Reagan supplied the weapons, Rios Montt used them

[Catherina]

When Former Guatemala President Efrain Ríos Montt Gets Out Of Prison, He'll Be 166 Years Old
Sunday, May 12, 2013

Reagan supplied the weapons, Rios Montt used them



We've mentioned Ríos Montt before-- first in 2007, when crooked Illinois Republican Congressman Jerry Weller (now retired) married the former dictator's daughter and absconded to Guatemala with all his loot. More recently we looked at Reactionary Mind author Corey Robin's review of a book by Greg Granlin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. How, I wondered, could any serious examination of the reactionary mind-- particularly the American reactionary mind-- not deal with the enormity of what was visited (by reactionary minds) on the Mayan native people of Guatemala, the ones whose ancestors had managed to escape being slaughtered in previous centuries by Spanish imperialists? And whose reactionary mind-- albeit an extraordinarily weak one-- would be better to start with than Ronald Reagan's?
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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.

Amid the hagiography surrounding Reagan’s death in June, it was probably too much to expect the media to mention his meeting with Ríos Montt. After all, it wasn’t Reykjavik. But Reykjavik’s shadow-- or that cast by Reagan speaking in front of the Berlin Wall-- does not entirely explain the silence about this encounter between presidents. While it’s tempting to ascribe the omission to American amnesia, a more likely cause is the deep misconception about the Cold War under which most Americans labour. To the casual observer, the Cold War was a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought and won through stylish jousting at Berlin, antiseptic arguments over nuclear stockpiles, and the savvy brinkmanship of American leaders. Latin America seldom figures in popular or even academic discussion of the Cold War, and to the extent that it does, it is Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua rather than Guatemala that earn most of the attention.

But, as Greg Grandin shows in The Last Colonial Massacre, Latin America was as much a battleground of the Cold War as Europe, and Guatemala was its front line. In 1954, the US fought its first major contest against Communism in the Western hemisphere when it overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had worked closely with the country’s small but influential Communist Party. That coup sent a young Argentinian doctor fleeing to Mexico, where he met Fidel Castro. Five years later, Che Guevara declared that 1954 had taught him the impossibility of peaceful, electoral reform and promised his followers that ‘Cuba will not be Guatemala.’ In 1966, Guatemala was again the pacesetter, this time pioneering the ‘disappearances’ that would come to define the dirty wars of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. In a lightning strike, US-trained security officials captured some thirty leftists, tortured and executed them, and then dropped most of their corpses into the Pacific. Explaining the operation in a classified memo, the CIA wrote: ‘The execution of these persons will not be announced and the Guatemalan government will deny that they were ever taken into custody.’ With the 1996 signing of a peace accord between the Guatemalan military and leftist guerrillas, the Latin American Cold War finally came to an end-- in the same place it had begun-- making Guatemala’s the longest and most lethal of the hemisphere’s civil wars. Some 200,000 men, women and children were dead, virtually all at the hands of the military: more than were killed in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador combined, and roughly the same number as were killed in the Balkans. Because the victims were primarily Mayan Indians, Guatemala today has the only military in Latin America deemed by a UN-sponsored truth commission to have committed acts of genocide.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n22/corey-robin/dedicated-to-democracy

...

And then there was the report almost exactly a year ago that the ex-Presidente was in custody, along with a This American Life program about one particular Guatemalan massacre. What struck me about it-- aside from the cold blooded and horrific murders of all the women and children-- was the impetus to "let bygones be bygones" and just move on. Oligarchs and ruling elites across the world have seen to it that social orders are organized by, of, and for the one percent. Under those circumstances accountability is almost nonexistent. The U.S. has no moral standing to complain about Syria, I wrote at the time, until Bush and his cronies are hanging or rotting in prison cells. Our entire society is rotting from inside because there is no accountability at the top.

Reagan ally and mass murderer, former Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, now 85, has finally been arrested. Since he was responsible for the brutal deaths of between a hundred and two hundred thousand innocent Mayan Indians, it's nice he's been indicted and is languishing in his mansion under house arrest. But the drumbeat to let bygones be bygones is already sounding and the current fascist in control of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, is carefully weighing his options.

