Ronald Reagan: Efraín Ríos Montt is “totally dedicated to democracy”

[Octafish]

A few days later, these kids were murdered in the name of fighting the commies.

Ronald Reagan: Efraín Ríos Montt is “totally dedicated to democracy”

by COREY ROBIN on MAY 11, 2013
Crooked Timber

So much of the discourse around the US and genocide focuses on the sin of omission, the failure of the US to prevent or stop genocide elsewhere. Now that former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt has been found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison—a fact established by a UN truth commission in 1997 but often ignored in the literature on genocide and intervention, which tends to focus on Rwanda and Bosnia—perhaps we can attend to the sin of commission. For the US support for Rios Montt was extensive. I wrote about just a little of it in the London Review of Books in 2004:

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.’ It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy’, and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting ‘a bum rap’ from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.

SOURCE w LINKS: http://crookedtimber.org/2013/05/11/ronald-reagan-efrain-rios-montt-is-totally-dedicated-to-democracy/

"Human Rights" was the cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy under President Jimmy Carter. Under Reagan and Bush and the rest of the BFEE, it was OK to murder innocent children in the name of anti-communism.

PS: Does anyone really wonder why our elected representatives in Washington DC are so hesitant to "redistribute" wealth downward today?

[Octafish]

1. David Bonior and the Democrats who opposed genocide were targeted by the Right

The Party's Whip, was redistricted out of his seat. Other liberal, progressive and humanitarian Democrats, likewise got the ziggy in the press and at the ballot box for opposing genocide in the name of capitalism.

CIA Out of Control

Russ Baker
Village Voice, Sept. 10, 1991

EXCERPT...

Dellums press secretary Max Miller says the representative from
Berkeley, together with majority whip David Bonior--another
outspoken liberal--made an agreement with Speaker Thomas Foley to
maintain a low profile in return for gaining seats on the committee.
After one full round of legislation and briefings, Miller says,
Dellums will be heard from. "They wanted to find out as much as
they could before speaking out." Meanwhile, the energetic Oliver
North, in his role as president of something called the Freedom
Alliance, has launched a campaign to collect a million Dump Dellums
signatures. He calls Dellums "a pro-Marxist, antidefense radical,"
who would be a threat on the "supersensitive" committee. Putting
Dellums on the panel, North says, was an "extremely reckless and
very dangerous appointment."

And those who make trouble get trouble. Reports and rumors that
the apparatus pokes into the personal lives of members of Congress
underlines the danger of investigating national security agencies.
"There's a little bit of fear that if you do go after the
intelligence community, your career is threatened," says McGehee,
author of "Deadly Deceits: My 25 years in the CIA." Even the
complacent Senate intelligence committee chair David Boren has
reason to worry. According to the "Voice"'s Doug Ireland (see Press
Clips, May 28), Boren faced a vicious primary battle in his first
senatorial campaign, during which his opponents accused him of being
a homosexual. At a press conference, Boren swore on a white Bible
that he was not. "It would therefore be utterly churlish," Ireland
wrote, "to speculate on whether or not the Company has a file on the
state of its tamed watchdog's libido." Since then, Boren has called
Robert Gates "one of the most candid people we've ever dealt with."

Leading congressional critics of the CIA have been defeated,
despite their long, distinguished careers in Washington and
Congress's nearly foolproof 98 per cent reelection rate. Both Otis
Pike and Frank Church were defeated soon after chairing their
precedent-setting '70s hearings. Pike's report had been so
incendiary that Congress voted not to release it before the White
House had a chance to censor the document. (It was ultimately
leaked to and published by the "Voice.&quot Pike's committee staff
director had been warned by the CIA special counsel, "Pike will pay
for this, you wait and see--we'll destroy him for this," according
to "The New York Times." Also defeated were outspoken senators Dick
Clark, Birch Bayh, and Harold Hughes. Foreign money--possibly South
African--is believed to have financed the defeat of Clark, a vocal
critic of the CIA and U.S. ties with South Africa.

Challenging the CIA also means trying to rein in dictatorial
tendencies that naturally accrue to the occupant of the Oval Office.
"Every president of the United States, no matter what he says before
he becomes president, about how he's going to clean things up," says
Marchetti, "once he gets in there and finds out that's *his* agency,
that's *his* intelligence community, hey, all bets are off."

