KREMC Linemen Bring Power To Guatemala
KREMC Linemen Bring Power To Guatemala
August 20, 2012 3:09 PM Stacey Page
Kosciusko REMC linemen Kelly Neace and Jeff Moore are part of an international initiative bringing electricity to remote villages in Guatemala for people who are still washing clothes by hand, gathering firewood daily so they can cook, and carrying buckets of water for drinking.
The project, called Hoosiers Power the World, is being coordinated by the Indiana Statewide Association of Rural Electric Cooperatives, Inc., in partnership with NRECA International Foundation.
“When the United Nations announced 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives, the KREMC board recognized it was the perfect time for us to participate in an international electrification project,” said Steve Rhodes, KREMC president and CEO. “This international initiative will change lives forever— much like our rural electric pioneers did for families across the nation 75 years ago. We can now pay it forward for some very remote areas of Guatemala that have never experienced the wonder of electricity.”
Two crews of Indiana electric cooperative linemen will each spend a couple weeks in August and September working alongside Guatemalan municipal employees in Hoja Blanco, Huehuetenango—or Huehue (way-way). Neace and Moore will respectively depart for Guatemala on Aug. 18 and Sept. 1, respectively, and return on Sept. 1 and 15. Daily tasks which are completed quickly and easily back home won’t be as simple in a part of the world where poles stand on the side of mountains reaching 5,000 to 7,000 feet above sea level, right of way maintenance is performed with a machete, and holes are still dug by hand for setting poles.
“Our excitement increased even more, when we received word recently that the municipal utility we’re working with in Hoja Blanco will form the first-ever rural electric cooperative in Guatemala. Our linemen will experience a full-circle moment when they witness a child’s face turning on a light at their home for the first time,” added Rhodes.
http://www.staceypageonline.com/2012/08/20/kremc-linemen-bring-power-to-guatemala/
(Short story, no more at link.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
if, instead of pouring so many millions of US taxpayers' required dollars into the genocide which has happened in that country since 1954, most of it involved in terrorizing the indigenous Guetemalan citizens, the Mayan Indians, when the US Government had the CIA sponsor and engineer the overthrow of Guatemala's elected, and beloved President Jacobo Arbenz, over 250,000 innocent lives ago.
Instead of bringing so many military people to study torture, deadly war tactics to use against the poor, the defenseless, the terror-filled, desperate villagers, campesinos, how WOULD it have been if instead, things like electricity, shelter, running water, plumbing could have been created for these people, instead of sending US helicopters overhead to find out where in the forest they were hiding from the soldiers, drop bombs on them, or send the death squads after them to crush the skulls of their children, rape the women, torture everyone who caught their attention, chop them up with machetes, and throw them into wells.....
There is NOTHING in this world which will erase the blood stains from the earth, from the history of the human race left by these atrocities. They are there forever.
I do respect the people who go there to help in the present. I only wish they had a hint of what their country has done to that one, but that information has always been whitewashed, even hidden from public view.
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National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 32
Versión en Español
The Guatemalan Military:
What the U.S. Files Reveal
Volume II
Documents
[font size=1]
Photo still from U.S. Army film shot in 1965. U.S. military
advisors confer as Col. Carlos Arana Osorio and an aide
look on.
(From left to right: Sgt. Casper González, U.S. infantry
advisor; U.S. Army intelligence advisor Major Vernon
Justice; unidentified Guatemalan soldier; and Col. Carlos
Arana Osorio.) [/font]
Document 1
January 4, 1966
[U.S. Counter-Terror Assistance to Guatemalan Security Forces]
Agency for International Development, secret cable
U.S. Public Safety Advisor John Longan, on temporary loan from his post in Venezuela, assists the Guatemalan government in establishing an urban “counter-terror” task force in the wake of a rash of kidnappings for ransom by insurgent organizations. During meetings with senior military and police officials, Longan advises how to establish overt and covert operations, including the design of “frozen area plans” for police raids, setting up road blocks within the capital, and creating a “safe house” in the Presidential Palace to centralize information gathered on the kidnappings. Longan’s strategy calls for the CIA to launch a new, long-range intelligence program, and urges U.S. police advisors to increase their influence on Guatemalan security forces.
[Note: In the document, CAS is an acronym for “Covert Action Staff,” the operational arm of the CIA Station in Guatemala.]
