Guatemala's
Election, Saturday, and the Ending of Latin America's Worst
Murder Story
By JONATHAN
POWER
November 3. 1999
LONDON- On Saturday, Guatemala will hold its first
general election since the signing of the peace agreement in
December 1996 which ended a 36 year long civil war that
claimed the lives of some 200,000 people, many of them
victims of army death squads.
For most of the indigenous Indian population, who have
been at the brunt end of the violence, it will seem like a
non-event. They have a choice between two parties of the
right. One is close to business; the other to the army.
Turnout is likely to be low.
Yet the election is significant. It takes this mercurial
country - the one that its Nobel laureate for literature,
Miguel Angel Asturias, described in 1920 as "steeped in
violence"- one more step away from its terrible past.
Of course, so many countries in Latin America have been
consumed by violent uprisings and savage army repression
over the last few decades that it seems perhaps difficult to
single out hell's kitchen. But, undoubtedly, Guatemala is
it. The violence there never reached the crescendo it did in
the cities of El Salvador. Nor did as many intellectuals
"disappear" as in Chile and Argentina. Nor has civil war
gone on for as long as in Colombia. Nor has there been the
single-minded control from one man as in Cuba. But no other
country can match it for the long term, systematic
assassinations and torture practised by its armed forces,
practised as a form of ethnic intimidation of the
Mayans.
I made my first visit to Guatemala in 1981, inspired, if
that is the word, by a conversation I had recently had with
Thomas Hammarberg, the then Secretary General of Amnesty
International. I'd asked him which was the worst country on
his books. Without missing a beat he replied,"Guatemala".
"How many political prisoners do you have listed?", I asked.
"We have none", he replied quietly, " in Guatemala there are
only political killings".
On that trip, with the aid of Amnesty International, I
traced the source of the political killings to an annex of
the presidential palace and compiled a great deal of
evidence that the then president, General Garcia Lucas,
directed the whole repressive apparatus personally. Most of
these murders were most definitely not the result of free
lance death squads, as the propaganda of the government -
and of a concurring American embassy - suggested.
My findings appeared prominently on the editorial pages
of the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.
I might as well have published them in my old school
magazine. This was the first year in office of President
Ronald Reagan and no one, neither in Congress nor in the
rest of the media, was much interested. The violence
continued to climb.
What I did not know so clearly then was that the U.S. in
its own way was as much a part of this awful violence as the
Guatemalan leadership itself. The Reagan Administration not
only gave the Guatemalan government active moral support, as
has become clear from de-classified cables, but once it
persuaded Congress in 1985 to lift its long-standing ban on
military support imposed in 1977 arms and training flowed to
the local military. Congress re-imposed its ban in 1990, but
clandestine aid continued under presidents Bush and Clinton
until 1995. In March this year we finally got the
confirmation of happenings that a few of us belatedly had
begun to suspect. President Bill Clinton on his visit to
Guatemala City made this apology: "For the U.S. it is
important I state clearly that support for military forces
and intelligence units which engaged in violence and
widespread repression was wrong."
Clinton, in fact, was formally putting America's
imprimatur on the then just released report of the
UN-appointed Guatemalan Commission for Historical
Clarification. (With generous funding from the U.S.
government.) The report, besides fingering both the overt
and the clandestine U.S. involvement, also confirmed
everything I'd learnt 18 years earlier. "The majority of
human rights violations occurred with the knowledge and by
order of the highest authority in the state" and "the vast
majority of the victims of the acts committed by the state
were not combatants but civilians". 4% of the acts of
violence it attributed to the guerrillas, 93% to the
state.
The report also fingered Cuba- but not Moscow - for
aiding the insurgency. Yet it concluded that at "no time did
the guerrilla groups have the military potential to pose an
imminent threat to the state."
No doubt, given the single mindedness of the Guatemalan
establishment at the time, the repression would have
continued, even without Washington's approval (as it had
during the Carter presidency). But the acquiescence of the
Reagan Administration gave the Guatemalan military more
rope. The Reagan White House saw the Guatemalan government
as one of the few reliable friends it had in Central America
in the struggle against "communist influence". The very fact
that the U.S. government ignored what Amnesty International
said or brushed aside the handful of critical articles that
appeared was all the Guatemalan government needed to know to
conclude it had a carte blanche. Indeed, the peace process,
albeit very slowly at first, only gathered speed once the
Reagan Administration was out of power. To set Guatemala on
a more normal course is this election's challenge. Peace IS
coming to Guatemala, but dreadfully slowly. The army's
sinister presidential security division remains
undismantled. A declining, badly run, economy, despite $1
billion provided by foreign donors in an attempt to breathe
more life into the peace agreement, does not provide the
best atmosphere either for further compromises or future
reform.
Even with the drumbeat of violence diminished,
Guatemala's indigenous people, two third's of its
population, remain among the most downtrodden of today's
Third World. Even with this election active citizenship is a
right exercised only by a minority. The new political and
army office-holders are going to need regular reminders that
they are being watched and much is expected of them. It is
not just another tragic banana backwater to be
forgotten.
Copyright © 1999 By JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by phone +44 385 351172 and e-mail:
JonatPower@aol.com
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