One man who told the truth blew his chance to become CIA
director, thanks to "reformer" Jimmy Carter. Hank Knoche, acting
director following Bush's retirement, had been called down to a
Senate committee. "The chairman was complaining that `we just don't
know what's really going on,'" says Marchetti, who was privy to the
details of the incident. "They asked [Knoche] about covert action
operations: `Do we know all the stuff that's going on? Could you
tell us more about them?'" Asked to reveal the 10 largest ongoing
operations, Knoche offered to name a few of the lesser ones, despite
urgings from his aide that he keep his mouth shut. President Carter
reportedly heard about it, and was none too happy. Instead of
Knoche, the odds-on favorite for the slot, he named intelligence
novice and old Naval Academy chum Admiral Stansfield Turner. "Hank
learned his lesson that day," says Marchetti.

CONTINUED...

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/alt.conspiracy/G8CP9pwqjvU

What a coincidence.

[byeya]

2. People fighting for humanitarianism in El Salvador were harassed by the fbi also. I remember

Raygun and his political henchmen doing the dirty to all who opposed the military dictatorships in Central America. Those who could not be marginalized were targeted for police action.
Honduras is now suffering under a coup sanctioned by the 0bama regime but most of Central America is relatively free for a change.

[a la izquierda]

3. Well, except Guatemala.

Their president ran death squads during their civil war.

[Octafish]

5. Friendly Dictators

Apart from a gun, there's nothing like money to bring people together:

Friendly Dictators

by Dennis Bernstein and Laura Sydell
from Eclipse Enterprises trading card series, 1995
Third World Traveler

EXCERPT...

Friendly dictators

Abacha, General Sani ----------------------------Nigeria
Amin, Idi ------------------------------------------Uganda
Banzer, Colonel Hugo ---------------------------Bolivia
Batista, Fulgencio --------------------------------Cuba
Bolkiah, Sir Hassanal ----------------------------Brunei
Botha, P.W. ---------------------------------------South Africa
Branco, General Humberto ---------------------Brazil
Cedras, Raoul -------------------------------------Haiti
Cerezo, Vinicio -----------------------------------Guatemala
Chiang Kai-Shek ---------------------------------Taiwan
Cordova, Roberto Suazo ------------------------Honduras
Christiani, Alfredo -------------------------------El Salvador
Diem, Ngo Dihn ---------------------------------Vietnam
Doe, General Samuel ----------------------------Liberia
Duvalier, Francois --------------------------------Haiti
Duvalier, Jean Claude-----------------------------Haiti
Fahd bin'Abdul-'Aziz, King ---------------------Saudi Arabia
Franco, General Francisco -----------------------Spain
Hitler, Adolf ---------------------------------------Germany
Hassan II-------------------------------------------Morocco
Marcos, Ferdinand -------------------------------Philippines
Martinez, General Maximiliano Hernandez ---El Salvador
Mobutu Sese Seko -------------------------------Zaire
Noriega, General Manuel ------------------------Panama
Ozal, Turgut --------------------------------------Turkey
Pahlevi, Shah Mohammed Reza ---------------Iran
Papadopoulos, George --------------------------Greece
Park Chung Hee ---------------------------------South Korea
Pinochet, General Augusto ---------------------Chile
Pol Pot---------------------------------------------Cambodia
Rabuka, General Sitiveni ------------------------Fiji
Montt, General Efrain Rios ---------------------Guatemala
Salassie, Halie ------------------------------------Ethiopia
Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira --------------------Portugal
Somoza, Anastasio Jr. --------------------------Nicaragua
Somoza, Anastasio, Sr. -------------------------Nicaragua
Smith, Ian ----------------------------------------Rhodesia
Stroessner, Alfredo -----------------------------Paraguay
Suharto, General ---------------------------------Indonesia
Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas -----------------------Dominican Republic
Videla, General Jorge Rafael ------------------Argentina
Zia Ul-Haq, Mohammed ----------------------Pakistan

SNIP...

VINICIO CEREZO

President of Guatemala

According to Amnesty International, arbitrary arrest, torture, disappearance, and political killings were everyday realities for Guatemalans during decades of US financed military dictatorship. In January 1986, Christian Democrat leader Vinicio Cerezo was elected President and said he had "the political will to respect the rights of man", but it didn't take long to find out that his political will was irrelevant in the face of Guatemala's well-oiled military machine. Hopes for change were dashed when Cerezo announced that Guatemala would continue to provide amnesty for all past military offenses committed from General Elrain Rios Montt's coup in 1982 through the 1986 elections. Although Ronald Reagan's State Department asserted "there has not been a single clear-cut case of political killing, within months of Cerezo's inauguration, opposition leaders attributed 56 murders to security forces and death squads, while Americas Watch claimed that "throughout 1986, violent killings were reported in the Guatemalan press at the rate of 100 per month". Altogether, Americas Watch says, tens-of-thousands were killed and 400 rural villages were destroyed by government death squads during Reagan's term in office. Colonel D'Jalma Dominguez, former army spokesman, explains "For convenience sake a civilian government is preferable, such as the one we have now. If anything goes wrong, only the Christian Democrats will get the blame. It's better to remain outside. The real power will not be lost." Today, the real power still resides with the military.

