The conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt on
charges of genocide against Mayan villagers in the 1980s has a special
meaning for Americans who idolize Ronald Reagan. It means that their
hero was an accessory to one of the most grievous crimes that can be
committed against humanity.
The courage of the Guatemalan people and the integrity of their legal
system to exact some accountability on a still-influential political
figure also put U.S. democracy to shame. For decades now, Americans have
tolerated human rights crimes by U.S. presidents who face little or no
accountability. Usually, the history isn’t even compiled honestly.
Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide
By contrast, a Guatemalan court on Friday
found
Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and
sentenced the 86-year-old ex-dictator to 80 years in prison. After the
ruling, when Rios Montt rose and tried to walk out of the courtroom,
Judge Yasmin Barrios shouted at him to stay put and then had security
officers take him into custody.
Yet, while Guatemalans demonstrate the strength to face a dark
chapter of their history, the American people remain mostly oblivious to
Reagan’s central role in tens of thousands of political murders across
Central America in the 1980s, including some 100,000 dead in Guatemala
slaughtered by Rios Montt and other military dictators.
Indeed, Ronald Reagan – by aiding, abetting, encouraging and covering
up widespread human rights crimes in El Salvador, Honduras and
Nicaragua as well as Guatemala – bears greater responsibility for
Central America’s horrors than does Rios Montt in his bloody 17-month
rule. Reagan supported Guatemala’s brutal repression both before and
after Rios Montt held power, as well as during.
Despite that history, more honors have been bestowed on Reagan than
any recent president. Americans have allowed the naming of scores of
government facilities in Reagan’s honor, including Washington National
Airport where Reagan’s name elbowed aside that of George Washington, who
led the War of Independence, oversaw the drafting of the U.S.
Constitution and served as the nation’s first president.
So, as America’s former reputation as a beacon for human rights
becomes a bad joke to the rest of the world, it is unthinkable within
the U.S. political/media structure that Reagan would get posthumously
criticized for the barbarity that he promoted. No one of importance
would dare suggest that his name be stripped from National Airport and
his statue removed from near the airport entrance.
But the evidence is overwhelming that the 40
th president
of the United States was guilty as an accessory to genocide and a wide
range of other war crimes, including torture, rape, terrorism and
narcotics trafficking. [See Robert Parry's
Lost History.]
Green Light to Genocide
Regarding Guatemala, the documentary evidence is clear that Reagan
and his top aides gave a green light to the extermination campaign
against the Mayan Ixil population in the highlands even before Rios
Montt came to power. Despite receiving U.S. intelligence reports
revealing these atrocities, the Reagan administration also pressed ahead
in an extraordinary effort to arrange military equipment, including
helicopters, to make the slaughter more efficient.
Rios Montt alongside supporter Ronald Reagan. (Photo: Upside Down World)“In
the tortured logic of military planning documents conceived under Mr.
Ríos Montt’s 17-month rule during 1982 and 1983, the entire Mayan Ixil
population was a military target, children included,” the New York Times
reported from Rios
Montt’s trial last month. “Officers wrote that the leftist guerrillas
fighting the government had succeeded in indoctrinating the impoverished
Ixils and reached ‘100 percent support.’”
So, everyone was targeted in these scorched-earth campaigns that
eradicated more than 600 Indian villages in the Guatemalan highlands.
But documents from this period indicate that these counterinsurgency
strategies predated Rios Montt. And, they received the blessing of the
Reagan administration shortly after Reagan took power in 1981.
A document that I discovered in the archives of the Reagan Library in
Simi Valley, California, revealed that Reagan and his national security
team in 1981 agreed to supply military aid to Guatemala’s dictators so
they could pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist
guerrillas” but people associated with their “civilian support
mechanisms.”
