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Edited on Mon Mar-12-07 03:28 PM by Judi Lynn
idiot right-wing public, knowing a lot of them have absolutely no idea what the U.S. has done to Guatemala. It only takes ANYONE a few minutes looking for information to run into the ugly, ugly truth: Reagan & Guatemala's Death Files
by Robert Parry
iF magazine, May/June 1999
Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America.
After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.
The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for the optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.
In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the Argentine generals before criticizing them.
Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.
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 a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.
(snip/...) http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Ronald_Reagan/Reagan_Guatemala.html~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ FLASHBACK: C.I.A. DEATH SQUADS
Allan Nairn
April 1995
The U.S. government has systematic links to Guatemalan Army death squad operations that go far beyond the disclosures that have recently shaken official Washington. The news that the C.I.A. employed a Guatemalan colonel who reportedly ordered two murders has been greeted with professions of shock and outrage. But in fact the story goes much deeper, as U.S. officials well know.
North American C.l.A. operatives work inside a Guatemalan Army unit that maintains a network of torture centers and has killed thousands of Guatemalan civilians. The G-2, headquartered on the fourth floor of the Guatemalan National Palace, has, since at least the 1960s, been advised, trained, armed and equipped by U.S. undercover agents. Working out of the U.S. Embassy and living in safehouses and hotels, these agents work through an elite group of Guatemalan officers who are secretly paid by the C.I.A. and who have been implicated personally in numerous political crimes and assassinations.
This secret G-2 / C.I.A. collaboration has been described by Guatemalan and U.S. operatives and confirmed, in various aspects, by three former Guatemalan heads of state. These accounts also mesh with that given in a March 28 interview by Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, the C.I.A.- paid Guatemalan G-2 officer who has been implicated in the murders of Guatemalan guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez and a U.S. citizen, Michael DeVine.
(snip)
Other officials, though, say that at least during the mid 1980s G-2 officers were paid by Jack McCavitt, then C.I.A. station chief, and that the "technical assistance" includes communications gear, computers and special firearms, as well as collaborative use of C.I.A.-owned helicopters that are flown out of the Piper hangar at the La Aurora civilian air port and from a separate U.S. air facility. Through what Amnesty International has called "a government program of political murder." the Guatemalan Army has, since 1978, killed more than 110,000 civilians. The G-2 and a smaller, affiliated unit called the Archivo have long been openly known in Guatemala as the brain of the terror state. With a contingent of more than 2,000 agents and with sub-units in the local army bases. the G-2-under orders of the army high command-coordinates the torture. assassination and disappearance of dissidents.
"If the G-2 wants to kill you, they kill you," former army Chief of staff Gen. Benedicto Lucas Garcia once said. "They send one of their trucks with a hit squad and that's it." Current and former G-2 agents describe a program of surveillance backed by a web of torture centers and clandestine body dumps. In 1986, then-army Chief of Staff Gen. Hector Gramajo Morales, a U.S. protege, said that the G-2 maintains files on and watches "anyone who is an opponent of the Guatemalan state in any realm." A former G-2 agent says that the base he worked at in Huehuetenango maintained its own crematorium and "processed" abductees by chopping off limbs, singeing flesh and administering electric shocks.
At least three of the recent G-2 chiefs have been paid by the C.I.A., according to U.S. and Guatemalan intelligence sources. One of them, Gen. Edgar Godoy Gaitan, a former army Chief of Staff, has been accused in court by the victim's family of being one of the prime "intellectual authors" of the 1990 murder of the noted Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack Chang. Another, Col. Otto Perez Molina, who now runs the Presidential General Staff and oversees the Archivo, was in charge in 1994, when, according to the Archbishop's human rights office, there was evidence of General Staff involvement in the assassination of Judge Edgar Ramiro Elias Ogaldez. The third, Gen. Francisco Ortega Menaldo, who now works in Washington as general staff director at the Pentagon-backed Inter-American Defense Board, was G-2 chief in the late 1980s during a series of assassinations of students, peasants and human rights activists. Reached at his home in Florida, Jack McCavitt said he does not talk to journalists. When asked whether Ortega Menaldo was on the C.I.A. payroll, he shouted "Enough!" and slammed down the phone.