SNIP...

GENERAL EFRAIN RIOS MONTT

President of Guatemala

"A Christian has to walk around with his Bible and his machine gun", said born-again General Efrain Rios Montt, military ruler of Guatemala from March 1982 to August 1983. Rios Montt was one in a long series of dictators who ran Guatemala after the Dulles brothers and United Fruit, backed by the CIA, decided that democratically-elected President Jacobo Arbenz was too reform-minded. And so, they overthrew the country's constitutional democracy in 1954. The succession of corrupt military dictators ruled Guatemala for over 30 years, one anti-communist tyrant after another receiving U.S. support, aid, and training. After the 1982 coup that brought Rios Montt to power, the U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala said "Guatemala has come out of the darkness and into the light". President Reagan claimed Rios Montt was given "a bum rap" by human rights groups, and that he was cleaning up problems inherited from his predecessor, General Romeo Lucas Garcia. Ironically, Garcia had given $500,000 to Reagan's 1980 campaign, and his henchman, Mario Sandoval Alarcon, the 'Godfather' of Central American death squads, was a guest at Reagan's first inaugural celebration. Sandoval proudly calls his National Liberation Movement " the party of organized violence". Montt simply moved Garcia's dirty war from urban centers to the countryside where "the spirit of the lord" guided him against "communist subversives', mostly indigenous Indians. As many as 10,000 Indians were killed and over 100,000 fled to Mexico as a result of Rios Montt's "Christian" campaign.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/dictators.html

[Octafish]

4. Ollie North, BFEE, had plans to round up protesters - REX 84

Here's Brendan Sullivan helping keep Ollie the Traitor from soiling his britches when the late U.S. Representative Jack Brooks (D-Texas) asked him about it during the joint Iran-Contra hearings. Brooks was told by Senator Dan Inouye (D-Hawai'i) to STFU:

News from Post-Constitutional America

PROGRESSIVE REVIEW, 1996 - The issue arose again during the Iran-Contra affair, but even in the wake of all the copy on that scandal, the public got little sense of how far some America's soldiers of fortune were willing to go to achieve their ends. When the Iran-Contra hearings came close to the matter, chair Senator Inouye backed swiftly away. Here is an excerpt from those hearings. Oliver North is at the witness table:

REP BROOKS: Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

BRENDAN SULLIVAN: Mr. Chairman?

SEN INOUYE: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch on that.

REP BROOKS: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had been a plan developed by that same agency, a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I wanted to get his confirmation.

SEN INOUYE; May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I'm certain arrangements can be made for an executive session

With few exceptions, the media ignored what well could be the most startling revelation to have come out of the Iran/Contra affair, namely that high officials of the US government were planning a possible military/civilian coup. First among the exceptions was the Miami Herald, which on July 5, 1987, ran the story to which Jack Brooks referred. The article, by Alfonzo Chardy, revealed Oliver North's involvement in plans for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to take over federal, state and local functions during an ill-defined national emergency.

According to Chardy, the plan called for 'suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to the Federal Management Agency, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law.' The proposal appears to have forgotten that Congress, legislatures and the judiciary even existed.

CONTINUED...

http://prorev.com/coup.htm

I'm old. I know. I've seen it. Things have only gotten worse.

[byeya]

6. I have alluded to this exchange with Rep Brooks before but I didn't know where to get

the transcript. Thanks.
This was a major misclaculation(at best) by the Democrats on the committee and Jack Brooks tried to get around the stifling rules the Dems accepted. Good for Brooks, "Boo" to the rest of the committee.

[Octafish]

7. Mr. Brooks passed away last year...A GREAT MAN...

From the lefties who remember him:

Congressman Jack Brooks, Rex ’84 and the Iran-Contra affair

By Patrick Martin
6 December 2012

Former congressman Jack Brooks, a liberal Democrat who represented an east Texas district centered on the city of Beaumont for 42 years, died Tuesday at the age of 89.

Obituaries by the New York Times and the Associated Press detailed his long political career, including his role as one of a handful of pro-civil-rights southerners in the Democratic Party, but passed over in silence the most critical episode in his four decades in Washington.

Brooks was one of the House members of the joint House-Senate committee established to investigate the Iran-Contra affair, a major political crisis of the Reagan administration. It erupted in November 1986, when Reagan was compelled to acknowledge that a group of White House aides had been conducting secret arms sales to Iran and using the proceeds of the arms sales to buy weapons to supply the right-wing Contra guerrillas fighting the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

SNIP...

