Guatemala's T&R commission and elephant in the room

Exhuming the Past In a Painful QuestGuatemalan Victims' Families Seek Closure, Justice

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post
Foreign Service
Thursday, September 28, 2006; A01

NEBAJ, Guatemala -- A decade after the conclusion of the long civil war that ravaged this Central American nation, Guatemalans are literally trying to dig up their past. Spurred by a surge of requests from victims' families this year, dozens of forensic anthropologists have been fanning out across the countryside to search for remains of the 200,000 people -- most of them Mayan Indian civilians -- who were killed or abducted during the 36-year conflict. Many were massacred by military forces and dumped into mass graves. Others were buried hurriedly in unmarked, secret locations by relatives anxious to avoid rampaging troops. About 40,000 victims simply disappeared after being seized by government operatives.

[snip]

But the slaughter reached its peak in the early 1980s, when the military launched a scorched-earth campaign through the countryside to eliminate any potential support for the guerrillas from the long-oppressed Mayan Indians. Hundreds of villages were burned, livestock destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.

[Golly, this sounds real bad. I wonder who would have supported such horrible activities? Oh yeah, now I remember. Too bad the author couldn't remember. Here's a few gems from the NYT from the first few years of the 1980s, just for the sake of posterity, and, of course, to notice parallels to current events:

January 30, 1984,
Section A; Page 1, Column 1;
Foreign Desk

U.S. AGREES TO SELL HELICOPTER PARTS TO GUATEMALANS

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 The Reagan Administration has agreed to sell Guatemala $2 million worth of spare parts for its aging fleet of United States-made military helicopters, the State Department said today. It would be the first official sale of military equipment to Guatemala since 1977, when the military Government refused assistance after the Carter Administration strongly criticized it for human rights abuses.

.....

The New York Times
September 18, 1983,
Section 4; Page 2, Column 1

Getting Tough With Congress on Central America

BYLINE: By Henry Giniger and Mill Freudenheim

If the United States fails to achieve peace and democracy in Central America, it will be largely the fault of Congress.

[Sounds familiar: how'd that work out? continuing...]

So contended a ''fed- up'' Reagan Administration last week as it appeared to drop its efforts at persuasion and geared to battle for the appropriations to support military and covert operations the Administration says are essential to American aims. As delivered by Under Secretary of Defense Fred C. Ikle, the fighting words to Congress also sounded to Democrats like preparation for the Republican election campaign next year.

.......

The New York Times
August 3, 1983,
Section A; Page 23, Column 5;
Editorial Desk

REAGAN'S PATH TO WAR

By John B. Oakes; John Oakes is former Senior Editor of The New York Times.

Unless he is stopped by Congress - and only Congress and the force of public opinion can stop him - Ronald Reagan could plunge this country into the most unwanted, unconscionable, unnecessary and unwinnable war in its history, not excepting Vietnam. Mr. Reagan sees ''the trouble'' in Central America as coming ''from outside the area,'' as ''revolution exported from the Soviet Union and Cuba' [definitely heard that before]' His response is to dispatch huge naval and air armadas to the waters off the Nicaraguan coasts and thousands of American troops to the ranchlands and jungles of neighboring Honduras.

.......

The New York Times
June 13, 1983,
Section A; Page 10

SPECIAL ENVOY PRAISES GUATEMALA

GUATEMALA, President Reagan's special envoy to Central America, Richard B. Stone, today praised ''positive changes'' in the Guatemalan military Government of President Efrain Rios Montt. Mr. Stone told reporters at the airport here that his 24-hour visit to Guatemala had been ''the most productive'' stop on his 10-nation mission to assess peace possibilities in the region. He then left for a brief stop in Belize before going on to Mexico for the final visit of his tour. Relations between the United States and Guatemala have been strengthened under the Reagan Administration, which ended a six-year embargo on arms sales and military aid imposed by the Carter Administration because of the Government's alleged human rights violations. Mr. Reagan has praised President Rios Montt as ''a man of great personal integrity.'' General Rios Montt seized power in a coup in March 1982 and imposed a state of siege.

