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A blind eye on Guatemala? By Jonathan Power, 8/20/2001 MADRID IN PROPORTION TO its population, more people were killed and tortured for their beliefs during the 1970s and 1980s in Guatemala than in any other country in the world. Over the last decade it had seemed to many that the situation was slowly but cumulatively improving. But over the last 12 months or so, the situation has started in some respects to worsen again. While the country still remains democratic (if imperfectly so), while some judges are slowly gaining a measure of independence and confidence (but a few live in fear of their lives), while the army - the main perpetuator of human rights abuses - has been shrunk in size, and while the press, always prepared to criticize the government and the political order, becomes even stronger and more independent, it is clear that all is not well in Guatemala. Some would put it more strongly and say that powerful elements in the Army are regressing to their old habits of intimidating and often killing their critics.Some, indeed, would go so far to say that the rise in human rights abuse could be correlated with the winding down of the Clinton administration and the changing of the guard in Washington - as when Ronald Reagan's administration came into office in 1981, which became the cue for human rights abuses in Guatemala to take off toward the stratosphere. Reagan made it abundantly clear he was far more concerned with opposing the advance of communism than he was with reining in the Guatemalan Army. The US ambassador to Guatemala, David Chaplin, regularly prompted his Washington superiors as to what was going on in the country, but it fell on deaf ears. In February 1984, only a day after he had sent one of his revealing cables to Washington, he was taken aback to hear that the assistant secretary of state for human rights, Elliott Abrams, had signed off on a secret report to Congress in which he argued that human rights were improving in Guatemala and Congress should no longer be inhibited about the resumption of US security assistance. No wonder that when the new president of Guatemala, General Efrain Rios Montt, visited Washington he could dare to say in his public speech, ''We have no scorched earth in Guatemala - only scorched communists.'' Thus today it looks as if the new nominations to high office of Reagan's Central American appointees, including Elliott Abrams and John Negroponte, are sending a signal, intentional or not, to the Guatemalan old guard that Washington will look the other way. In a new report, Amnesty International says: ''Human rights organizations and advocates are increasingly being targeted. The prevailing impunity gives a clear signal that perpetrators can continue to get away with murder, literally. Amnesty is concerned that the Guatemalan government is in fact encouraging attacks through ill-considered public statements that have periodically accused human rights defenders and other activists of seeking to destabilize the country.'' It's been just over 20 years since Amnesty issued one of its most outspoken reports on Guatemala, in which it accused the government of running ''a deliberate and longstanding program'' of torture and murder. It was this report that drew the world's attention for the first time to the particular horror of Guatemala. The massacres and murder were not the work of independent right-wing death squads, as had been maintained but, as Amnesty correctly said, of special units of the Army itself, receiving their orders directly from the president's office. All through the Reagan years this was denied, or at least minimized. When George Bush Sr. took over, he did move to use his authority to wind down the killings, although it seems from recent evidence that American clandestine military support did continue. Only under the administration of Bill Clinton was the UN encouraged to investigate past abuses. It came up with conclusions that read like a reprint of the Amnesty report of 1981. In 1999 on a visit to Guatemala City, Clinton made a public mea culpa, saying, ''For the United States it is important that I state clearly that [American] support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong.'' And The Washington Post editorialized: ''We Americans need our own truth commission.'' It is only five weeks ago that President Alfonso Portillo of Guatemala met President George W. Bush. But was anything made clear about America's intolerance for winding the clock back? Was anything said to disillusion the Guatemalans that the appointments of Negroponte and Abrams don't mean that this administration will tolerate what the Reagan administration did? Judging from the record, if anything on these lines was said, you would have needed sophisticated listening equipment to have heard it. This is not to say that Bush is about to re-engage in Central America in a reprise of the Reagan years, when communism had to be stopped no matter how it was done. The stakes are not that high today. But without a doubt, under Bush there is a profound sense of benign neglect. Left to its own devices, without pressure from outside, Guatemala appears to be in danger of sliding back into its murderous old habits.Jonathan Power is a writer living in London. |
