| THE US ROLE IN GUATEMALA'S PAST (PART 2) |
| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Monday, August 11 2003 |
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| The U.S. government is once again taking a close look at the political landscape in Guatemala, and what it sees is not a pretty picture. The State Department recently said that it would be very difficult to have optimum relations with Guatemala if former dictator Efrain Rios Montt were to win the presidential elections on Nov. 9. Ironically, the United States played a significant role in Rios Montt's brutal past.
Seventy-seven-year-old Rios Montt has been accused of genocide, torture and illegal detentions. Hundreds of massacres are attributed to the armed forces he led during the civil war in Guatemala. In early 1982, he deposed Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia in a bloody coup and launched his infamous "bullets and beans" campaign to try to quell the leftist insurgency with a combination of military power and food distribution. His actions had the secret backing of the CIA.
During the 18 months he was in power, there were more than 19,000 documented killings and at least 9,000 disappearances. Frank La Rue, director of the Center for Human Rights Legal Action in Guatemala, estimates the figure could be as high as 60,000 killings. It was during this time that former President Reagan hailed Rios Montt as "a man of great personal integrity and commitment ... truly dedicated to democracy."
Shortly after Reagan's comments, according to CIA declassified documents, the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala warned that he was convinced that violent acts were ordered by officers close to Rios Montt. President Reagan still pushed to lift a weapons embargo that was imposed on Guatemala by the Carter administration precisely because of human-rights abuses. The embargo was eventually lifted.
But the role of the United States in Rios Montt's past began several years before that. In 1950, he took a "special course" at the infamous U.S. Army School of the Americas. The military-training facility was founded in the 1940s to maintain stability in Latin America and prevent the expansion of communist regimes. However, the institution became known as "School of the Assassins."
Thousands of military officers from Latin America attended the school and were not just trained in counterinsurgency tactics. The Pentagon admitted in 1996 that, in fact, the School of the Americas had used training manuals in Spanish advocating secret executions, torture, blackmail and extortion against dissidents and their families.
Unfortunately for many Latin Americans, some military officers learned their lessons too well and became some of the most notorious human-rights abusers in the region. Graduates include former Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega; former Salvadoran President Roberto D'Aubisson, believed to have ordered the murder of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero; and Argentine Gen. Roberto Viola, convicted of murder, kidnapping and torture during the "dirty war."
Whatever Efrain Rios Montt learned at the School of the Americas, he used it in 1954 as a young officer to help the CIA in the planning of a coup that overthrew democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. Arbenz's nationalistic policies were seen as tolerant of communists, and his proposed agrarian reform had irritated the powerful United Fruit Company.
All of that is history. Now Efrain Rios Montt wants votes, not bullets, to regain control of the country, albeit with questionable tactics. On two different occasions during the '90s, courts in Guatemala blocked Rios Montt's efforts to become president based on a constitutional prohibition of those who took power by force. This time, the former dictator got around the Constitution with a little help from his friends (at least four magistrates have been linked to his political party). Recent polls show him at a distant third place, with his numbers slowly but surely growing.
It remains to be seen what position the U.S. government will take in the presidential race in Guatemala, or if it will use methods of pressure to try to prevent the monster it helped create from becoming president and bringing back memories of one of the darkest chapters in that country's history. |
