Guatemala: A Country Incommunicado

excerpted from the book

State Terrorism and the United States

From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism

by Frederick H. Gareau

Clarity Press, 2004, paper

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Guatemala is a poor Central American country, with a very unequal] distribution of wealth and income common to Latin America, but aggravated by the prejudice that the Ladinos (the Mestizos) hold toward the majority of the population who are Mayan Indians. The Maya live in grinding poverty. To the delight of tourists, they wear their traditional colorful clothing-at least this was the case in the past. In this the land of the former Mayan empire, the rich have disproportionate wealth and income, while the poor are forced to get along on very little. President Arbenz and the predecessor regime of Juan Arevelo, a liberal who was elected to office after over a century of rule by despotic caudillos, tried to do something about poverty. For the first time in Guatemalan history a labor code was promulgated, forced labor was abolished, and land reform was instituted.

Arevelo undertook to narrow the gap between those who have and those who have not and to improve the lot of the majority Indian population through a series of measures which antagonized the latifundia, foreign investors, and military officers. Arbenz continued with these reforms, pushing through parliament a far-reaching program of agrarian reform, and announcing his intention of expropriating the unused land of the United Fruit Company. The U.S. State Department announced on May 17, 1954 that Guatemala had received a shipment of arms from Czechoslovakia.'

The CIA proceeded to train and to supply an invasion force in neighboring Honduras under the command of a Guatemalan colonel, Carlos Castillo Armas.

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It was the army that in 1954 turned the invasion into the coup that deposed Arbenz. The "liberation army" of Armas was not an impressive force. Totaling only 300 troops, it was composed of Guatemalans, as well as mercenaries from Nicaragua, Honduras, and Panama. It was stopped just 20 miles from the Honduran border by the regular Guatemalan army. More important were the bombing and strafing of CIA and Air Force planes flying out of Nicaragua. Targets were chosen mainly for their psychological impact: ammunition dumps, military drill fields, and oil storage facilities. Other significant developments were taking place at army headquarters and at the national palace.

President Arbenz ordered that the workers and campesinos be armed so as to oppose the invaders. His chief of staff carried out his orders, but he had to report back that army officers under him refused to do so. Nine days after the invasion, on June 27, representatives of the officer corps confronted the president to demand his resignation, a more decisive action than the invasion in bringing an end to the regime. In any case, both were part of a scenario planned and orchestrated by the CIA. Colonel Armas arrived at the Guatemalan capital not as the commander of a victorious invasion force, but in the airplane of the American ambassador! The colonel was assassinated three years later. The coup that toppled the Arbenz regime in 1954 was a watershed in the history of the Central American country. It was the last effort before the bloody repression that followed to bring a measure of justice to the Guatemalan underclass.

The factual basis for portraying this repression is the reports of two truth commissions and a study conducted by Father Falla, the Jesuit priest and anthropologist who interviewed 773 refugees in Mexico who had escaped the horror of Guatemala. The first of the truth commission reports was published in April 1998 by the Catholic Archdiocese of Guatemala City, the second by the United Nations.

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The second truth commission report was mandated by the peace accord of Oslo, an agreement negotiated by the United Nations...

The UN [truth] commission recorded 42,275 victims of acts of violence and human rights violations that occurred in the period between 1962 and 1996.6 This number represents some of the unfortunate victims successfully and directly targeted by the government and the guerrillas. Of these, 23,671 were executions and 6,159 were victims of forced disappearance. This means that 56 percent of the reported human rights violations and acts of violence were executions and over 14 percent were forced disappearances. Since those forcibly disappeared were usually killed, both the absolute number killed and ratio of those killed to human rights violations in Guatemala were very high. The commission estimated that the total number of victims in the two categories in actuality had exceeded 200,000. No matter how viewed or arranged, the repression in this Central American state was very lethal. The majority of the victims recorded by the commission were civilians, not guerrillas or members of the armed forces. One fourth were women, who were often raped before they were tortured or killed, and many were children, who were also sometimes raped before they were tortured or killed. Eighty-three percent of the victims were Mayan, the remaining seventeen percent Ladino (mestizo). Ninety-one percent of the violations recorded by the commission occurred during the period 1978 to 1984 (during the Carter and Reagan administrations).

Similarly, nearly 80 percent of the violations documented by the report of the Archdiocese occurred between 1980 and 1983 (mostly during the Reagan administration). These facts are consonant with the fact that this period was the one in which the state was carrying out its policy of massacring Maya in rural areas.

