The Horrors Committed

[unhappycamper]

The Horrors Committed
Prensa Libre, Guatemala
By Marielos Monzon
Translated By Norma L. Colyer
5 October 2010
Edited by Gillian Palmer

Yes, it is awful. Spreading syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid to a group of Guatemalans to conduct experiments and test the effectiveness of penicillin is an aberration. But isn’t it just as horrifying to have financed, supported and trained those who executed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the devastated villages? Isn’t it awful to have designed and helped to implement counterinsurgency strategies that included kidnappings, selective murders, torture, rape and other offenses against the “enemies of the regime”?

Have we already forgotten who funded and trained the group of mercenaries who staged the coup against the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, in order to defend the economic interest of U.S. companies and to stop the so-called “communist threat”? Can we not remember the origin of the death squads, now-illegal arms groups that have captured institutions and act with impunity? Was the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification’s report, which points to the Guatemala army and the U.S. government oligarchy as responsible for the genocide, perhaps not sufficiently conclusive?

Who else could have been behind Operation Condor in the Southern Cone, in which the most egregious human rights violations were committed? Who else could have supported dictatorships throughout Latin America and trained officers at the School of the Americas? Who else could have directed covert operations to eliminate popular unions and student leaders in Guatemala and the rest of the continent during the Cold War years?

The declassified documents detail a good share of the horrors committed in our country with the support and financing of the United States. There are numerous books by Guatemalan and U.S. authors that refer to the North American intervention in Guatemala that cut short a democratic process which, had it continued, would have changed the discriminating, poverty-stricken and desolate face of the country in which we live today.

What happens is that once again the double standard of our society — which justifies crimes, massacres, torture and death squads (including extrajudicial executions committed today) and which condemns only experiments on innocent people — rears its head.

[Angry Dragon]

1. The elected officials of this country have no one to blame

except themselves for the hate and terror they have visited on the planet directed at us
The rich control the officials and then they run around and claim we need to protect
ourselves from the terrorists they have created.

The terrorists have won, the ones outside this country that have us hating everyone that is not like us and the rich
terrorists of this country that try to rip away the rights of the population.

You decide which is worse.