, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-storm-eta-guatemala-queja/guatemala-ends-rescue-operation-after-landslide-village-to-be-abandoned-idUSKBN27Q2RB" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">said</a> the evacuated village would be declared a cemetery.The former director of Guatemala's national disaster management agency said the country is ranked among the highest risk countries for natural disasters, based on data by the <a href="https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/WRR_2017_E2.pdf" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">World Risk Index</a>.</div><div class="rebellt-item col1" id="rebelltitem2" data-id="2" data-reload-ads="false" data-is-image="False" data-href="https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-refugees-eta-guatemala-2648862911.html?rebelltitem=2#rebelltitem2" data-basename="particle-2" data-post-id="2648862911" data-published-at="1605122669" data-use-pagination="False" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">"It is a structural problem that is linked not only the threat or the probability of producing elements like Eta, but rather other factors that make us vulnerable and are directly tied to the development of the country," Alejandro Maldonado said, The Washington Post reported.The inability to invest in mitigation plans, and deforestation were likely to be circumstances that caused the landslide, noted Maldonado.The residents of Queja are the latest addition of what is being called the "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/climate-migration.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">great climate migration</a>." Climate change is causing sea level rise and extreme weather conditions, such as intense heat, drought, <a href="https://www.c2es.org/content/wildfires-and-climate-change/#:_{:text=Climate%20change%20has%20been%20a,in%20the%20Western%20United%20States.&text=Research%20shows%20that%20changes%20in,these%20increases%20in%20wildfire%20risk.}" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">wildfires</a> and enlarged hurricanes and typhoons, which induce mudslides, landslides and flooding, forcing many to flee their homes, never to return.</div><div class="rebellt-item col1" id="rebelltitem3" data-id="3" data-reload-ads="true" data-is-image="False" data-href="https://www.ecowatch.com/climate-refugees-eta-guatemala-2648862911.html?rebelltitem=3#rebelltitem3" data-basename="particle-3" data-post-id="2648862911" data-published-at="1605122669" data-use-pagination="False" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/climate-refugees" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">climate refugees</a> are predicted to increase in number in the <a href="https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/climate-refugee.htm" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">coming years</a> as more natural disasters occur. According to Ecological Threat Register, a September 2020 <a href="https://www.visionofhumanity.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/ETR_2020_web-1.pdf" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">report</a> by the non-profit think tank Institute for Economics & Peace, one billion people live in areas were there is not enough infrastructure in place to combat ecological changes.2020 already claims the largest number of <a href="https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/weather/hurricane/fl-ne-2020-hurricane-season-active-history-atlantic-20201109-qxiclv7vtffxbkvhogblznwl5q-story.html" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">hurricanes</a> and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/24/climate/fires-worst-year-california-oregon-washington.html" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">wildfires</a> ever recorded.Eta first made landfall just south of Puerto Cabezas, a city on Nicaragua's Caribbean coast on <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/03/weather/hurricane-eta-tuesday/index.html" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">Nov. 3</a>, as a Category 4 hurricane, causing 140 mph winds, massive downpours and destructive flooding to several countries in Central America, including Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras.Hurricane Eta <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/11/weather/eta-storm-wednesday/index.html" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); overflow-wrap: break-word;">is expected to hit</a> Florida's Gulf Coast in its fourth landfall on Wednesday, as a Category 1 hurricane, bumped up from a subtropical storm with rains hitting southern Florida on Sunday and Monday. 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In late December, it seemed likely that they would be granted their request, which would have postponed the evictions for at least six months.According to emails filed in court, CGN managers called their “contacts” at the Policía Nacional Civil, Guatemala’s national police, to see if the PNC could conduct the evictions ahead of schedule, before the amparo could be granted. However, the police replied that too many officers were on holiday. Additionally, “they said the order to speed up the execution of the orders will have to come from a very high level either the President or the Minister of the Interior,” Monzón wrote.Monzón called Rodolfo Sosa, a CGN lawyer, who said he would try to speak to the Guatemalan president, Óscar Berger. Sosa and Berger were once partners in the same prestigious firm, and Sosa’s daughter is married to one of the president’s sons. Sosa could not reach Berger, however. So Monzón contacted his “friend,” the minister of defense, who also couldn’t help because of the vacationing officers.Since those avenues were dead ends, CGN requested that the court let it weigh in during the legal proceedings that CONIC had initiated....Skye and CGN management also participated in coordinating the on-the-ground activities of the rank-and-file police officers and soldiers who effectively worked as partners of CGN’s security. Photos show that shortly before the eviction on January 9, dozens of PNC trucks and vans stretched in a long row along the road outside of CGN’s compound, inside of which a white pickup truck carried men “in what appear to be army uniforms,” according to the affidavit filed by the 11 women’s lawyers. The public and private security forces gathered at CGN’s facilities “on the morning of each eviction, including the eviction on January 17,” the affadavit alleges. Photos also show CGN managers, their middlemen, and PNC officers having a meeting after the eviction of January 8, 2007. This was just one of the “pre-eviction planning sessions and post-eviction debriefs [that] were held in CGN’s offices,” the affidavit claims.The armed, masked men who stormed into Lote Ocho as the rain poured and the wind gusted at 5 o’clock in the evening on January 17, 2007, only seemed to be distinguished by their uniforms. The uniforms were black, “the colour of the sky,” and “the colour of the trees,” the women say. Black, blue, and green: the outfits of the PNC, CGN security, and the army. Something else helped tell them apart: Two of the women who are literate say they saw CGN’s logo on the blue uniforms.This distinction mattered little, however, since the three groups of men had allegedly already broken into smaller groups and teamed up when they attacked, according to the women’s depositions. Men from each force seized one pregnant woman who was making tortillas and dragged her into the bushes as her children cried and screamed, she testified. She described the men as a “dog when he comes and he finds some food and he’s growling.” It was all together that they gagged her, wrapped cloth around her eyes and ears, cut her clothes off with a machete, and raped her one after another in what was perhaps an intentional reenactment of the rapes that the military used as a tactic of terror against Maya women during the civil war. “They took off my clothing and they played with my life,” another woman said during her deposition. Men from all three groups splashed gasoline over the makeshift huts and the women’s tattered clothing and set them ablaze.Irma Cac, one of the woman who was allegedly gang-raped, cried while speaking in Toronto in September 2019 after attending a hearing in the ongoing lawsuit. “I will never forget,” she said, “it will never escape from my eyes — the color of <div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/upside-genocide/">https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/upside-genocide/</a></div><div>
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</div><div><div>under the direction of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s then-dictator, the country’s military forces engaged in crimes against humanity—including genocide—against the indigenous people in the Ixil region of the department of Quiché, according to the findings of a three-judge panel. (A constitutional court later vacated the sentence on technical grounds but did not challenge the findings [see Kate Doyle, “Guatemala’s Genocide on Trial,” June 10/17].) Largely ignored during the trial, as a thoughtful piece by The New York Times’s Elisabeth Malkin observed, was the role of top Reagan administration officials—including Ronald Reagan himself—in helping to empower and then cover up the Guatemalan military’s crimes.</div><div>
</div><div>When Ríos Montt executed his coup in March 1982, US Ambassador Frederic Chapin—perhaps naïvely, perhaps cynically—welcomed the event with the words “The Guatemalan government has come out of the darkness and into the light.” Even after the killings increased in intensity, this remained the official US line. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliott Abrams credited Ríos Montt with having “brought considerable progress” on human rights issues and insisted that “the amount of killing of innocent civilians is being reduced step by step.” As if living in an Orwell novel, Abrams demanded that Congress provide the regime with advanced arms because its alleged “progress need[ed] to be rewarded and encouraged.”</div><div>
</div><div>This attitude remained consistent up the chain of command. Secretary of State George Shultz believed that the Ríos Montt regime “help[ed] prevent an extremist takeover.” Most enthusiastic of all, perhaps, was President Reagan: he judged Ríos Montt to be “totally dedicated to democracy” and “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.” Were they simply ignorant of the abuses? If they were, it may have been due to willful ignorance. Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas Enders wrote to Amnesty International disputing its reporting on the killings in Guatemala and insisted that the government was making “significant progress” on human rights while the genocide was taking place. What’s more, declassified documents reveal that just ten days before Reagan sang the dictator’s praises upon meeting him, the State Department had received reports of a “well-founded allegation of a large-scale killing of Indian men, women and children in a remote area by the [Guatemalan] army.”</div><div>
</div><div>Genocide or no, Guatemala was considered an important ally in the Reagan administration’s anticommunist crusade in Central America, which was focused on, but not limited to, Nicaragua and El Salvador. These officials were hoping to convince Congress to lift the arms embargo against Guatemala that had been put in place under the Carter presidency. Reagan wanted to equip the new regime with advanced helicopter parts to improve its ability to strafe and kill its opponents. Congress never agreed to this, but it did grant additional economic aid, while the Guatemalan military got its advanced weaponry from Israel and Taiwan. Moreover, as Allan Nairn reported in The Progressive in 1986, though the helicopter deal did not go through, “in late 1982, [the Reagan administration] quietly approved a pair of transactions worth $40 million to supply the Guatemalan air force with two transport jets and eight T-37 trainers.”</div><div>
</div><div>To be fair to the genocidal dictator, as Walter LaFeber notes in his history of US policy in the region, Inevitable Revolutions, what came after his regime was hardly an improvement. Following a 1983 coup in which Ríos Montt was deposed—and which the US may have encouraged—the military continued its genocidal rampage. As LaFeber writes, “In one village, the army herded the entire population into the courthouse, raped the women, beheaded the men, and took the children outside to smash them to death against rocks.”</div><div>
</div><div>In 1999, a UN investigative body known as the Historical Clarification Commission reported that Guatemala’s military and paramilitary forces were responsible for 93 percent of the 42,275 cases of people who, in the words of human rights activist Aryeh Neier, were “murdered, disappeared, raped, or tortured”—and that number covered little more than 20 percent of the estimated victims. President Clinton traveled there and apologized for the US role in these crimes. But what I find interesting is how little the act of helping to engender—and then justify—the genocide has mattered to the reputations of the former US officials who helped it along.</div><div>
</div><div>Thomas Enders was rewarded with an ambassadorship to Spain. Elliott Abrams was raked over the coals a bit during Iran-Contra for lying to Congress, but not for his role in helping to ensure that the Guatemalan military’s mass murder continued unimpeded. Following a high-level Middle East policy job in the second Bush administration, Abrams was welcomed by the Council on Foreign Relations and frequently gives paid speeches to synagogues and Jewish groups. George Shultz, meanwhile, is as respected a former statesman as anyone alive, and Ronald Reagan, of course, has been turned into an American icon.</div><div>
</div><div>Franklin Roosevelt’s reputation has suffered grievously for his relative inaction during the Nazi Holocaust. Henry Kissinger is considered a “war criminal” even in some polite company for his tangential role in the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s (as well as his role in the 1973 Chilean coup). And yet, for some reason, those who encouraged and apologized for the genocidal rampages of the Guatemalan regime have gotten off scot-free. This is itself a kind of crime. How about the next time that, say, Elliott Abrams speaks at a local synagogue, worshipers inquire as to which genocidal murders he condemns and which he not only supports, but actually helps to make possible?</div><div>