This supportive attitude took shape in spring 1981 as President
Reagan sought to relax human-rights restrictions on military aid to
Guatemala that had been imposed by President Jimmy Carter and the
Democratic-controlled Congress in the late 1970s. As part of that
easing, Reagan’s State Department “advised our Central American
embassies that it has been studying ways to restore a closer,
cooperative relationship with Guatemala,” said a White House “
Situation Room Checklist” dated April 8, 1981.
The document added: “State believes a number of changes have occurred
which could make Guatemalan leaders more receptive to a new U.S.
initiative: the Guatemalans view the new administration as more
sympathetic to their problems [and] they are less suspect of the U.S.
role in El Salvador,” where the Reagan administration was expanding
military aid to another right-wing regime infamous for slaughtering its
political opponents, including Catholic clergy.
“State has concluded that any attempt to reestablish a dialogue [with
Guatemala] would require some initial, condition-free demonstration of
our goodwill. However, this could not include military sales which would
provoke serious U.S. public and congressional criticism. State will
undertake a series of confidence building measures, free of
preconditions, which minimize potential conflict with existing
legislation.”
In other words, the Reagan administration was hoping that the U.S.
government could get back in the good graces of the Guatemalan
dictators, not that the dictators should change their ways to qualify
for U.S. government help.
Soliciting the Generals
The “checklist” added that the State Department “has also decided
that the administration should engage the Guatemalan government at the
highest level in a dialogue on our bilateral relations and the
initiatives we can take together to improve them. Secretary [of State
Alexander] Haig has designated [retired] General Vernon Walters as his
personal emissary to initiate this process with President [Fernando
Romeo] Lucas [Garcia].
“If Lucas is prepared to give assurances that he will take steps to
halt government involvement in the indiscriminate killing of political
opponents and to foster a climate conducive to a viable electoral
process, the U.S. will be prepared to approve some military sales
immediately.”
But the operative word in that paragraph was “indiscriminate.” The
Reagan administration expressed no problem with killing civilians if
they were considered supporters of the guerrillas who had been fighting
against the country’s ruling oligarchs and generals since the 1950s when
the CIA organized the overthrow of Guatemala’s reformist President
Jacobo Arbenz.
The distinction was spelled out in “
Talking Points”
for Walters to deliver in a face-to-face meeting with General Lucas. As
edited inside the White House in April 1981, the “Talking Points” read:
“The President and Secretary Haig have designated me [Walters] as
[their] personal emissary to discuss bilateral relations on an urgent
basis.
“Both the President and the Secretary recognize that your country is
engaged in a war with Marxist guerrillas. We are deeply concerned about
externally supported Marxist subversion in Guatemala and other countries
in the region. As you are aware, we have already taken steps to assist
Honduras and El Salvador resist this aggression.
“The Secretary has sent me here to see if we can work out a way to
provide material assistance to your government. … We have minimized
negative public statements by US officials on the situation in
Guatemala. … We have arranged for the Commerce Department to take steps
that will permit the sale of $3 million worth of military trucks and
Jeeps to the Guatemalan army. …
“With your concurrence, we propose to provide you and any officers
you might designate an intelligence briefing on regional developments
from our perspective. Our desire, however, is to go substantially beyond
the steps I have just outlined. We wish to reestablish our traditional
military supply and training relationship as soon as possible.
“As we are both aware, this has not yet been feasible because of our
internal political and legal constraints relating to the use by some
elements of your security forces of deliberate and indiscriminate
killing of persons not involved with the guerrilla forces or their
civilian support mechanisms. I am not referring here to the regrettable
but inevitable death of innocents though error in combat situations, but
to what appears to us a calculated use of terror to immobilize non
politicized people or potential opponents. …
“If you could give me your assurance that you will take steps to halt
official involvement in the killing of persons not involved with the
guerrilla forces or their civilian support mechanism … we would be in a
much stronger position to defend successfully with the Congress a
decision to begin to resume our military supply relationship with your
government.”
In other words, though the “talking points” were framed as an appeal
to reduce the “indiscriminate” slaughter of “non politicized people,”
they embraced scorched-earth tactics against people involved with the
guerrillas and “their civilian support mechanisms.” The way that played
out in Guatemala – as in nearby El Salvador – was the massacring of
peasants in regions considered sympathetic to leftist insurgents.
