Guatemala: Digging Up the Past

[Judi Lynn]

Guatemala: Digging Up the Past
Posted: 02/12/2014 1:25 pm EST Updated: 02/12/2014 1:59 pm EST

Fredy Peccerelli considers himself lucky. His family was able to leave Guatemala during its long internal conflict. He grew up mostly in New York City, planning to become a doctor, at his father's urging.

But the problems of his homeland were not far from his thoughts. At Brooklyn College, he switched from pre-med courses to physical anthropology so he could become a professor who explored the ancient ruins in Guatemala's jungles. Then he attended a conference on human rights and exhumation, saw the slides of graves and changed his life completely.
"It was as if I was struck by lightning," he said during an interview at his office in Guatemala City, the capital. "I knew what I wanted to do."

Peccerelli says that when he arrived in Guatemala, in 1992, land mines and gun battles were constant dangers. Laughing at himself, he says he wasn't too pleased about the snakes, tarantulas and dengue fever either.

But the work that had called to him was very serious. The UN-backed Commission on Historical Clarification determined that 669 massacres had been committed during Guatemala's 1960-1996 armed conflict. The commission's 1999 report blamed the military and its allies for at least 626 massacres and for 91 percent of the human rights violations, which included 160,000 deaths and 40,000 forcible disappearances.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-borst/guatemala-digging-up-the_b_4771280.html

Only Jimmy Carter resisted funding the massive barbarism, and deep funding was immediately restored and enthusiastically supported by Ronald Reagan, along with the emotional, cheap public influence wielded among US right-wing citizens by US fundamentalist evangelists like Jerry Falwell, etc.

[WhiteTara]

1. 160,000 deaths and 40,000 forcible disappearances.

That is stunning. I had no idea to the extent of the atrocities. 200,000 people.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Once you scratch the surface on this, it will explain US policy throughout the Americas,

as it has been repeated endlessly from the first.

Slaughter Was Part of Reagan’s Hard Line

Greg Grandin

Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University and a fellow at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He is the author of the forthcoming "Empire of Necessity."

Updated May 21, 2013, 1:54 PM


In 1966, the U.S. Army’s Handbook of Counterinsurgency Guidelines summarized the results of a war game waged in a fictitious country unmistakably modeled on Guatemala. The rules allowed players to use “selective terror” but prohibited “mass terror.” “Genocide,” the guidelines stipulated, was “not an alternative.”

A decade and a half later, genocide was indeed an option in Guatemala, supported materially and morally by Ronald Reagan’s White House. Reagan famously took a hard line in Central America, coming under strong criticism for supporting the contras in Nicaragua and financing counterinsurgency in El Salvador.

His administration’s actions in Guatemala are less well known, but even before his 1980 election, two retired generals, who played prominent roles in Reagan’s campaign, reportedly traveled to Central America and told Guatemalan officials that “Mr. Reagan recognizes that a good deal of dirty work has to be done.”

Once in office, Reagan, continued to supply munitions and training to the Guatemalan army, despite a ban on military aid imposed by the Carter administration (existing contracts were exempt from the ban). And economic aid continued to flow, increasing to $104 million in 1986, from $11 million in 1980, nearly all of it going to the rural western highlands, where the Mayan victims of the genocide lived.

This aid helped the Guatemalan military implement a key part of its counterinsurgency campaign: following the massacres, soldiers herded survivors into “model villages,” detention camps really, where they used food and other material supplied by the U.S. Agency for International Development to establish control.

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/05/19/what-guilt-does-the-us-bear-in-guatemala/guatemalan-slaughter-was-part-of-reagans-hard-line

[Judi Lynn]

3. Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide – Ex-Guatemalan Dictator Rios Montt Guilty of Mayan Genocide

Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide – Ex-Guatemalan Dictator Rios Montt Guilty of Mayan Genocide
By Robert Parry
Global Research, May 13, 2013
Consortiumnews 11 May 2013

More than any recent U.S. president, Ronald Reagan has been lavished with honors, including his name attached to Washington’s National Airport. But the conviction of Reagan’s old ally, ex-Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt, for genocide means “Ronnie” must face history’s judgment as an accessory to the crime.


The conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of genocide against Mayan villagers in the 1980s has a special meaning for Americans who idolize Ronald Reagan. It means that their hero was an accessory to one of the most grievous crimes that can be committed against humanity.

The courage of the Guatemalan people and the integrity of their legal system to exact some accountability on a still-influential political figure also put U.S. democracy to shame. For decades now, Americans have tolerated human rights crimes by U.S. presidents who face little or no accountability. Usually, the history isn’t even compiled honestly.

