Guatemala Ex-Dictator to Stand Trial on Genocide

[Judi Lynn]

17. The more you learn about US/Latin America relations, the less likely you'll be

to take anyone pitching the US right-wing spin seriously.

Guatemala has been controlled by US interests for ages. Here's an abreviated look at the filthy overthrow of Guatemala's elected President, Jacobo Arbenz in 1954:

1954 Guatemalan coup d'état
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Operation PBSUCCESS: the deposed Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (1951–54)
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état (18–27 June 1954) was the CIA covert operation that deposed President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (1950–54), with Operation PBSUCCESS — paramilitary invasion by an anti-Communist “army of liberation”. In the early 1950s, the politically liberal, elected Árbenz Government had affected the socio-economics of Decree 900 (27 June 1952), the national agrarian-reform expropriation, for peasant use and ownership, of unused prime-farmlands that Guatemalan and multinational corporations had set aside as reserved business assets. The Decree 900 land reform especially threatened the agricultural monopoly of the United Fruit Company (UFC), the American multinational corporation that owned 42 per cent of the arable land of Guatemala; which landholdings either had been bought by, or been ceded to, the UFC by the military dictatorships who preceded the Árbenz Government of Guatemala. In response to the expropriation of prime-farmland assets, the United Fruit Company asked the US Governments of presidents Harry Truman (1945–53) and Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61) to act diplomatically, economically, and militarily against Guatemalan President Árbenz Guzmán, which, in 1954, resulted in the Guatemalan coup d’état that provoked the thirty-six-year Guatemalan Civil War, from 1960 to and 1996, in which 140,000 to 250,000 Guatemalans were killed.[1]

Initially, the US saw neither political nor economic threat from President Árbenz Guzmán, because he appeared to have “no real sympathy for the lower classes”. Yet, he soon continued the progressive elimination of the historic economic feudalism of Guatemala, which had been initiated by the predecessor Government (1945–51) of President Juan José Arévalo Bermejo; which although “favorably disposed, initially, toward the United States, was modeled, in many ways, after the Roosevelt New Deal”; nonetheless, such relative political and economic liberalism, in the governing of a Latin American country, was worrisome to American corporate and political interests.[2][3]

From the dismissive cultural perspective of the CIA, the socio-economic development of Guatemalan society effected by the Árbenz Government was only “an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the Banana republic”;[4] thus the geopolitical opinion of the US State Department, wherein the Inter-American Affairs Bureau officer Charles R. Burrows explained the perceived threat to US interests:

Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program, of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises, has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors, where similar conditions prevail.

— Shattered Hope: the Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (1992) p. 365.[5]

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

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PINOCHET AND THE AMNESIA OF THE U.S. PRESS, by Roger Burbach

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The U.S. role in the coup and subsequent repression in Chile is certainly not a secret. Both before and after Pinochet's arrest, the alternative press reported extensively on U.S. involvement in Chile. In the Bay Area, the Information Service on Latin America (ISLA), published by the Data Center in Oakland, released a series of articles in December 1998 on Pinochet's bloody rule and his U.S. backing. In one of the articles, "The Hand of the CIA in the Coup of '73 Ignored by the Press in the United States" (originally published by the Mexican newspaper La Jornada), authors Jim Cason and David Brooks note that while "the dictator's career of repression is often recounted, with few exceptions (those that merely point out that the United States endorsed the coup) no mention is made of Washington's hardly disguised hand in the events of September of 1973, and during the following 17 years of dictatorship" (www.igc.org/isla/chile, Feature Coverage, Focus on Chile).

Another local news organization, San Francisco-based Pacific News Service, offered an article by Andrew Reding headlined "Reno Should Indict Pinochet." Published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian (1/20/99), the article notes that U.S. government agencies such as the CIA and Defense Department are "determined to avoid further exposure of their ties" to Pinochet's secret police (the DINA) and the Chilean military. Reding describes how the DINA carried out international terrorist actions, including the assassinations in Washington, D.C. of former Allende minister Orlando Letelier and his American associate, Ronni Moffet. In an age when U.S. grand juries are convened with increasing frequency to go after accused terrorists, Reding writes that "a grand jury would be certain to indict Pinochet."

Beyond the Bay Area, other publications and research organizations (all considered outside the mainstream or left of center) have amply documented Pinochet's reign of terror and U.S. involvement in it. The National Security Archive, based in Washington, D.C., has posted on the Internet 23 major declassified documents from FBI and U.S. intelligence agency files dating from 1970 to 1976 (www.seas.qwu.edu/nsarchive). One of the most damning is a report from then-Assistant Secretary of State Jack Kubisch to Henry Kissinger dated just two months after the coup. Kubisch wrote that 1,500 Chileans had already been killed and that there had been 320 summary executions in the first 19 days after the coup--more than three times the publicly acknowledged figure. The report goes on to detail U.S. aid to Pinochet, including special food shipments, plans to send Chile two naval destroyers, and efforts to get international agencies to open up to Pinochet financial coffers that were closed to the Allende administration.

Peter Kornbluh, who compiled the documents for the National Security Archive, wrote a feature article for The Nation ("Prisoner Pinochet," 12/21/98) concluding that "the CIA was well aware of the DINA's practice of 'completely barbaric' torture and murder," and knew about Operation Condor, "the campaign of kidnappings and assassinations of political opponents carried out by a network of Southern Cone intelligence agencies, led by Chile." The relationship between the CIA's Santiago station chief, Stuart Burton, and the head of DINA, Colonel Manuel Contreras, was so close that they "used to go on Sunday picnics together with their families," according to one human rights researcher cited by Kornbluh.

Kornbluh's article also discusses the U.S. government's current recent obstruction of efforts to bring Pinochet to justice: "The Clinton administration stonewalled for more than a year before producing any records" requested by the Spanish court that's trying to prosecute Pinochet. The documents that eventually were turned over by the United States amounted to "zilch," according to one Spanish lawyer.

In contrast, the United States was persuaded to provide some important documentation to the United Nations-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission in Guatemala. To the dismay of many U.S. officials, when its report was released in late February, the commission's head assigned major responsibility for 200,000 deaths and a 30-year civil war to U.S. involvement, including CIA support for death squads and a string of repressive Guatemalan regimes.

More:
http://www.media-alliance.org/article.php?id=530