[Rios Montt was one hell of a brutal dictator (see CSM below): but he was our son of a bitch.]

.......

The New York Times
January 8, 1983,
Saturday, Section 1; Page 1, Column 1;
Foreign Desk

U.S. LIFTS EMBARGO ON MILITARY SALES TO GUATEMALANS

By BERNARD GWERTZMAN, Special to the New York Times

The Reagan Administration today lifted the five-year-old embargo on arms sales to Guatemala because of what it said were ''significant steps'' taken by the Government to end human rights abuses. The State Department announcement allows Guatemala to buy from the Defense Department $6.3 million worth of spare parts and other equipment for its air force, mostly to rehabilitate American-made helicopters for use against guerrillas. The move, while small in military terms, was viewed by the Administration and its critics as an important symbolic step signifying support for the Government of Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, who overthrew Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia and seized power last March.

[nothing like selling arms to a dictator to further the cause of democracy: way to go US State Department!]
.....

Christian Science Monitor (Boston, MA)

January 6, 1983,
Thursday, Opinion and Commentary; Pg. 23
Guatemala's 'bum rap'?


BYLINE: By Corinne B. Johnson; Corinne B. Johnson of the American Friends Service Committee was a member of a four-person team of inquiry, organized by the National Council of Churches of Christ, in Guatemala Nov. 7-12.

In the wake of his brief visit with President Rios Montt of Guatemala, Ronald Reagan has concluded that Guatemala has gotten a ''bum rap'' on its human rights performance. The United States President has a responsibility to certify to the Congress that there are not ''gross and consistent'' violations of human rights in any country to receive military assistance. Based on his comment and on human rights reports by the State Department, it appears that the President will certify Guatemala as free of gross and consistent violations and recommend arms aid and military training.

As recently as November Joseph Moran, of the North Carolina State Conference of Churches, and I went to Santa Anita las Canoas, a village of the municipality of San Martin Jilotepeque, Chimaltenango, Guatemala, to investigate a report of violence against civilians. We met an army patrol ordered there by radio. In conversation, the captain in charge said that things had been calm in the area for three to four months, and he summoned a villager to verify his statement. The villager first reiterated the captain's view; after further discussion he told us in detail of events on Oct. 18, three weeks earlier.

On that day, an army unit had required the village residents - men, women, and children - to assemble in the chapel. The unit brought in hooded informers who identified 18 village men as guerrilla collaborators; an army captain came and ordered the 18 executed. They were killed that evening in the chapel yard and their bodies buried in a cornfield just below. As this story was told, the army captain stood silent, his head bowed. We were stunned, by the story itself and that it had been told in the presence of army personnel.

Our team of inquiry was organized in response to an invitation from President Rios Montt to visit to see the human rights situation for ourselves. We held more than 40 interviews with individuals and groups in Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. The story of Santa Anita may have been the most dramatic that we heard, but it was not exceptional, and it and many others led us to conclude that the government and army of Guatemala are indeed engaged in gross and consistent violations of human rights, especially in rural areas, especially against indigenous people.

In the face of these findings, it is disturbing to realize that the US Embassy describes the human rights situation in Guatemala as improved, without gross and consistent violations. A church team, known to be traveling with a presidential invitation and with army credentials, in Guatemala for only five days, was able to gather substantial information concerning violations by the army. The State Department has numerous staff in the country on a permanent basis but does little independent investigating. The question arises whether human rights information is gathered to assist policy formulation, or whether policy considerations shape the human rights ''information'' gathered by State Department personnel.

Perhaps Congress should make specific appropriations to insure independent, objective investigation. The present system of human rights reporting from Guatemala is worse than nothing; many more innocent people will suffer death and injury if the ''information'' produced by this system is used to justify increased arms shipments or military training for the Guatemalan Army.

.....