At one point during North’s testimony, Congressman Brooks, a member of the joint committee, sought to raise the issue of the officer’s work at the National Security Council on a project that pre-dated Iran-Contra. This had been described in an article in the Miami Herald, the only newspaper to report it, as Operation Rex ’84, a plan to suspend the US Constitution, declare martial law, establish a “parallel government” of US military and intelligence operatives, and round up potential opponents of a US war with Nicaragua. The plan was to be activated in the event that the Reagan administration decided to invade the Central American country.

In the jargon of the military-intelligence apparatus, this plan to establish a military dictatorship in America and jail hundreds of thousands of people because of their political views was known as an exercise in ensuring “continuity of government.”

CONTINUED...

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/12/06/brks-d06.html

PS: Way back when, an independent investigator named Danny Casolaro found a thread that linked Poppy Bush and the Watergate crew to the October Surprise to the Iran-Contra Affair to the INSLAW/PROMIS software scam. Casolaro went to meet a source and ended up dead in a West Virginia motel room, a "suicide" followed by quick embalming. Of course, investigators found his papers and brief case missing, but that's life. Around that time, Brooks and a few good Congressmen were investigating the INSLAW/PROMIS story. I called Mr. Brooks' office and got the quick skinny on what they had found, re the software. Amazing stuff that all Americans should know, but, for some reason, never seems to make it on-air or in-print.

PPS: You are most welcome, byeya! I'm getting ready to retire and very much appreciate that you and younger DUers understand how important history is for our current situation and bringing forward a better day.

[byeya]

9. I personally think this institutionalized pro-war, pro-corporatist propaganda began with the Wests'

beginning the Cold War at the end of WW2. The Republicans gained control of Congress and Taft Hartley was allowing red-baiting to become the norm. AFL unions, and the some CIO unions, saw the leadership of the individual unions red-bait fellow workers to consolodate their power and to banish democracy from the unions and the shop floor. The Cold War also kept the majority of the population scared and unquestioning.

(I think I am older that you are)

[byeya]

8. Texas had quite a few good Representatives. Wright Patman, on balance, was a good one too, imo.

[Octafish]

13. Barbara Jordan

BeeJae

"What the people want is very simple - they want an America as good as its promise." -- Barbara Jordan

[stevenleser]

10. I would say there is a 90% chance this will be a segment on my next show.

Thank you for this.

[byeya]

11. Good for you!

[Octafish]

12. An Open Letter to the Indigenous Peoples of Guatemala

by MADRE
Published on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 by Common Dreams

The international human rights community has been watching for months as former dictator Efrain Rios Montt was brought to trial, thirty years after he led a genocide against Guatemala’s Indigenous Ixil Peoples.

We at MADRE were watching when the courtroom erupted into a three-ring circus, over and over, as lawyers walked out, as judges insisted that the trial was illegal, as the man who inflicted mass killings and rapes upon the people of Guatemala insisted that he was innocent.

We were watching closely just days ago as Efrain Rios Montt was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.

While we watched, we remembered all the times we have visited our sister organizations in their communities, sitting with them in their homes and hearing the horrors that they faced. This trial finally confirmed for the whole world Rios Montt’s role in orchestrating months of terror and attempting to destroy the Ixil People.

This measure of justice, more than thirty years after those dark days, is long overdue.

We know that this verdict cannot heal the wounds that you have suffered. It will not bring back the loved ones you have lost. It will not rebuild the communities that were torn apart and the homes that were destroyed.

You stood tall and demanded to be heard, through years when it seemed that the world would not listen.

But every day, by surviving and supporting each other, you are restoring your lives and your communities, your histories and your culture.

Your commitment to justice made this victory possible. You refused to be silenced, even when powerful forces tried to intimidate and threaten you. You refused to be ridiculed or dismissed. You stood tall and demanded to be heard, through years when it seemed that the world would not listen.

This verdict is thanks to your determination to prevent these atrocities from ever happening again, to protect your children and grandchildren, and to give them a future.

To every person among the hundreds who bravely testified before the court, telling of the brutality they witnessed and endured, and to the thousands more whose stories we have not yet heard, we offer our deepest honor and respect.

Efrain Rios Montt did not act alone. He had an accomplice in the Reagan Administration. The US considered him an ally, not only refusing to acknowledge the massacres occurring under his regime, but offering him moral and military support. We are committed to speak out against this injustice and to demand full accountability.

We celebrate this victory, and we offer you our solidarity in the days to come. We will stand beside you and join our voices to yours in the ongoing call for justice, even across the distances that separate us.

MADRE is a human rights organization advance women’s human rights by meeting urgent needs in communities and building lasting solutions to the crises women face.

SOURCE: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15

MADRE

PS: You are most welcome, stevenleser. Thank you for all you do as a journalist and for democracy.