U.S. Wary of Candidate in Guatemala

[Khephra]

WASHINGTON -- Two days ahead of Guatemala's presidential election, the State Department made clear its reservations about former President Efrain Rios Montt, one of the three main candidates to succeed President Alfonso Portillo.

Rios Montt was unelected military president 20 years ago when the Guatemalan army engaged in bloody repression of civilians, particularly in indigenous communities, during the country's civil war.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher did not refer directly to this period. He said that "in light of Mr. Rios Montt's background, it would be difficult for the United States to have the kind of relationship with Guatemala that we would ideally prefer if he were in charge."

more........

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-us-guatemala,0,4024651.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

[Say_What]

1. Guatemala's Upcoming Elections - "Democracy in the Americas?"

Interesting information on Montt. He's a graduate of the School of the Americas. No wonder Boucher didn't "refer directly to this period".

<clips>

...Given Rios Montt’s track record, of course the real question is not whether he has a chance at the Presidency, but why he is not sitting alongside Slobodan Milosevic or some Tutsi army commander in the dock at an international war crimes tribunal. In this respect he has already joined the hallowed ranks of such big-league war criminals as Radovan Karadzic, Augusto Pinochet, Indonesia’s General Wiranto, Liberia’s Charles Taylor, and our own Dr. Henry Kissinger, who have so far managed to escape the scales of justice for reasons that have little to do with their innocence or the scale of their transgressions.

....Ecumenical Genocide. From 1978 to 1986 Guatemala was ruled by a blood-thirsty junta that was directed, in turn, by Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia (1978-82), General Rios Montt (March 1982–August 1983), and Oscar Mejia Victores (September 1983–1985) -- perhaps best known for describing the high level of violence in his country as “folkloric.” Beginning in the late 1970s, this group of US-trained uniformed savages began to systematically annihilate Mayan villages, which they feared might be sympathetic to left-wing guerillas.

In particular, for 17 months in 1982-83, General Rios Montt, a proud graduate of the US military’s School of the Americas (since renamed the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation”) and a self-styled “born-again Christian” who had become an ordained minister in California-based Gospel Outreach’s Guatemala Verbo evangelical church, presided over an especially harsh period of repression, which saw the expansion of the PAC (Las Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil vigilante groups that were responsible for wiping out most of the Mayan villages. A former investigator for the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences’ Guatemala exhumations project told me about one typical incident, near the central highlands village of Rio Negro in March 1982:

I organized the technical team that exhumed the gravesite at Rio Negro. We located the bodies of 177 women and children on a mountain side near the village, an hour by foot up the mountain from the dam. According to an eyewitness who was located by human rights investigators accompanying the team, the killings were done by the Patrullas, who were part of Rios Montt’s “Frijolles e Fulsilles” “(beans and bullets) strategy. The investigators located one old woman, a survivor who had managed to get away and witnessed the whole thing. According to her, the Patrullas marched these people up the mountain. The patrol was drinking. They put a tape on a cassette player and ordered the women to dance, “Just like you dance the guerillas.” They started shooting at their feet, then some of the Patrullas took some of the younger women off into the bushes and raped them. When the women fought back, they were hit in the face with rifle butts and knocked unconscious. This was consistent with the mandible fractures we found on a handful of bodies. We also found several infants who had skull fractures. The men of the village had escaped to the mountains, and did not expect the PAC to harm the women or children. They were wrong. They watched the whole thing from another mountain,,,,"


<http://bloodbankers.typepad.com/submerging_markets/2003/11/guatemalas_upco.html#more>

[DUreader]

2. Strange, Monnt seems like just their kind of guy

[Say_What]

7. RayGun on Montt: “a man of ...ntegrity,” “totally dedicated to democracy"

He was absolutely their kind of guy.