</div><div>Frank Smyth wrote about the Ríos Montt trial earlier this year, and asked if other Guatemalan military officers would ever face justice for their role in that country's genocide.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>Eric Alterman Longtime Nation media columnist Eric Alterman is a CUNY distinguished professor of English at Brooklyn College and the author of 11 books.</div></div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div> =naclaEven as word of the genocide leaked out, Ríos Montt maintained friendships with prominent U.S. evangelical Christians Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Ronald Reagan had won the presidency in 1980 by flipping the evangelical vote away from the Democrats, who had helped elect Carter four years before. In 1982, Reagan traveled to Guatemala during the genocide and <a href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=42070" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none; font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">dismissed reports of abuses</a>, saying that Ríos Montt was “totally dedicated to democracy in Guatemala.” Reagan said “frankly I’m inclined to believe” Ríos Montt has been “getting a bum rap.”</div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/did-donald-trump-help-an-anti-corruption-probe-in-guatemala-to-aid-his-re-election-bid/">https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/did-donald-trump-help-an-anti-corruption-probe-in-guatemala-to-aid-his-re-election-bid/</a>This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman. “How Donald Trump took down the Robert Mueller of Latin America.” That’s the headline of a new <a href="https://www.revealnews.org/article/how-donald-trump-took-down-the-robert-mueller-of-latin-america/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">investigation</a> by Reveal at The Center for Investigative Reporting and in The Daily Beast that looks at how the Trump administration aided Guatemala’s right-wing government to kill a powerful anti-corruption commission.The story centers on Iván Velásquez, a Colombian prosecutor who headed the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, known as CICIG, from 2013 to ’19. A leading backer of the commission in the United States was former Vice President Joe Biden. After leaving office, Biden wrote, quote, “I made it clear that U.S. funding for Guatemala hinged on CICIG being allowed to continue its work."but the Trump administration took the opposite approach and agreed to withdraw support for the commission in apparent exchange for Guatemala’s support of Trump’s immigration and Middle East policies. In 2018, Guatemala moved its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem just after the United States did. A year later, Guatemala’s then-president, the former comedian Jimmy Morales, agreed to make Guatemala a “safe third country,” quote-unquote, for migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. The agreement requires asylum seekers who journey through Guatemala en route to the United States to apply for asylum in Guatemala instead of at the U.S.-Mexico border.On August 31st, 2018, Guatemalan President Morales announced he was shutting down the anti-corruption commission, which had begun investigating Morales himself, his son and his family. Morales was flanked by 50 military officers. Soon tanks and jeeps with mounted artillery, provided by the United States, circled around the office of the commission.Reporters Aaron Glantz and Anayansi Diaz-Cortes write, quote, “All of this shook Guatemalan society to the bone — a dark reminder of the civil war and military rule,” unquote. Before it was disbanded, CICIG have prosecuted over 100 cases, including one against former Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, who was forced to resign in 2015 after months of massive protests and remains in jail.Well, Aaron Glantz and Anayansi Diaz-Cortes both join us to talk about their <a href="https://www.revealnews.org/article/how-donald-trump-took-down-the-robert-mueller-of-latin-america/" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">reporting</a> for Reveal and the <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-donald-trump-helped-kneecap-the-robert-mueller-of-south-america" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">report</a> in The Daily Beast.Aaron, why don’t you talk about the significance of releasing this now? I mean, this is a story that involves President Trump, that involves Vice President Pence, that involves Sheldon Adelson, the big Republican donor, in connections to Israel, that involves Colombia itself. Iván Velásquez is a crusading human rights prosecutor, who was attempting to do this work in Guatemala.AARON GLANTZ: Iván Velásquez, who is the person who blew the whistle to us, had taken down presidents and paramilitaries in Guatemala and in Colombia. And he was known as the Robert Mueller of Latin America. He was brought to Guatemala in 2013 — as you mentioned, he had the strong support of Vice President Joe Biden — with the idea that if tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors are arriving at the U.S. border every year, that it’s in the U.S. interest to improve conditions in Guatemala by lessening the amount of corruption and impunity in that country. And so, as you mentioned, Iván Velásquez, shortly after he arrives in Guatemala, he throws the president, Otto Pérez Molina, a former member of the ruling military junta from earlier, in prison for running a customs ring at the airport, his involvement in that.But, as you mentioned, then Donald Trump comes in office. And we see an entirely different dynamic take place, where these two former television stars, Donald Trump and Jimmy Morales, both with a documented history of racism, band together to kill this anti-corruption force and save themselves.AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Iván Velásquez himself, the head of CICIG, talking about what happened.<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background: rgb(245, 245, 245); border: none !important;">IVÁN VELÁSQUEZ: [translated] President Jimmy Morales tells President Trump, “I understand what you’re going through. You are being persecuted by Robert Mueller in the States. I am being persecuted by Iván Velásquez in Guatemala. I know how much you’ve suffered through all this.” When Ambassador Nikki Haley visits Guatemala, it is an explicit show of support for Morales. She has a series of complaints for me: stop doing press conferences, anonymity. That is what is expected of my role at CICIG. It’s a transaction where both parties seem to win something: You help us by ending this persecution unleashed by the CICIG, and we will help you. And how do you shut down CICIG? By cutting the funds. And that is exactly what happened.</blockquote>AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go to March 2018, when then-U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley spoke to AIPAC, the policy conference in Washington, D.C., and thanked Guatemala for supporting the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.<blockquote style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px; padding: 10px 20px 10px 24px; position: relative; line-height: 1.7; overflow: hidden; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; border: none !important;">NIKKI HALEY: Last week I took a trip to Guatemala and Honduras. And I thanked them both for voting with us. God bless Guatemala. They’ve even joined us in moving their embassy to Jerusalem.</blockquote>AMY GOODMAN: So, Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, if you could talk more about this? Then you have Sheldon Adelson chartering a private plane for Morales and the leadership of Guatemala to go to Jerusalem, when the U.S. was recognizing their moved embassy to Jerusalem. How this is all a part of this story?ANAYANSI DIAZ-CORTES: Well, I think the important thing to remember, Amy, is that this commission was basically set up to do kind of the hard labor, the boring labor, of institution building, after decades of civil war and U.S. involvement in supporting military dictatorships here.So, you know, when we look at Biden’s support of the CICIG and the contrast to what begins to happen once Velásquez starts going after Jimmy Morales for corruption, then you see lobbying on the part of, you know, Guatemala sending signals to the U.S. to then support the United States in moving the Guatemalan Embassy to Jerusalem as a way to tell Trump, “I understand your suffering. You have Robert Mueller” — like he said, “You have Robert Mueller in the United States. I have Iván Velásquez here. Get the CICIG out of my hair, in exchange for a pliant immigration policy in Guatemala.”And we see how that timeline takes place, first with Nikki Haley visiting Guatemala and telling Iván Velásquez, “Tone it down. Stop it with the ‘I heart CICIG’ bumper stickers. Don’t hold press conferences.” And then, kind of days later, she is at AIPAC — with Jimmy Morales there, as well — announcing this, and that leads to a slow demise, over the year, of the CICIG.It’s also important to just acknowledge that in order for CICIG to work, CICIG can make recommendations based on what they believe should happen, but really it is the attorney general and the Guatemalan Congress who implement these recommendations. So, at some point, Morales, you know, Thelma Aldana, who was the attorney general then, and Velásquez were a dream team. They were kind of working together. The moment that Velásquez goes under Morales’s family, that then changes, right? Morales refuses to stand before a judge, and Velásquez doesn’t back down.AMY GOODMAN: And Thelma Aldana — people can go to our website at democracynow.org to see our <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/6/21/guatemala_presidential_election_thelma_aldana_corruption" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">interview</a> with the former Guatemalan attorney general, who then Morales goes after and indicts. And this weekend, Interpol said they’re not going to honor any arrest warrant for her.ANAYANSI DIAZ-CORTES: That’s correct, Amy. That is correct. And we don’t get into that story in our radio story because there’s so much to get into, but her leaving Guatemala was like a key moment, where suddenly you have the attorney general that Velásquez was working so closely with is no more, as well. So, he’s slowly isolated. And once the U.S. support is taken away, well, CICIG is basically left not only without teeth, but without substance.AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can wrap this up, Aaron Glantz, and talk about what came of this, what this means that you had Morales surrounded by military tanks, a number provided by the United States, announcing CICIG was being dissolved and Iván Velásquez was being thrown out?AARON GLANTZ: Well, as you said in your intro and we say in our piece, it was a dark reminder of the days when Guatemala had previously been ruled by U.S.-backed military juntas. And the whole purpose of this international anti-corruption force was to help turn the page and move towards a more just society.And that was visually — you know, all those military members, the U.S.-provided military vehicles in the streets sent a clear message. When Velásquez leaves the country to attend U.N. meetings in the U.S., he tries to get back in, they won’t let him in. And they send his belongings to Colombia, which is where he’s from, and it’s where Anayansi and I went earlier this year to interview him and get his story.AMY GOODMAN: Well, we want to thank you so much for being with us. We’re going to link to your <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-donald-trump-helped-kneecap-the-robert-mueller-of-south-america" target="blank" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">story</a> in The Daily Beast at democracynow.org, Aaron Glantz and Anayansi Diaz-Cortes with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, the piece called “How Donald Trump took down the Robert Mueller of Latin America.”=Evangelical links have also helped shape US alliances in the Trump presidency. As secretary of state, Pompeo has been instrumental in forging link with other evangelical leaders in the hemisphere, including Guatemala’s Jimmy Morales and the new Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro.Both have undertaken to follow the US lead in moving their embassies in Israel to Jerusalem.<a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/06/23/guatemala-land-defender-san-rafael-mine/">http</a> ---<div><a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/06/23/guatemala-land-defender-san-rafael-mine/">https://theintercept.com/2019/06/23/guatemala-land-defender-san-rafael-mine/</a>no lnx many[vid]SHE DEFENDED HER LAND AGAINST A MINE IN GUATEMALA. THEN SHE FLED IN FEAR FOR HER LIFE.Alleen BrownJune 23 2019, 7:30 a.m.Video by Martyna StarostaTERESA MUÑOZ WAS riding her motorbike along her regular delivery route on a winding Guatemala road, carrying the homemade cheese she sold for a living, when she saw in her rearview mirror one of the white sedans that employees of the Escobal silver mine drove. Mining company cars had followed her before, but this time, the vehicle swerved. The driver rammed her motorbike, pitching her into the street, and then sped off. Muñoz was left bruised and scraped, convinced they’d meant to kill her.For years, she had been a leader in the fight against the silver mine, the project of Tahoe Resources, a U.S.-headquartered Canadian company. Located in the southeastern Guatemala city of San Rafael las Flores, Escobal was on its way to becoming one of the largest silver mines in the world. Muñoz and her family helped organize community votes on the mine, participated in rallies to stop production, and educated people about the mine’s potential harms.Rainfall in the mountains that contain the Escobal mine feeds the Los Esclavos River and a multitude of natural springs, whose waters fuel the production of coffee and onions in the region, grown for export. For sustenance, families grow beans, corn, and squash in the forested hillsides. More than half the surrounding population lives below the poverty line, making them particularly vulnerable to changes in the local hydrology. Mines like Escobal use massive quantities of water and divert flows in ways that can disrupt communities’ access. Such projects have also been known to leach heavy metals into drinking water sources.The mountains are part of the territory of the Xinca people, an Indigenous group whose language and culture were nearly wiped out by Spanish colonizers and the Catholic Church. For years, Tahoe Resources argued that there were no Xinca people left in the communities surrounding the mine who would require any consultation. They were wrong. In fact, the mine’s denial of the Xincas’ existence fueled a regional reclamation of the identity. “Soy Xinca” — “I am Xinca” — has become the rallying cry under which Muñoz and others fight.[GettyImages-866773202-tahoe-guatemala-mining-1561145616RTS2014K-guatemala-tahoe-mining-1561145629Left: The mining complex in San Rafael Las Flores, Guatemala, on Oct. 26, 2017. Right: Workers at the Escobal silver mine in Guatemala on Aug. 14, 2017.Photos: Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty Images; and Luis Echeverria/Reuters]
In response to the anti-mining movement in San Rafael, Tahoe hired firms run by U.S. and Israeli ex-special forces veterans to protect the project and lobbied the Guatemalan government to quash the resistance. Over the course of the 12-year conflict, mine opponents have been shot, imprisoned, and even killed.For Muñoz, the fight meant exile. “I’m sure, as is my family, that if I had continued there, I wouldn’t be alive anymore,” she told The Intercept. In 2016, she abandoned the land for which she’d risked everything and sought asylum in the United States, a process that has stalled since Donald Trump’s crackdown on asylum-seekers began.A name for people like Muñoz has emerged over the last decade: land defender. The term encompasses not only environmental activists defending their communities from contamination and lawyers fighting to enforce environmental regulations, but also peasant farmers attempting to hold on to their livelihoods and Indigenous people organizing to protect spaces that represent an extension of their identity.The most famous land defender was Berta Cáceres, a member of the Lenca Indigenous group in Honduras who organized opposition to the Agua Zarca Dam. Cáceres’s murder by the dam’s hired hitmen was preceded by a U.S.-backed coup in Honduras in 2009 that paved the way for a wave of mega-project approvals. Now, a global shift toward autocracy is precipitating new threats against land defenders, and Guatemala is a case in point.Last year was one of the most dangerous for land defenders in Guatemala since the end of the country’s brutal civil war in 1996. According to the Unit for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Guatemala, 18 land defenders and campesino organizers were assassinated in 2018, including Indigenous people fighting to protect their territory from agribusiness and hydroelectric projects, and the leaders of peasant organizations fighting to maintain access to land they use to sustain their livelihoods. Ronal David Barillas Díaz, a Xinca leader who organized against the sugar industry as well as the San Rafael mine, was among those killed. Of 392 aggressions against human rights defenders documented by the unit, including threats, assaults, arrests, and unfounded judicial complaints, 184 were aimed at Indigenous people defending their land.