(snip/...) http://www.uruknet.de/?p=21732 
Reburial of massacre victems, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tuesday, June 8th, 2004
"Reagan Was the Butcher of My People:" Fr. Miguel D'Escoto Speaks From Nicaragua
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We go to Managua, Nicaragua to speak with Fr. Miguel D'Escoto, a Catholic priest who was Nicaragua's Foreign Minister under the Sandinista government in the 1980s.
The 8 years Reagan was in office represented one of the most bloody eras in the history of the Western hemisphere, as Washington funneled money, weapons and other supplies to right wing death squads. And the death toll was staggering - more than 70,000 political killings in El Salvador, more than 100,000 in Guatemala, 30,000 killed in the contra war in Nicaragua. In Washington, the forces carrying out the violence were called "freedom fighters." This is how Ronald Reagan described the Contras in Nicaragua: "They are our brothers, these freedom fighters and we owe them our help. They are the moral equal of our founding fathers."
(snip/...) http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/08/1453219~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ronald Reagan's Bloody "Apocalypto"
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
Sunday 17 December 2006
Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto," a violent capture-and-escape movie set 500 years ago in a brutal Mayan society, ends ironically when European explorers arrive and interrupt the final bloody chase.
The surprise appearance of the Europeans was good news for Gibson's hero - distracting his last pursuers - but, as history tells us, the arrival of the Europeans actually escalated the New World's violence, bringing a more mechanized form of slaughter that devastated the Mayas and other native populations.
An even greater irony, however, may be that the U.S. media has done a better job separating fact from fiction about Gibson's movie than in explaining to Americans how some of their most admired modern politicians, including Ronald Reagan, were implicated in a more recent genocide against Mayan tribes in Central America.
America's hand in the later-day slaughter of these Mayas traces back to Dwight Eisenhower's presidency in 1954 when a CIA-engineered coup overthrew the reform-minded Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz.
(snip/...) http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/67/24543~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Guatemalan Massacres, Death Squads, Torture and Republican Hypocrisy on Iraq
~snip~
The election of Reagan and the unleashing of the Holocaust
In 1980, many wanted Ronald Reagan elected to get tough on communism. The effect on Guatemala would be devastating. Before the U.S. election in 1980, wealthy Guatemalan businessmen were hoping for a Reagan victory. Here are some excerpts from an August 24, 1980 article in the New York Times Magazine, Guatemala: State of Siege by Alan Hilding:
Some wealthy Guatemalan businessmen are know to be financing the E.S.A. and in private, they argue that the hit squad is, in the words of one cotton planter, a "distasteful necessity." P. 7.
They are therefore lobbying conservative United States Congressman and gambling that a Reagan victory in November will revitalize Washington's traditional policy of "anti-Communism" in Central America.
Some conservative Guatemalans, who boast close contacts with the Reagan campaign have even called for a rupture of diplomatic relations with the United States while Carter is in the White House. P. 8.
And here are some additional comments prior to Reagan's election:
Fred Sherwood, a U.S. resident of Guatemala for over 40 years, owns the Prokesa coffee-bag factory in Guatemala. In 1954, he aided CIA forces in carrying out the coup; since then, he has openly espoused his support for government death squads--and offered his definition of Guatemalans as "dumb savages." In September 1980, Sherwood said; They're bumping off the commies, our enemies....Hell, I'd give them some cartridges if I could and everyone else would, too....why should we criticize them?...why the hell should we criticize the death squad or whatever you want to call it? Christ, I'm all for it." Jean-Marie Simon, Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny (Norton 1987) p. 103.
Could there have been any doubt what a Reagan administration would mean for Guatemala?
The Guatemaln Holocaust is documented
In 1996, the parties signed the Peace Accords ending the bloody civil war. The Catholic Church then commenced a detailed investigation into the numerous atrocities, acts of barbarity and murders of civilians that had occurred, and released its findings in a report published by the Archdiocese of Guatemala entitled Guatemala: Never Again! On April 24, 1998, Archbishop Juan Gerardi announced the findings of the Catholic Church from the pulpit in Guatemala City, stating that 90% of the deaths had been caused by the Guatemalan military. He finished his sermon with the following:
Bringing the memory of these painful events into the present leads us to confront some of the first words of our faith, "Cain, where is your brother Abel?"
"I don't know," he answered. "Am I my brother's keeper?"
Yahweh replied, "What have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground" (Gn 4:9-10). p. xxv.
(snip/...) http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/9/222442/5744 |
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