E. Howard Hunt was more than a Watergate burglar. He was the man most responsible for putting together the CIA’s 1954 coup in Guatemala. You can read an interview he gave about his role here. It’s relevant today because one of the consequences of that coup was the worst genocide in this hemisphere in the 20th-Century. Efraín Ríos Montt was responsible for the worst of it, and he was convicted today of genocide and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to 80 years in prison.
Corey Robin used the occasion to remind us of a piece he did in 2004 for the London Review of Books on Greg Gandin’s book The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. The relevant bits are here:
On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.’ It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy’, and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting ‘a bum rap’ from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.
And here:
With the 1996 signing of a peace accord between the Guatemalan military and leftist guerrillas, the Latin American Cold War finally came to an end – in the same place it had begun – making Guatemala’s the longest and most lethal of the hemisphere’s civil wars. Some 200,000 men, women and children were dead, virtually all at the hands of the military: more than were killed in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador combined, and roughly the same number as were killed in the Balkans. Because the victims were primarily Mayan Indians, Guatemala today has the only military in Latin America deemed by a UN-sponsored truth commission to have committed acts of genocide.
Congratulations, America! And Saint Ronnie definitely deserves an honorable mention medal of some sort.
Why go all the way back to E. Howard Hunt? Obama has two Latin American coups to his credit.
The Honduras Coup: Is Obama Innocent?
Paraguay: Obama’s Second Latin American Coup
Watching a crime against democracy happen – even if it is “watched closely” – and failing to denounce it makes one complicit in the act.
Nah. Only actual complicity makes one complicit.
I guess you did’t get the memo, Phil: the State Department called the Honduran coup, which came from the judiciary not he military, an “illegal coup,” rather than a “military coup.”
This, you see, demonstrates the administration’s support for and involvement in the coup, because calling it a “military coup” would have required the United States to cut off all aid to the country, instead of doing what they actually did, which was cut off all aid except for an AIDS prevention program.
The best part: the “crime against democracy” was parliament voting to use a provision of the Constitution to remove the President.
That this is the big crime laid at the feet of the Obama administration – they didn’t interfere in the parliamentary action taken by a sovereign state in accordance with its constitution.
Which is pretty much just like Ronald Reagan.
The Obam administration cut off aid to the Honduran government and denounced the removal of Zelaya as an “illegal coup,” only restoring relations after legitimate elections were held.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/state-department-steps-coup/
Which is pretty much the same thing as Reagan lauding the Guatemalan military and advocating for an expansion of military aid, if you cock your head to the side and squint.
The funniest part, though, is watching you describe the perfectly-legal (although undesirable) removal of the Paraguayan President through parliamentary means as a “coup.” Because you are so committed to democracy, I guess.
Obama has broken dramatically from the old pattern of American support for right-wing coups in Latin America, but acknowledging this disrupts a beloved narrative and requires one to pass on an opportunity to denounce the United States. The ignorance-soacked mythology that has grown up around the Honduran coup is a particularly impressive piece of wishful thinking.
We all knew this during the time in question, but now the truth is in the offing. What I am hoping is that that lizard Rios-Montt doesn’t get sympathy for his age and win an appeal. He needs to sit a spell in a jail and ponder eternity, which is fast approaching.
Additionally, the genocide needs to be placed squarely in the lap of that other lizard, St. Ronnie. Those Natives weren’t commie dupes, they were people. There was no justification on earth that would suffice for what happened to them. I would not be surprised if this was another instance where the Guatemalan right wanted to get rid of any indigenous peoples regardless of whether they would support any popular movement or not.
Finally, the U.S. evangelical right was brought into Guatemala at his behest. He was supposedly Catholic until he decided to become a born-again Christian, because it PAID, and he wanted something else that would give him a spiritual bulwark against his atrocities. No wonder the Catholics felt threatened by the inroads made by evangelicals during this time, but of course, they were on the wrong side.
And we mock Palin for not knowing that Africa isn’t a country. Or GWB not knowing that there are Sunni Muslims and Shia Muslims — and his brain would have been totally taxed if he’d been forced to learn that those aren’t the only two sects of Islam.
Really wish justice were swifter for mass murderers.
A different country but also death squads and supported by Reagan, Kyle Minor at Salon reminds us that Joan Didion’s Salvador remains a must read.
A few years after Didion’s book was published, there was Oliver Stone’s Salvador.
For Ronnie and the crackpot right of his day the Cold War was such a big deal it made all means fair.
They were the same idiots who would think it a good move to support Islamists against Russians in Afghanistan.
To this day, DC and the foreign policy establishment are full of blockheads for whom no enemy is more dreadful still than Russia, unless it’s those commies in China.
As for clean hands, I for one am not taking the fall for that grinning clown or any of his gross misdeeds.
I was depressed when Americans went for Ronnie the first time and deeply depressed when they did it again.
Might as well blame a German Jew for the doings of Hitler.
But the retaliation the United States has earned will be visited on people who can be reached by the righteously vengeful. That doesn’t include the perpetrators, who have barricaded themselves against the wrath to come. They know what they’ve done, and they know what they deserve. And they’re anxious to avoid it at all costs, even the lives of their fellow Americans. Maybe even especially at the cost of the lives of their fellow Americans.
Because then they can strike up a fresh chorus of “They Hate Us for Our Freedoms” and send another batch of 18- and 19-year-olds off to their doom. Americans like that.
why? i always wash my hands, use alcohol..
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