Jorge Santos, the organization’s general coordinator, credits the increase in violence to outgoing President Jimmy Morales’s abandonment of the nation’s lauded anti-corruption efforts. But he finds it hard to be optimistic that the looming runoff presidential election in August holds hope for change. “Guatemala is at an important crossroads,” Santos told The Intercept. “One road is uphill, with many large rocks, but it allows us to build democracy, consolidate mechanisms of equity, aspirations for peace, for social justice, probably very slowly. The other is a road of regression, and it’s a regression that’s taking place at a very fast and accelerated rate. It’s a scenario that is going to put us in a state where it is understood that the only mechanism of exercising power is through violence.”
[GettyImages-81528402-civil-war-guatemala-1561145604Maya Ixil men carry the coffins of their loved ones, victims of the Guatemalan army massacre of April 16, 1981, for burial in Nebaj, northwest of Guatemala City, on June 9, 2008. Photo: Eitan Abramovich/AFP/Getty Images]A Precarious PeaceThe roots of the mining industry in Guatemala are soaked in the blood of its 36-year civil war. Beginning in 1960, Guatemala’s military government mercilessly repressed Indigenous-led, leftist opposition movements, killing or disappearing 200,000 people. Although the rebels were called terrorists, the state and its paramilitary groups carried out 93 percent of the killings, and around 80 percent of the victims were Mayan. The communism-obsessed U.S. government provided political and financial support to the murderous regime.
The first large metal mine, owned by the Canadian International Nickel Company, arrived in Guatemala in the early years of the conflict, to an area known to be a center of guerrilla resistance. The mining company’s presence fueled a crackdown that cost 3,000 to 6,000 lives, according to some estimates.
Finally, the 1996 Peace Accords brokered a truce between the government and the opposition movements. The heart of the accords was a demilitarization agreement meant to eliminate the paramilitary forces. For the first time in the nation’s history, the accords also recognized the rights of Indigenous people to preserve their languages, practice their religions, and live free from discrimination. Guatemala signed on to the International Labor Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention the same year.
Beyond humanitarian goals, the accords had another purpose: to signal that Guatemala was open for business. Only months after they were signed, Guatemala enacted a new mining law that allowed foreign companies to wholly own mining enterprises operating in the country, exempted those companies from a variety of taxes, and reduced government royalties on mined minerals. Guatemala became one of the cheapest places in the world to mine.
Meanwhile, members of the old military regime were finding their way into the private sector. In response, the United Nations’ International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, the CICIG, was founded in 2006 “to investigate illegal security groups and clandestine security organizations in Guatemala — criminal groups believed to have infiltrated state institutions.” The U.S. would provide $44.5 million in funding over the next decade.
Quelvin Jiménez, a Xinca lawyer, spent the 2000s developing grammatical standards for the Xinca language and working with a federal anti-racism commission to address ongoing discrimination. In 2010, he learned that the Escobal silver mine would be coming to his people’s homeland. He alerted members of the Xinca community. Among the articles of the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention was a requirement that Indigenous people be consulted before minerals are extracted from the territory they occupy.“As we are in this period of reclaiming our rights, the mine arrives,” said Jiménez. “All those processes are stalled by the presence of the San Rafael mine.”To its shareholders, Tahoe Resources suggested that it had no responsibility to consult with Indigenous people. “According to our understanding, although Indigenous people may have inhabited the site at one time, there are no Indigenous populations that currently live in the immediate area of the Escobal project site,” the company wrote in a 2012 filing.
[ss-munoz-guatemala-land-defender-1561145638Teresa Muñoz at her home in the U.S., where she is applying for asylum, in October 2018. Still: Martyna Starosta for The Intercept]Land Defenders Under SiegeMuñoz’s home in Mataquescuintla, Guatemala, located a few miles from the mine, was built by her father using adobe that she and her 12 siblings helped mix. Growing up, they spent the mornings making tortillas for the family and the rest of the day playing in the woods and planting or harvesting corn, beans, and coffee.After her father died, Muñoz took charge of caring for her sister Engracia, who suffered a traumatic brain injury as a teenager, and cultivated her family’s land, making cheese out of her cows’ milk to sell.Muñoz had never been involved in any activism until she heard about the mine at church. “When I learned of the tremendous harms that such a project causes to the environment in these territories, I got worried,” Muñoz said.She and others began holding referenda on the mine in various communities. The tactic could not legally bar the mine from operating, but it created a public record of the lack of local support. In the eight participating municipalities, more than 90 percent of community members voted against the mine. Meanwhile, protesters began rallying at construction sites where infrastructure was being installed.In response, Tahoe hired International Security and Defense Management, a private security firm run by a U.S. Special Forces veteran, to assemble a security plan. The company hired Golan Group, founded by former Israeli special forces officers, to carry it out.Muñoz was one of few women who stood front and center at the anti-mine actions. “They realized I was one of the leaders,” she said.Advocates for land defenders have observed a pattern in the cases of violence they’ve investigated in San Rafael and across Guatemala. “They start to portray human rights defenders as terrorists,” said Maria Reyes, who worked closely with Escobal opponents as an official with Protection International. Extractive industries push the narrative that “this isn’t a peaceful protest, but rather a blockade that is violating the rights of others.” [THEREFORE VIOLENT?!]“There’s an escalation that begins with the act of defamation,” Santos explained. “It can reach such a level that it ends in the ‘civil death’ of the human rights defender — when they are captured and brought to prison — or with their physical death, when they are assassinated.”By the end of 2012, events around the mine were escalating. Protests erupted as Tahoe installed high-voltage lines to power the project. A cement plant and a storage facility were set on fire. Then, in January, two security guards were killed in a confrontation with armed men. The resistance movement denied responsibility for the violence and property damage, suggesting that agents provocateur might have been responsible. The mine’s head of security claimed that surveillance cameras weren’t working at the time, and the identity of the perpetrators never emerged. Two months later, four Xinca leaders, including the president of the Xinca parliament, were kidnapped after participating in a referendum on the mine. One of them was killed.Meanwhile, Tahoe’s pressure campaign on the Guatemalan government was paying off. The National Security Commission decided that unrest against any mine should be considered a matter of national security, according to a report by Plaza Pública, and an opaque interagency group made up of environment, energy, and national security officials was formed to monitor such projects.Things came to a head in April 2013, when a group of protesters gathered in front of the mine’s entrance. Security guards opened fire, injuring six mine opponents. Protests and road blockades followed, as the Xinca leaders demanded dialogue. The escalating conflict culminated in a midnight standoff near the mine between police and men with covered faces. An officer was shot and killed.Two days later, Guatemala’s then-president, Otto Pérez Molina, approved a state of siege in four municipalities including San Rafael, deploying thousands of military personnel and suspending constitutional rights. Arrest warrants were issued for more than a dozen mine opponents, including Muñoz, who was accused of being an organized crime leader.GettyImages-167936856-siege-guatemala-1561145608 A soldier inspects a car at a checkpoint in Guatemala on May 2, 2013, after then-President Otto Pérez Molina ordered a state of siege. Photo: Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty ImagesMuñoz was in the middle of taking a shower the following morning when she was alerted that military officials were approaching her home. Other women arrested for mine resistance had reported physical and verbal abuse by police. Muñoz made a split-second decision, putting on her clothes backward in her haste to escape into the forest behind her house. She walked all day through the mountains toward Guatemala City, rushing to avoid ending up alone in the dark. She made it the roughly 40 miles before nightfall.In the months that followed, Muñoz stayed indoors and adopted a new identity. Her brother Santiago had fled too, claiming asylum in Costa Rica, but she was unable to have any contact with him, Engracia, or the rest of her family. It was difficult to bear. Finally, after seven months, a judge withdrew all allegations against her.Although returning home was a relief, “Another difficult phase of my life began,” Muñoz said. Her dairy business was destroyed, and she felt emotionally frayed and ill-equipped to manage her mounting debt after months in hiding.Yet to the surprise of her family, she kept participating in the anti-Escobal movement, even as the mine began production.By then, its impacts were revealing themselves. Residents of the tiny, intensely poor town of Cuchilla, which sits directly above the mine, were experiencing small earthquakes they said always occurred at the same time of day. Cracks appeared in the foundations of their homes, and the state agency that manages disasters eventually declared the community to be uninhabitable. Although the mine agreed to buy the homes of many displaced residents, it denied responsibility for the seismic activity, calling the purchases humanitarian assistance.Meanwhile, Tahoe continued to claim that there were no Indigenous people in the region. The law was clear enough: If the Xinca existed, then the mine had to consult with them in order to operate. But the company’s argument was based on data from Guatemala’s 2002 census, the results of which have been questioned by anthropologists as well as Xinca leaders.Muñoz’s story offers insight into why the census data is wrong. When asked by The Intercept if she identified as Indigenous, Muñoz said no. But when asked if she was Xinca, she said yes. Jiménez, the Xinca lawyer, explained that community elders see the designation “Indigenous” as a Western imposition and that few identify as such. A report published by Guatemala’s Ministry of Culture and Sports noted that census takers might have asked ineffective questions or assumed subjects’ ethnic identities based on their clothing or language.The violence continued. In one of the most tragic incidents in the fight against the mine, a 16-year-old artist, musician, and vocal mining opponent named Topacio Reynoso was shot and killed in 2014 as she left a local festival with her father. Reynoso’s case remains unsolved.Muñoz was run off the road the next year. At first, she tried to hide her injuries, even from her siblings. But she knew that after defamation, criminalization, and assassination comes impunity. “When one wants to access justice, the fact is it’s not on the side of those who defend human rights,” Reyes explained.Rather than hoping that her attackers would be deterred by Guatemala’s feeble criminal justice system, Muñoz fled to the United States in 2016. At the time, Tahoe was the second-highest producing silver mine in the world.
GettyImages-486339366-otto-perez-1561145611Former Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, center, attends a court hearing to face corruption charges on Sept. 3, 2015. Photo: Saul Martinez/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesAt a CrossroadsThere was a moment, around the time Muñoz left the country, when it seemed to Santos that the cycle of attacks on land defenders might break.In 2015, tens of thousands of people took to the streets to demand the resignation of Pérez Molina. CICIG investigators had uncovered a multimillion-dollar customs fraud scheme involving the president, and it appeared that people were finally fed up with impunity and corruption. Pérez Molina stepped down and was jailed.It was a time of intense relief and hope for the nation. Aggressions against land and human rights defenders dropped. But it didn’t last long.By August 2017, the anti-corruption commission was seeking to investigate the new president, Jimmy Morales, for possible campaign finance violations. Although Morales had run on an anti-corruption platform, he refused to become the CICIG’s next target and announced that he would eject its commissioner, Iván Velásquez, from the country. It was the beginning of the president’s war against the commission — and what many would come to call a slow-motion coup.In turn, 2018 became one of the most violent years Santos had observed. Relative to its population, Guatemala was second only to Colombia in the number of land and human rights defenders assassinated, according to Front Line Defenders. The most intense period of violence began on May 9, when two men gunned down Luis Arturo Marroquín in broad daylight in the town of San Luis Jilotepeque before driving away in a pickup truck. Marroquín was a leader of the Campesino Development Committee, or CODECA, which had applied to launch a political party the same day. In a speech that spring, Morales had railed against the group.By the time the month was over, three Maya Q’eqchi’ members of another prominent campesino organization had been murdered in a region to the north, where palm oil plantations have claimed vast tracts of land. In June, three more CODECA members were murdered, all by machete. And at the end of July, the body of Juana Raymundo, a 25-year-old Maya Ixil woman and rising CODECA leader, was discovered with signs of asphyxiation by some kind of rope or belt.In the midst of it all, the Escobal opponents obtained an appointment with the head of the anti-corruption commission. They explained to investigators that in addition to police repression and the potential for contamination, they were disturbed by the mining money that was coursing through the community.Some of the money may have been the kind of legal bribery that every boom town sees. In San Rafael, 36 percent of the $16 million in royalties provided to the town has gone toward local government administration. But Leonel López Díaz, who worked as a driver and security guard for the mine and is now involved in the resistance, said he witnessed checks being passed to local officials that he believed to be separate from the royalties. A spokesperson for Pan American Silver, which purchased Tahoe Resources in 2019, did not respond to a question from The Intercept about the allegation. When he worked for another mine, López Díaz said, he used to go to church and record the priest’s Masses, listening for anti-mining rhetoric.The concerns were enough to pique the investigators’ interest. It was bad timing. In August, Morales officially announced that he would end the CICIG’s mandate.[GettyImages-1025598396-morales-1561145621 President Jimmy Morales announces that he will not renew the mandate of a U.N. anti-corruption mission in a press conference in Guatemala City on Aug. 31, 2018. Photo: Orlando Estrada/AFP/Getty Images]When Pérez Molina threatened to shut down the commission in 2015, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden threatened to withhold aid, and Pérez Molina backed off. But this time, Donald Trump’s administration remained silent, perhaps encouraged by hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of lobbying from anti-CICIG politicians and businesspeople, or Morales’s attempts to curry favor by opening a Guatemalan embassy in Jerusalem days after the U.S. did the same.