NYT, December 5, 1982,
Sunday, Late City Final Edition
Section 4; Page 1, Column 3

LATIN REALITY INTRUDES ON REAGAN'S DREAM OF UNITY

BYLINE: By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

AN PEDRO SULA, Honduras IT was to have been a relatively uneventful trip a simple chance for President Reagan to travel to Latin America to preach his familiar gospel of democracy, vigilance and free enterprise. But well before it was over, Mr. Reagan's 11,000-mile journey became a lesson in what President Belisario Betancur of Colombia called ''the reality of the continent as it really is.''

The ''reality'' appeared mostly as a pervasive determination by less developed countries in the hemisphere to maintain a view of the world independent of that of the United States. Mr. Reagan's first trip to the third world thus marked a significant chapter in his Presidency. It was a test of whether he and his aides were ready to learn the lessons of the region's complexity, and a test of the marketability of the Reagan message and personality in not always welcome settings.


[snip]


From the time of his Presidential campaign in 1980, Mr. Reagan has spoken of his ''dream'' of a unified Western Hemisphere tapping its natural resources and growing economically by relying on free trade and free enterprise. But the worldwide recession has at least deferred that dream by throwing the hemisphere into its most severe economic crisis in a generation. Throughout the region, countries are being strangled by high interest rates and the drop in export prices for coffee, sugar and other commodities. Mr. Reagan's recent emergency package of $350 million in aid under the Caribbean Basin Initiative, for example, did little more than bring Costa Rica, El Salvador and other countries back from the brink of bankruptcy. In his weekly radio address to the American people yesterday, the President said final passage this year of the Caribbean legislation was ''a top priority.'' Mr. Reagan and his aides seem to realize that the whole area is vulnerable and unstable.

Strains between the United States and Latin America were aggravated this year by the Falkland war.

[snip]

Inevitably, Mr. Reagan's visit to Central America underscored the difficulties facing him. A meeting late yesterday with Gen. Efrain Rios Montt of Guatemala, for example, had to be scheduled at the airport here because Costa Rica did not want him in San Jose. While the Administration considers the sale of helicopter and communications equipment to Guatemala because of its feeling that the human rights situation is improving, reports grow of massacres of Indian peasants. Meanwhile, in a surprise statement, Mr. Reagan told reporters that he was prepared to seek a renewal of aid to El Salvador because of the improvement in the human rights situation there. His comment came only a month after Ambassador Dean R. Hinton threatened to cut off aid unless more action on human rights was taken. Administration officials maintain that progress has been achieved in more areas than just human rights -land reform, control of the military and the holding of elections, for instance. But Mr. Reagan's gestures in favor of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador were bound to distress those who feel that the United States could do more to encourage genuine reconciliation.

A trip intended to sound a call for democracy and independence took on toward the end a somewhat ambiguous note. Because of increased clandestine activity of the Central Intelligence Agency in that country - which the President refused to confirm - there are reports that the United States is behind a covert effort to topple the leftist Government in Nicaragua. The risk in the Presidential visit seemed to be that the United States might emerge identified more than ever with violence, and not with the economic progress Mr. Reagan seeks.

French Revolution:English reform::Islamic Revolution:US welfare state

The connection here is tenuous and needs much more explanation, but in reading about the development of democratic capitalist institutions in England in the nineteenth century, I was struck by this passage in Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy:

The outbreak of the French Revolution put and end to all hope of reform. More specifically, as soon as the Revolution passed beyond its liberal phase, when Louis XVI's flight to Varennes and recapture 'tore the veil of illusions' from liberal prospects and the Revolution began to enter a radical phase, those in England who sympathized with it found their position more and more awkward. Pitt the Younger stopped all talk of reform. England began to enter a phase of repression that lasted until after the Napoleonic Wars. Its fundamental feature was that the upper classes, in both the town and the countryside, closed ranks around patriotic and conservative slogans against the menace of radicalism and tyranny in France and against the remotest threat to their privilages.65 If the menace of revolution and military dictatorship had not ended at the Battle of Waterloo, it is highly unlikely that England would have resumed in the
nineteenth century those slow and halting steps toward political and social reform that she had given up at the end of the eighteenth. Acceptable regimes in Europe, the absence of a threat from that quarter, was one of the prerequisites for peaceful, democratic evolution in England.