For those not familiar with Ríos Montt, here's the briefest of summaries: In 1951 he attended the U.S. terrorism school in Georgia, School of the Americas, which indoctrinates budding young Latin American fascists and trains them to keep their countrymen down fight Communism. Three years later he was part of the CIA plot to overthrow populist Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. A religionist fanatic and close associate of both Pat Robertson's and Jerry Falwell's, Ríos Montt preached that a true Christian had the Bible in one hand and a machine gun in the other. He soon seized power with the help of the CIA. He immediately targeted labor unions-- literally targeted... and not with Bibles, with the other hand. Tens of thousands of deaths mounted and mounted, mostly of impoverished, maginalized Mayans, and over a million were displaced and forced to live in concentration camps and to work in the fields of Guatemalan land barons, that country's one percent.

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2013/05/when-former-guatamala-president-efrain.html

[Catherina]

1. How Ronald Reagan Made Genocide Possible in Guatemala

How Ronald Reagan Made Genocide Possible in Guatemala

Benjy Hansen-Bundy, Robert Parry
April 16, 2013

...

A document that I discovered recently in the archives of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, revealed that Reagan and his national security team in 1981 agreed to supply military aid to the brutal right-wing regime in Guatemala to pursue the goal of exterminating not only "Marxist guerrillas" but people associated with their "civilian support mechanisms."

This supportive attitude toward the Guatemalan regime's brutality took shape in spring 1981 as President Reagan sought to ease human-rights restrictions on military aid to Guatemala that had been imposed by President Jimmy Carter and the Democratic-controlled Congress in the late 1970s.

As part of that relaxation effort, Reagan's State Department "advised our Central American embassies that it has been studying ways to restore a closer, cooperative relationship with Guatemala," according to a White House "Situation Room Checklist" dated April 8, 1981. The document added:

"State believes a number of changes have occurred which could make Guatemalan leaders more receptive to a new U.S. initiative: the Guatemalans view the new administration as more sympathetic to their problems (and) they are less suspect of the U.S. role in El Salvador," where the Reagan administration was expanding support for another right-wing regime infamous for slaughtering its political opponents, including Catholic clergy.

"State has concluded that any attempt to reestablish a dialogue (with Guatemala) would require some initial, condition-free demonstration of our goodwill. However, this could not include military sales which would provoke serious U.S. public and congressional criticism. State will undertake a series of confidence building measures, free of preconditions, which minimize potential conflict with existing legislation."

The "checklist" added that the State Department "has also decided that the administration should engage the Guatemalan government at the highest level in a dialogue on our bilateral relations and the initiatives we can take together to improve them. Secretary [of State Alexander] Haig has designated [retired] General Vernon Walters as his personal emissary to initiate this process with President [Fernando Romeo] Lucas [Garcia].

"If Lucas is prepared to give assurances that he will take steps to halt government involvement in the indiscriminate killing of political opponents and to foster a climate conducive to a viable electoral process, the U.S. will be prepared to approve some military sales immediately."

But the operative word in that paragraph was "indiscriminate." The Reagan administration expressed no problem with killing civilians if they were considered supporters of the guerrillas who had been fighting against the country's ruling oligarchs and generals since the 1950s when the CIA organized the overthrow of Guatemala's reformist President Jacobo Arbenz.

...

http://portside.org/2013-04-17/how-ronald-reagan-made-genocide-possible-guatemala

[Demeter]

2. It's called "Looking Forward" and we are still doing it

The corollary, of course, is "Don't look back, they're gaining on you!"

Sometimes, I wish I had another place to go...one that wasn't so hypocritical and fascist.

[bemildred]

3. That is because with an honest look back, our "leaders" have screwed the pooch,

jumped the shark, trashed the place, and most of all failed, and they have been at it for a long time now.

[Catherina]

4. Chomsky on Reagan, Eisenhower, Guatemala

... The CIA is assigned the responsibility of carrying out the crimes and atrocities. And then if anything goes wrong, you can blame it on the CIA, sort of rogue elements out of control.

But that’s a joke. It’s very hard to find a case where the CIA acted outside presidential authority. And this is a clear case. Eisenhower gave the orders. The beachhead story doesn’t mention the fact that Eisenhower knew perfectly well that his administration had been trying very hard to force Guatemala to accept East European arms. Guatemala had a democratic government. In fact, it was a brief interlude. A Guatemalan poet called it years of spring in a history of tyranny, or something like that. There was a brief interlude of democracy, to which the U.S. was strongly opposed.

