Guate: Rios Montt genocide trial / 2nd day of conclusions, Prosecution wraps up

[Catherina]

70. Video History Lesson - Guatemala - An American Genocide

Guatemala - An American Genocide

Guatemala - An American Genocide

Broadcast: 10/8/1999

Reporter: Jonathan Holmes

LEAD STORY
SERIES 9
EPISODE 6

"I said to my wife, we must get out, because the soldiers didn't see us as human beings but as animals."
Andres, Mayan peasant from the highlands.


The United Nations Guatemalan Clarification Commission estimates that a hundred thousand Mayan villages were massacred by the Guatemalan army during the seventies and eighties, in a campaign aided and financed by the US Government. The evidence for this hidden and very dirty war is investigated by Jonathan Holmes through the bones of the victims and the documents of the perpetrators. He accompanies US forensic expert Dr Clyde Snow in the painful task of exhuming the victims from the more than 400 massacre sites that have been identified: "You can hardly throw a rock around here without hitting a mass grave"

Earlier this year President Clinton apologised for the American involvement in Latin America's dirty wars after a thousand US Government classified documents revealed CIA training manuals for assassinations, deliberate attempts to hide or deny the genocide and direct involvement in military coups to topple reformist Governments. This was the era of the cold war and Reagan's fear of the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua spreading. Anything was justified to contain the threat, including as Jonathan says about the US aid to the Guatemalan military:"They created a monster, which later they were powerless to control".

Indeed for the people of Guatemala the nightmare is not over. Just last year the Catholic Bishop of Quiche was pummelled to death with a concrete block after accusing the Guatemalan army of genocide. All the evidence points to military intelligence as the murderers.

http://www.abc.net.au/foreign/stories/s415678.htm