“What is happening in terms of the democratic regression of the United States since the arrival of Donald Trump has also played a fundamental role in the aspirations of the fight against corruption and impunity in [Guatemala],” said Santos.
It’s a problem that goes beyond Central America. “There is also a global expression leaning more and more toward the extreme right,” he said. “We feel this more in the countries that historically have shortfalls in democracy and human rights.” In many such places — such as Brazil, the Philippines, and Colombia — the shift is expressed in violence against land defenders.
Even in the U.S., as Indigenous people and environmental activists gear up to stand in the way of the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline, many wonder how a law enforcement response under Trump might be even worse than Standing Rock, an oil pipeline fight that was violently repressed under President Barack Obama.
And in the background, the effects of climate change are putting new pressure on land disputes across the globe, including in Guatemala.
Morales will be out as president following a runoff election on August 11. But on the question of uprooting corruption, the two candidates that survived the first round of elections in June are unpromising. Both have already found themselves in the crosshairs of the CICIG. After former first lady Sandra Torres announced her candidacy, she was granted immunity from prosecution for alleged campaign finance violations in the 2015 election. The anti-corruption commission sought to lift her immunity, a request that remains stranded in legal proceedings. And former prisons director Alejandro Giammattei was jailed in 2010 in the wake of a CICIG investigation into the murder of seven prisoners by security officials. Charges against him were eventually dropped. Neither candidate has committed to support the commission.
In 2019, the assassinations of land defenders and campesinos have only continued. The Unit for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders in Guatemala has documented six so far. Four of those killed worked with CODECA. Two more were conservationists for the Foundation for Ecodevelopment and Conservation. They worked in protected areas in eastern Guatemala, including a reserve home to a dozen threatened species of frogs and salamanders whose habitat has steadily been deforested by agribusiness and the timber industry.[RTS20CIL-xinca-people-guatemala-1561145625Xinca residents of San Rafael Las Flores outside of the Constitutional Court of Guatemala after a news conference on Tahoe Resources’ Escobal mine on Sept. 6, 2018. Photo: Luis Echeverria/Reuters]The CheckpointTeresa’s brother Miguel Ángel Muñoz begins his 24-hour shift in the community of Casillas at 5 p.m. once a week. As he sits on the side of the highway, he sips coffee and chats with the other dozen or so people keeping watch. Every so often a large truck rolls by, and that’s when the action begins. The men rush to the road and place cones around the vehicle. Most drivers agree to allow them to inspect what is being carried.“Our job is to stop the trucks and check them to see if they carry mining products or if they’re bringing fuel or cement to the mine. We stop them here, and we register them,” Miguel Ángel said during an October shift. “If they’re not carrying anything, we let them pass.”The checkpoint in Casillas was set up in 2017, shortly before a court ordered the mine to suspend production, pending litigation over the Xincas’ existence in the area. Law enforcement attempted to evict them that first year, shooting tear gas that billowed near a school and a health center, but they failed. A similar checkpoint has since been set up in the family’s home community of Mataquescuintla.Despite centuries of efforts by the church, the state, and a private corporation, the Xincas have refused to die. In September, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court ruled against Tahoe Resources, affirming that the Xinca people exist in the area impacted by the mine and must be consulted. Unanswered is whether Xinca consent is required before the project can recommence. “The only proposal we have is that they leave,” Miguel Ángel said.Tahoe’s share prices tumbled in the wake of the movement’s success in sparking delays. In January, the massive Vancouver-based mining company Pan American Silver moved in to purchase the company for $1.07 billion. “We are working towards building enduring, positive relationships with all stakeholders in the region, and to establishing a reputation as an honest, credible partner. At this stage, we are focused on actively listening in order to create a space for dialogue and to gain a deeper understanding of people’s expectations and concerns about the mine,” Siren Fisekci, Pan American Silver’s vice president for investor relations and corporate communications, told The Intercept in an emailed statement. She said the company is not setting any timeline for the mine’s potential restart.
On the ground, the change in ownership meant little. The in-country staff remain the same, according to the nonprofit Earthworks, and aggression toward the resistance has continued.
Jiménez, the lawyer representing the Xinca people, received death threats over the phone in February. He’s noticed people following him in cars and watching his house. Amnesty International has urged Guatemala’s attorney general to investigate and provide protection.
Asked for comment, Fisekci wrote, “We adhere to the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights. We do not tolerate threats or any forms of violence.”In March, Guatemala’s University of San Carlos, along with the local anti-Escobal organization CODIDENA and Virginia Tech researchers from the same lab that exposed lead contamination in Flint, Michigan, published a study on the impacts of the mine so far.
In San Rafael, arsenic has been detected in tap water. Its origins are complicated, according to Guadalupe García Prado, the study’s coordinator. Demand for water after the mine began operations required the city to drill a new water well. The San Carlos researchers traced the arsenic to the new well and found that a water treatment plant is making little difference.
The study found that at least 12 springs have dried up since the mine arrived. Possibly to blame, the researchers argue, is a process called dewatering, where the mine perpetually pumps water out of its tunnels — approximately 255 million gallons per minute — into treatment ponds, before releasing it into the Los Esclavos River. The process is necessary even when the mine is out of production to keep the tunnels from flooding.
The expected productive life of the mine is 18 years, and much of the risk of contamination will arise after it is closed. Newly exposed sulfide minerals in mining areas often react with water and air to form acid mine drainage, which can dissolve other metals, like arsenic, from the surrounding rock, contaminating water. It will fall to the Guatemalan government to manage the risk — a task the researchers argue it lacks the capacity to carry out. In fact, the researchers confirmed that an old artisanal mine in the area that ceased operation 40 years ago was still leaching into water systems, contaminating natural springs with cadmium and lead.
In the end, the mining executives will move on, and the hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars in royalties that Tahoe used as bait to hook Guatemala’s government will disappear.
“Guatemala has built a model of such a nature that it exploits, excludes, or exiles,” as Santos put it. “What’s installed is a spurious private investment in which the guarantees of labor rights and social welfare are not exercised.” He added, “What this is going to produce are large contingents of migration.”
ss-checkpoint-guatemala-1561145634 Miguel Ángel Muñoz, Teresa’s brother, at the checkpoint in Casillas, Guatemala, in September 2018. Still: Martyna Starosta for The InterceptIf the conflict against the mine heats up again, Miguel Ángel says he’s willing to die if he has to — migrating to the U.S. is not on the table. He tried that already.In 1995, Miguel Ángel joined his brother Santiago in the U.S. and got a job at a doughnut bakery in Virginia. He hated almost everything about it. He hated being trapped indoors and the way people looked at him like he was a burden. Remembering riding his bike on a path near the mountains is the only thing that lights up his face when he talks about Virginia. He came home to stay.Teresa’s sister Salomé Muñoz returned too, after eight years of working long night shifts and selling tamales in the U.S. to get by. Her three children are U.S. citizens, but given the opportunity to go home to the mountains, she opted out of the United States. “Here, I walk barefoot in the mountains. Here, you go along singing; there’s no penalty for making noise. My life was very confined there,” she said. She’s caring for Engracia in their father’s home in Teresa’s absence.Teresa Muñoz packages bacon on a frigid, fast-moving assembly line 10 hours a day. Her lawyer says hers is a textbook asylum case, yet proceedings have been stalled for months. Still, she’s building a life for herself. Although she has few friends, she attends church on Sundays and goes to the gym. Her studio apartment is surrounded by large trees.Muñoz can’t imagine a scenario in which she’ll be able to return to Guatemala. But she’s found small ways to continue to defend her land, even from thousands of miles away. “I’ve managed to form a little group of people here in the United States,” she said. Over the phone, she’s coordinating friends of the Escobal resistance now living across the U.S. to raise money for meals for mining opponents during their 24-hour shifts. “We’ll send it to the mountains, to my town.”Reporting for this story was supported with a grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation.RELATEDDefending Land and Environmental Rights Has Become an Increasingly Deadly EndeavorSAN PEDRO, PERU – JULY 19, 2017: A dead fish floats in a film of oil residue. A recent pipeline leak leaves the fishing grounds for five communities contaminated. 1,600 barrels of oil skimmed were off of this stream. San Pedro, on the Marañón River in the State of Loreto, Puru on July 19, 2017. (Photo by Ben Depp)“This Is Not A Symbolic Action” — Indigenous Protesters Occupy Oil Platforms in Radicalized Fight Against Pollution in the AmazonA woman holds a picture of Honduran Human Rights activist, Coordinator of the Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) Berta Caceres Flores, reading "Justice for Berta", during a march for the International Women Day in Managua on March 8, 2016. The march was to demand an international commission to investigate Caceres' murder, which took place on March 3 in La Esperanza, Honduras. AFP PHOTO/ Inti OCON / AFP / Inti Ocon        (Photo credit should read INTI OCON/AFP/Getty Images)Drugs, Dams, and Power: The Murder of Honduran Activist Berta CáceresHow a Movement That Never Killed Anyone Became the FBI’s No. 1 Domestic Terrorism ThreatCONTACT THE AUTHOR:Alleen Brownalleen.brown@?theintercept.com
</div>http<a href="https://theintercept.com/2019/06/23/guatemala-land-defender-san-rafael-mine/">s://theintercept.com/2019/06/23/guatemala-land-defender-san-rafael-mine/</a>=<header style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 165px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; position: relative;"><div class="article--header" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;"><h2 style="margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; float: none; line-height: 1em;"><a href="https://theconversation.com/corruption-triumphs-in-guatemalas-presidential-election-119076" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none;">Corruption triumphs in Guatemala’s presidential election</a></h2><p class="byline" style="margin: 0px 0px 5px; padding: 2px 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; line-height: 1.2; clear: both;"><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;"><a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/naomi-roht-arriaza-757331" style="text-decoration-line: none; outline: none;">Naomi Roht-Arriaza</a>, <span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">University of California, Hastings</div></header><div class="content" data-raw="" style="margin: 0px 0px 0px 165px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;"><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial;">For their next president, Guatemalans must choose between two veteran politicians with shady pasts and alleged ties to organized crime.</div><a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/dicaprio-solar-investment-2563538171.html">https://www.ecowatch.com/dicaprio-solar-investment-2563538171.html</a><a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/guatemala-textile-design-1975198164.html">http://www.ecowatch.com/guatemala-textile-design-1975198164.html</a>https://www.propublica.org/podcast/item/how-a-shootout-on-a-guatemalan-highway-opened-window-to-corruption/http://www.democracynow.org/2016/1/8/18_ex_military_guatemalan_leaders_arrestedIn Guatemala, police have arrested and indicted 18 ex-military leaders on charges of committing crimes against humanity during the decades-long, U.S.-backed dirty war against Guatemala’s indigenous communities. The ex-military leaders face charges of ordering massacres and forced disappearances during the conflict, which led to more than a quarter-million deaths. Many of the arrested former military leaders were backed by the United States, including Manuel Benedicto Lucas García, a former army chief of staff and the brother of ex-President Romeo Lucas. García had worked closely with U.S. military officials to develop a system of warfare in the highlands against Guatemala’s indigenous Mayan communities, which involved decapitating and crucifying people. Prosecutors also moved to have the immunity lifted for Édgar Justino Ovalle Maldonado, an ex-military leader who is now the right-hand man of incoming President Jimmy Morales. The arrests come six months after massive popular uprisings against a corruption scandal ousted the now-jailed former President Otto Pérez Molina, who was also formerly a U.S.