After the dictatorship was overthrown in 1944, Guatemala gradually got an authentic democratic government, which had enormous popular support. Schlesinger and Kinzer didn’t know at the time they wrote their book, but since then CIA and other documents have been released. They make it clear that the great fear in the U.S. administration was the enormous popular support that the democratic government had because of its progressive social policies. It was mobilizing peasants for the first time to participate in the political system. And that was just considered a terrible crime, because a real democracy was developing, which might even influence others. So Dulles and Eisenhower, in secret discussions, were profoundly concerned. The main threat they could see in Guatemala was that it might be supporting strikes in nearby Honduras or it might be supporting Jose Figueres, the leading figure of Central American democracy, who was trying to overthrow a dictatorship in Costa Rica, and it might be that Guatemala was supporting it. So those were the threats.

They threatened Guatemala very clearly with attack. Guatemala tried to get military aid from Europe. The U.S. blocked that. Finally, Guatemala made the tactical mistake of accepting military aid from the only country that would give it to it. It happened to be Czechoslovakia. And the U.S. triumphantly discovered that Czech arms were going to Guatemala to defend itself from an attack by the hemispheric superpower, and that was trumpeted as a threat to the U.S. How can the U.S. survive if Guatemala gets a rifle from Czechoslovakia? And it was used as the pretext for the invasion, which of course was covered up. It wasn’t called a U.S.-backed invasion, although that’s in fact what it was.

Incidentally, although we have an enormous amount of information about Guatemala, it is nevertheless limited. Part of the reason is that the Reaganites, who were not conservatives, they were extreme statist reactionaries, believed in a powerful interventionist state, which intervenes massively in the domestic economy and in international affairs. They also had to prevent the public from knowing what it was doing. So one of the achievements of the Reagan administration was to block the regular release of archival records. There are U.S. laws that require the State Department to declassify and release records after a thirty-year period. There are some constraints, but basically to release them. The Reagan administration for the first time blocked that because they didn’t want the public to know what had happened in Guatemala and Iran. So either they destroyed them or they hid them, but they didn’t release them. That was considered so outrageous that the State Department historians, who are a pretty conservative bunch, resigned in protest and made a public protest about it.

...

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200408--.htm

[MinM]

5. “Dirty Wars” and Disinformation in the Age of Ronald Reagan

...Beginning in the early 1960s, the FBI conducted a multi-pronged counterintelligence offensive against targets like Martin Luther King, Jr. and his supporters, the Socialist Workers Party, White Hate Groups, the Black Panthers, people who wanted to abolish HUAC, and the New Left. The Bureau’s enemies were bugged, infiltrated, sabotaged and disrupted whenever possible. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover personally approved hundreds of such COINTELPRO operations, on grounds that Communists were behind every act of dissent.

In the 1970s, victims of COINTELPRO obtained voluminous files on these activities through the Freedom of Information Act, leading to multi-million dollar lawsuits against the government and its agents. But much of the damage couldn’t be undone. For example, no lawsuit could compensate for the impact on film star Jean Seberg. Her support for the Black Panthers provided a justification for the FBI to spread false stories about her sex life. Distressed by the smears, she had a mental breakdown and ultimately killed herself...

Revelations about intelligence abuses led in the 1970s to more restrictive standards and, for a while, limited intrusive tactics. But by the early 1980s, another terrorist scenario reversed that trend. Reagan’s CIA chief, William Casey, drafted an executive order on intelligence, freeing the attorney general to conduct an intrusive investigation of anyone who “may be acting on behalf of a foreign power.” As far as the disinformation experts were concerned, this included all of the American left. Searches and break-ins would no longer require warrants; the CIA would once again be able to bug US citizens at home; phone taps were back in fashion. And to cut down on objections, the attorney general urged federal agencies to withhold more information about what they were doing...

The theory was adopted as a rationale for covert US acts of war in Central America and equally covert harassment at home of people who didn’t care for the Reagan Revolution. To the administration and Jeremiah Denton, anyone opposing the government was more than likely either a potential terrorist or a Soviet dupe. Either way, they required surveillance and maybe much more.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/dirty-wars-and-disinformation-in-the-age-of-ronald-reagan/5338436