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THE CIA IN GUATEMALA: THE LESSER KNOWN HOLOCAUST |
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by wakeupmag.co.uk
"We have
no scorched earth policy. We have a scorched Communist policy." "The military
guys who do this are like serial killers. If Jeffrey Dahmer
Compared to the struggles against
state tyranny in other Central American countries, very little is heard
of Guatemala in the Western media. This is because the level of
repression is extremely high; Guatemala has suffered the worst record of
human rights abuses in Latin America. During three decades, hundreds of
thousands of people have been massacred during their struggle against a
government that has been armed and trained by the U.S.
After years of interference in
Guatemalan politics, the level of American involvement increased
dramatically in 1954 with a coup (organised by the CIA) against the
democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, whose agrarian
reform policies threatened the interests of both the wealthy elite in
Guatemala and U.S. corporations such as the United Fruit Company. The
coup restored these groups' stranglehold on the economy with the
installation of a military dictatorship led by Colonel Carlos Castillo
Armas.
Hand-picked by the CIA for his
malleability, Armas flew into the capital on July 3rd 1954, aboard the
private aircraft of the U.S. ambassador John Peurifoy. Peurifoy
immediately furnished lists of radical opponents to be eliminated, as he
had done on his previous posting to Greece. A massive bloodletting
began, with strong racial as well as ideological overtones (around half
the population of Guatemala is indigenous). Land reform activists were
repressed and in the battles that followed, indigenous communities were
savagely attacked.
The successive regime of President
Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes permitted the CIA to use the country for its
training camps for Cuban exiles during the 1960s. When a rebellion broke
out in November 1960, the CIA came to the aid of Fuentes, sending in
B-26 bombers against the rebels; the insurgency was crushed and Fuentes
remained in power. Despite evidence of widespread human rights abuses by
the dictatorship, the U.S. continued to pour money, training and
equipment into the Guatemalan military.
However, Ydigoras planned to step
down from power in 1964, leaving the door open to an election. This
alarmed the U.S., who believed that a free election in Guatemala would
reinstate a left wing government bent upon land reform and an
independent foreign policy. Thus, in 1963 after a secret meeting,
President Kennedy backed an army coup, which further consolidated the
power of military control over the country.
The tone of the new government,
headed by Colonel Enrique Peralta Azurdia, was set with one his first
acts - the murder of eight political and trade union leaders by driving
over them with rock-laden trucks. When Peralta wanted to deal with a
left wing rebellion in late 1965, he declared, "If I have to turn the
country into a graveyard to pacify it, I will do so."
Peralta was assisted in this by
CIA counter insurgency specialists such as John Logan, who instructed
the Guatemalan military, police and secret service in developing an
"anti-terrorist" plan of action. Firstly, a clandestine cell within the
presidential palace was set up to co-ordinate all anti-Communist
activity. This became known as the Casa Negra, the dreaded "black room".
Secondly, raids were launched all over Guatemala City to "force the
Communists out of their hiding places". Thirdly, areas of the country
were "frozen" - taken over and controlled by the military.
Peralta secretly offered John
Logan cash rewards for any Communist leader arrested or killed; Logan
immediately requested other U.S. agents to be sent to the country to
"influence police operations" and secret mass killings began. In March
1966, the head of CIA operations in Guatemala reported to Agency
headquartersin Langley, Virginia: "The following Communists and
terrorists were secretly executed by the Guatemalan authorities on the
night of March 6: [a list of names]. The executions will not be
announced and the Guatemalan government will deny that they ever took
place."
Among those murdered was the
figurehead of popular resistance, Victor Gutierez Garbin, leader of the
Popular Socialist Party. A few days after his death, the CIA chief in
Guatemala described Gutierez as "a cultured man, honest and brave, which
made him one of the most influential leaders among the workers" -
attributes that were not held up for praise but as justification for his
assassination.
