Archived: Declassification Shows U.S. Role in Guatemalan Abuses
cor
as Guatemalan military intelligence agents dumped suspected guerrillas
-- dead and alive -- out of airplanes into the ocean.
Now, we are sending the same man to oversee the prison abuses in Iraq.
This is what the USA calls "freedom and democracy"
-------- Original Message --------
From: rich@math.
Subject: Archived: Declassification Shows U.S. Role in Guatemalan Abuses
From: MichaelP <papado
Subject: Partial Declassification Shows U.S. Role in Guatemalan Abuses
Date: 1999/03/11
Is there a possibility that this pattern which existed during the 70's and
the 80's, also carried through into the 90's ? ? After all there have
been some changes in the U$ administration !!!
Cheers
MichaelP
In Declassified Documents, Diplomats Describe Massacres, CIA Ties to
Army
By Douglas Farah
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, March 11, 1999; Page A26
During the 1960s, the United States was intimately involved in
equipping and training Guatemalan security forces that murdered
thousands of civilians in the nation's civil war, according to newly
declassified U.S. intelligence documents.
The documents show, moreover, that the CIA retained close ties to the
Guatemalan army in the 1980s, when the army and its paramilitary
allies were massacring Indian villagers, and that U.S. officials were
aware of the killings at the time. The documents were obtained by the
National Security Archive, a private nonprofit group in Washington.
Some of the documents were made available to an independent commission
formed to investigate human rights abuses during Guatemala's 36-year
civil war, which killed an estimated 200,000 people. The report by the
Historical Clarification Commission, which grew out of the
U.N.-brokered peace agreement that ended the conflict in 1996, was
released last month in Guatemala and blamed government forces for the
overwhelming majority of human rights violations during the conflict.
But some of the documents were not released until yesterday. One was a
Jan. 4, 1966 memo from a U.S. State Department security official
describing how he set up a "safe house" in the presidential palace for
use by Guatemalan security agents and their U.S. contacts. The safe
house became the headquarters for Guatemala's "dirty war" against
leftist insurgents and suspected allies.
"I have never seen anything like it," said Kate Doyle, Guatemala
project director at the archives, expressing amazement at "the
description of our intimacy with the Guatemalan security forces."
Three months after the cable about the safe house, on March 6, 1966,
security forces arrested 32 people suspected of aiding Marxist
guerrillas; those arrested subsequently disappeared. While the
Guatemalan government denied any involvement in the case, a CIA cable
sent later that year identifies three of those missing, saying, "The
following Guatemalan Communists and terrorists were executed secretly
by Guatemalan authorities on the night of March 6."
The CIA has a long history of involvement in Guatemala, having helped
to orchestrate the army's overthrow of a democratically elected
government in 1954. Nevertheless, largely because of human rights
concerns, the United States never provided Guatemalan security forces
with the same level of support it gave anti-communist forces in
neighboring Nicaragua and El Salvador during fighting in the 1980s.
In 1977 the Guatemalan government rejected $2.1 million in U.S.
military aid because it was conditioned on improved performance on
human rights. But in the early 1980s, under the Reagan administration,
the relationship warmed up again despite occasional clashes over the
military's brutal tactics.
As the Cold War raged in the 1960s and '70s, the United States gave
the Guatemalan military $33 million in aid even though U.S. officials
were aware of the army's dismal track record on human rights, the
documents show.
On Oct. 23, 1967, for example, a secret State Department cable
reported that covert Guatemalan security operations included
"kidnapping, torture and summary executions." The cable said that "in
the past year . . . approximately 500-600 persons have been killed;
with the addition of the 'missing' persons this figure might double to
1,000-2,000." It also described the government's Special Commando
Unit, which used civilians as well as military personnel and carried
out "abductions, bombings, street assassinations and executions of
real or alleged communists."
A 1992 CIA cable confirmed that indigenous villages were targeted for
destruction because of the army's belief that the Indians supported
the guerrillas.
In describing one episode, which occurred shortly before it was
written, the cable reported that "several villages have been burned to
the ground." It continued, "The well-documented belief by the army
that the entire Ixil Indian population is [pro-guerrilla] has created
a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to
combatants and noncombatants alike."
An April 1994 Defense Intelligence Agency report outlined how, in the
1980s, as U.S. aid grew, Guatemalan military intelligence agents
dumped suspected guerrillas -- dead and alive -- out of airplanes into
the ocean.
"In this way they have been able to remove the majority of the
evidence showing that the prisoners were tortured and killed," the
memo said.
But as grim a picture as the documents portray, said Doyle, the
project director, the Clinton administration was to be commended for
making them public.
"The commission asked for documents from Argentina, Israel and
Taiwan," Doyle said. "Only the United States responded.