Guatemala's challenge (Kinzer / Guardian)

[struggle4progress]

Today the new president, Alvaro Colom, inherits a country that, thanks to US intervention, is on the verge of becoming a failed state
Stephen Kinzer
January 14, 2008 7:00 PM

... When I began reporting from Guatemala in the mid-1970s, I found a dynamic young politician named Manuel Colom Argueta who agreed to tutor me in the ways of his country. He had been mayor of Guatemala City and was planning to run for president. We spent hours together as inspiring teacher and eager pupil.

Colom's story was that of 20th-century Guatemala. He came of age in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when his country was under democratic rule. After the CIA coup of 1954, which brought down the elected government and replaced it with military dictatorship, he became a leading opposition figure. His transcendent goal was to reach power and restore the democracy that Guatemala lost in 1954.

He never made it. On March 22 1979, my friend was cornered and shot 36 times as the minister of defence watched from a helicopter overhead. It was a particularly brazen example of the violence unleashed in Guatemala by military-backed regimes that held power for decades after the 1954 coup ...

... From 1944 to 1954, Guatemala was a beacon of hope in the Americas, an example of the good that democracy can bring to oppressed people. That ended with the CIA coup. In the decades that followed, military commanders waged a pitiless war that not only killed hundreds of thousands of people - more than were slaughtered in the rest of Latin American combined - but immersed the country in a culture of violence. Many murders in Guatemala today follow the same pattern that was common during the years of military repression. Victims are abducted, tortured and given a final coup de grace. Their bodies are dumped by a roadside, and the killers go on to their next job ...

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/stephen_kinzer/2008/01/guatemalas_challenge.html

[Rydz777]

1. Thanks for the post. We need more info on Latin America. eom