Document 2
March 1966
[Interrogation and Execution of Five Prisoners]
CIA, secret cable
The CIA Station in Guatemala reports the capture, interrogation and secret execution of five persons who had crossed “illegally” into Guatemala from Mexico in early March 1966. This document evaluates the accuracy of the information extracted from the victims during two days of torture following their arrest on March 3, and prior to their murder at the hands of Guatemalan security officers the next day. Among those executed is Leonardo Castillo Flores, a “top leader” of both the Guatemalan Workers’ Party (PGT) and the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), the military arm of the PGT.
Document 3
March 1966
[Death List]
CIA, secret cable
The CIA Station in Guatemala City reports the secret execution of several Guatemalan “communists and terrorists” by Guatemalan authorities on the night of March 6, 1966. The victims--the leader of the Guatemalan Workers’ Party (PGT), Victor Manuel Gutiérrez, among them--are several of the more than 30 PGT members and associates abducted, tortured, and killed by Guatemalan security forces in March of 1966. This operation was a direct consequence of urban “counter-terror” tactics designed by U.S. officials in support of the Peralta government. It became notorious as the first case of forced mass “disappearance” in Guatemala’s history--indeed in all of Latin America—and served as one of the “Casos Ilustrativos” in the 1999 report of the historical Clarification Commission.
Document 4
December 3, 1966
[Request for Special Training]
Department of State, secret cable
U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission in Guatemala Viron Vaky forwards to Washington the text of a cable the embassy received from the SOUTHCOM Commander-in-Chief, General Robert W. Porter. Porter’s cable describes a request made to him by the Guatemalan Vice Defense Minister, Colonel Francisco Sosa Avila, for U.S. assistance in the covert training of special kidnapping squads that would target leftists. Although Porter declines, he does not hesitate to recommend that the United States “fully support current police improvement programs and initiate military psychological warfare training and additional counterinsurgency operations training.” Vaky is troubled by these requests, noting that, “In present complicated situation we might unwittingly contribute to instability rather than help when we extend aid.”
Document 5
October 23, 1967
Guatemala: A Counter-Insurgency Running Wild?
Department of State, secret intelligence note
Thomas L. Hughes of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research questions the current Guatemalan government’s ability to control military and police forces in light of “accumulating evidence that the counter-insurgency machine is out of control.” The document describes some of the methods utilized in Guatemala’s “successful” campaign, including “overt and covert operations by the Guatemalan security forces and right wing civilian associates,” and the formation of clandestine counter-terrorist units to carry out abductions, bombings, torture, and executions “of real and alleged communists.”
Document 6
circa November 1967
[Special Commando Unit of the Guatemalan Army - SCUGA]
CIA, secret information report
The CIA Station in Guatemala reports that SCUGA, the Guatemalan Army’s urban counter-terrorist squad, plans to expand its operations to include an intelligence-gathering network. The new unit will collect information through the arrest and interrogation of “communist revolutionaries,” and recruit informants from those captured. Its members will also carry out “special assignments” upon occasion, including the assassination of local civil authority figures deemed subversive.
Document 7
February 1968
[Guatemalan Security Forces Kill Four]
CIA, secret information report
Members of the Fourth Corps of the National Police apprehend and execute four suspected subversives: Rafael Tischler Guzmán, Cayetano Barreno Juarez, Julio César Armas González, and Enrique de la Torre Morel. In an effort to cover up the operation, the Guatemalan security forces feed a false story to the press stating that there had been a gunfight with the victims after the security forces discovered weapons and subversive propaganda.
Document 8
March 29, 1968
Guatemala and Counter-terror
Department of State, secret memorandum
Viron Vaky, now back in Washington with the State Department’s Policy Planning Council, writes an extraordinary indictment of U.S. policy in Guatemala in a memorandum to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Covey Oliver. Vaky argues that the Guatemalan government’s use of counter-terror is indiscriminate and brutal, and has impeded modernization and institution building within the country. Furthermore, he writes, the United States has condoned such tactics. “This is not only because we have concluded we cannot do anything about it, for we never really tried. Rather we suspected that maybe it is a good tactic, and that as long as Communists are being killed it is alright. Murder, torture and mutilation are alright if our side is doing it and the victims are Communists.” Vaky urges a new policy in Guatemala that rejects counter-terror and represents a “clear ethical stand” on the part of the United States.
In a news interview 30 years later, Vaky said he doubted anyone in the State Department ever read his memorandum. In any event, Vaky went on to a long and successful career as a professional foreign service officer, serving in Latin America and elsewhere.
More:
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB32/vol2.html