By contrast, a Guatemalan court on Friday found Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced the 86-year-old ex-dictator to 80 years in prison. After the ruling, when Rios Montt rose and tried to walk out of the courtroom, Judge Yasmin Barrios shouted at him to stay put and then had security officers take him into custody.

Yet, while Guatemalans demonstrate the strength to face a dark chapter of their history, the American people remain mostly oblivious to Reagan’s central role in tens of thousands of political murders across Central America in the 1980s, including some 100,000 dead in Guatemala slaughtered by Rios Montt and other military dictators.

More:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/ronald-reagan-accessory-to-genocide-ex-guatemalan-dictator-rios-montt-guilty-of-mayan-genocide/5334855

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“This American Life” Conceals U.S. Involvement in Guatemala’s 1982 Dos Erres Massacre


In 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.

Although This American Life’s Ira Glass reported that state-led massacres “happened in over 600 villages” and he cited a 1999 United Nations-sponsored truth commission report that found “the number of Guatemalans killed or disappeared by their own government was over 180,000,” Glass failed to report that the same commission also concluded that the “government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations” that resulted in atrocities like those at Dos Erres. As Bhatt notes in his report, the Washington Post and PBS both reported this aspect of the commission’s report at the time.

Bhatt’s report also clarifies the deep historical context of Guatemalan state-sponsored violence against its civilian population, in ways that the This American Life story failed to explain. In 1954, the US organized a coup d’état against Guatemala’s first democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz. Consequently, a series of US-backed dictators ruled Guatemala. The Dos Erres massacre was part of the Guatemalan military’s ongoing campaign, which the US had supported at least indirectly since the 1954 coup. Under the direction of Efraín Rios Montt, who ruled Guatemala for 17-months from 1982-83, the state’s security forces escalated their attacks on leftist insurgents. The US helped to train and arm Montt’s troops. Declassified US intelligence documents revealed CIA and Pentagon involvement in the massacre.

During his rule, Montt counted President Ronald Reagan as a close ally. As Bhatt documents, the Reagan administration deliberately obscured “Guatemala’s record of atrocities” under Montt. Although the This American Life episode included commentary by Kate Doyle, an expert on declassified documents at the National Security Archives, as Bhatt also reports the broadcast version of “What Happened at Dos Erres” omitted the portions of Doyle’s in-studio discussion where she spoke about US complicity in the massacre. Similarly, Bhatt notes that the This American Life broadcast also “excluded content from its own media partner, ProPublica,” which would have corroborated US involvement in the massacre.

More:
http://www.projectcensored.org/american-life-conceals-u-s-involvement-guatemalas-1982-dos-erres-massacre/


By Robert Parry
February 6, 2011

Americans feel better about themselves, you might want to spend a minute thinking about the many atrocities in Latin America and elsewhere that Reagan aided, covered up or shrugged off in his inimitable "aw shucks" manner.

After all, the true measure of a president shouldn’t be his style or how he made us feel but rather what he did with his extraordinary power, what were the consequences for real people, either for good or ill.

Yet, even as the United States celebrates Reagan’s centennial birthday and lavishes praise on his supposed accomplishments, very little time has been spent reflecting on the unnecessary bloodbaths that Reagan enabled in many parts of the world.

Those grisly deaths and ugly tortures get whisked away as if they were just small necessities in Reagan’s larger success “winning the Cold War” – even though the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was already winding down before Reagan arrived on the national scene. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Myth.”]

Yet, Reagan’s Cold War obsessions helped unleash right-wing “death squads” and murderous militaries on the common people in many parts of the Third World, but nowhere worse than in Latin America.

More:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/020611.html

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Guatamala’s Montt guilty of Atrocity; but what about Ronald Reagan? (Democracy Now!)
By Juan Cole | May. 16, 2013

Guatamalan court has sentenced former dictator Efrain Rios Montt to 80 years in prison for his responsibility for the slaughter of some 1,771 members of the Maya Ixil by the army during his period in power, 1982-83.

What the court did not decide was the culpability of Ronald Reagan for the atrocity, given his warm support for Montt and Guatamalan right wing repression in that period.

Kate Doyle has assembled relevant documentation at the National Security Archive.

The Final Battle: Ríos Montt's Counterinsurgency Campaign

U.S. and Guatemalan Documents Describe the Strategy Behind Scorched Earth

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB425/

Democracy Now! interviews Allan Nairn on the issue:

(Video follows)

More:
http://www.juancole.com/2013/05/guatamalas-atrocity-democracy.html

[WhiteTara]

4. Oh, I knew about the events and the players et al,

but I thought the number of deaths was around 30 to 40 thousand which of course if horrific enough, but my god! I hope those monsters are chased through the depths of hell for a eon.