And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
M O J O U R N A L
News from the MoJo Wire and Mother Jones magazine
Week of March 16-22, 1999
http://www.motherjones.com/
[excerpted from]
http://www.motherjones.com/scoop/scoop10.html
"If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to
pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so."-- Guatemalan President Carlos
Arana, 1971
"The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch
the fish, you have to drain the sea.";-- Guatemalan President Efrain Rios
Montt, 1982
"United States... support for military forces or intelligence units which
engaged in violent and widespread repression... was wrong.";-- United
States President Bill Clinton, last Wednesday
President Clinton finally damn-near apologized for America's role in
almost a half-century of repression in Guatemala.
Clinton was forced into this damn-near apology after the U.N.'s independent
Historical Clarification Commission issued a nine-volume report called
"Guatemala: Memory Of Silence."
Created as part of the 1996 peace accord that ended Guatemala's civil war,
the Commission and its 272 staff members interviewed combatants on both
sides of the conflict, gathered news reports and eyewitness accounts
from across the country, and extensively examined declassified U.S.
government documents.
The result?
<P>
The U.N.'s Commission concludes that for decades, the United States
knowingly gave money, training, and other vital support to a military
regime that committed atrocities as a matter of policy, and even "acts of
genocide" against the Mayan people.
Thus Clinton's latest appalling damn-near apology.
It's a common rationalization that in a civil war, both sides commit
atrocities in roughly equal amounts. But the Commission examined 42,275
separate human-rights violations -- torture, executions, systematic rape,
and so on, including 626 documented incidents the Commission could only
describe as "massacres." The final score:
93% were committed by U.S.-supported government paramilitary forces.
4% cannot be attributed with certainty.
3% were committed by rebels.
And worse, as Amnesty International and other independent observers have
reported for years, the vast majority of victims were non-combatant
civilians.
Merely trying to form an opposition political party was reason enough to
be killed. So was being a trade unionist, a student or professor, a
journalist, a church official, a child or elderly person from the same
village as a suspected rebel, a doctor who merely treated another victim,
or even a widow of one of the disappeared simply asking for the body.
But most of the casualties were Mayan Indians. Since the rebels didn't
have the military strength to be able to hold cities, they hid in rural
areas populated primarily by Mayans. So the Guatemalan government simply
slaughtered entire villages, engaging in "the massive extermination of
defenseless Mayan communities."
200,000 people died.
The Commission also concludes that massacres -- which rose to the level of
"genocide" during the war's peak years in the early 1980s -- were not
random acts of field commanders beyond government control. The genocide
was deliberate policy. And U.S. support and training of the paramilitary
was crucial, having "a significant bearing on human-rights violations."
Unfortunately, the report doesn't name specific officers and government
officials responsible. But that's not terribly surprising: last year,
Roman Catholic bishop Juan Jose Gerardi issued a report on wartime
atrocities that did just that.
A few days later, Father Gerardi was bludgeoned to death with a concrete
block.
This is the country Bill Clinton now lauds as "a battlefield of ideology [that]
has been transformed into a marketplace of ideas."
Some marketplace. Ca-chunk. Thank you, come again.
Thing is, the Commission's findings aren't really news at all. What's new
here is the depth of documentation, and that the information is coming
from an official source.
That the Guatemalan military committed genocide and widespread atrocities
has been widely known for many years. That the U.S. supported and trained
the Guatemalan military, along with repressive security forces in numerous
other countries, is a matter of public record.
In September 1996, the U.S. Department of Defense admitted that manuals
used until recently to train Latin American soldiers included numerous
illegal practices, including summary execution. And in January of 1997,
two CIA manuals on interrogation were declassified that contained plain
references to electrical and chemical torture.
(One of the CIA's manuals, prepared for their 1954 covert war in
Guatemala, is a 21-page "Study of Assassination" which admits that murder
"is not morally justifiable" -- and then explains how to kill by whopping
someone with "a hammer, axe, wrench, screw driver, fire poker, kitchen
knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy, and handy." Which presumably
includes concrete blocks. Yeesh. Scans of a few of the more bizarre
pages and the complete text of the assassination manual will be posted on
my Web site, <a href="http://www.bobharris.com">www.bobharris.com</a>, by
the end of this week.)