Reporting the Truth
U.S. intelligence officers in the region also kept the Reagan
administration abreast of the expanding slaughter. For instance,
according to one “secret” cable from April 1981 — and declassified in
the 1990s — the CIA was confirming Guatemalan government massacres even
as Reagan was moving to loosen the military aid ban.
On April 17, 1981, a CIA cable described an army massacre at Cocob,
near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory, because the population was
believed to support leftist guerrillas. A CIA source reported that “the
social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas” and “the
soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved.”
The CIA cable added that “the Guatemalan authorities admitted that
‘many civilians’ were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were
non-combatants.” [Many of the Guatemalan documents declassified in the
1990s can be found at the
National Security Archive’s Web site.]
Despite these atrocities, Reagan dispatched Walters in May 1981 to
tell the Guatemalan leaders that the new U.S. administration wanted to
lift the human rights embargoes on military equipment that Carter and
Congress had imposed.
According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, when
Guatemalan leaders met again with Walters, they left no doubt about
their plans. The cable said Gen. Lucas “made clear that his government
will continue as before — that the repression will continue. He
reiterated his belief that the repression is working and that the
guerrilla threat will be successfully routed.”
Human rights groups saw the same picture, albeit from a less
sympathetic angle. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a
report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for
“thousands of illegal executions.” [Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1981]
But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the horrific
scene. A State Department “white paper,” released in December 1981,
blamed the violence on leftist “extremist groups” and their “terrorist
methods” prompted and supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
Fully Onboard
What the documents from the Reagan Library make clear is that the
administration was not simply struggling ineffectively to rein in these
massacres – as the U.S. press corps typically reported – but was fully
onboard with the slaughter of people who were part of the guerrillas’
“civilian support mechanisms.”
U.S. intelligence agencies continued to pick up evidence of these
government-sponsored massacres. One CIA report in February 1982
described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central
El Quiche province.
“The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed
to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the
Guerrilla Army of the Poor [the EGP] and eliminate all sources of
resistance,” the report said. “Since the operation began, several
villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of
guerrillas and collaborators have been killed.”
The CIA report explained the army’s modus operandi: “When an army
patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is
assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently
destroyed.” When the army encountered an empty village, it was “assumed
to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are
hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to
return to. …
“The army high command is highly pleased with the initial results of
the sweep operation, and believes that it will be successful in
destroying the major EGP support area and will be able to drive the EGP
out of the Ixil Triangle. … The well documented belief by the army that
the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in
which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and
non-combatants alike.”
The reality was so grotesque that it prompted protests even from some
staunch anticommunists inside the Reagan administration. On Feb. 2,
1982, Richard Childress, one of Reagan’s national security aides, wrote
a “secret” memo to his colleagues summing up this reality on the ground:
“As we move ahead on our approach to Latin America, we need to
consciously address the unique problems posed by Guatemala. Possessed of
some of the worst human rights records in the region, … it presents a
policy dilemma for us. The abysmal human rights record makes it, in its
present form, unworthy of USG [U.S. government] support. …
“Beset by a continuous insurgency for at least 15 years, the current
leadership is completely committed to a ruthless and unyielding program
of suppression. Hardly a soldier could be found that has not killed a
‘guerrilla.’”
Rios Montt’s Arrival
But Reagan was unmoved. He continued to insist on expanding U.S.
support for these brutal campaigns, while his administration sought to
cover up the facts and deflect criticism. Reagan’s team insisted that
Gen. Efrain Rios Montt’s overthrow of Gen. Lucas in March 1982
represented a sunny new day in Guatemala.
An avowed fundamentalist Christian, Rios Montt impressed Official
Washington where the Reagan administration immediately revved up its
propaganda machinery to hype the new dictator’s “born-again” status as
proof of his deep respect for human life. Reagan hailed Rios Montt as “a
man of great personal integrity.”
