User:Ultramarine/Sandbox

Guatemala

Further information: [[:History of Guatemala, Operation PBSUCCESS, CIA sponsored regime change, Church Committee]]

Background

The Guatemala Civil War was predominantly fought between the government of Guatemala and insurgents between 1960 and 1996.

In 1999, the independent Guatemalan Truth Commission (the "Historical Clarification Commission") issued a report. Among the report's conclusions were

...estimate[s] 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% of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93% of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved....the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages... [which] "eliminated entire Mayan villages... completely exterminat[ing] Mayan communities, destroy[ing] their livestock and crops."

— Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com

The report went on to term the Guatemalan military's campaign in the northern highlands a "genocide," and noted that 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 Guatemalan Government accused Cuba of supporting the insurgents.[1]

Guatemala was theoretically democratic for much of this period.

The Polity data series, a widely used ranking of the degree of democracy, ranks Guatemala, on a scale from -10 to 10, as follows:

• 1944-1950 5
• 1950-1954 2 Coup against Jacobo Arbenz in 1954
• 1954-1958 -6
• 1958-1966 -5
• 1966-1970 3
• 1970-1974 1
• 1974-1978 -3
• 1978-1982 -5
• 1982-1984 -7 Military dictatorship under Efraín Ríos Montt in 1982-83
• 1984-1985 -6
• 1986-1996 3
• 1996-2003 8 After the civil war

US involvement

Declassified CIA documents show that the United States was instrumental in organizing, funding, and equipping the coup which toppled the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954. Analysts Kate Doyle and Peter Kornbluh note that "After a small insurgency developed in the wake of the coup, Guatemala's military leaders developed and refined, with U.S. assistance, a massive counterinsurgency campaign that left tens of thousands massacred, maimed or missing."

After the U.S.-backed coup, which toppled president Jacobo Arbenz, lead coup plotter Castillo Armas assumed power. Author and university professor, Patrice McSherry argues that with Armas at the head of government, "the United States began to militarize Guatemala almost immediately, financing and reorganizing the police and military." Human rights expert Michael McClintock has argued that the national security apparatus Armas presided over was “almost entirely oriented toward countering subversion,” and that the key component of that apparatus was “an intelligence system set up by the United States.” At the core of this intelligence system were records of communist party members, pro-Arbenz organizations, teacher associations, and peasant unions which were used to create a detailed “Black List” with names and information about some 70,000 individuals that were viewed as potential subversives. It was “CIA counter-intelligence officers who sorted the records and determined how they could be put to use.” McClintock argues that this list persisted as an index of subversives for several decades and probably served as a database of possible targets for the counter-insurgency campaign that began in the early 1960s.

Guerrilla unrest in Guatemala started in 1960, which in 1962 led President John F. Kennedy to approve a “pacification program aimed at the most rebellious provinces…including both ‘civic action’ programs such as digging wells and building clinics and a sharp increase in military assistance.” Patrice McSherry argues that after a successful (U.S. backed) coup against president Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes in 1963, U.S. advisors began to work with Colonel Carlos Manuel Arana Osorio to defeat the guerrillas, borrowing “extensively from current counterinsurgency strategies and technology being employed in Vietnam.” Between the years of 1966-68 alone some 8,000 peasants were murdered by the U.S. trained forces of Colonel Arana Osorio. Arana Osorio earned the nickname "The Butcher of Zacapa" for killing 15,000 peasants to eliminate 300 suspected rebels. [2] McClintock argues that “counter-insurgency doctrine, as imparted by the United States civil and military assistance agencies, had a tremendous influence on Guatemala’s security system and a devastating impact on Guatemala’s people.” He notes:

United States counter-insurgency doctrine encouraged the Guatemalan military to adopt both new organizational forms and new techniques in order to root out insurgency more effectively. New techniques would revolve around a central precept of the new counter-insurgency: that counter insurgent war must be waged free of restriction by laws, by the rules of war, or moral considerations: guerrilla “terror” could be defeated only by the untrammeled use of “counter-terror”, the terrorism of the state.

— Michael McClintock

This idea was also articulated by Colonel John Webber, the chief of the U.S. Military Mission in Guatemala, who reportedly instigated the technique of “counter-terror.” Colonel Webber defended his policy by saying, “That’s the way this country is. The Communists are using everything they have, including terror. And it must be met.”

According to the Center for International Policy, "The CIA established a liaison relationship with Guatemalan security services widely known to have reprehensible human rights records, and it continued covert aid after the cutoff of overt military aid in 1990. This liaison relationship and continued covert aid occurred with the knowledge of the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Congressional oversight committees. Contrary to public allegations, CIA did not increase covert funding for Guatemala to compensate for the cut-off of military aid in 1990."