The UN commission found that in Guatemala the problem was government repression much more than guerrilla warfare. Ninety-three percent of the violations recorded by the commission, including 92 percent of the executions and 91 percent of the forced disappearances were committed by the state and related paramilitary groups. Only three percent of the executions, forced disappearances, and tortures were laid at the door of the guerrillas.,, This included five percent of the executions and two percent of the forced disappearances. The remaining four percent of the executions, forced disappearances, and tortures were labeled "private." These crimes were committed by unidentified armed groups, civil elements, and public officials. The investigation revealed that the groups other than the guerrillas often worked together in committing the offenses. The commission also attributed many more massacres to the state than to the guerrillas. The state committed 626 of them, the guerrillas.

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The report of the United Nations was given the suggestive name Guatemala/a: Memory of Silence. The report itself concluded that the cost of the repression was high in terms of lives lost, "but also because Guatemala became a country silenced, a country incommunicado." Free speech was a victim along with other human rights. "To write about political and social realities, events, or ideas meant running the risk of threats, disappearances, and torture." The large news agencies in general went along with the government and engaged in self-censorship and distortion of the facts. This is the same phenomenon that occurred in El Salvador, a social malady common to our case studies. Government repression produced not only silence among the masses of people, but passivity and a dehumanizing effect as well.

The huge increase in military spending diverted funds from education and other social programs. The increases in military spending were also facilitated by the large amount of economic aid provided by Washington.

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Targeting Women and Children

The authors of the report of the Archdiocese emphasized the violence perpetrated by the army against women and children, particularly Mayan women and children. At times women were successful in resisting their oppressors, a subject not explored here. Children were less able to resist. They had more difficulty in fleeing, and often their families went down before them, and could not help them. Nor did they grasp the mechanics of violence. "Half of the massacres ordered included the collective murder of children.

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The children were sometimes eliminated so that later they would seek out those who killed their parents to get even. Or they were tortured or threatened so as to get information from their parents. The murder of these children was also consistent with the military training and instructions given to soldiers. The murder of children was adopted by the army as terrorism-as a counterinsurgency tactic, part of a scorched earth operation. The carefully designed strategy included the elimination of entire communities including the children.

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The question arises as to how the [Guatemalan] army and its allied agencies could commit such atrocities, especially since most of the perpetrators were enlisted personnel from the same class and the same ethnic group as the great majority of the victims. Part of the answer is provided by the counterinsurgency training that army personnel received from Washington. The truth commission reports, however, did not dwell upon this, just as their general focus was on what institutions within Guatemala did, not on how these institutions were affected by outside forces, The authors of the Archdiocesan report rejected the explanation that human nature was responsible or that the perpetrators were demented. Rather they sought a structural explanation-in the training of the Guatemalan army. The report of the archdiocese found that the army developed a military training system based on forcible recruitment, absolute obedience, strict control over groups, and "complicity in atrocities" .211 The inner two characteristics are common to armies, the outer two are not. The army did have volunteers as well. Those of military age in the villages were sometimes spared torture or worse, but then forced to fill the ranks of the army. If they objected, they were accused of being guerrillas and were threatened with death.

Once in training, whether volunteers or not, they entered a system designed to suppress their individuality, one whose premise was an absolute submission to orders and isolation from their customary social surroundings. Failure to obey orders was met with harsh punishment, isolation in small cells, or even death. The entire group was often punished for the disobedience of one member, actions that encouraged monitoring by the group itself. The army fostered a sense of group loyalty and a frame of reference that justified their actions. The recruits were taught the code of silence, not to inform on each other. They were shown news clippings and videos from Argentina, in which solders engaged in this "disloyal and criminal conduct." They were fed an ideology that pinned the ills of the country, including poverty, upon the communists and their local representatives, the guerrillas.

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Besides implicating the recruits, the training was designed to inure them to the suffering of others, to foster contempt for their life. One soldier's period of training coincided with the widespread atrocities of the late seventies and earlier eighties. He evidently had been sent to the field for some practical training. While searching for the officer to whom he had been ordered to report, he heard the voices of soldiers. They yelled to him, "hurry or you are going to miss out on something good." But by the time he got there he was too late. Only one of the boys was left, and they were cutting off his head.

"Okay today we are going to learn how to kill people .1130 These were the opening words to one session in a series in which the recruits learned different methods of killing, how to organize massacres, and how to conceal corpses. They were taught "the step of death." For this they practiced on a fellow recruit. It was practice killing at short range, that typical of murdering civilians, perhaps in a massacre. How calmly to shoot the victim in the chest or the head, perhaps after he had dug his own grave. The trainees would learn torture techniques for three days, followed by a period of rest. It was the second section chief, an intelligence officer, who gave the orders actually to kill. "He specifically gave orders even to the point of killing someone, finishing someone off." Evidently, the reference here is to a surplus prisoner that the army had on hand.