-backed military leader during the country’s dirty wars. The arrests come one day after acting President Alejandro Maldonado made a surprise announcement he was slashing the minimum wage for the manufacturing industry in certain areas. Video of the announcement shows acting President Maldonado appearing to break down in the face of opposition, waving his arms and shouting at the protesters, calling them "Leninists" and "bums."---AMY GOODMAN: Guatemalan prosecutors also moved to have the immunity lifted for Édgar Justino Ovalle Maldonado, an ex-military leader who’s now the right-hand man of the incoming Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales. The arrest comes six months after massive popular against a corruption scandal ousted the now-jailed former President Otto Pérez Molina, who is also formerly a U.S.-backed military leader during Guatemala’s dirty wars.For more, we’re joined by Allan Nairn, an investigative journalist and activist who has worked on Guatemala for decades, is an award-winning journalist.Allan, talk about the significance of these developments this week.ALLAN NAIRN: Well, for Guatemala, this is kind of the beginning of a Nuremberg trial-type process, except it’s not being done by a foreign, occupying power that just won a war, the way the Nuremberg trials were done. This is being done by the local justice system. Heroism on the part of survivors who brought complaints forward, and also on the part of forensic anthropologists, lawyers, prosecutors, who are risking their lives to bring these cases, have resulted in this round-up of some of the worst mass killers in the country. And they were working for the Guatemalan army—they weren’t renegades. They were, in turn, working for the U.S. government. The U.S. was backing the G2 military intelligence service, for which many of these arrested officers were working. Some were on the U.S. payroll. They were armed, they were trained, they were advised by the U.S. General Benedicto, who we just saw in the clip saying he wasn’t a coward, he worked together with Colonel George Maynes, the U.S. military attaché. Maynes told me that he and Benedicto together developed the strategy of the sweeps into the highland villages, where they would go in, execute civilians, throw them in mass graves, decapitate, crucify.Those who were arrested on charges yesterday are facing charges tied to two specific cases. One is the case of a 15-year-old boy. The army raided his house with machine guns. They snatched him. They taped his mouth. They threw a nylon bag over his head. They dragged him into a van. He was never seen again. The reason they hit his house was because his sister, his older sister, had been held captive at an army base, where she was being tortured and repeatedly raped, but she—one account says she had grown so skinny from lack of food that she was able to slip out through the bars and escape. So, retaliation, they hit the house, they took the boy.The other case concerns the army base at Cobán, where they’ve so far found 558 cadavers, so far—skeletons, 90 of them children. People were brought there from massacre sites all around the northwest. Some of them fled from the massacre sites surrounding the Chixoy Dam project, which is backed by the World Bank. The army would go into villages, burn the houses, take women down to the rivers and violate them. And a number were taken away in helicopters—helicopters, some supplied by the U.S., some supplied by Guatemalan oligarchs, some working out of aCIA operation at the Aurora airport. And from there, they were flown to the Cobán army base. And now, years later, their bones, the bones of these largely women and children, have been traced through DNA sampling back to the surviving families, who have been brave enough to stand up and report this. And these are the bases of the cases....<div class="secondary_content column three_large three_medium" style="display: inline-block; padding: 0px 15px; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: top; width: 318px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 300; letter-spacing: 0.5px; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><div class="widget"></div></div><div class="primary_content seven_large seven_medium column" id="story" style="display: inline-block; padding: 0px 23px 0px 15px; box-sizing: border-box; vertical-align: top; width: 742px; margin-top: 12px; position: relative; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; letter-spacing: 0.5px; line-height: normal; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 1; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;"><div class="story_with_left_panel">ALLAN NAIRN: Well, this was only—this was only politically possible because of the uprising. The uprising, where hundreds of thousands of people came into the streets, brought down General Pérez Molina, and it created a climate where the prosecutors dared to try to go forward with these charges.These officers arrested the other day include a former army chief of staff, a group of intelligence chiefs, a former member of the Ríos Montt junta, a former minister of the interior. These are people at the heart of the power structure in Guatemala. They’re the partners of the oligarchy. They were the partners of the U.S. military. If you go back and read the cables that have so far been declassified from within the Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. agencies, you see them praising these officers, the very ones who were—have now been arrested for these atrocities. And these men arrested are also—also form part of the core of the group that’s the government of—the incoming government, Jimmy Morales, just elected. His right-hand man was Ovalle Maldonado, who is one of those charged with crimes at the Cobán base, which I was just describing, where they—the pits are just stacked with skeletons. So, this has big implications.And it could have even bigger implications for the U.S. I spoke to, during the years when this was happening, three of the four CIA station chiefs who served there. I named their names in an <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/109240082/CIA-Death-Squad-Allan-Nairn-The-Nation-April-17-1995#scribd" style="text-decoration: none; border: 0px;">article</a> which appeared in The Nation in 1995. The prosecutors can go look at that article, see who they are. The U.S. personnel who were there, and who are still alive, can be subpoenaed. The U.S. should be subpoenaed to release all NSA, State Department and Pentagon documents regarding payments they made to these officers, training and advice they gave to them. The Guatemalan authorities, in theory, would have the right to extradite surviving U.S. officials.AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, I wanted to go back to 1995—we’re talking what? Twenty years ago—when you were interviewed by Charlie Rose about the piece inThe Nation called "C.I.A. Death Squad," in which you described how Americans were directly involved in the killings by the Guatemalan army. You were being interviewed alongside Elliott Abrams, who challenged what you were saying. Abrams had served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan from ’81 to 1985. It starts with you, Allan.<blockquote style="font-weight: 300; line-height: 27px; margin: 35.1875px 70.3906px;">ALLAN NAIRN: We’re talking about more than 100,000 murders, an entire army, many of its top officers employees of the U.S. government. We’re talking about crimes, and we’re also talking about criminals, not just people like the Guatemalan colonels, but also the U.S. agents who have been working with them and the higher-level U.S. officials. I mean, I think you have to be—you have to apply uniform standards. President Bush once talked about putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity, Nuremberg-style tribunal. I think that’s a good idea. But if you’re serious, you have to be even-handed. If we look at a case like this, I think we have to talk—start talking about putting Guatemalan and U.S. officials on trial. I think someone like Mr. Abrams would be a fit—a subject for such a Nuremberg-style inquiry. But I agree with Mr. Abrams that Democrats would have to be in the dock with him.</blockquote>AMY GOODMAN: So, there, as Allan is speaking, Elliott Abrams, the assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan, is simply throwing his head back and laughing. Allan, your thoughts today?ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Abrams was perhaps the key figure in U.S. Central American policy during the time of the slaughter. He later became a top adviser to the Bush Jr. White House dealing with the Middle East, where the U.S. has mounted similar operations in support of killer forces. For example, in Iraq, in the capacity as a private contractor, the U.S. brought over one of the U.S. military men, Colonel Steele, who had worked alongside the Salvadoran death squads. And in Iraq, he helped to set up the Shiite militia operations that went out and targeted Sunnis in Iraq. This was under the time of General Petraeus, when Petraeus was also carving up Baghdad with walls on a sectarian basis. They called it the "Salvador Option." This is a policy that’s been applied uniformly around the world. But since the U.S. is not yet as civilized as Guatemala, people like Abrams have not been put in the dock. But the Elliott Abrams equivalent—equivalents in Guatemala are this morning being brought before a judge in Guatemala as prisoners, and they’re going to face their fate.AMY GOODMAN: And finally, this week also, the current president, just before Jimmy Morales takes over, of Guatemala surprised many by announcing that he is slashing the minimum wage in maquiladora areas, in a video that’s gone viral. Describe what happened.ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Maldonado Aguirre, the interim president, who used to be the kind of the front man for the MLN death squad party, announced he was cutting the minimum wages in these factory areas. He was giving a speech. Some demonstrators showed up. And he, who is known for his smooth demeanor, his calm, he just went nuts, and he started screaming at the demonstrators. He called them "bums." He called them "Leninists."But there’s a strong connection between the slashing of wages and this terror. Terror helps to keep the wages down. When you break strong communities, when you make it impossible for unions to organize without facing the threat of deaths—death or disappearance, that pulls down wages. We all know about the outsourcing of production from the U.S., but there’s also an outsourcing of repression. In the early 20th century, U.S. labor leaders and organizers were killed, with a fair amount of frequency. But over the years, that became unnecessary. As the production has moved overseas, so has the killing. So that exerts the downward pressure on wages. At the same time, when there’s terror in a place like Guatemala, people flee. They come to the U.S. That’s where a lot of the undocumented immigrants originated from. And then Americans complain. Well, you know, if you go and burn down your neighbor’s house, don’t complain when, as they run from the flames, they come onto your lawn.AMY GOODMAN: Which brings us directly to our next segment, and we’ll be talking about immigration and the immigrants who are imprisoned and the raids that are taking place since New Year’s under the Obama administration, sending immigrants back over the border. Allan Nairn, I want to thank you for being with us, investigative journalist who’s reported on Guatemala for decades. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.</div></div><div>1992 dec </div><div><div></div><div><a href="http://cloudfront-files-1.publicintegrity.org/legacy_projects/pdf_reports/THETORTURERSLOBBY.pdf">http://cloudfront-files-1.publicintegrity.org/legacy_projects/pdf_reports/THETORTURERSLOBBY.pdf</a></div><div>
</div><div>With the fall of communism and the end of the Cold War, nations such as Nicaragua, Angola and</div><div>the Eastern European countries, once caught in the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union,</div><div>have begun the long hard march toward democracy. Indeed, the world celebrates this tide of democratic</div><div>freedom and self-determination. Yet. oppression and human rights abuses persist around the globe.</div><div>Consider Guatemala, the homeland of this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchu, a</div><div>human rights activist who fled her country in the mid 1980s. Security forces tortured and murdered most</div><div>of her family for their efforts to gain respect for the rights of Guatemala's indigenous population. Menchu</div><div>does not know if she will return to live in Guatemala now that she has won the Nobel. She continues to</div><div>receive death threats.</div><div>
</div><div>In November 1989. Diana Ortiz, an American nun teaching in Guatemala, was kidnapped, taken to</div><div>a secret detention center, tortured and raped. A few months later, Michael DeVine, an American who was</div><div>an innkeeper in rural Guatemala, was abducted, tortured and executed by members of Guatemala's security</div><div>forces. The human rights situation has not substantially improved in Guatemala -- last year, hundreds of</div><div>political executions were reported.</div><div>
</div><div>Although the U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala was recalled, and U.S. military aid and commercial</div><div>arms sales to Guatemala were suspended in December 1990, the country was given nearly $91 million in</div><div>U.S. assistance in fiscal year 1991.</div><div>
</div><div>To keep those dollars flowing in, and to refurbish its dismal human rights image, Guatemala spent</div><div>more than $650,000 for Washington lobbyists and public relations experts. No one in Washington received</div><div>more money from Guatemala than Patton, Boggs and Blow, the powerful firm that took in $220,000 from</div><div>Guatemala in 1991. One of its assignments: prepare a status report on the Michael DeVine murder.</div></div>=http://www.alternet.org/guatemalas-indigenous-people-fighting-back-against-exploitation-multinational-mining-companies==“This American Life” Conceals U.S. Involvement in Guatemala’s 1982 Dos Erres MassacreIn May 2012, Public Radio International’s This American Life partnered with ProPublica and Fundacion MEPI to produce a broadcast titled, “What Happened at Dos Erres,” which gave a new account of a 1982 military massacre in that Guatemalan village. In March 2013, the broadcast received a prestigious Peabody Award for excellence in electronic journalism. What This American Life failed to mention in its account of “What Happened at Dos Erres” and the Peabody Board overlooked, Keanne Bhatt reports, was prior documentation of the United States’ direct involvement in supporting the murder of over 200 innocent Guatemalan civilians in that event.<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://projectcensored.us2.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=e8526bc09be7b03c98231efd7&id=4009443671&e=087818defe" style="line-height: 1.2em; outline: none; word-wrap: break-word;">http://www.projectcensored.org/american-life-conceals-u-s-involvement-guatemalas-1982-dos-erres-massacre/</a>---<a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/19/genocide_trial_of_former_dictator_ros">http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/19/genocide_trial_of_former_dictator_ros</a>

