Clinton's Latest Damn-Near Apology


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Guatemala: Clinton's Latest Damn-Near Apology

by Bob Harris

Published in the Humanist, May/June 1999

"If it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so." — Guatemalan President Carlos Arana, 1971

"The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea." — Guatemalan President Efrain Rios Montt, 1982

"United States . . . support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression . . . was wrong." — U.S. President Bill Clinton, March 10, 1999

So President Clinton damn-near apologized at last for the United States' role in almost a half century of repression in Guatemala.

He was forced into this damn-near apology after the United Nations' independent Historical Clarification Commission issued a nine-volume report called Guatemala: Memory of Silence. Created as part of the 1996 peace accord that ended Guatemala's civil war, the commission and its 272 staff members interviewed combatants on both sides of the conflict, gathered news reports and eyewitness accounts from across the country, and extensively examined declassified U.S. government documents.

The result? The U.N. commission concluded that for decades the United States knowingly gave money, training, and other vital support to a military regime that committed atrocities as a matter of policy and even "acts of genocide" against the Mayan people. Thus Clinton's dismal damn-near apology.

It's a common rationalization that, in a civil war, both sides commit atrocities in roughly equal amounts. But the commission examined 42,275 separate human rights violations: torture, executions, systematic rape, and so on, including 626 documented incidents the commission could only describe as "massacres." The final score: 93 percent were committed by U.S.-supported government paramilitary forces; 3 percent were committed by rebels; and 4 percent cannot be attributed with certainty.

And worse, as Amnesty International and other independent observers have reported for years, the vast majority of victims were noncombatant civilians. Merely trying to form an opposition political party was reason enough to be killed. So was being a trade unionist, a student or professor, a journalist, a church official, a child or elderly person from the same village as a suspected rebel, a doctor who merely treated another victim, or even a widow of one of the disappeared simply asking for the body.

But most of the casualties were Mayan Indians. Since the rebels didn't have the military strength to be able to hold cities, they hid in rural areas populated primarily by Mayans. So the Guatemalan government simply slaughtered entire villages, engaging in what the commission called "the massive extermination of defenseless Mayan communities." Two hundred thousand people died.

The commission also concluded that massacres—which rose to the level of "genocide" during the war's peak years in the early 1980s—were not random acts of field commanders beyond government control. The genocide was deliberate policy. And U.S. support and training of the paramilitary was crucial, having "a significant bearing on human rights violations."

Unfortunately, the report doesn't name specific officers and government officials responsible. But that's not terribly surprising: last year, Roman Catholic Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi issued a report on wartime atrocities that did just that. A few days later, Gerardi was bludgeoned to death with a concrete block.

This is the country Bill Clinton now lauds, saying, "A battlefield of ideology has been transformed into a marketplace of ideas." Some marketplace.

Thing is, the commission's findings aren't really news at all. What's new here is the depth of documentation and the fact that the information is coming from an official source.

That the Guatemalan military committed genocide and widespread atrocities has been widely known for many years. That the United States supported and trained the Guatemalan military, along with repressive security forces in numerous other countries, is a matter of public record. In September 1996, the U.S. Department of Defense admitted that manuals used until recently to train Latin American soldiers included numerous illegal practices, including summary execution. And in January 1997, two declassified CIA manuals on interrogation contained plain references to electrical and chemical torture.

In fact, one of the CIA manuals, prepared for its 1954 covert war in Guatemala, is a twenty-one page "Study of Assassination" which admits that murder "is not morally justifiable" while at the same time explains how to kill by whopping someone with "a hammer, axe, wrench, screwdriver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy." This presumably includes concrete blocks. (Scans of a few of the more bizarre pages and the complete text of the assassination manual are posted on my website at www. bobharris.com.)

However, the Pentagon's inspector general characterized the manuals as simply "mistakes." Yeah, sure. The IG didn't go on to specify just who made the mistakes or how or why at least a thousand copies of the "mistakes" were distributed to police and military agencies around the world. And since the "mistakes" were made public, not a single U.S. officer has been disciplined, reassigned, or even retrained.

In truth, the manuals can actually be traced to Project X, a 1965 army program to train military, police, and paramilitary forces throughout Southeast Asia and Latin America. Project X was a direct precursor to Operation Phoenix in Vietnam and Operation Condor in South America—notorious programs that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. Project X was halted under the Carter administration, but its essentials were reinstated in 1982 under President Ronald Reagan.

And this just in: documents released March 10, 1999—the same day Clinton wobbled through his damn-near apology—indicate that the United States was more intimately involved with the Guatemalan paramilitary than even the U.N. commission report indicates. This new batch of documents was obtained by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit bunch of truthseekers who do tremendous work obtaining and analyzing the internal record of things we aren't supposed to know. (You can find many of its most intense finds posted at www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/.)

Thanks to these latest releases, it's now indisputable that, as early as 1966, officials from the U.S. State Department, far from opposing the torturers, set up a "safe house" for security forces in Guatemala's presidential palace, which eventually became the headquarters for "kidnapping, torture . . . bombings, street assassinations and executions of real or alleged communists." CIA documents also prove that, from the get-go, U.S. intelligence was fully aware that "disappearances" were actually kidnappings followed by summary executions. Rather than act to stop the slaughter, however, the State Department continued to provide tens of millions of dollars in aid.

The flow of cash stopped briefly in 1977 when the Carter administration made further aid dependent on improved human rights. However, once Reagan was elected, covert money and support for the Guatemalan dictatorship increased to new heights, as did the atrocities. A newly declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report states that, as was done by CIA-supported security forces in Argentina, the bodies of victims both dead and alive were routinely hurled out of aircraft into the ocean, removing "the evidence showing that the prisoners were tortured."

Still, aid to the Guatemalan government continued through the Bush years, even though CIA cables reported as late as 1992 on the continuing destruction of entire Mayan villages, killing "combatants and noncombatants alike." "Counterinsurgency" aid to Guatemala continued until 1995, when Clinton finally pulled the plug after American lawyer Jennifer Harbury was able to generate a small amount of public outrage over the torture and murder of her Guatemalan husband by a CIA informant.

Unfortunately, to this day, CIA "anti-drug" money continues to flow into Guatemala. Not that it's serving any visible anti-drug function; as of this writing, Guatemala trails only Mexico as a transshipment point for Columbian drugs entering the United States, and many of the same CIA-supported military officers suspected of human rights abuses are also considered to be major drug traffickers.

The State Department knows full well that at least 250 tons of cocaine pass through Guatemala each year. And the Drug Enforcement Administration reportedly has the goods on over thirty Guatemalan military officers. But so far, for some reason, prosecutions still aren't happening.

Your tax dollars at work.

The 1954 coup destroyed Guatemala's democratic institutions and established a brutal military dictatorship as the nation's supreme power. And almost half a century of CIA-supported repression, torture, and murder later, a U.S. president is barely able to mutter a damn-near apology.

And people actually complain that Clinton isn't sorry enough about Monica.

Bob Harris is a radio commentator, political writer, and popular humorist who has spoken at over 300 colleges nationwide. His regular column, "The Scoop." from which the above item was drawn and published in the May/June 1999 Humanist, appears online at www.motherjones.com. To see the author's other work, visit his own website at www.bobharris.com. He can be e-mailed at bob@bobharris.com.