The commissioners who wrote the United Nations report were impressed with "the degrading contents of the training of the Army's special counterinsurgency force, known as Kaibiles." The report went on to say that the training included the killing of animals and then eating them raw and drinking their blood to demonstrate courage. The extreme cruelty of this training, according to testimony received by the commission, was put into practice in a range of operations carried out by these counterinsurgency forces. The way they carried out these operations confirmed one point of their training Decalogue: "the Kaibil is a killing machine'

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The report of the Archdiocese found the army, police forces, civil patrols, military commissioners, death squads, and paramilitaries responsible for 95.19 percent of the victims. This compares with 93 percent found in the United Nations report. The report of the Archdiocese identified the army as the chief transgressor, having committed 62.9 percent of the crimes by itself and another 20.22 percent in conjunction with other transgressors. The guerrillas were charged with having committed 4.81 percent of the violations.

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The overall conclusion of the [truth] commission was "that agents of the State of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against groups of Maya in the four regions analyzed. 1143 The commissioners who wrote the report went on to say that they had received information that similar acts had "occurred and were repeated" in other regions inhabited by the Mayan people. They added that, aside from the culpability of the actual perpetrators of the crimes, the state of Guatemala was also guilty of genocide, "because the majority of these acts were the product of policy pre-established by a command superior to the material perpetrators." Moreover, the state was charged with contravening the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by failing to investigate and to punish acts of genocide committed on its territory.

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The United Nations commission found that the hostilities in Guatemala could not be reduced to a struggle between two armed parties. Such an interpretation fails to explain the persistence of political and economic forces on each side. The commission argued that between 1978 and 1982 citizens from broad sectors of society mobilized in opposition to the established order. These sectors included parts of the Catholic Church, labor union and peasant leaders, teachers, representatives of the liberal professionals, and many Maya. The relationship of the former to the insurgents was often problematical. Nonetheless, they were targeted. This was encouraged by counterinsurgency doctrine which insisted on the very broadest definition of the enemy and its agents. It lumped together all opposition to the status quo as insurgency, leaving no room for a third force.

The commission argued that the state's response to the guerrillas was totally disproportionate to any threat they posed. It charged that the army knew of the military inferiority of the insurgents, but exaggerated their military capability. It waged an internal war, a campaign of terror, against those who were against, or seemed to be against, the status quo. All opponents were considered to be under one banner, and the state set out to annihilate or terrorize them. Washington taught counterinsurgency and provided the wherewithal to implement it in the Guatemalan setting where those wielding power divided society along rigid lines into the ins and the outs along both class and ethnic lines.

The United Nations commissioners turned to the army and to the intelligence services to identify the state institutions directly responsible for state terrorism committed in the country in the sixties, the seventies, and halfway through the eighties. They charged that the Guatemalan army deliberately militarized the country in stages, culminating in the eighties in the penetration and absolute control of state institution S.49 Military intelligence structures played a decisive role in the process. The result was that these structures controlled the population, the state institutions, and the army itself. This control depended not merely upon its formal structures, but also upon an extensive network of informants who infiltrated a variety of social institutions. The evidence pointed to the military intelligence agencies as being involved in widespread covert, irregular, and unconventional operations. Their control of state institutions assured their immunity. The commissioners specifically fingered the army intelligence agencies G-2 and the Presidential General Staff as the agencies that prepared the lists of those to be captured, interrogated, tortured, forcibly disappeared, or executed. They concluded that the majority of atrocities committed in the country took place with the knowledge or by order of the highest authorities of "the state."

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WASHINGTON'S COMPLICITY

The United States government gave military assistance to Guatemala. In the early stages, the emphasis was on the teaching of counterinsurgency doctrine and on building an infrastructure for its application. Moreover, Washington's aid was specifically concentrated on the growth and improvement of local communications and intelligence agencies, the very institutions that the UN commissioners found were guilty of most of the crimes.

As is usually the case with truth commissions, the UN commission on Guatemala had little to say about Washington's support for the government under review. After stating that the United States demonstrated that it was willing to provide support for military regimes in its strategic backyard, it found room for this charge:

In the case of Guatemala, military assistance was directed towards reinforcing the national intelligence apparatus and for the training the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques, key factors which had significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation .

