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From: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
Date: Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 10:52 PM
Subject: Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities
To: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities
By Robert Parry
February 6, 2011
When you're listening to the many tributes to President Ronald Reagan, often
for his talent making Americans feel better about themselves, you might want
to spend a minute thinking about the many atrocities in Latin America and
elsewhere that Reagan aided, covered up or shrugged off in his inimitable
"aw shucks" manner.
After all, the true measure of a president shouldn't be his style or how he
made us feel but rather what he did with his extraordinary power, what were
the consequences for real people, either for good or ill.
Yet, even as the United States celebrates Reagan's centennial birthday and
lavishes praise on his supposed accomplishments, very little time has been
spent reflecting on the unnecessary bloodbaths that Reagan enabled in many
parts of the world.
Those grisly deaths and ugly tortures get whisked away as if they were just
small necessities in Reagan's larger success "winning the Cold War" - even
though the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was
already winding down before Reagan arrived on the national scene. [See
Consortiumnews.com's "Reagan's 'Tear Down This Wall' Myth
<http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/012911.html> ."]
Yet, Reagan's Cold War obsessions helped unleash right-wing "death squads"
and murderous militaries on the common people in many parts of the Third
World, but nowhere worse than in Latin America.
In the 1970s and 1980s, as Latin American security forces were sharpening
themselves into finely honed killing machines, Reagan was there as an ardent
defender, making excuses for the atrocities, and sending money and equipment
to make the forces even more lethal.
For instance, in the late 1970s, when Argentina's dictators were inventing a
new state-terror program called "disappearances" - the unacknowledged
murders of dissidents - Reagan was making himself useful as a columnist
deflecting the human rights complaints coming from the Carter
administration.
At the time, Argentina's security forces were rounding up tens of thousands
of political opponents who became subjects of ingenious torture techniques
often followed by mass killings, including a favorite method that involved
shackling naked prisoners together, loading them onto a plane, piloting the
plane out to sea and shoving them through the plane's door, like sausage
links.
However, since Argentina's rightists were devout Catholics, they had a
special twist when the prisoners were pregnant women. The expectant mothers
would be kept alive until they reached full term and then were subjected to
either induced labor or Caesarian sections.
The babies were handed out to military families and the new mothers were
loaded aboard the death planes to be dumped out over the sea to drown. The
children were sometimes raised by their mothers' murderers. [See
Consortiumnews.com's "Argentina's Dapper State Terrorist
<http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/122910b.html> " or "Baby-Snatching:
Argentina's Dirty War Secret.
<http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story44.html> "]
As ghastly as Argentina's "dirty war" was, it had an ardent defender in
Ronald Reagan, who used his newspaper column to chide President Jimmy
Carter's human rights coordinator, Patricia Derian, for berating the
Argentine junta.
Reagan joshed that Derian should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the
Argentine generals before criticizing them. [For details, see Martin Edwin
Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]
Sympathizing with Torturers
So, there was good reason for the right-wing oligarchs and their security
services to celebrate when Reagan was elected president in November 1980.
They knew they would enjoy a new era of impunity as they tortured, raped and
murdered their political opponents.
Even before Reagan took office, four American churchwomen in El Salvador
were kidnapped by elements of the right-wing Salvadoran military. Because
the women were suspected of harboring leftist sympathies, they were raped
and executed with high-powered bullets to their brains, before their bodies
were stuffed into shallow graves.
The incoming Reagan administration was soon making excuses for the
Salvadoran killers, including comments from Reagan's U.N. Ambassador Jeane
Kirkpatrick and Secretary of State Alexander Haig.
The brutal Argentine generals also got a royal welcome when they visited
Washington. Kirkpatrick feted them at an elegant state dinner.
More substantively, Reagan authorized CIA collaboration with the Argentine
intelligence service for training and arming the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel
force created to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. The
Contras were soon implicated in human rights atrocities of their own.
Torture was also on the Reagan's administration's menu for political
enemies. A 2004 CIA Inspector General's report, examining the CIA's abusive
"war on terror" interrogations under President George W. Bush, noted the spy
agency's past "intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals
whose interests are opposed to those of the United States."