<div id="story-summary" itemprop="description">A historic trial

against former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on

charges of genocide and crimes against humanity came to an abrupt end

Thursday when an appeals court suspended the trial before a criminal

court was scheduled to reach a verdict. Ríos Montt on was charged in

connection with the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/topics/guatemala" data-clicky-href="#story/content/topic_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Topic Link">Guatemala</a>’s

Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. His 17-month rule is seen as

one of the bloodiest chapters in Guatemala’s decades-long campaign

against Maya <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/topics/indigenous" data-clicky-href="#story/content/topic_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Topic Link">indigenous</a>

people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.

Thursday’s decision is seen as a major blow to indigenous victims.

Investigative journalist <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/allan_nairn" data-clicky-href="#story/content/guest_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Guest Link">Allan Nairn</a> reported last night Guatemalan <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/topics/army" data-clicky-href="#story/content/topic_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Topic Link">army</a>

associates had threatened the lives of case judges and prosecutors and

that the case had been annulled after intervention by Guatemala’s

president, General Otto Pérez Molina. Ríos Montt was the first head of

state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. Nairn flew to

Guatemala last week after he was called to testify in Ríos Montt's

trial. He was listed by the court as a "qualified witness" and was

tentatively scheduled to testify on Monday. But at the last minute,

Nairn was kept off the stand "in order," he was told, "to avoid a

confrontation" with the president, General Pérez Molina, and for fear

that if he took the stand, <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/topics/military" data-clicky-href="#story/content/topic_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Topic Link">military</a>

elements might respond with violence. In the 1980s, Nairn extensively

documented broad army responsibility for the massacres and was prepared

to present evidence that personally implicated Pérez Molina, who was

field commander during the very Mayan Ixil region massacres for which

the ex-dictator, Ríos Montt, had been charged with genocide. [includes

rush transcript]</div>

    
      <h2 class="section-header"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Transcript</font></h2>
      <div id="story-rush-transcript">
        <p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
          This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
        </font></p>
      </div>
      <p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">JUAN</span> GONZÁLEZ:</strong> An

historic trial against former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín

Ríos Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity came to an

abrupt end Thursday when an appeals court suspended the trial before a

criminal court was scheduled to reach a verdict. Investigative

journalist <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/allan_nairn" data-clicky-href="#story/content/guest_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Guest Link">Allan Nairn</a> reported last night Guatemalan <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/topics/army" data-clicky-href="#story/content/topic_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Topic Link">army</a> associates had threatened the lives of case judges and prosecutors and that the case had been annulled after intervention by <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/topics/guatemala" data-clicky-href="#story/content/topic_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Topic Link">Guatemala</a>’s president, General Otto Pérez Molina.

Ríos Montt was the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide.

He was charged in connection with the slaughter of more than 1,700

people in Guatemala’s Ixil region after he seized power in 1982. His

17-month rule is seen as one of the bloodiest chapters in Guatemala’s

decades-long campaign against Maya <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/topics/indigenous" data-clicky-href="#story/content/topic_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Topic Link">indigenous</a> people, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.<a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/19/exclusive_allan_nairn_exposes_role_of">http://www.democracynow.org/2013/4/19/exclusive_allan_nairn_exposes_role_of</a>
<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">

ALLAN NAIRN:

Well, the U.S. was the sponsor of the Guatemalan army, as it had been

for many decades, as the U.S. has and continues to sponsor dozens and

dozens of repressive armies all over the world. In the case of

Guatemala, if you go into the military academy and you see the pictures

of the past presidents of military academy, some of them are actually

Americans. They’re actual American officers there who were openly

running the Guatemalan military training. By the ’80s, when the Ríos

Montt massacres were being carried out, the U.S. Congress was under the

impression that they had successfully stopped U.S. military aid to

Guatemala. But in fact it was continuing. The CIA

had an extensive program of backing the G-2, the G-2, the military

intelligence service, which selected the targets for assassination and

disappearance. They even—they even built a headquarters for—a secret

headquarters for the G-2 near the Guatemala City airport. They had

American advisers working inside the headquarters. Out in the field,

Guatemalan troops were receiving from the U.S. ammunition, weapons.

</blockquote>

And most importantly, the U.S., beginning under the Carter

administration but continuing under Reagan and after, asked the Israelis

to come in and fill the gap that was caused by congressional

restrictions. So Israel was doing massive shipments of Galil automatic

rifles and other weapons. And Pérez Molina, as you saw in the video,

actually had one of his subordinates come over and show me an

Israeli-made mortar. That mortar and the helicopters he was asking for

from the U.S., those were the kind of weapons they would use to bomb

villages and attack people as they were fleeing in the mountains. In

listening to the testimony in the trial up to this moment, I was struck

by the fact that almost every witness mentioned that they had been

attacked from the air, that either their village had been bombed or

strafed or that they were bombed or strafed as they were fleeing in the

mountains. This testimony suggests that the use of this U.S. and Israeli

aircraft and U.S. munitions against the civilians in the Ixil highlands

was actually much more extensive than we understood at the time.

</blockquote>

Beyond that, beyond the material U.S. support, there’s the question

of doctrine. Yesterday in the trial, the Ríos Montt defense called

forward a general, a former commander of the G-2, as an expert witness

on the defense side. And at the end of his testimony, the prosecution

read to this general an excerpt from a Guatemalan military training

document. And the document said it is often difficult for soldiers to

accept the fact that they may be required to execute repressive actions

against civilian women, children and sick people, but with proper

training, they can be made to do so. So, the prosecutor asked the Ríos

Montt general, "Well, General, what is your response to this document?"

And the general responded by saying, "Well, that training document which

we use is an almost literal translation of a U.S. training document."

So this doctrine of killing civilians, even down to women, children and

sick people, was, as the general testified, adopted from the U.S.

Indeed, years before, the U.S. military attaché in Guatemala, Colonel <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/john" data-clicky-href="#story/content/guest_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Guest Link">John</a> Webber, had said to Time

magazine that the Guatemalan army was licensed to kill guerrillas and

potential guerrillas. And, of course, the category of potential

guerrillas can include anyone, including children....<blockquote class="collapsed-hide">

Then, Bosworth went on to say that the U.S. was not giving any

military assistance to Guatemala, but I guess it was a couple weeks

after that interview when we went down to Guatemala, I met a U.S. Green

Beret, Captain Jesse Garcia, who was training the Guatemalan military in

combat techniques, including what he called how—in his words, "how to

destroy towns." This was apart from the weapons and U.S. munitions that I

mentioned before, apart from the CIA trainers who were working in the CIA-built headquarters of the G-2, the military intelligence service that was doing the assassinations and disappearances.

</blockquote>

AMY GOODMAN:

The G-2 being the Guatemalan G-2. Now, today Stephen Bosworth is the

dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. But before that, in

2009, well, he played a key role in the <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/topics/obama" data-clicky-href="#story/content/topic_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Topic Link">Obama</a> administration.

</blockquote>

ALLAN NAIRN:

Yes, rather than being—you know, in what you might consider to be a

normally functioning political system, if a high government official

lied like that about matters of such grave, life-and-death importance

and was involved in the supply of arms to terrorists, in this case the

Guatemalan military, you would expect him at the minimum to be fired and

disgraced, or maybe brought up on charges. But Bosworth was actually

promoted. And under the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton chose him

as the special envoy to <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/topics/north_korea" data-clicky-href="#story/content/topic_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Topic Link">North Korea</a>. He’s been in the news a great deal in recent times because of his very prominent role there.

</blockquote>

AMY GOODMAN: In 1995, Allan Nairn was interviewed on Charlie Rose about his piece in The Nation called "CIA

Death Squad," in which he described how Americans were directly

involved in killings by the Guatemalan army. He was interviewed

alongside Elliott Abrams, who challenged what he was saying. Abrams had

served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian

affairs under President Reagan from 1981 to 1985. This clip begins with

Elliott Abrams.<blockquote>

</blockquote>

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: Wait a minute. We’re not here to refight the Cold <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/topics/war" data-clicky-href="#story/content/topic_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Topic Link">War</a>.

We’re here to talk about, I thought, a specific case in which an

allegation is being made that—of the husband of an American and, another

case, an American citizen were killed, and there was a CIA

connection with—allegedly with the person allegedly involved in it.

Now, I’m happy to talk about that kind of thing. If Mr. Nairn thinks we

should have been on the other side in Guatemala—that is, we should have

been in favor of a guerrilla victory—I disagree with him.

</blockquote>

ALLAN NAIRN: So you’re then admitting that you were on the side of the Guatemalan military.

</blockquote>

ELLIOTT ABRAMS:

I am admitting that it was the policy of the United States, under

Democrats and Republicans, approved by Congress repeatedly, to oppose a

communist guerrilla victory anywhere in Central America, including in

Guatemala.

</blockquote>

CHARLIE ROSE: Alright, well, I—

</blockquote>

ALLAN NAIRN: A communist guerrilla victory.

</blockquote>

CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah, I—

</blockquote>

ALLAN NAIRN: Ninety-five percent of these victims are civilians—peasant organizers, human rights leaders—

</blockquote>

CHARLIE ROSE: I am happy to invite both of you—

</blockquote>

ALLAN NAIRN:

—priests—assassinated by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan army. Let’s look at

reality here. In reality, we’re not talking about two murders, one

colonel. We’re talking about more than 100,000 murders, an entire army,

many of its top officers employees of the U.S. government. We’re talking

about crimes, and we’re also talking about criminals, not just people

like the Guatemalan colonels, but also the U.S. agents who have been

working with them and the higher-level U.S. officials. I mean, I think

you have to be—you have to apply uniform standards. <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/president_bush" data-clicky-href="#story/content/guest_link" data-clicky-title="Story: Content - Guest Link">President Bush</a>

once talked about putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against

humanity, Nuremberg-style tribunal. I think that’s a good idea. But if

you’re serious, you have to be even-handed. If we look at a case like

this, I think we have to talk—start talking about putting Guatemalan and

U.S. officials on trial. I think someone like Mr. Abrams would be a

fit—a subject for such a Nuremberg-style inquiry. But I agree with Mr.

Abrams that Democrats would have to be in the dock with him. The

Congress has been in on this. The Congress approved the sale of 16,000

M-16s to Guatemala. In ’87 and ’88—

</blockquote>

</blockquote><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/topics/guatemala">http://www.democracynow.org/topics/guatemala</a>===
<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-charges-for-accused-commando-in-dos-erres-massacre">http://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-charges-for-accused-commando-in-dos-erres-massacre</a>
<div class="article">

        
      
      
            <p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> A former Guatemalan Army lieutenant was extradited

Friday from Canada to stand trial in Southern California on federal

charges related to the massacre of 250 people in a Guatemalan village in

1982, a case that has resulted in landmark human rights prosecutions in

Guatemala and the United States.

U.S. federal officers took custody of Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes in

Calgary Friday morning and were en route to Los Angeles, U.S. officials

said. Sosa, 54, is the highest-ranking officer to have been arrested on

charges alleging direct involvement in the massacre by a 20-man unit of

elite commandos in the northern Guatemalan farming hamlet of Dos Erres.

</div>

</div>

            <p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In May, ProPublica reported <a href="http://www.propublica.org/series/finding-oscar">the story of Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañeda</a>, who

learned only last year that he was a Dos Erres survivor. He had been abducted by

a commander of the unit and raised by his family.

Sosa, a karate instructor who

holds both U.S. and Canadian citizenship, fled his home in the Los Angeles area

in mid-2010 as agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) closed in on

him. He went to Mexico and then to Lethbridge in western

Canada, where he has family, and was arrested in January of last year,

according to U.S. and Canadian court documents. Last month, a Canadian appeals

court ended his legal fight to avoid extradition to the United States.

Because U.S. courts do not

have jurisdiction for the massacre, federal prosecutors indicted Sosa on charges

of lying on immigration forms. He allegedly concealed his military service and

involvement in Dos Erres on the forms when he obtained citizenship in 2008 and

residency 10 years earlier, according to an indictment filed in 2010. The trial

could start in about two months in federal court in Riverside, Calif.

In Dos Erres, Sosa allegedly

oversaw the slaughter of men, women and children who were dumped in a well

during a day-long frenzy of torture, rape and pillage, according to U.S. and

Guatemalan court documents. He allegedly fired his rifle and threw a grenade into

a pile of living and dead victims in the well, according to the testimony in

Guatemalan courts of two former soldiers who are now protected witnesses.

Sosa was a sub-lieutenant at the time,

junior in rank only to three lieutenants in the squad of highly-trained

commando instructors. Sosa denied guilt during a recent telephone interview

with ProPublica from jail in Calgary. He said he was in another village doing a

military public works project on the day of the massacre in December 1982. He

described the charges against him as the product of a conspiracy.

