In soliciting responses to the question of the degree of American responsibility for the war crimes and acts of genocide that just earned former Guatemalan strongman Efraín Ríos Montt an 80-year prison sentence, the New York Times was kind enough to divulge that J. Michael Waller worked “with counterinsurgency forces in El Salvador and with insurgents in Nicaragua” in the 1980’s. They also disclose that Mr. Waller is currently the provost of The Institute of World Politics. You may not have heard of this little institute that operates out of a building in the DuPont Circle neighborhood of Washington DC. It was founded in 1990 by John Lenczowski, who was a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s infamous National Security Council.
Lenczowski’s stated purpose for establishing the Institute was to develop a graduate school and curriculum that integrates “all the instruments of statecraft,” teaching students to apply them across the spectrum of conflict while remaining grounded in American founding principles and the rule of international law. Other senior staffers from Reagan’s National Security Council helped form the core of the institute’s faculty…
…According to its mission statement, the school develops leaders in the intelligence, national security, and diplomatic communities, while teaching the ethical exercise of statecraft. The curriculum emphasizes more arcane elements of statecraft, including: counterintelligence; counterpropaganda; economic statecraft and warfare; information operations; political warfare; and public diplomacy.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but if the U.S. government were to cooperate with Judge Yassmin Barrios’s demand that an immediate investigation of “all others connected to the crimes” of Ríos Montt be conducted by the Guatemalan attorney general, then many of the people on Reagan’s National Security Council would immediately have to lawyer up. In fact, although most of these individuals are retired, they may be dusting off their old spy “statecraft” tools as we speak. They certainly have an incentive to do so:
Little fanfare accompanied the trial court’s release of its 718 page full reasoned judgment on May 17, 2013, one week after the court convicted former de facto head of state Ríos Montt of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to 80 years in prison. The trial court simply notified the parties to pick up a copy of the sentence at 3pm, when the doors to the courthouse were already closed to the public.
The release of the judgment also starts the 10-day window for the defense counsel to appeal the guilty verdict, which lawyers for Ríos Montt have pledged to do if the Constitutional Court does not overturn the verdict first.
After the guilty verdict was issued Friday, May 10, the Constitutional Court has said that it has been reviewing various pending challenges lodged by the defense counsel. After postponing the release of the decisions twice last week, the Constitutional Court said on Thursday that it intends to issue judgments on Monday after a 10 am extraordinary session, apparently called in light of ongoing divisions within the Court.
Yes, this morning the Constitutional Court will decide whether or not to uphold the verdict. And what kind of pressure are they under?
The pressures on the Constitutional Court, and in the country, are very high, some of them alarmingly so. Francisco García Gudiel, Rios Montt’s lawyer, expressed his frustration over the Court’s delay in resolving the matter and stated to the press that if the Court rules against his client, there are 45,000 supporters willing and ready to “paralyze” the country. On Thursday, the President of the Bar Association of Guatemala, Luis Reyes, urged the lawyers connected to the trial to refrain from dividing the nation further through their public remarks about the trial.
Meanwhile, the Indigenous Observatory and the Secretary General of the Ixil Community, Miguel Ceto, have accused the powerful business lobby CACIF of funding efforts by former members of civilian patrols (PACs, or private militia groups formed under Ríos Montt) to co-opt people to go to Guatemala City on Monday to lend their support to Rios Montt. The Indigenous Observatory alleged that CACIF secured participation through promises of fertilizer and access to government welfare programs.
The Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations (CACIF) was the oligarchic wing of the reactionary Guatemalan right in the 1980’s.
When Reagan was running for president against Carter in 1980 his campaign and foreign policy team actually sent emissaries to Guatemala. They met with the military chiefs and the heads of CACIF, which was the Guatemalan chambers of commerce, agriculture, industry and finance, the convening body. They told them, according to the discussions that I had with the people that they met with, that once Reagan came to office, they would have a freer hand. ..
…Reagan’s campaign emissaries told the death squad chieftains and the oligarchy and the military, don’t worry, when we come in, you’ll get a free hand. That’s basically what happened…
These old spys who want to avoid any responsibility for the crimes and genocide committed in Guatemala are probably not completely unconnected from current events on the ground there:
High-profile government officials, and especially Judge Yassmín Barrios, who presided over the trial, have become the targets of highly sophisticated media campaigns to discredit them. They have also been threatened with disciplinary sanction or even civil or criminal charges.
So, this is the context of this morning’s column in the New York Times, authored by the provost of The Institute of World Politics. Mr. Waller argues that there is a complete moral equivalence between the genocide that the Guatemalan right committed against its indigenous people and the crimes committed by left-wing factions supported by Fidel Castro and Soviet Russia.
The Rios Montt prosecution was less about justice and more about using the courts to wage political propaganda campaigns to settle old scores. Rios Montt’s real crime was not genocide, according to prevailing logic, but his political beliefs. His polar opposite contemporaries in Central America will never be prosecuted because they were fighting for “progressive ideals.”
I am going to use the Holocaust Museum of Houston as my source here:
In 1980, the Guatemalan army instituted “Operation Sophia,” which aimed at ending insurgent guerrilla warfare by destroying the civilian base in which they hid. This program specifically targeted the Mayan population, who were believed to be supporting the guerilla movement.
Over the next three years, the army destroyed 626 villages, killed or “disappeared” more than 200,000 people and displaced an additional 1.5 million, while more than 150,000 were driven to seek refuge in Mexico. Forced disappearance policies included secretly arresting or abducting people, who were often killed and buried in unmarked graves. In addition, the government instituted a scorched earth policy, destroying and burning buildings and crops, slaughtering livestock, fouling water supplies and violating sacred places and cultural symbols. Many of these actions were undertaken by the army, specifically through special units known as the Kaibiles, in addition to private death squads, who often acted on the advice of the army. The U.S. government often supported the repressive regimes as a part of its anti-Communist policies during the Cold War. The violence faced by the Mayan people peaked between 1978 and 1986. Catholic priests and nuns also often faced violence as they supported the rights of the Mayan people.
I don’t think I have to say a single good word about Fidel Castro or Soviet Russia’s policies in Central America to argue truthfully that they never had responsibility for anything on this scale, and certainly not aimed at any particular ethnicity or indigenous group. Mayans were treated as if their were presumptively communist and worthy of annihilation as a result. This policy was controversial in the United States, but not on Reagan’s National Security Council.
Remember that it was this National Security Council that included people like John Poindexter, Robert McFarlane, Eliot Abrams, and Oliver North which defied Congress’s prohibition on arming Nicaragua’s Contras and sold weapons to Iran to find money for them. Other monies from the weapons sale went to pay ransom to Hizbollah.
So, Mr. Waller, who is the provost of this institute which is basically the living monument to these crimes is invited to defend these policies in the New York Times. He’s the provost of the institute that houses former CIA director William Casey’s personal library.
My question is: What did you expect him to say?