By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth
campaign called his “rifles and beans” policy. The slogan meant that
pacified Indians would get “beans,” while all others could expect to be
the target of army “rifles.” In October, Rios Montt secretly gave carte
blanche to the feared “Archivos” intelligence unit to expand “death
squad” operations in the cities. Based at the Presidential Palace, the
“Archivos” masterminded many of Guatemala’s most notorious
assassinations.
The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army
conducting Indian massacres, but ideologically driven U.S. diplomats fed
the Reagan administration the propaganda spin that would be best for
their careers. On Oct. 22, 1982, embassy staff dismissed the massacre
reports as a communist-inspired “disinformation campaign.”
Reagan personally joined this P.R. spin seeking to discredit human
rights investigators and others who were reporting accurately about
massacres that the administration knew were true. On Dec. 4, 1982, after
meeting with Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as “totally
dedicated to democracy” and added that Rios Montt’s government had been
“getting a bum rap” on human rights. Reagan discounted the mounting
reports of hundreds of Mayan villages being eradicated.
In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in
“suspect right-wing violence” with kidnappings of students and teachers.
Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources
traced these political murders to Rios Montt’s order to the “Archivos”
in October to “apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected
guerrillas as they saw fit.”
Despite these facts on the ground, the annual State Department human
rights survey praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in
Guatemala. “The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late
in the year” 1982, the report stated.
Indiscriminate Murder
A different picture — far closer to the secret information held by
the U.S. government — was coming from independent human rights
investigators. On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch condemned the
Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian
population.
New York attorney Stephen L. Kass said these findings included proof
that the government carried out “virtually indiscriminate murder of men,
women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly
supportive of guerrilla insurgents.”
Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before
execution, Kass said, adding that children were “thrown into burning
homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard
many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung
against poles so their heads are destroyed.” [AP, March 17, 1983]
Publicly, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face.
In June 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised “positive changes”
in Rios Montt’s government, and Rios Montt pressed the United States for
10 UH-1H helicopters and six naval patrol boats, all the better to hunt
guerrillas and their sympathizers.
Since Guatemala lacked the U.S. Foreign Military Sales credits or the
cash to buy the helicopters, Reagan’s national security team looked for
unconventional ways to arrange the delivery of the equipment that would
give the Guatemalan army greater access to mountainous areas where
guerrillas and their civilian supporters were hiding.
On Aug. 1, 1983, National Security Council aides Oliver North and Alfonso Sapia-Bosch
reported
to National Security Advisor William P. Clark that his deputy Robert
“Bud” McFarlane was planning to exploit his Israeli channels to secure
the helicopters for Guatemala. [For more on McFarlanes's Israeli
channels, see Consortiumnews.com's "
How Neocons Messed Up the Mideast."]
“With regard to the loan of ten helicopters, it is [our]
understanding that Bud will take this up with the Israelis,” wrote North
and Sapia-Bosch. “There are expectations that they would be
forthcoming. Another possibility is to have an exercise with the
Guatemalans. We would then use US mechanics and Guatemalan parts to
bring their helicopters up to snuff.”
Hunting Children
What it meant to provide these upgrades to the Guatemalan killing
machine was clarified during the trial of Rios Montt with much of the
testimony coming from survivors who, as children, escaped to mountain
forests as their families and other Mayan villagers were butchered.
As the New York Times
reported,
“Pedro Chávez Brito told the court that he was only six or seven years
old when soldiers killed his mother. He hid in the chicken coop with his
older sister, her newborn and his younger brother, but soldiers found
them and dragged them out, forcing them back into their house and
setting it on fire.
“Mr. Chávez says he was the only one to escape. ‘I got under a tree
trunk and I was like an animal,’ Mr. Chávez told the court. ‘After eight
days I went to live in the mountains. In the mountain we ate only roots
and grass.’”