The report noted "a resurgence in interest" in teaching these techniques in
the early 1980s "to foster foreign liaison relationships." The report said,
"because of political sensitivities," the CIA's top brass in the 1980s
"forbade Agency officers from using the word 'interrogation" and substituted
the phrase "human resources exploitation" in training programs for allied
intelligence agencies.
Euphemisms aside, the CIA Inspector General cited a 1984 investigation of
alleged "misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in
interrogations and the death of one individual." In 1984, the CIA also was
faced with a scandal over an "assassination manual" prepared by agency
personnel for the Nicaraguan Contras.
While the IG report's references to this earlier era were brief - and the
abuses are little-remembered features of Ronald Reagan's glorified
presidency - there have been other glimpses into how Reagan unleashed this
earlier "dark side" on the peasants, workers and students of Central
America. Arguably, the worst of these "dirty wars" was inflicted on the
people of Guatemala.
Genocide in Guatemala
After taking office in 1981, Reagan pushed to overturn an arms embargo that
Carter had imposed on Guatemala for its wretched human rights record. Yet
even as Reagan moved to loosen up the military aid ban, U.S. intelligence
agencies were confirming new Guatemalan government massacres.
In April 1981, a secret CIA cable described a massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj
in the Ixil Indian territory. On April 17, 1981, government troops attacked
the area believed to support leftist guerrillas, the cable said.
According to a CIA source, "the social population appeared to fully support
the guerrillas" and "the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that
moved." The CIA cable added that "the Guatemalan authorities admitted that
'many civilians' were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were
non-combatants."
Despite the CIA account and other similar reports, Reagan permitted
Guatemala's army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June
1981. To permit the sale, Reagan removed the vehicles from a list of
military equipment that was covered by the human rights embargo.
Confident of Reagan's sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its
political repression without apology.
According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, Guatemalan leaders
met with Reagan's roving ambassador, retired Gen. Vernon Walters, and left
no doubt about their plans. Guatemala's military leader, Gen. Fernando Romeo
Lucas Garcia, "made clear that his government will continue as before - that
the repression will continue."
Human rights groups saw the same grisly picture. The Inter-American Human
Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan
government for "thousands of illegal executions." [Washington Post, Oct. 16,
1981]
But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the ugly scene. A
State Department "white paper," released in December 1981, blamed the
violence on leftist "extremist groups" and their "terrorist methods,"
inspired and supported by Cuba's Fidel Castro.
More Massacres
Yet, even as these rationalizations were pitched to the American people,
U.S. intelligence agencies in Guatemala continued to learn of
government-sponsored massacres.
One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the
so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province.
"The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to
destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army
of the Poor [known as the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance," the
report stated. "Since the operation began, several villages have been burned
to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been
killed."
The CIA report explained the army's modus operandi: "When an army patrol
meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that
the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed."
When the army encountered an empty village, it was "assumed to have been
supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly
thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to. ...
"The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian
population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be
expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."
In March 1982, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup d'etat. An
avowed fundamentalist Christian, he immediately impressed Official
Washington with his piety. Reagan hailed Rios Montt as "a man of great
personal integrity."
By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign
called "rifles and beans." The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get
"beans," while all others could expect to be the target of army "rifles."
In October 1982, Rios Montt secretly gave carte blanche to the feared
"Archivos" intelligence unit to expand "death squad" operations, internal
U.S. government cables revealed.
Defending Rios Montt
Despite the widespread evidence of Guatemalan government atrocities cited in
the internal U.S. government cables, political operatives for the Reagan
administration sought to conceal the crimes. On Oct. 22, 1982, for instance,
the U.S. Embassy claimed the Guatemalan government was the victim of a
communist-inspired "disinformation campaign."
Reagan personally took that position in December 1982 when he met with Rios
Montt and claimed that his regime was getting a "bum rap" on human rights.
On Jan. 7, 1983, Reagan lifted the ban on military aid to Guatemala,
authorizing the sale of $6 million in military hardware, including spare
parts for UH-1H helicopters and A-37 aircraft used in counterinsurgency
operations.
State Department spokesman John Hughes said the sales were justified because
political violence in the cities had "declined dramatically" and that rural
conditions had improved, too.
