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Knowingly complicit in the deaths of 200,000 Mayan Indians! "Declassified CIA documents show high-level U.S. officials were kept informed of the atrocities." --AP Some of Reagan's "death squad" friends--people who disemboweled pregnant Mayan peasants, and skinned others alive, and raped others before they killed them, and slaughtered children and whole families and villages--are still alive and living in luxury. This is a courageous article by AP reporters WILL WEISSERT and JUAN CARLOS LLORCA. Just to write about these things is still dangerous. ----- "In the 1980s in Guatemala, Reagan aided military regimes that waged scorched-earth campaigns against rural peasants, including genocide against Indian populations. Reagan personally attacked the human rights reports describing atrocities inflicted on hundreds of Mayan villages. On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Guatemalan dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as 'totally dedicated to democracy' and asserted that Rios Montt's government was 'getting a bum rap.'"
http://consortiumnews.com/2004/060704.html
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"The grisly reality of Central America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war.
"The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s.
"Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army 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 north, the report termed the slaughter a 'genocide.'
"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 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.
"'Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals,' said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.
"'Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people,' he added.
"The report did not single out culpable individuals either in Guatemala or the United States. But the American official most directly responsible for renewing U.S. military aid to Guatemala and encouraging its government during the 1980s was President Reagan."
http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/052699a1.html
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WE DIDN'T "WIN" THE BATTLE AGAINST "COMMUNISM." WE EXTERMINATED MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WHO LOOKED TO IT FOR JUSTICE AND EQUITY. Upwards of 2 million people in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, two hundred thousand in Guatemala alone, plus many thousands more in Honduras, in Nicaragua, in southern Mexico, in Argentina, in Chile, in Bolivia, in Haiti, in El Salvador, in the Congo, and in a proxy wars with the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and other places.
Global corporate predators like to push the line that we won this economic argument with the poor, fair and square. What garbage! We committed the ultimate sin against Free Speech: silencing the speakers forever.
I have a confession to make. I was having my own kid during this period in our history. It was the greatest joy of my life, and still is. Meanwhile, poor Mayan women were having their babies ripped from their wombs, and were being raped and killed, and their entire race nearly exterminated, only two countries away--and I knew nothing. Nothing! I learned something about it later, and have only now really done the research, as the result of recent revelations. And I was politically savvy--and had been an activist on war and civil rights issues! Our ignorance of our own government's activities can be staggering. Our protected enclosure here inside the "Iron Curtain" of our war profiteering corporate news monopolies is mind-boggling. I'm just commenting. I'm not judging myself, or any other Americans. It's something we need to know about ourselves--in order to correct it. And I've just learned--for the first time--about a Guatemalan bishop who was RECENTLY assassinated after he authored a Catholic Church report on the atrocities.
"A year ago (1998!), assassins murdered Bishop Juan Gerardi two days after he presented a church report blaming the army for the mass killings of the 1980s. Ignoring evidence tying the bishop’s murder to the military, prosecutors first arrested a homeless man, then a priest. The priest was held for over half a year even though forensic experts concluded he could not have been the murderer.
http://www.worldpolicy.org/globalrights/guatemala/1999-0318-joc-genocidetribunal.html
1998!
(Note: Clinton did well on the Guatemala issue--he went to Guatemala and apologized for the US part in those atrocities--during the UN "truth and reconciliation" process, which was initiated to end the Guatemalan civil war. But then the "death squadders" got control of our government again, and it's as if we have learned NOTHING! Of course, We, the People, are learning--and probably BECAUSE we are learning, control over our government has been increasingly removed from us, most recently by rigged electronic voting machines, which tip the scales against us, and deny us true representation. It's so sad to me that a people that so loves to rescue others--as we are doing right now in the Denver avalanche--and that is so good at it, and that has so much generosity, and courage, and such a can-do spirit, is inflicted with these monsters running our government, whose ikon is The Hangman, and who bring death everywhere.) |
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