Note 65: Much of what took place resembles American reaction to communist expansion after 1945. There is the same ambiguity about the characteristic of the revolutionary enemy, the same exploitation of this ambiguity be the dominant elements in society, the same disillusionment and dismay among its original supporters as the revolution abroad deceived their hopes.

I quote this at length in order to point to potential parallels in the second half of the analogy above. If one can think of the dismantling of the welfare state and various civil rights won over the last half century as the equivalent of a retrenchment of certain conservative forces, it seems that the new "far enemy" is Islamic radicals, for whom we are actually the far enemy. In that case, the analogy seems a bit off, but I can see how it might still work. According to many of the more astute commentators (as opposed to those who re-draw a thick line in the sand between US and THEM) the revolution in Islam goes in several directions and its relationship with the West is only one of them.

The Islamist response to, for instance, Western colonization or neo-colonization, in the form of the Iranian revolution (which, I suppose, was also an attempt at getting state power: according to most accounts, it was the leftist and even communist agitators that started the social movement for the overthrow of the Shaw; but the cultural revolution hijacked the social movement and installed the Islamic republic after the fact, possibly because the ideology had more of a local history. In any case, though the anti-imperialist rhetoric stuck around in the form of anti-Western discourse, the people who had started this leftist, basically Western inspired revoluction were often executed or imprisoned. But I digress...) was obviously related to Western interferance. And certainly the fact of the west looms largely in many of the conflicts in Islam. The point made by Aslan and others is that there is a reformation project going on in Islam and if there is a resistance to the West, it is against this kind of more liberal interpretation of Islam.

Of course, as Aslan tries to show, this interpretation is actually endemic to Islam itself, reflecting some of the fundamental principles of social justice Mohummed proclaimed in his revolution of the seventh century. Since the claim of the wahhabist and other versions of militant Islam is that they are returning to the true religion, Aslan is obviously trying to unseat this argument, even as he is cementing its legitimacy. Like all arguments over founding documents or founding fathers, it is always very dicey to try to argue against fundamentalists by accepting the foundation as legitimate. In other words, though the strategy will obviously be lost on people who already accept the foundation as legitimate, it would be far more effective to point out that when these people wrote, civilization was slightly different and that, perhaps, it would be better to look more at essences rather than intentions in the originary documents.

In any case, what I am getting at is that the reactionary response to this kind of liberal reinterpretation of makes he struggle mostly between forces on those terms, rather than being waged against the "far enemy" of the US/West. However, because one of the strategies of some elements of that reactionary struggle instead focus on the "far enemy"--particularly in it's "near presence" in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in England, Spain, and, once, a few years ago, in the US--it opens the door for reactionary forces in the US to reform the country along the lines that they would like to. Thus reducing the anti-globalization movement to a small rabble was the first consequence as organized labor pulled out in 2001 of a movement that they helped invigorate within the US only a few years earlier, and which had received some of the most visible press available in Genoa in the July before Sept. 11. The protests scheduled for Sept 29, 2001 in DC, which normally would have been coordinated around globalization (which had also begun to characterize itself in proto-Marxist terms of anti-capitalism) and would have been potentially much larger, disintegrated, except for a small group organized to protest the impending war on Afghanistan.

Surely the retrenchment had begun much earlier, but this seemed to put it into overdrive in the US context as defense against the "far enemy" became a convenient moment to push through all kinds of legislation--such as the patriot act--that took away some of the momentum of the earlier social advances. I suppose that this is not all that novel, but the point is that, regardless of the balance of forces within the country or the ideologies present, these kinds of international events and pressures--from the French Revolution to the current struggle within Islam--have the potential to reorder priorities and allow the currently dominant group to push through their agenda, regardless of what seems to be its ideological fit with the problem at hand.