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A
blind eye on Guatemala?
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
December 30, 2004
LONDON - Eight years ago this week,
after 200,000 unnecessary deaths, 40,000 "disappearances"
and 440 decimated villages, peace formally came to the
last redoubt of the Central American war zone,
Guatemala.
Put it up there with Rwanda,
Cambodia, ex-Yugoslavia and today the Congo, as one of
the great killing fields of the "post-war" world. The
violence never reached the crescendo it did in
neighboring El Salvador, nor did as many people just
"disappear" as happened in Chile and Argentina, nor did
the war stretch on and on as long as in Peru and
Colombia, but no country in Latin America came near
Guatemala for long-term systematic assassination and
torture.
Before my first trip to this
heart-torn country in 1980 I went for a briefing in
London from the secretary-general of Amnesty
International. I had asked him to point me in the
direction of the worst country on their books and
Guatemala it was. "How many political prisoners do you
have there?" I asked him. "None", he replied, "Only
political killings."
On that first visit I broke the
story in the International Herald Tribune and the New
York Times that the death squads were not ad hoc groups
of off duty soldiers and private body guards of big
landlords resisting peasant revolts, as was the common
excuse, but were organized and directed from the
presidential office. But there was an overpowering
silence from official Washington where Ronald Regan was
the new Teflon president.
The U.S. ambassador to Guatemala,
David Chaplin, regularly prompted his Washington
superiors as to what was going on but it fell on deaf
ears. In February 1984 only a day after he had sent one
of his revealing cables to Washington he was taken aback
to hear that Elliot Abrams, the assistant secretary of
state for human rights and one of the architects of
Reagan's anti communist crusade in Central America, had
signed off on a secret report to Congress in which he
argued that human rights were improving in Guatemala and
Congress should no longer be inhibited about the
resumption of U.S. security assistance.
A year later I took a three-day
hike around Lake Atitlan, a massive, silver sheen of wide
water lying beneath three extinct volcanoes, the
heartland of the major guerrilla groups fighting on
behalf of the overcrowded Indian communities. I learnt
not just of the hardship of remote Mayan villages but of
brave North American priests who lay down their lives in
order to relay to the outside world the massacres and
mayhem that happened in their parishes.
When George Bush senior became
president he moved to use his authority to wind down the
killings. In 1999 President Bill Clinton, who had
encouraged UN mediation that led to the 1996 peace
accords, visited Guatemala and said, "For the United
States it is important that I state clearly that
[American] support for military forces and
intelligence units which engaged in violence and
widespread repression was wrong"
When a country has been through so
much violence it is difficult for it to settle down and
unlike El Salvador the left is too divided and not
politically strong enough to work with the government to
give the country stability. Criminal violence is
horrendous. The political violence ebbs and flows. Under
President Alvaro Arzú who negotiated the peace
accords, the official death squads were dismantled. Human
rights activists surfaced from the underground. But then
under his successor, Alfonso Portillo, who is now wanted
in both the U.S. and Guatemala on charges of money
laundering and embezzlement, the situation regressed.
Last year the rhetoric once again changed for the better
when Oscar Berger won office. He has cut the number of
troops by half and installed a tough human rights
campaigner as ombudsman. But still activists say they
fear for their lives and big landlords with their private
security forces are beginning to kill again.
I walked down from my hotel to the
old presidential palace facing a plaza, once a quiet,
somnolent place. A few years before some president had
ordered that the granite stone be painted over a vile
green which quite suited its interior purpose. This time
as I wandered around dodging the traffic and the bustling
market place, marks of Guatemala's now thriving economy,
I saw that the paint had been scraped off and the stone
shone in the winter sunlight.
Guatemala is beginning to clean
itself up inside as well as out. But it is a slow, slow
process. The judges remain corrupt and the police ill
trained and incompetent.
Colin Powell's State Department has
pushed on the human rights front but certainly could do
more. Will Condoleezza Rice pay it as much attention?
Left to itself, without continuous pressure from outside,
Guatemala could easily slide back into its murderous old
habits.
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
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på svenska
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