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After 1963 military aid from Washington was used primarily to strengthen specialized counterinsurgency units that became permanent auxiliary forces to the regular army. This aid was channeled through the Military Assistance Program of the United States, aid that increased after 1960. This program sponsored training in counter guerrilla techniques and small-unit tactical operations. Suitable weapons were provided, and the army's communications and transportation systems were upgraded. Guatemalan forces were trained by mobile teams, advisors and military schools located both in Panama and in the United States. Eight thousand men were added to the regular army, together with more than one thousand mobile military police, and nine thousand military commissioners. The army gained the capacity to organize an intelligence and control apparatus in

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The Carter administration suspended military aid to Guatemala in 1977 in response to reports of human rights violations as well as to pressure from London due to Guatemala's claims to Belize. Military aid resumed in 1985. During the time when Washington's military aid was cut off, its allies took up the slack. This military aid was then provided by Israel, Taiwan, and Argentina "rather than directly from the United States. 1154 It was at this time that Guatemala received Bell helicopters, the Israel Gaul rifle, Pilatus aircraft, and Israeli Arava cargo planes.

In 1981 and 1982 the Reagan administration sought to justify the behavior of the Guatemalan government and army. Consistently, the administration downplayed the scope of the massacres and excused the Guatemalan army. '55 For example, in 1981, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State blamed the guerrillas for the wholesale slaughter, and a human rights report of the State Department blamed most of the violence on self-appointed vigilante groups. In contrast to this, the United Nations report pointed to the period 1981 through 1983 as that period during which the "State of Guatemala.. committed acts of genocide against groups of Guatemalan people .

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In view of the military aid and training, economic aid, diplomatic support and obfuscation of the dreadful events in Guatemala, it seems clear that Washington facilitated state terrorism in that country.

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The first recommendation of the United Nations report was that the president of Guatemala admit that the governmental repression outlined in the report had occurred and that he assume responsibility for this oppression, particularly for those crimes committed by the army and the state security forces. He did not assume this responsibility. On March 10, 1999, thirteen days after the United Nations released its report, President Clinton visited Guatemala City. In his speech there, he did recognize that repression had occurred. The American president, however, did not assume any responsibility for what had occurred, nor did he apologize-not for complicity in the commission of terrorism, before, after, or during its commission, or by any administration. He did admit that Washington "was wrong" to have supported the Guatemalan "military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report." He added that the United States must not repeat the mistake. Clinton aides said that the president had spent some time in deciding how to craft his statement. These words were uttered as the president made a four-day visit to Central America. He used the opportunity to praise the local governments for ending their civil wars and for establishing what he termed "democratic systems of government." Similarly, earlier in a speech given in San Salvador, he referred to the repression that occurred in that country but did not apologize for Washington's complicity in it. He boldly affirmed that over the past few years a battlefield of ideology in Central America had been transformed into a marketplace of ideas.

A Bishop Is Beaten to Death

Two days after the archdiocese of Guatemala issued its report, Bishop Juan Gerardi, the head of the project that produced it, was beaten to death with a cement block.

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A New York Times editorial of July 19, 2002 remarked that Guatemala was "drifting back toward violence and misrule. 1166 The army and its allies that acted before as death squads had gained strength, and they were again involved in criminal behavior. The editorial pointed out that the party of the sitting president was controlled by former military officers and led by General Efrain Rios Montt who served as dictator during the worst government repression in the eighties. Some four months later the United Nations mission set up to verify the Guatemalan government's compliance with the peace accords charged that that government had utterly failed to carry out the programs of reconciliation and social development mandated by these accords. The mission attributed the "human rights crisis" existing in the country partly to this failure. It also faulted the government for increasing the role of the military in the country and for failing to investigate crimes. The Central American project director of the Inter-American Dialogue pointed to Guatemala as the most corrupt country in the region. It also has the widest gap between the rich and the poor.

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In 2003, human rights groups inside and outside Guatemala, including Amnesty International, urged the establishment of another truth commission to investigate the persistent violations of human rights in the country. "Former members of the military close to the government have been linked to politically motivated assassinations and threats against people seeking to prosecute war crimes . The Guatemalan human rights ombudsman asked the government to allow the United Nations and the Organization of American States to appoint the truth commission.

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Washington's policy was a deliberate one of improving the very structures used in Guatemala's "dirty war." Moreover, Washington also provided diplomatic support and economic and military aid to the Central American government. The economic aid helped to finance the repression. When military aid was halted during the Carter administration, Washington's allies provided aid until the restriction on American aid was removed by the Reagan administration. Another conclusion, also painful given the poverty of Guatemala and the condition of the Maya there, can be made at this juncture) The CIA planned and sponsored the coup d'etat of 1954 that interrupted a program of reform for the Mayan majority, and darkened the possibility that this reform will take place in the foreseeable future. This also makes Washington a candidate for accessory to the violation of economic rights-which are widely considered as a component of human rights, the gamut of which are understood to be mutually supporting and indivisible.

State Terrorism and the United States

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