By 1967 the Casa Negra was
orchestrating a full-scale reign of terror. In the period from October
1966 to March 1968, an estimated 3,000 to 8,000 Guatemalans were killed
by the police, the military and "death squads" (who were often the
police or military in civilian clothes, carrying out atrocities too
bloody for the government to claim credit for.) By 1972 the number of
their victims was estimated at 13,000 and four years later the count
exceeded 20,000. The head of intelligence at the State Department wrote:
"At the heart of the secret anti-Communist force is a special unit of
the army which kidnaps, kills in the street, plants bombs and executes
real or supposed Communists. It occasionally acts against ill-defined
'enemies of the government'". Rather than voicing disquiet about the
abuses of human rights, the report noted a concern that "the Communists
could benefit politically" from the indiscriminate terror.
Anyone attempting to organise a
union or simply suspected of being in support of the resistance was a
target. Armed men broke into their homes and dragged them away. The
abducted were tortured, mutilated or burned; their bodies were found
buried in mass graves or floating in plastic bags in lakes or rivers, or
lying beside the road. Bodies were dropped into the Pacific from
airplanes. In the Gualan area, it was said, no one fished any more
because too many corpses were caught in the nets. In Guatemala City,
right wing terrorists machine-gunned people and houses in daylight.
Journalists, lawyers, students, teachers, trade unionists, members of
opposition parties, anyone who helped or expressed sympathy for the
rebel cause, anyone with a vaguely leftist political association or a
moderate criticism of government policy and relatives of the victims
were all targets for attack.
"It is hard to
find the words to express the state of putrefaction that exists in
The U.S. Agency for International
Development (AID) contributed to a programme to greatly expand the size
of Guatemala's national police force and to develop it into a
professional body skilled at counteracting urban disorder. Additionally,
the police force was completely supplied with radio patrol cars and a
radio communications network and funds to build a national police
academy and pay for salaries, uniforms, weapons and equipment.
Senior police officers and
technicians were sent for training at the Inter-American Police Academy
in Panama (replaced in 1964 by the International Police Academy in
Washington) and at a Federal School in Los Fresnos, Texas (where they
were taught how to construct and use a variety of explosive devices).
Their instructors were often CIA officers operating under AID cover.
John Gilligan, Director of AID during the Carter administration, disclosed, "At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people. The idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas - government, volunteer, religious, every kind."
CIA officers and Green Berets
accompanied the Guatemalan soldiers into battle areas and taught their
trainees various methods of interrogation, including electric shock
techniques. One method of torture consisted of putting a hood filled
with insecticide over the head of the victim.
The slogan of the New
Anticommunist Organisation was "See a Communist, kill a Communist.
Another of the death squads, Mano Blanca (White Hand) distributed
leaflets in residential areas suggesting that doors of left-wingers be
marked with a black cross." Bodies were found decapitated or castrated,
or with pins stuck in the eyes. Men were found dead with their eyes
gouged out, their testicles in their mouths, without hands or tongues
and women with their breasts cut off. Entire villages where there were
people suspected of supporting the guerrillas were rounded up and
massacred and the village bulldozed over to cover the traces.
At the same time as these
atrocities were taking place, the American ambassador, John Gordon Mein,
presented the Guatemalan military with new armoured vehicles, grenade
launchers, training and radio equipment and several HU-1B jet-powered
attack helicopters. Mein publicly stated: "Liberty must be defended and
that liberty is now being threatened in Guatemala."
As public concern began to grow worldwide about the violence, the Guatemalan president appointed a new defence minister and sent a few officers abroad, to minimise bad publicity. However, the massacres continued, with the full knowledge and consent of Washington. One CIA report written in 1971 stated: "The army and police are secretly eliminating a great number of terrorists." Following the discovery of large deposits of petroleum and minerals such as copper and nickel in the 1970s, large landowners and foreign corporations began expropriating communal lands. There were mass expulsions of indigenous peasants from their homes. However, despite the constant danger, indigenous groups continued to campaign for land reform. When President Lucas Garcia began his reign of terror in 1978, he set out to eliminate all the new popular leaders. Death squads roamed the land and murdered at will, and moves to obtain land were brutally crushed. Between March and September 1982, more than 4,000 people were killed and thousands more were tortured; the reform movement withered.