In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in "suspect
right-wing violence" with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of
victims were appearing in ditches and gullies.
CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt's order to the
"Archivos" the previous October to "apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose
of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit."
Despite these ugly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human
rights survey sugarcoated the facts for the American public and praised the
supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala.
"The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year"
1982, the report stated.
A different picture - far closer to the secret information held by the U.S.
government - was coming from independent human rights investigators. On
March 17, 1983, Americas Watch representatives condemned the Guatemalan army
for human rights atrocities against the Indian population.
New York attorney Stephen L. Kass cited proof that the government carried
out "virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm
regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents."
Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution,
Kass said. Children were "thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the
air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being
picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are
destroyed." [AP, March 17, 1983]
'Positive Changes'
Publicly, however, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face.
On June 12, 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised "positive changes"
in Rios Montt's government. But Rios Montt's vengeful Christian
fundamentalism was hurtling out of control, even by Guatemalan standards. In
August 1983, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores seized power in another coup.
Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to kill anyone
deemed a subversive or a terrorist.
When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International
Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin
suspected that "Archivos" hit squads were sending a message to the United
States to back off even the mild pressure for human rights.
In late November 1983, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration
postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month,
however, Reagan sent the spare parts anyway. In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too,
in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the
Guatemalan army.
By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army's stubborn
brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named
Alberto Piedra, who was all for increased military assistance to Guatemala.
In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan's
State Department "is apparently more concerned with improving Guatemala's
image than in improving its human rights."
Other examples of Guatemala's "death squad" strategy came to light later.
For example, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cable in 1994 reported that
the Guatemalan military had used an air base in Retalhuleu during the
mid-1980s as a center for coordinating the counterinsurgency campaign in
southwest Guatemala - and for torturing and burying prisoners.
At the base, pits were filled with water to hold captured suspects.
"Reportedly there were cages over the pits and the water level was such that
the individuals held within them were forced to hold on to the bars in order
to keep their heads above water and avoid drowning," the DIA report stated.
The Guatemalan military used the Pacific Ocean as another dumping spot for
political victims, according to the DIA report.
Bodies of insurgents tortured to death and live prisoners marked for
"disappearance" were loaded onto planes that flew out over the ocean where
the soldiers would shove the victims into the water to drown, a tactic that
had been a favorite disposal technique of the Argentine military in the
1970s.
The history of the Retalhuleu death camp was uncovered by accident in the
early 1990s when a Guatemalan officer wanted to let soldiers cultivate their
own vegetables on a corner of the base. But the officer was taken aside and
told to drop the request "because the locations he had wanted to cultivate
were burial sites that had been used by the D-2 [military intelligence]
during the mid-eighties," the DIA report said.
'Perception Management'
Guatemala, of course, was not the only Central American country where Reagan
and his administration supported brutal counterinsurgency and paramilitary
operations -- and then sought to cover up the bloody facts.
Deception of the American public - a strategy that the administration called
"perception management" - was as much a part of Reagan's Central American
activities as the Bush administration's lies and distortions about weapons
of mass destruction were to the lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003.
Reagan's falsification of the historical record became a hallmark of the
conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala. In one case,
Reagan personally lashed out at a human rights investigator named Reed
Brody, a New York lawyer who had collected affidavits from more than 100
witnesses to atrocities carried out by the U.S.-supported Contras in
Nicaragua.
Angered by the revelations about his beloved Contras, Reagan denounced Brody
in a speech on April 15, 1985, calling him "one of dictator [Daniel]
Ortega's supporters, a sympathizer who has openly embraced Sandinismo."
Privately, Reagan had a far more accurate understanding of the true nature
of the Contras. At one point in the Contra war, Reagan turned to CIA
official Duane Clarridge and demanded that the Contras be used to destroy
some Soviet-supplied helicopters that had arrived in Nicaragua.
Clarridge recalled that "President Reagan pulled me aside and asked, 'Dewey,
can't you get those vandals of yours to do this job.'" [See Clarridge's A
Spy for All Seasons.]
On Feb. 25, 1999, a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the
staggering human rights crimes that Reagan and his administration had aided,
abetted and concealed.
The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body,
estimated that the Guatemalan 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.