The Dos Erres case was one

of the worst of hundreds of massacres during Guatemala's 30-year civil war,

which ended in 1996 and resulted in more than 200,000 deaths. In "<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/finding-oscar-massacre-memory-and-justice-in-guatemala">Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in

Guatemala</a>," ProPublica told the story

through the odyssey of Oscar Ramírez Castañeda, now a

33-year-old father of four living in Boston. After a dogged investigation by

Guatemalan prosecutors, Oscar learned last year that his life until that point

had been based on a lie.

DNA tests proved that when

Oscar was age 3 and living in the village, a commando lieutenant spared his

life and abducted him after the unit killed the boy's mother and eight brothers

and sisters. The lieutenant died in an accident months later, but his family

raised Oscar as if he were one of their own. Oscar, an illegal immigrant who

came to the United States in 1998, is now a father of four and works two

full-time jobs.
---
Juan González's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Empire-History-Latinos-America/dp/0143119281#reader_0143119281" class="external text" title="http://www.amazon.com/Harvest-Empire-History-Latinos-America/dp/0143119281#reader 0143119281" rel="nofollow">Harvest of Empire</a>

takes an unflinching look at the role that U.S. economic and military

interests played in triggering an unprecedented wave of migration that

is transforming our nation’s cultural and economic landscape. It's now

the basis of a <a href="http://vimeo.com/48145023" class="external text" title="http://vimeo.com/48145023" rel="nofollow">new documentary</a>. <a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/25/harvest_of_empire_new_film_recounts" class="external text" title="http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/25/harvest of empire new film recounts" rel="nofollow">Democracy Now segment</a>

===

Bitter Fruit: worked for head of UFC Sam Zemurray 1950; sold commie scare, sam ~ saying indians too igniorant for marxism; p 80

1917 caruso tour, pr advidor to paris peace talks; P&G, Crisco and CBS

elirte must use PR to control for the good of all

media: pals of owner NYT, Scripps-Howard, The New leader, CSM, SF Chron; had list of 25K opinion makers

nephew of freud (by marriage?]

close to new dealers (fialed to get P&G to hire more blacks)

el pulpo, the octopus, bad PR for UFC, colonial SZ hird; both jew outsiders self made

EB wrote critical rept on racisms, living conds, ignored

new pres Th cabot, bro of JM cabot, asst sec of state for inter Am affairs just before 54 coup

EB PO's about guater labor Code, union disrutions 83  UFC asked Henry Cabot Lodge sen to object

got NY herald trib to write Comm in the Carribean

adademic and state dept saw progress in guate; sided w US on Korea; patterned gov on FDR 85

Sam worked w/ guate gov and unions, then anit-commie ex RKO head ambassador, met w/ possible coup

iran nat'l oil, so UF scared; 2nd PR effort w/ junkets, Toirello objected to BS

53 EB planted a story that red agents in latin A, trained in Czech

The New Leader ~ commie, conduit to CIA, AFL

fed disinfo to press and congress

hired lobbyiost tommy the cork corcoran; put sam and nelson rockefeller together to liberalize banana trade; als oLa Follettte of WI  91

also pals in CIA and flying tigers (CAT, then air america); cia smuggling guns to Arbenz opos (land reform)

cia head?) beetle wanted to be head of UFC?! 93 W Bedell Smith got on bd

had covered flank w/ New dealers,, now courted resurgent right in Ike and Joe McC

Clements at hearst pal of somoza jr in Nic, also PR r=frim fhiresd to do rept on guate, 2nd rept urged action/coup found Armas

RMN protege held hearings on reds on guate aug 54 after coup

UF spent 1/2 mil /yr on PR 97

JFD sr partner in  wiich worked for bank tie to guate RR IRCA sullivan and cromwell

JF helped UF buy RR to keep out competitiors 106  Allen also helped, on bd of bank

JM cabot owned stock in UF; wife of UF pr guy whitman was Ike sec; amb robt hill costa rica

Kermit turned down coup job; internal fightas, cork said UF must be involved?

arbenz bribe failed; wisner asst tracy barnes [julian?]

US cut off guata arms when wd not sign; bought from czech, mostly junk but PO'd US

(earlier aborted IOp Success had planted ussr arms?)

Armas tried to deal w/ US but Peurifoy  an ~ commie dick

cia pirate radio (offical station down for repairs on citiical day in coup, so pirates stole freq]

via bombed missionary radio in screwup

diaz put in as pres vbut not acceptable to US armas and monzon allmost fought?

armas shut unions labor code changed

cia went after sukarno in indonesia and castro

UFC did not prosper, antitrust suit by state dept (despirte moveWhy the Kremlin hates banaas 229

merger, ceo jumped out 44th floor of pan am bldg

rmn visited armas guate 55  corruption, casinos,

armas shot by guy wo apparnetluy killed self

cia trained cubans in guate, later berets trained ~ insurgents 9origin in Op success) 30K kia 1966

80's army became a caste, death squads

1400pp rept 36 yrsm, 150K killed m 50k disappeared (Bp author bated to death 2 days later) 264

later study said 93% of death caised by gov, backed by US gov and biz

bitter fruit  steve schlesinger and st kinzer Harv UP 1999

Dulles bros paid atten after UF land taken (it was mostly unused, they had way more than needed even if some fallow ~ disease

and they were offered compensation

===

'52 black eagle of harlem hubert fauntleroy Julian smuggled 20mm antiaircraft in

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Julian">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Julian</a>

Although Julian never succeeded in flying across the Atlantic, his efforts made him an international celebrity, and in 1931 Emperor <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haile_Selassie" title="Haile Selassie" class="mw-redirect">Haile Selassie</a> invited him to Ethiopia to take part in his coronation ceremonies. Julian impressed the Emperor with his skills as a parachutist, landing within a few feet of his throne during one ceremony, a feat that won him Ethiopian citizenship and a position in the nation's airforce. However, Julian had less success as a pilot, crashing the Emperor's favorite plane, after which he quickly returned to Harlem.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Julian#cite_note-Shaftel-0">[1]</a>

In 1931 he was the first flyer of African descent to fly coast to coast in the United States. Julian was one of several aviators in the 1920s and 1930s who competed in outdoing each other and briefly holding records for longest non-stop flights. In 1931, for example, Julian held the non-stop non-refueling aviation endurance record with a flight of 84 hours and 33 minutes. Julian flew a number of flights in and between the Americas, Europe, and Africa, surviving several crashes. In between major flights, he toured with a small all-Black flying circus which he headed, called The Five Blackbirds.

During the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italy" title="Italy">Italian</a> invasion of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopia" title="Ethiopia">Ethiopia</a> in 1935, Julian flew to Ethiopia to aid in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Italo-Abyssinian_War" title="Second Italo-Abyssinian War">defense of Selassie's government</a>. He was put in command of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Air_Force" title="Ethiopian Air Force">Imperial Ethiopian Air Force</a>, which at the time consisted of 3 planes. Upon his return to the United States, he was temporarily detained at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island" title="Ellis Island">Ellis Island</a>, over the question of his nationality — British or Ethiopian. Later, after getting into a public fist-fight with fellow African-American aviator <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_C.Robinson%28aviator%29&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="John C. Robinson (aviator) (page does not exist)">John C. Robinson</a>, Julian was ordered to leave the country.

Julian also invented some safety devices used in airplanes.

---

Although Julian had left Trinidad by the time of Frank Boland’s crash, news of the incident influenced him to patent, in 1921, the "Airplane Safety Appliance,” essentially an amalgam of parachute and propeller. He later said his idea pre-figured the chutes used to return the Apollo spacecraft to Earth....

In 1949, Julian became a licensed arms dealer, acting as an agent for developing and newly independent nations. He became “richer now than a yacht full of Greeks.” He pursued this career with uncharacteristic discretion until 1952, when he would again find himself in the headlines after Time magazine reported that in three years as an arms buyer for the Guatemalan government, Julian had sold the left-leaning Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán regime “forty .50-caliber machine guns, six half-tracks, 3,000 pairs of boots, 20 bulletproof vests, and trucks, jeeps, rifles, bazookas and ammunition,” by way of Italy, Spain, and Switzerland, before relations between Guatemala and Julian soured and the shipments were suspended.

Those, and deals in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Pakistan, would earn him decades of FBI surveillance. The FBI’s file is typical of the era: obsessed with Communism and subtly racist, calling Julian “a playboy” who is “subsidized by wealthy white women.” The bureau also called Julian “a crook and imposter” and “arrogant,�� but “very intelligent.”  congo? QE II?

---
GUATE: if arbenz not a commie, he'll do till one comes along" ?!  Tracy Barnes )Groton Yale Harv Law) grew up on Whitney estate on long is  OSS silver star; rebel taining camp on somoza farm in nicaragua 95

Al Haney loose cannon, planted fake UFO stories to distract from plot; givn a hit list of 58 ppl (wd send a msg rebels serious?!) E Howard Hunt wabted terror campaign; pirate radio lucked out when official station went down for maint; stole the frq and sent scary stories uprising, poison wells and kid draft 99

Pres arbenz freaked, marshall law, found evidence of US in student group (75 tortured and killed)

3 f47 fighter -bombers (2 broke) blew up oil tank, out in 20 min; called big ike donor pawley who gave 150K for 3 new bombers;
embassy roof had tape of jets; pres drakn to stupor; armas later 21 gun salute, toased by VP rmn at WH.  43 men kia but said one, thus myth born ashes
---

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat</a>

The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état was a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_operation" title="Covert operation">covert operation</a> organized by the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States" title="United States">United States</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency" title="Central Intelligence Agency">Central Intelligence Agency</a> to overthrow <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobo_Arbenz_Guzm%C3%A1n" title="Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán">Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán</a>, the democratically-elected <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Guatemala" title="President of Guatemala">President of Guatemala</a>. Arbenz's <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratically-elected_government" title="Democratically-elected government">government</a> put forth a number of new policies, such as seizing and <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expropriating" title="Expropriating">expropriating</a> unused, unfarmed land that private corporations set aside long ago and giving the land to peasants. The U.S. intelligence community deemed such plans <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist" title="Communist">communist</a> in nature. This led CIA director <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Dulles" title="Allen Dulles">Allen Dulles</a> to fear that Guatemala would become a "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union" title="Soviet Union">Soviet</a> beachhead in the <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_hemisphere" title="Western hemisphere">western hemisphere</a>".<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#cite_note-a-0">[1]</a> Dulles' concern reverberated within the CIA and the <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_administration" title="Eisenhower administration">Eisenhower administration</a>, in the context of the <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-communist" title="Anti-communist">anti-communist</a> fears of the <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyist" title="McCarthyist">McCarthyist</a> era. Arbenz instigated sweeping land reform acts that antagonized the U.S.-based <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multinational_corporation" title="Multinational corporation">multinational</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company" title="United Fruit Company">United Fruit Company</a>, which had large stakes in the old order of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala" title="Guatemala">Guatemala</a> and lobbied various levels of U.S. to take action against Arbenz.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#cite_note-c-1">[2]</a> Both Dulles and his brother were shareholders of United Fruit Company.

The operation, known by the code name Operation PBSUCCESS, lasted from late 1953 to 1954. The CIA armed and trained an ad-hoc "Liberation Army" of about 400 fighters under the command of a then-exiled <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_army" title="Guatemalan army">Guatemalan army</a> officer, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel" title="Colonel">Colonel</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Castillo_Armas" title="Carlos Castillo Armas">Carlos Castillo Armas</a>, and used them in conjunction with a complex and largely experimental <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomatic" title="Diplomatic">diplomatic</a>, <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic" title="Economic">economic</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda" title="Propaganda">propaganda</a> campaign. They even established a Voice of Liberation radio station, actually located across the border in Honduras, which relayed programming originating in Miami, and pretended to be the spontaneous voice of patriots opposed to the elected government. The operation effectively ended the experimental period of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy" title="Representative democracy">representative democracy</a> in Guatemala known as the "<a class="new" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ten_Years_of_Spring&action=edit&redlink=1" title="Ten Years of Spring (page does not exist)">Ten Years of Spring</a>", which ended with Arbenz's official resignation.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#cite_note-ccguat-2">[3]</a>

The operation was preceded by a plan, never fully implemented, as early as 1951, to supply anti-Arbenz forces with weapons, supplies, and funding, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PBFORTUNE" title="Operation PBFORTUNE">Operation PBFORTUNE</a>. Afterwards there was an operation, <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PBHISTORY" title="Operation PBHISTORY">Operation PBHISTORY</a>, whose objective was to gather and analyze documents from the Arbenz government that would incriminate Arbenz as a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_state" title="Puppet state">Communist puppet</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#cite_note-b-3">[4]</a>

...