International concern over the
Guatemalan government's excesses led to a Congressional curtailment of
U.S. military aid to the dictatorship under the Jimmy Carter
administration in 1977. However, the Republican presidential candidate
Ronald Reagan then began a courtship of the Guatemalan far right. In
December 1979 a delegation from the American Security Council (an
ultra-right military lobby) visited Guatemala on behalf of Reagan. One
of the ASC consultants was John C.Trotter, the manager of Guatemala
City's Coca-Cola bottling plant franchise. Trotter was implicated in the
death squad murders of a number of workers and union leaders at the
bottling plant and was removed from management by Coca-Cola headquarters
after an international union and church-led protest and boycott of Coke.
During the 1980s, Guatemalan
speculator and right-wing activist Roberto Alejos Arzu (who had made his
plantation available as a training site for participants in the CIA's
Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961) sponsored a series of trips to his country
by many of the most prominent leaders of the American New Right. Several
high-level Reagan advisers visited Guatemala to give support to death
squad organisers, including Roger Fontaine, National Security Council
assistant for Latin American affairs and Lt. General Daniel Graham,
former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), who also visited
El Salvador for Reagan.
In 1980 Reagan met with Guatemalan
hotel magnate Eduardo Carette, a leading figure in Amigos del Pais, an
extremist right-wing pressure group comprised of Guatemalan businessmen
and landowners. Reagan told ambassador-to-be Carette, "Hang in 'til we
get there. We'll get in and then we'll give you help. Don't give up.
Stay there and fight. I'll help you as soon as I get in." Reagan's
associates duly put pressure on Congress to "lend a sympathetic ear" to
the lobbying campaign by Amigos del Pais to restore U.S. aid and
training for the Guatemalan military.
At the Republican Convention
before his election as President, Ronald Reagan offered a "salute" to
the new Guatemalan President Romero Lucas Garcia and informed him,
"things are going to be changing." Two of Reagan's closest associates -
retired General John K. Singlaub (former commander of U.S. forces in
South Korea) and retired Lt. Gen. Daniel Graham, headed American
delegations to Guatemala, where they assured President Garcia that
Reagan would provide for the resumption of military training and aid as
soon as he was installed in office.
High-level Guatemalan officials
stated at the time that Reagan's assurances may have led to an increase
in the number of death squad assassinations, while a senior leader of
Guatemala's moderate Christian Democratic Party (already decimated by
more than 34 assassinations of its leadership in the last year) was in
fear of his life.
Death squad founder Mario Sandoval Alarcon with friends.
The brutal regime of General
Efrain Rios Montt was brought to power in a CIA-backed coup in March
1982. Montt boasted openly of his policy of genocide against the
indigenous populations, stating on Guatemalan television that he had
"declared a state of siege so that we could kill legally." In his first
six months of power, Montt massacred 2,600 Indians and peasants, while
during his 17-month reign, more than 400 villages were brutally wiped
off the map.
Rios Montt had been trained by the
CIA in the Panama Canal Zone and in counterinsurgency at Fort Bragg,
North Carolina, where his regime was taught how to implement its Model
Village programme. This was based on the strategic hamlet programme used
by the U.S. in the Vietnam War. It was intended to convey to the world
that the government wished to re-establish the democratic life of the
country but in reality, the "villages" were concentration camps in which
the government imposed its own social and political systems to undermine
indigenous community structures. In addition to American support,
Israel, Argentina and Chile provided military aid and training to
Montt's dictatorship.
Backed by the CIA, the Guatemalan
military under Rios Montt
A CIA report detailed the instructions given by Montt to
his secret service: "You are free to arrest, imprison, interrogate and
eliminate any alleged guerrilla in whatever way you see fit." The air
force base of Retalhuleu was turned into a vast torture centre.
Prisoners were flung into deep pits filled with water, their bodies
later thrown into mass graves and sealed with cement.
The notorious death squads, with
such names as "Secret Anti-Communist Army" and "Eye For An Eye,"
continued their ruthless use of torture, machine-gun executions and
"disappearance". Some 70,000 people were murdered in the early 1980s,
while U.S. military aid to Guatemala continued, peaking at $50 million
in 1983. That year, the State department accused Amnesty International
of conducting "a campaign of misinformation in favour of the
Communists".
Over 200,000 Guatemalans have been
killed since the 1980s. There have been 50,000 "disappeared", over one
million displaced and 250,000 children who have lost one or both
parents. Evidence mounted in the late 1980s that private businessmen
provided the payrolls for the death squads and often assisted in
compiling the lists of "troublesome" labour activists, political leaders
and other suggested victims.