Mayan Exterminations
The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their
livestock and crops," the report said. In the northern highlands, the report
termed the slaughter "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
[of these] 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," Tomuschat said.
During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President Bill Clinton
apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala.
"For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support
for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and
widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that
mistake," Clinton said.
Though Clinton admitted that U.S. policy in Guatemala was "wrong" -- and the
evidence of a U.S.-backed "genocide" might have been considered startling --
the news was treated mostly as a one-day story in the U.S. press. It
prompted no panel discussions on the cable news shows that were then
obsessed with Clinton's personal life.
But there was another factor in the disinterest. By the late 1990s, Ronald
Reagan had been transformed into a national icon, with the
Republican-controlled Congress attaching his name to public buildings around
the country and to National Airport in Washington.
Democrats mostly approached this deification of Reagan as harmless, an easy
concession to the Republicans in the name of bipartisanship. Some Democrats
would even try to cite Reagan as supportive of some of their positions as a
way to protect themselves from attacks launched by the increasingly powerful
right-wing news media.
The Democratic goal of looking to the future, not the past, had negative
consequences, however. With Reagan and his brutal policies put beyond
serious criticism, the path was left open for President George W. Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney to return to the "dark side" after the 9/11
attacks, authorizing torture and extrajudicial killings.
Now, Reagan's "greatness" is being sealed by the elaborate celebrations in
honor of his 100th birthday, including a special homage paid during the
Super Bowl. In recent days, commentators, like MSNBC's Chris Matthews, have
scrambled to position themselves as Reagan's admirers, all the better to
protect their careers.
But amid all the extravagant hoopla and teary tributes to the late
president, perhaps some Americans will stop and think of all the decent
people in Latin America and elsewhere who died horrible and unnecessary
deaths as Ronald Reagan cheerily defended their murderers.
[Many of the declassified Guatemalan documents have been posted on the
Internet by the National Security Archive
<http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB32/vol2.html> .]
http://consortiumnews.com/2011/020611.html
Sw
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From: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
Date: Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 10:52 PM
Subject: Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities
To: ShunkW <shunkw@sbcglobal.net>
Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities
By Robert Parry
February 6, 2011
When you're listening to the many tributes to President Ronald Reagan, often
for his talent making Americans feel better about themselves, you might want
to spend a minute thinking about the many atrocities in Latin America and
elsewhere that Reagan aided, covered up or shrugged off in his inimitable
"aw shucks" manner.
After all, the true measure of a president shouldn't be his style or how he
made us feel but rather what he did with his extraordinary power, what were
the consequences for real people, either for good or ill.
Yet, even as the United States celebrates Reagan's centennial birthday and
lavishes praise on his supposed accomplishments, very little time has been
spent reflecting on the unnecessary bloodbaths that Reagan enabled in many
parts of the world.
Those grisly deaths and ugly tortures get whisked away as if they were just
small necessities in Reagan's larger success "winning the Cold War" - even
though the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was
already winding down before Reagan arrived on the national scene. [See
Consortiumnews.com's "Reagan's 'Tear Down This Wall' Myth
<http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/012911.html> ."]
Yet, Reagan's Cold War obsessions helped unleash right-wing "death squads"
and murderous militaries on the common people in many parts of the Third
World, but nowhere worse than in Latin America.
In the 1970s and 1980s, as Latin American security forces were sharpening
themselves into finely honed killing machines, Reagan was there as an ardent
defender, making excuses for the atrocities, and sending money and equipment
to make the forces even more lethal.
For instance, in the late 1970s, when Argentina's dictators were inventing a
new state-terror program called "disappearances" - the unacknowledged
murders of dissidents - Reagan was making himself useful as a columnist
deflecting the human rights complaints coming from the Carter
administration.
At the time, Argentina's security forces were rounding up tens of thousands
of political opponents who became subjects of ingenious torture techniques
often followed by mass killings, including a favorite method that involved
shackling naked prisoners together, loading them onto a plane, piloting the
plane out to sea and shoving them through the plane's door, like sausage
links.
However, since Argentina's rightists were devout Catholics, they had a
special twist when the prisoners were pregnant women. The expectant mothers
would be kept alive until they reached full term and then were subjected to
either induced labor or Caesarian sections.