<h2>Operation PBFORTUNE</h2>

<div class="rellink relarticle mainarticle">Main article: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PBFORTUNE" title="Operation PBFORTUNE">Operation PBFORTUNE</a></div>

As early as 1951, before the agrarian reform law had been written or passed, CIA apprehension about a Communist takeover caused the agency to seriously explore options for Arbenz's overthrow. Arbenz's toleration for known Communists made him at best a "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fellow_traveler" title="Fellow traveler">fellow traveler</a>," and at worst a Communist himself.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#cite_note-state.gov-4">[5]</a> The most viable option being considered was the covert backing of rebel groups and dissidents already active in Guatemala and the then CIA <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Director_of_Central_Intelligence" title="Director of Central Intelligence">Director of Central Intelligence</a> (DCI) <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_B._Smith" title="Walter B. Smith">Walter B. Smith</a> sent an agent to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_City" title="Guatemala City">Guatemala City</a> to investigate potential candidate individuals or organizations. At the time the state of the opposition to Arbenz was inert, divided, and increasingly fractious. The agent returned empty handed. Fortunately for the CIA, this roughly coincided with the first <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_visit" title="State visit">state visit</a> of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Nicaragua" title="President of Nicaragua">President</a> of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua" title="Nicaragua">Nicaragua</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastasio_Somoza" title="Anastasio Somoza">Anastasio Somoza</a>. He informed them of Castillo Armas's small rebel group and stated that, with the CIA's support, he and Armas could unseat Arbenz. They also could expect financial backing from Dominican <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictator" title="Dictator">dictator</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Trujillo" title="Rafael Trujillo">Rafael Trujillo</a> and, as Armas later claimed, from internal elements within the Guatemalan army. DCI Smith urged his subordinates to follow up on this and to establish contacts with Armas, which they did in June of the same year. At the CIA's request, Armas then relayed to them a plan for invasion, which was to launch from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Salvador" title="El Salvador">El Salvador</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico" title="Mexico">Mexico</a>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honduras" title="Honduras">Honduras</a> (from UFC land) and would be coordinated with simultaneous uprisings within Guatemala. Armas requested arms, money, aircraft, and boats and informed them that he would launch the invasion as planned regardless of the CIA's support if need be. In July the CIA secured arms, transport, and $225,000 (US) for Armas, and furnished a few WWII-era airplanes. In September the CIA secured State Department approval and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PBFORTUNE" title="Operation PBFORTUNE">Operation PBFORTUNE</a> was set.

One of two major setbacks occurred shortly afterwards when, while preparing for the arms shipment, the operation had to be called off. Somoza had been speaking of the invasion plan with other <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_American" title="Central American">Central American</a> leaders and the operation's cover, which was very important due to the fragile diplomatic situation the United States had with the region, was blown. While Operation PBFORTUNE was officially terminated, the operation led a twilight existence with the arms shipment prepared prior still kept in waiting and with Armas being kept on a $3,000 a week retainer, which allowed him to hang on to his small troupe of rebels.

With almost all of their local assets destroyed, the CIA was forced to rely solely on the much more fragmented exile groups.

After all but abandoning the project in mid-1953, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Security_Council" title="United States National Security Council">U.S. National Security Council</a> revived the project in August of that year after a review of the situation in light of the success of the recent CIA-organized <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat" title="1953 Iranian coup d'état">coup against Mossadegh</a> in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran" title="Iran">Iran</a>. CIA officers involved included <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Barnes" title="Tracy Barnes">Tracy Barnes</a>, the CIA officer in charge, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Atlee_Phillips" title="David Atlee Phillips">David Atlee Phillips</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Esterline" title="Jacob Esterline">Jacob 'Jack' Esterline</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Howard_Hunt" title="E. Howard Hunt">E. Howard Hunt</a>, <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Sanchez_Morales" title="David Sanchez Morales">David Sanchez Morales</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Wisner" title="Frank Wisner">Frank Wisner</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William%22Rip%22_Robertson" title="William " rip="rip" robertson="robertson">William "Rip" Robertson</a>, <a class="mw-redirect" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Pawley" title="William Pawley">William Pawley</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Droller" title="Gerry Droller">Gerry Droller</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat#cite_note-Spartacus-10">[11]</a>...

----

��

<table><tbody><tr><td> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentina" title="Argentina">Argentina</a></td><td><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopoldo_Galtieri" title="Leopoldo Galtieri">Leopoldo Galtieri</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Eduardo_Viola" title="Roberto Eduardo Viola">Roberto Eduardo Viola</a></td></tr><tr><td><img src="/c9271294-56ec-5230-b0ea-a88414b39762.png"/> <a title="Bolivia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolivia">Bolivia</a></td><td><a class="mw-redirect" title="Hugo Banzer Suárez" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Banzer_Su%C3%A1rez">Hugo Banzer Suárez</a>, <a title="Luis Arce Gómez" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Arce_G%C3%B3mez">Luis Arce Gómez</a></td></tr><tr><td><img src="/0356ab71-46a5-503e-ae27-169097ec8863.png"/> <a title="Chile" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chile">Chile</a></td><td><a title="Ra��l Iturriaga" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%BAl_Iturriaga">Raúl Iturriaga</a></td></tr><tr><td><img src="/b9c33476-57b2-5494-9f63-19020212cfca.png"/> <a title="Ecuador" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecuador">Ecuador</a></td><td><a title="Guillermo Rodríguez (politician)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillermo_Rodr%C3%ADguez_%28politician%29">Guillermo Rodríguez</a></td></tr><tr><td><img src="/43470810-63f8-5755-ac96-55df5cecaccc.png"/> <a title="El Salvador" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Salvador">El Salvador</a></td><td><a title="Roberto D'Aubuisson" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_D%27Aubuisson">Roberto D'Aubuisson</a></td></tr><tr><td><img src="/04a68967-42d6-59a6-a617-dc4cea853e87.png"/> <a title="Guatemala" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala">Guatemala</a></td><td><a title="Marco Antonio Yon Sosa" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Antonio_Yon_Sosa">Marco Antonio Yon Sosa</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation#cite_note-33">[34]</a>

<a class="mw-redirect" title="Efrain Rios Montt" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efrain_Rios_Montt">Efrain Rios Montt</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation#cite_note-34">[35]</a></td></tr><tr><td><img src="/ede8c331-b123-5af2-b064-5c14cd5f2c30.png"/> <a title="Panama" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama">Panama</a></td><td><a title="Manuel Noriega" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Noriega">Manuel Noriega</a>, <a title="Omar Torrijos" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Torrijos">Omar Torrijos</a></td></tr><tr><td style=" height: 31px;"><img src="/f7c3ccd4-c704-5fe1-9595-0989298431f2.png"/> <a title="Peru" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peru">Peru</a></td><td style=" height: 32px;"><a title="Vladimiro Montesinos" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimiro_Montesinos">Vladimiro Montesinos</a>, <a title="Juan Velasco Alvarado" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Velasco_Alvarado">Juan Velasco Alvarado</a></td></tr></tbody></table>

---

<a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/guat3.htm">http://killinghope.org/bblum6/guat3.htm</a>
<a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/guat3.htm">

    </font></a></p><p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/guat3.htm#end">go to end</a> <a name="beginning" /></font></b></p><a name="beginning"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
    </font></a><pre><a name="beginning"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><big><b>37.         GUATEMALA  1962 to 1980s</b></big>

<big> A less publicized "final solution"</big>

    <b> <small>Indians tell harrowing stories of village raids in which <br />     their homes have been burned, men tortured hideously and <br />     killed, women raped, and scarce crops destroyed. It is <br />     Guatemala's final solution to insurgency: only mass <br />     slaughter of the Indians will prevent them joining a mass <br />     uprising.{1}</small></b></font></a></pre><pre><a name="beginning"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">

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.</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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}</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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.</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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-�-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.</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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}</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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.</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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} </a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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.</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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.</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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}</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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.</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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.</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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.</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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.</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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}</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
"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}</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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:

    <b><small> I went alone to visit the head of the Mano Blanca and asked <br />     him why he was going to kill this lad.  At first he denied <br />     sending the letter, but after a bit of discussion with him <br />     and his first assistant, the assistant said, "Well, I know <br />     he's a Communist and so we're going to kill him."</small></b>

"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:

     <b><small>These articles, especially the helicopters, are not easy <br />     to obtain at this time since they are being utilized by <br />     our forces in defense of the cause of liberty in other <br />     parts of the world [i.e., southeast Asia].  But liberty <br />     must be defended wherever it is threatened and that <br />     liberty is now being threatened in Guatemala.{20}</small></b><br /><br />

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:

     <b><small>It is hard to find the words to express the state of <br />     putrefaction that exists in Guatemala, and the permanent <br />     terror in which the inhabitants live.  Every day bodies <br />     are pulled out of the Motagua River, riddled with bullets <br />     and partially eaten by fish.  Every day men are kidnapped <br />     right in the street by unidentified people in cars, armed <br />     to the teeth, with no intervention by the police patrols.{21}<br /><br /></small></b><b>The US Agency for International Development (AID), its Office of</b>

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.</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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}</a></pre><pre><a name="beginning">
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}</a><a name="mid-text">
</a>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.</pre><pre>
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}</pre><pre>
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}</pre><pre>
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}</pre><pre>
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}</pre><pre>
"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}</pre><pre>
"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.</pre><pre>
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}</pre><pre>
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}</pre><pre>
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}</pre><pre>
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}</pre><pre>
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}</pre><pre>
 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 R��os Montt, Reagan,

referring to the allegations of extensive human-rights abuses,

declared that the Guatemalan leader was receiving "a bad

deal."{49}</pre><pre>
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:

    <b><big> </big></b><b>Having come to the conclusion that the actual state of violence, <br />composed of the malnutrition, ignorance, sickness and hunger of the <br />vast majority of the Guatemalan population, is the direct result of a <br />capitalist system that makes the defenseless Indian compete against <br />the powerful and well-armed</b> <b>landowner, my brother [Father Arthur <br />Melville] and I decided not to be silent accomplices of the mass <br />murder that this system generates.</b>

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.</pre><pre> 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}</pre><pre>
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}</pre><pre>
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}</pre><pre>
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.</pre><pre>
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}

<big>NOTES </big>

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.

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.

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.

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).

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".

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.

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.

New York Times, 19 March 1981, p. 10.
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.

Ibid., 21 June 1981; 25 April 1982; The Guardian (London), 10

January 1983.

San Francisco Chronicle, 27 August 1981, p. 57.
Washington Post, 21 October 1982, p. A1.
The Guardian (London), 10 January 1983; 17 May 1983.
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 Efra�n R�os Montt (AI, July 1982).

49. New York Times, 6 December 1982, p. 14.

Contemporary Marxism (San Francisco), No. 3, Summer 1981.
The National Catholic Reporter (Kansas City, Missouri

weekly), 31 January 1968.

52. Los Angeles Times, 25 December 1988.

Occurred on 2 December 1990; Report, Summer 1991, from

Witness for Peace, Washington, a religious-oriented human-rights

organization concerned with Central America.

Los Angeles Times, 7 May 1990.
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.

</pre>

    <p><b><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is a chapter from <i>Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II &nbsp;</i>��by William Blum</font></b><br/>

<a href="http://killinghope.org/bblum6/guat3.htm#beginning">return to beginning</a> <a name="end"> </a><a href="http://killinghope.org/">return to homepage</a>=<blockquote style="line-height: 14.4px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Former Honduras' de facto President Roberto Micheletti suspended his visit to Guatemala due to people's rejection and demonstrations in this capital.

The Foundation for the Development of Guatemala (FUNDESA) had previously invited Michelleti to deliver a presentation at the National Insurance Companyon Wednesday, but it had to cancel the event beacuse of mounting criticism againt the presence of Micheletti....</blockquote><blockquote style="line-height: 14.4px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">FUNDESA members do not see Zelaya's removal from government and Micheletti's rise to power as a coup but as a constitutional transtion, however after the decision of inviting Micheletti was known, political analists stressed it was wrong to welcome in Guatemala someone who has violated the human rights of the Honduran people.</blockquote>

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