Utilizing a series of formerly secret government documents, George Washington University historians Kate Doyle and Carlos Osorio, document U.S. training, cooperation and political support of Guatemalan Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, despite U.S. Department of State and CIA knowledge of his frequent command of and/or participation in extra-judicial killings, kidnappings and civilian massacres. Colonel Estrada would eventually rise to command D-2, the Guatemalan Military Intelligence services who were responsible for many of the terror tactics wielded throughout the 1980s against the Guatemalan people.

In 1999, the Guatemalan Truth Commission (the "Historical Clarification Commission") issued a damning report which, among other things, clearly stated that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some of these state operations."

In their 1998 "Report On Guatemala" Rolando Alecio and Ruth Taylor condemn the "legacy of state terror" the nation has inherited from the U.S.-backed and -trained military. Similarly,

Recent disclosures have revealed the extent of U.S. support for the Guatemalan army despite its reputation as the most repressive military in Latin America. For years Guatemala's elite military officers have been trained in the United States, and at any given time dozens are on the CIA payroll.

— Minor Sinclair, the Sojourner

Writing for The Nation, in 1995 Allan Nairn argued that "North American C.l. A. operatives [were] work[ing] inside a Guatemalan Army unit that maintain[ed] a network of torture centers and ha[d] killed thousands of Guatemalan civilians." Nairn stated that Gramajos was a CIA asset and receiving pay from them, and he linked Gramajos to the early 1980s highland massacres.

"We have created a more humanitarian, less costly strategy, to be more compatible with the democratic system ... which provides development for 70% of the population while we kill 30%. Before, the strategy was to kill 100%."

— General Gramajo, while at Harvard

Professor Gareau argues that the School of the Americas, a U.S. Army institution where Gramajo-Morales trained as a young officer and taught in later life, is a terrorist training ground. He notes a UN report which states the school has "graduated 500 of the worst human rights abusers in the hemisphere." He further argues that people protesting against the school are frequently beaten and arrested, "By the year 2002, 71 demonstrators had served a total of 40 years of jail time for protesting in front of the School of the Americas". This includes an 88 year old nun. Gareau claims that by funding, training and supervising Guatemalan 'Death Squads' Washington was complicit in state terrorism. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, expands on this by stating: "In particular, the U.S. client regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala regularly massacred their own populations, slaughtering over 100,000 civilians during the 1980s and into the beginning of 1990s. Yet the U.S. continued to sponsor such terrorism, propping up the dictatorships responsible for such violence while actively helping them carry it out..."

Defenders of the former School of the Americas (reorganized as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001) argue that no school should be held accountable for the actions of only some of its many graduates. Before coming to WHINSEC each student is “vetted” by his/her nation and the U.S. embassy in that country. All students are now required to receive "human rights training in law, ethics, rule of law and practical applications in military and police operations."

A 1996 report on CIA's action in Guatemala by the Intelligence Oversight Board states that:

The CIA's successes in Guatemala in conjunction with other U.S. agencies, particularly in uncovering and working to counter coups and in reducing the narcotics flow, were at times dramatic and very much in the national interests of both the United States and Guatemala.

The report also states "Relations between the U.S. and Guatemalan governments came under strain in 1977, when the Carter administration issued its first annual human rights report on Guatemala. The Guatemalan government rejected that report's negative assessment and refused U.S. military aid." Relations between the two countries warmed in the mid-1980s the Reagan administration's covert funding of several wars in Central America. In December 1990, however, the Bush administration suspended almost all overt military aid."

The human rights records of the Guatemalan security services — the D-2 and the Department of Presidential Security (known informally as "Archivos," after one of its predecessor organizations) — were generally known to have been reprehensible by all who were familiar with Guatemala. U.S. policy-makers knew of both the CIA's liaison with them and the services' unsavory reputations. The CIA endeavored to improve the behavior of the Guatemalan services through frequent and close contact and by stressing the importance of human rights — insisting, for example, that Guatemalan military intelligence training include human rights instruction. The station officers assigned to Guatemala and the CIA headquarters officials whom we interviewed believe that the CIA's contact with the Guatemalan services helped improve attitudes towards human rights. Several indices of human rights observance indeed reflected improvement — whether or not this was due to CIA efforts — but egregious violations continued, and some of the station's closest contacts in the security services remained a part of the problem.

— Anthony S. Harrington et al, Report on the Guatemala Review