However, the Pentagon's Inspector General characterized the manuals as
simply "mistakes."
Yuh-huh. Sure.
The IG did not go on to specify just who made the mistakes or how, or why
at least a thousand copies of the "mistakes" were distributed to police
and military agencies around the world. And since the "mistakes" were
made public, not a single American officer has been disciplined,
reassigned, or even retrained.
In truth, the manuals can actually be traced to Project X, a 1965 Army
program to train military, police, and paramilitary forces throughout
Southeast Asia and Latin America. Project X was a direct precursor to
Operation Phoenix in Vietnam and Operation Condor in South America,
notorious programs that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousand of
civilians. Project X was halted under the Carter administration, but its
essentials were reinstated in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan.
And this just in: documents released last Wednesday, the same day Clinton
wobbled through his damn-near apology, indicate that the U.S. was more
intimately involved with the Guatemalan paramilitary than even the
Commission report indicates.
(This new batch of documents was obtained by the National Security
Archive, a non-profit bunch of truthseekers who do tremendous work
obtaining and analyzing the internal records of things we weren't supposed
to know. You can find many of their most intense findings posted on their
Web site, <a
href="http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/">www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/</a>.)
Thanks to last week's releases, it's now indisputable that as early as
1966, officials from the U.S. State Department, far from opposing the
torturers, set up a "safe house" for security forces in Guatemala's
presidential palace, which eventually became the headquarters for
"kidnapping, torture... bombings, street assassinations, and executions of
real or alleged communists." CIA documents also prove that from the
get-go, U.S. intelligence was fully aware that "disappearances" were
actually kidnappings followed by summary executions. Rather than act to
stop the slaughter, however, the State Department continued to provide
tens of millions of dollars in aid.
The flow of cash stopped briefly in 1977 when the Carter Administration
made further aid dependent on improved human rights. However, once Reagan
was elected, covert money and support for the Guatemalan dictatorship
increased to new heights, as did the atrocities.
A newly-declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report states that, as
was done by CIA-supported security forces in Argentina, the bodies of
victims both dead and alive were routinely hurled out of aircraft into the
ocean, removing "the evidence showing that the prisoners were tortured."
Still, aid to the Guatemalan government continued through the Bush years,
even though CIA cables reported as late as 1992 on the continuing
destruction of entire Indian villages, killing "combatants and
noncombatants alike."
"Counterinsurgency" aid to Guatemala continued until 1995, when Clinton
finally pulled the plug after American lawyer Jennifer Harbury was able to
generate a small amount of public outrage over the torture and murder of
her Guatemalan husband by a CIA informant.
Unfortunately, CIA "anti-drug" money continues to flow into Guatemala to
this day. Not that it's serving any visible anti-drug function: as of
this writing, Guatemala trails only Mexico as a transshipment point for
Columbian drugs entering the U.S., and many of the same CIA-supported
military officers suspected of human-rights abuses are also considered to
be major drug traffickers.
The State Department knows full well that at least 250 tons of cocaine
pass through Guatemala each year. And the DEA reportedly has the goods on
over 30 Guatemalan military officers. But so far, for some reason,
prosecutions still aren't happening. Gee, I wonder why...
Your tax dollars at work.
The 1954 coup destroyed Guatemala's democratic institutions and
established a brutal military dictatorship as the nation's supreme power.
And almost half a century of CIA-supported repression, torture, and murder
later, an American president is barely able to mutter a damn-near apology.
And people actually complain that Clinton isn't sorry enough about
Monica.
--------------
{My Quote: " Since trade ignores national boundries and the manufacturer
insists on
having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must
follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must
be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers
must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of
unwilling nations be outraged in the process." (or mass murders committed
in the name of greed..marketocracy at it finest)
Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, 1907}
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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