The babies were handed out to military families and the new mothers were
loaded aboard the death planes to be dumped out over the sea to drown. The
children were sometimes raised by their mothers' murderers. [See
Consortiumnews.com's "Argentina's Dapper State Terrorist
<http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/122910b.html> " or "Baby-Snatching:
Argentina's Dirty War Secret.
<http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story44.html> "]
As ghastly as Argentina's "dirty war" was, it had an ardent defender in
Ronald Reagan, who used his newspaper column to chide President Jimmy
Carter's human rights coordinator, Patricia Derian, for berating the
Argentine junta.
Reagan joshed that Derian should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the
Argentine generals before criticizing them. [For details, see Martin Edwin
Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]
Sympathizing with Torturers
So, there was good reason for the right-wing oligarchs and their security
services to celebrate when Reagan was elected president in November 1980.
They knew they would enjoy a new era of impunity as they tortured, raped and
murdered their political opponents.
Even before Reagan took office, four American churchwomen in El Salvador
were kidnapped by elements of the right-wing Salvadoran military. Because
the women were suspected of harboring leftist sympathies, they were raped
and executed with high-powered bullets to their brains, before their bodies
were stuffed into shallow graves.
The incoming Reagan administration was soon making excuses for the
Salvadoran killers, including comments from Reagan's U.N. Ambassador Jeane
Kirkpatrick and Secretary of State Alexander Haig.
The brutal Argentine generals also got a royal welcome when they visited
Washington. Kirkpatrick feted them at an elegant state dinner.
More substantively, Reagan authorized CIA collaboration with the Argentine
intelligence service for training and arming the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel
force created to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. The
Contras were soon implicated in human rights atrocities of their own.
Torture was also on the Reagan's administration's menu for political
enemies. A 2004 CIA Inspector General's report, examining the CIA's abusive
"war on terror" interrogations under President George W. Bush, noted the spy
agency's past "intermittent involvement in the interrogation of individuals
whose interests are opposed to those of the United States."
The report noted "a resurgence in interest" in teaching these techniques in
the early 1980s "to foster foreign liaison relationships." The report said,
"because of political sensitivities," the CIA's top brass in the 1980s
"forbade Agency officers from using the word 'interrogation" and substituted
the phrase "human resources exploitation" in training programs for allied
intelligence agencies.
Euphemisms aside, the CIA Inspector General cited a 1984 investigation of
alleged "misconduct on the part of two Agency officers who were involved in
interrogations and the death of one individual." In 1984, the CIA also was
faced with a scandal over an "assassination manual" prepared by agency
personnel for the Nicaraguan Contras.
While the IG report's references to this earlier era were brief - and the
abuses are little-remembered features of Ronald Reagan's glorified
presidency - there have been other glimpses into how Reagan unleashed this
earlier "dark side" on the peasants, workers and students of Central
America. Arguably, the worst of these "dirty wars" was inflicted on the
people of Guatemala.
Genocide in Guatemala
After taking office in 1981, Reagan pushed to overturn an arms embargo that
Carter had imposed on Guatemala for its wretched human rights record. Yet
even as Reagan moved to loosen up the military aid ban, U.S. intelligence
agencies were confirming new Guatemalan government massacres.
In April 1981, a secret CIA cable described a massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj
in the Ixil Indian territory. On April 17, 1981, government troops attacked
the area believed to support leftist guerrillas, the cable said.
According to a CIA source, "the social population appeared to fully support
the guerrillas" and "the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that
moved." The CIA cable added that "the Guatemalan authorities admitted that
'many civilians' were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were
non-combatants."
Despite the CIA account and other similar reports, Reagan permitted
Guatemala's army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June
1981. To permit the sale, Reagan removed the vehicles from a list of
military equipment that was covered by the human rights embargo.
Confident of Reagan's sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its
political repression without apology.
According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, Guatemalan leaders
met with Reagan's roving ambassador, retired Gen. Vernon Walters, and left
no doubt about their plans. Guatemala's military leader, Gen. Fernando Romeo
Lucas Garcia, "made clear that his government will continue as before - that
the repression will continue."
