Guatemala to apologize to former president's family

[Judi Lynn]

Guatemala to apologize to former president's family
29 Sep 2011 16:22

Source: reuters // Reuters


GUATEMALA CITY, Sept 29 (Reuters) - Guatemala will seek to make amends to former president Jacobo Arbenz, ousted in a violent coup nearly 60 years ago, as the Central America nation tries to emerge from generations of violence and political unrest.

The populist Arbenz was only the second freely elected president in Guatemala when his promise to redistribute land irritated fruit exporters and led to a 1954 coup backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom will issue a public apology to the former leader's family on Oct. 20, a national holiday to commemorate a revolution that started in 1944 and paved the way for the country's first democratic elections.

The government will also add a retelling of Arbenz's legacy to school textbooks that do not recognize the former president, who spent almost three decades in exile before dying in Mexico in 1971, and name a stretch of major highway after him.

More:
http://www.trust.org/alertnet/news/guatemala-to-apologize-to-former-presidents-family

[Peace Patriot]

1. Though the Catholic Church, as an institution, is sick beyond redemption, in my opinion,

the Catholic religion has had a few great ideas over the centuries, and one of them is the notion of penitents wearing "sack cloth and ashes" to acknowledge and repent of their sins. (What is a sin is another question.) I want to see the CIA (not to mention the Pope and the Cardinals) don "sack cloth and ashes" to repent of their crimes against the people of Latin America and, in the case of the JFK assassination (and probably RFK and MLK as well), and the many wars they have instigated in our name in which many of our own have suffered or died, their crimes against us. (As for the Pope and Cardinals, they owe repentance mainly for their oppression of women, lo, these last 1,500 years--a very lo-o-ong sin!)

Repentance, if it is genuine ("sack cloth and ashes") is a very great idea, in that it allows for re-integration of the person into society and a healing of the injured, the injurer and the society as a whole. It could be applied to a lot of situations--for instance, our overcrowded, torturous jails. Let the injurer recompense the injured, where possible, and return to society in "sack cloth and ashes" until the injury is healed as well as it can be. This is not to say that the guilty should not be tried and convicted, and that some of the guilty--very few, I think--need to be permanently isolated from society. Most of those probably should be in mental institutions receiving proper medical care. Some may be so damaged as human beings that repentance is too remote and they are too dangerous to be free. But MOST (about 75%) of our prisoners are in jail for what can only be described has PETTY crimes--drug possession, drug trading, prostitution, relatively minor theft--all in all, they are in prison for being POOR. It is difficult even to say WHOM they owe repentance to, but "sack cloth and ashes" for them would certainly be more useful, more productive, more creative, more healing and more reasonable than warehousing them in torturous prisons! And even those who have committed an actual serious injury--assault, armed robbery, rape, even murder--CAN be redeemed, with the proper attitude of society that injury needs to be HEALED, not shoved away in a dungeon (nor avenged with more murder).

Thus, these measures in Guatemala and other Latin American countries, to heal wounds, such as the CIA overthrow of the Arbenz goverment--though they, of course, do not include "sack cloth and ashes" for the remote perps, and, in some cases (as in Guatemala) no conviction of the local perps--are the right idea, or are at least headed in the right direction. These are vast injuries--to everyone, to society--and need to be acknowledged and repented.