Guatemala Needs Peace And Justice - OpEd

[Judi Lynn]

April 27, 2023

By IDN
By Jonathan Power*

Twenty years after 200,000 unnecessary deaths, 40,000 “disappearances” and 440 decimated villages, peace formally came to the last redoubt of the Central American war zone, Guatemala, in 1996. Put it up there with Rwanda, Cambodia, ex-Yugoslavia and today, the Congo as one of the great killing fields of the “post-war” world.

The violence never reached the crescendo it did in neighbouring El Salvador, nor did as many people just “disappear” as happened in Chile and Argentina, nor did the war stretch on and on as long as in Peru and Colombia, but no country in Latin America came near Guatemala for long-term systematic assassination and torture.

Before my first trip to this heart-torn country in 1980 I went for a briefing in London from the secretary-general of Amnesty International. I had asked him to point me in the direction of the worst country on their books and Guatemala it was. “How many political prisoners do you have there?” I asked him. “None”, he replied, “Only political killings.”

On that first visit I broke the story in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times that the death squads were not ad hoc groups of off duty soldiers and private bodyguards of big landlords resisting peasant revolts, as was the common excuse, but were organized and directed from the presidential office. But there was an overpowering silence from official Washington where Ronald Regan was the new Teflon president.

More:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/27042023-guatemala-needs-peace-and-justice-oped/