Human rights groups saw the same grisly picture. The Inter-American Human
Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan
government for "thousands of illegal executions." [Washington Post, Oct. 16,
1981]
But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the ugly scene. A
State Department "white paper," released in December 1981, blamed the
violence on leftist "extremist groups" and their "terrorist methods,"
inspired and supported by Cuba's Fidel Castro.
More Massacres
Yet, even as these rationalizations were pitched to the American people,
U.S. intelligence agencies in Guatemala continued to learn of
government-sponsored massacres.
One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the
so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province.
"The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to
destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army
of the Poor [known as the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance," the
report stated. "Since the operation began, several villages have been burned
to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been
killed."
The CIA report explained the army's modus operandi: "When an army patrol
meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that
the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed."
When the army encountered an empty village, it was "assumed to have been
supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly
thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to. ...
"The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian
population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be
expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."
In March 1982, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup d'etat. An
avowed fundamentalist Christian, he immediately impressed Official
Washington with his piety. Reagan hailed Rios Montt as "a man of great
personal integrity."
By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign
called "rifles and beans." The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get
"beans," while all others could expect to be the target of army "rifles."
In October 1982, Rios Montt secretly gave carte blanche to the feared
"Archivos" intelligence unit to expand "death squad" operations, internal
U.S. government cables revealed.
Defending Rios Montt
Despite the widespread evidence of Guatemalan government atrocities cited in
the internal U.S. government cables, political operatives for the Reagan
administration sought to conceal the crimes. On Oct. 22, 1982, for instance,
the U.S. Embassy claimed the Guatemalan government was the victim of a
communist-inspired "disinformation campaign."
Reagan personally took that position in December 1982 when he met with Rios
Montt and claimed that his regime was getting a "bum rap" on human rights.
On Jan. 7, 1983, Reagan lifted the ban on military aid to Guatemala,
authorizing the sale of $6 million in military hardware, including spare
parts for UH-1H helicopters and A-37 aircraft used in counterinsurgency
operations.
State Department spokesman John Hughes said the sales were justified because
political violence in the cities had "declined dramatically" and that rural
conditions had improved, too.
In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in "suspect
right-wing violence" with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of
victims were appearing in ditches and gullies.
CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt's order to the
"Archivos" the previous October to "apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose
of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit."
Despite these ugly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human
rights survey sugarcoated the facts for the American public and praised the
supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala.
"The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year"
1982, the report stated.
A different picture - far closer to the secret information held by the U.S.
government - was coming from independent human rights investigators. On
March 17, 1983, Americas Watch representatives condemned the Guatemalan army
for human rights atrocities against the Indian population.
New York attorney Stephen L. Kass cited proof that the government carried
out "virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm
regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents."
Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution,
Kass said. Children were "thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the
air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being
picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are
destroyed." [AP, March 17, 1983]
'Positive Changes'
Publicly, however, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face.
On June 12, 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised "positive changes"
in Rios Montt's government. But Rios Montt's vengeful Christian
fundamentalism was hurtling out of control, even by Guatemalan standards. In
August 1983, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores seized power in another coup.
Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to kill anyone
deemed a subversive or a terrorist.
When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International
Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin
suspected that "Archivos" hit squads were sending a message to the United
States to back off even the mild pressure for human rights.
In late November 1983, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration
postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month,
however, Reagan sent the spare parts anyway. In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too,
in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the
Guatemalan army.
By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army's stubborn
brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named
Alberto Piedra, who was all for increased military assistance to Guatemala.
In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan's
State Department "is apparently more concerned with improving Guatemala's
image than in improving its human rights."
Other examples of Guatemala's "death squad" strategy came to light later.
For example, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cable in 1994 reported that
the Guatemalan military had used an air base in Retalhuleu during the
mid-1980s as a center for coordinating the counterinsurgency campaign in
southwest Guatemala - and for torturing and burying prisoners.
At the base, pits were filled with water to hold captured suspects.
"Reportedly there were cages over the pits and the water level was such that
the individuals held within them were forced to hold on to the bars in order
to keep their heads above water and avoid drowning," the DIA report stated.
The Guatemalan military used the Pacific Ocean as another dumping spot for
political victims, according to the DIA report.