Rosario Godoy de Cuevas was abducted and killed in
Guatemala in 1985.
She was one of the leaders of a campaign to locate the "disappeared." Her husband, a trade union activist, had "disappeared" the year before.
Elias Barahona, former press secretary to Interior
Minister Alvarez Ruiz, fled the country in the late 1980s and at a
Panama City press conference, he issued a 15-page statement detailing
how President Lucas and his generals ran the death squads from the
fourth floor of the National Palace Annex. He also listed the addresses
of houses used by the government for detention and torture of its kidnap
victims.
Despite such evidence and the
near-universal recognition that Guatemala was one of the worst human
rights violators in the entire world, both Guatemalan president Col.
Carlos Aranao Osorio (known as "The Butcher of Zacape") and former
vice-president Mario Sandoval Alarcon (high commander of the death
squads) were invited to the Reagan inauguration in the U.S. In fact
American businessmen based in Guatemala who backed the death squads
heavily funded Reagan's election campaign, including one payment of over
$120,000 from Amigos del Pais. None of these payments were disclosed to
the Federal Election Commission.
"Why should we
be worried about the death squads? They're bumping off the
In 1989 Reagan struck a deal with
Guatemalan businessmen and government officials involved with the death
squads, which led to the restoration of the sale of U.S. weapons,
ammunitions, crowd control and counterinsurgency gear; the resumption of
CIA training of the Guatemalan military and police, particularly in
surveillance, intelligence and interrogation techniques; curtailment of
U.S. criticism of the regime's massive human rights violations; and the
promise of U.S. military intervention in the event of the Guatemalan
government being threatened by a popular uprising.
Although the government repression
was meant to frighten the Guatemalan population into submission, it
actually served to radicalise them. In various communities, indigenous
peasants organised themselves in armed self-defence groups or joined the
revolutionary movement URNG (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity).
In 1989 U.S. National Guard units
from a number of states rotated through Guatemala, ostensibly providing
medical and dental services in highly conflicted areas where the
guerrilla movement was strongest. In reality, they carried out
interrogations on behalf of the Guatemalan police and were in the area
of El Aquacate when the army massacred 22 villagers. Sister Dianna
Ortiz, a nun, related how, in 1989, she was kidnapped, burned with
cigarettes, raped repeatedly, and lowered into a pit full of corpses and
rats. She said that a fair-skinned man who spoke with an American accent
seemed to be in charge.
Indigenous Guatemalans march for their
rights
The CIA was still actively
involved in the death squads and other covert intelligence operations in
Guatemala throughout the 1990s. In 1992, a resistance leader, Efrain
Bamaca Velasquez, disappeared. The government claimed that he had died
in an armed clash with the police. But his wife, American lawyer
Jennifer Harbury, refused to accept the official version and claimed
that she had received reports that the authorities had tortured her
husband. The State Department responded by branding Harbury's claims as
"lies" and "manipulation".
However, U.S. Senator Robert
Torricelli generated front page headlines when he revealed in Congress
that one of the Guatemalan officers involved in Velasquez' murder - Col.
Julio Roberto Alpirez - had been a paid agent of the CIA. A recently
released CIA report from the time reveals that Velasquez was arrested,
tortured and executed "when there was nothing more to be got out of
him".
After the CIA's Alpirez was
implicated in another murder, that of U.S. citizen Michael DeVine (DeVine
was killed because he had uncovered some of the Guatemalan military's
involvement in drug trafficking and other illegal activities), Alpirez
received some $44,000 in "severance pay" from the CIA in 1990.
Torricelli pushed for U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to make
the Alpirez files public; to this date, the State Department has
persistently refused.
CIA agent Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez,
Jennifer Harbury and Carol DeVine, the widows of
Efrain Velasquez and Michael DeVine
respectively, testify in Congress about the CIA's involvement in the murders of their husbands.
The Bush administration, in a
public show of anger at DeVine's murder, cut off military aid to
Guatemala, but secretly allowed the CIA to provide millions of dollars
to the government to make up for the loss. The annual payments of $5 to
$7 million apparently continued into the Clinton administration.