The Times reported that “prosecution witnesses said the military
considered Ixil civilians, including children, as legitimate targets. …
Jacinto Lupamac Gómez said he was eight when soldiers killed his parents
and older siblings and hustled him and his two younger brothers into a
helicopter. Like some of the children whose lives were spared, they were
adopted by Spanish-speaking families and forgot how to speak Ixil.”
Elena de Paz Santiago, now 42, “testified that she was 12 when she
and her mother were taken by soldiers to an army base and raped. The
soldiers let her go, but she never saw her mother again,” the Times
reported.
Even by Guatemalan standards, Rios Montt’s vengeful Christian
fundamentalism had hurtled out of control. On Aug. 8, 1983, another coup
overthrew Rios Montt and brought Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores to power.
Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to
murder with impunity, finally going so far that even the U.S. Embassy
objected. When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for
International Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador
Frederic Chapin suspected that “Archivos” hit squads were sending a
message to the United States to back off even mild pressure for human
rights.
In late November, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration
postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next
month, however, Reagan sent the spare parts anyway. In 1984, Reagan
succeeded, too, in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military
training for the Guatemalan army.
By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army’s stubborn
brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named
Alberto Piedra, who favored increased military assistance to Guatemala.
In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan’s
State Department “is apparently more concerned with improving
Guatemala’s image than in improving its human rights.”
Reagan’s Dark Side
Despite his outwardly congenial style, Reagan – as revealed in the
documentary record – was a cold and ruthless anticommunist who endorsed
whatever “death squad” strategies were deployed against leftists in
Central America. As Walters’s “Talking Points” demonstrate, Reagan and
his team accepted the idea of liquidating not only armed guerrillas but
civilians who were judged sympathetic to left-wing causes – people who
were deemed part of the guerrillas’ “civilian support mechanisms.”
Across Central America in the 1980s, the death toll was staggering —
an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly
20,000 slain from the Contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political
“disappearances” in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during
the resurgence of political violence in Guatemala. The one consistent
element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization
emanating from Ronald Reagan’s White House.
It was not until 1999, a decade after Ronald Reagan left office, that
the shocking scope of the atrocities in Guatemala was comprehensively
detailed by a truth commission that drew heavily on U.S. government
documents declassified by President Bill Clinton. On Feb. 25, 1999, the
Historical Clarification Commission estimated that the 34-year civil war
had claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage
bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. The panel estimated that the army
was responsible for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas
for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.
The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626
massacres against Mayan villages. “The massacres that eliminated entire
Mayan villages … are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the
imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala’s history,” the
commission concluded. The army “completely exterminated Mayan
communities, destroyed their livestock and crops,” the report said. In
the northern highlands, the report termed the slaughter “genocide.”
[Washington Post, Feb. 26, 1999]
Besides carrying out murder and “disappearances,” the army routinely
engaged in torture and rape. “The rape of women, during torture or
before being murdered, was a common practice” by the military and
paramilitary forces, the report found. The report added that the
“government of the United States, through various agencies including the
CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state
operations.” The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave
money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed “acts of
genocide” against the Mayans. [NYT, Feb. 26, 1999]
During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President
Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in
Guatemala dating back to 1954. “For the United States, it is important
that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence
units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and
the United States must not repeat that mistake,” Clinton said.
Despite the damning documentary evidence and now the shocking
judgment of genocide against Rios Montt, there has been no interest
in Washington to hold any U.S. official accountable, not even a thought
that the cornucopia of honors bestowed on Ronald Reagan should cease or
be rescinded.
It remains unlikely that the genocide conviction of Rios Montt will
change the warm and fuzzy glow that surrounds Ronald Reagan in the eyes
of many Americans. The story of the Guatemalan butchery and the Reagan
administration’s complicity has long since been relegated to the great
American memory hole.
But Americans of conscience will have to reconcile what it means when
a country sees nothing wrong in honoring a man who made genocide
happen.
© 2013 Consortiumnews.com
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book,
Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are
Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.
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