Bodies of insurgents tortured to death and live prisoners marked for
"disappearance" were loaded onto planes that flew out over the ocean where
the soldiers would shove the victims into the water to drown, a tactic that
had been a favorite disposal technique of the Argentine military in the
1970s.
The history of the Retalhuleu death camp was uncovered by accident in the
early 1990s when a Guatemalan officer wanted to let soldiers cultivate their
own vegetables on a corner of the base. But the officer was taken aside and
told to drop the request "because the locations he had wanted to cultivate
were burial sites that had been used by the D-2 [military intelligence]
during the mid-eighties," the DIA report said.
'Perception Management'
Guatemala, of course, was not the only Central American country where Reagan
and his administration supported brutal counterinsurgency and paramilitary
operations -- and then sought to cover up the bloody facts.
Deception of the American public - a strategy that the administration called
"perception management" - was as much a part of Reagan's Central American
activities as the Bush administration's lies and distortions about weapons
of mass destruction were to the lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003.
Reagan's falsification of the historical record became a hallmark of the
conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala. In one case,
Reagan personally lashed out at a human rights investigator named Reed
Brody, a New York lawyer who had collected affidavits from more than 100
witnesses to atrocities carried out by the U.S.-supported Contras in
Nicaragua.
Angered by the revelations about his beloved Contras, Reagan denounced Brody
in a speech on April 15, 1985, calling him "one of dictator [Daniel]
Ortega's supporters, a sympathizer who has openly embraced Sandinismo."
Privately, Reagan had a far more accurate understanding of the true nature
of the Contras. At one point in the Contra war, Reagan turned to CIA
official Duane Clarridge and demanded that the Contras be used to destroy
some Soviet-supplied helicopters that had arrived in Nicaragua.
Clarridge recalled that "President Reagan pulled me aside and asked, 'Dewey,
can't you get those vandals of yours to do this job.'" [See Clarridge's A
Spy for All Seasons.]
On Feb. 25, 1999, a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the
staggering human rights crimes that Reagan and his administration had aided,
abetted and concealed.
The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body,
estimated that the Guatemalan 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.
Mayan Exterminations
The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their
livestock and crops," the report said. In the northern highlands, the report
termed the slaughter "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
[of these] 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," Tomuschat said.
During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President Bill Clinton
apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala.
"For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support
for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and
widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that
mistake," Clinton said.
Though Clinton admitted that U.S. policy in Guatemala was "wrong" -- and the
evidence of a U.S.-backed "genocide" might have been considered startling --
the news was treated mostly as a one-day story in the U.S. press. It
prompted no panel discussions on the cable news shows that were then
obsessed with Clinton's personal life.
But there was another factor in the disinterest. By the late 1990s, Ronald
Reagan had been transformed into a national icon, with the
Republican-controlled Congress attaching his name to public buildings around
the country and to National Airport in Washington.
Democrats mostly approached this deification of Reagan as harmless, an easy
concession to the Republicans in the name of bipartisanship. Some Democrats
would even try to cite Reagan as supportive of some of their positions as a
way to protect themselves from attacks launched by the increasingly powerful
right-wing news media.
The Democratic goal of looking to the future, not the past, had negative
consequences, however. With Reagan and his brutal policies put beyond
serious criticism, the path was left open for President George W. Bush and
Vice President Dick Cheney to return to the "dark side" after the 9/11
attacks, authorizing torture and extrajudicial killings.
Now, Reagan's "greatness" is being sealed by the elaborate celebrations in
honor of his 100th birthday, including a special homage paid during the
Super Bowl. In recent days, commentators, like MSNBC's Chris Matthews, have
scrambled to position themselves as Reagan's admirers, all the better to
protect their careers.
But amid all the extravagant hoopla and teary tributes to the late
president, perhaps some Americans will stop and think of all the decent
people in Latin America and elsewhere who died horrible and unnecessary
deaths as Ronald Reagan cheerily defended their murderers.
[Many of the declassified Guatemalan documents have been posted on the
Internet by the National Security Archive
<http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB32/vol2.html> .]
http://consortiumnews.com/2011/020611.html
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Palash Biswas
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