When further public outcry over
Guatemala's human rights record led to a suspension of U.S. military
aid, the "drug war" funding mechanism proved valuable as a conduit for
covert U.S. aid to the dictatorship. Through the Drug Enforcement Agency
(DEA), Washington provided the Guatemalan army with millions of dollars,
ostensibly as part of its drug eradication policy. The real aim of the
programme however was counter-insurgency against the left.
The Guatemalan army and government have long been heavily involved in drug trafficking. Unlike South America, there are no independent drug cartels in Guatemala. Production and transportation of narcotics is directed by well-placed members of the military and G-2, Guatemala's powerful military intelligence unit. When airport immigration agent Carlos Minera was tried for cocaine smuggling in 1989, he testified that G-2 members were involved in the drug trade. G-2 officers assigned to drug control were paid not by the DEA but by the CIA in order to increase the Agency's influence. This revealed the farcical concept of the U.S. government supplying money to an army to fight against itself.
After a Colombian plane with U.S. markings crashed,
U.S. DEA agents and
Guatemalan soldiers seized cocaine worth $50 million. Termed "another fierce blow to international narcotraffic" in the media, the bust turned out to be a boom to the domestic drug market when it went "missing" the next day.
America's anti-drug programme had
no significant impact on the country's drug production and trafficking
but did have serious consequences for indigenous Guatemalans. The
spraying of lethal insecticides by "anti-drug" helicopters and planes
damaged the ecology of large tropical reserves and poisoned large
numbers of people, animals, fish and plant life in the targeted areas.
Fourteen people died in the Tacuna area of San Marcos after showing
symptoms of poisoning. Although reports of nausea, respiratory problems,
diarrhoea and death or illness of livestock were widely reported, the
protests were routinely ignored.
The New York Times reported in
1977 that "30 or 40 people a day are treated for pesticide poisoning .
Death can come in hours, or a longer lasting liver malfunction… the
amounts of DDT in mothers' milk in Guatemala are the highest in the
Western world".
In an attack, guerrillas destroyed
22 crop-duster planes; they were quickly replaced with the help of
Washington, together with as much pesticide they could carry, courtesy
of Monsanto Chemical Company of St. Louis and Guatemala City.
The spraying programme had a
covert agenda: some of the 40,000 internal refugees from the violence
had banded together in remote areas to form Communities of Populations
in Resistance (CPRs). It was these which the government, under the guise
of "anti-drug policy", bombed using US-supplied helicopter gunships and
Super Turbo Thrush planes. The population in the CPRs consisted largely
of indigenous civilians who fled their homes in the wake of government
repression. Many were accused by the government of defending human
rights or asking for better working conditions for their people, or
simply of associating with or living near someone who had been accused
of these "crimes".
"Today in the
United States, we don't hear much talk anymore about armed
In 1997 the Guatemalan government theoretically ended
Latin America's longest armed struggle when it signed a peace treaty
with the URNG. The elected civilian government of President Alvaro Arzu
was committed under the peace plan to reforms which would conclude in
the year 2000, costing an estimated £1.6 billion, of which little has so
far been forthcoming from the international community.
The country remains ravaged by
decades of oppression, government corruption and massive economic and
social discrimination. Such is the result of Washington's interference
in the internal politics of a country that would otherwise no doubt be
enjoying today a democratic society and far greater prosperity for the
mass of its people. In particular, the support that the Reagan
administration gave to the far right in Guatemala is an indictment of
Washington's entire Central American foreign policy.
No U.S. official has ever been
brought to justice for complicity in the atrocities carried out in
Guatemala.
Guatemalans march through the capital
to mark the signing of a
As with the CIA's Indonesian operations, Guatemala was a
training ground for the Agency's more infamous operations elsewhere in
Central America. For instance, David Phillips was one of the CIA
officers involved in the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954.
This apprenticeship served him well in Cuba during the Batista
dictatorship and he later worked on the Bay of Pigs task force. Phillips
went on to direct CIA operations in the Dominican Republic when the U.S.
invaded that country, was CIA Chief of Station in Brazil under the
military dictatorship there, and became chief of all Latin American
operations in the period leading up to the military coup in Chile.
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