<clips>

...But when Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, the old public policy of mutual understanding and back-scratching returned. Indeed, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Michael Deaver’s LA/DC- based PR firm, Deaver and Hannaford, was hired by the junta’s cronies, a substantial amount of Guatemalan money reportedly found its way to the Reagan war chest, and sanctions against US arms purchases disappeared. With encouragement from officials like Secretary of State Al Haig, military aid and advice to the junta was also promoted through Israel, which provided more than 300 security advisors, built an entire factory in the northern province of Alta Verapaz to manufacture Galil rifles, the Guatemalan Army’s weapon of choice against the Mayan peoples, and also supplied a computer system for tracking “subversives.”

Meanwhile, on the political front, there was a systematic attempt to erase the bloodstains from Guatemala’s image. US Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders praised Rios Montt for his “effective counterinsurgency,” and Ronald Reagan called him “a man of great personal integrity,” “totally dedicated to democracy,” and someone who had supposedly been given “a bum rap” by Amnesty International.


<http://bloodbankers.typepad.com/submerging_markets/2003/11/guatemalas_upco.html#more>

[DUreader]

3. LOL: STATE DEPT.'S GUATEMALA PLOY / Historic Memory Alert:

http://www.bigleftoutside.com/archives/000224.php



June 2002: US Ambassador Manuel Rocha publicly threatened a change in US relations if Bolivia were to elect coca grower
Evo Morales in the June 30th presidential electoin. Morales was WAY behind in the polls before Rocha made the threat. Then
the votes are counted. Evo comes a hair fracture from the presidency and the coalition to which he belongs becomes the
most important bloc in Congress. Rocha, soon after, leaves his diplomatic post and, well... should we file a Missing Persons'
report? His legacy: His final boneheaded maneuver.

In any case, after June 30, 2002, the State Department clearly knew: If the State Department criticizes a candidate prior to
the election in a Latin American country during these currently historic times, even if that candidate is behind in the polls, that
candidate's chances of winning the presidency don't decrease... they increase.

Okay, now, fast-forward:


snip

http://www.bigleftoutside.com/

[DUreader]

4. More on Guatemala from BigLeftOutside

Click Here for text with hyperlinks

http://www.bigleftoutside.com/archives/000222.php


Not many blogs that venture into foreign policy reach the level of detail with supporting links that can be read in this splendid
analysis by James S. Henry on the "election" that will be held on Sunday in Guatemala.

While the increasingly lame Council on Hemispheric Affairs - looking perhaps to do still more hypocritical logrolling with Juan
Forero and the NY Times ("oh, please, Mr. Forero, mention us again, so we can show the rich fucks how, um, prestigious,
we are...") - worries aloud in a press release this week about the safety of (wealthy) American citizens in Guatemala and
urges the Bush administration to play the bogus drug-war "certification" card against Guatemala, this guy Henry really did his
homework, and looks at Sunday's vote more appropriately from the perspective of the consequences for Guatemala's 13.9
million, mostly indigenous, citizens:

[Judi Lynn]

5. Reagan saw him as essential in Reagan's war against the left

(snip) Under the rationale of fighting “world communism,” the United States under Reagan sponsored regimes whose sheer hideousness and brutality rivals the Nazis.

In Guatemala, for instance, the U.S.-backed army slaughtered more than 200,000 people — including genocide against the Mayan Indians — for their “leftist” sympathies. The worst massacres happened when dictator Efrain Rios Montt ruled Guatemala. Reagan persistently denied the massive evidence of abuses, defending Rios Montt as “totally dedicated to democracy.”

In Nicaragua, Reagan’s “freedom fighters,” the Contras, were unleashed in a terror campaign of rape, torture and slaughter of civilians to topple the Nicaraguan government. Reagan defended this fascist military group as the “moral equals of our Founding Fathers.”

Then again, during a visit to Germany in 1985, Reagan deemed Hitler’s SS soldiers “victims just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps,” equating the voluntary elite corps of the Nazi armies with murdered innocent civilians.

Posterity has unraveled the myth of the “Reagan Doctrine,” which allowed for any monstrous action under the banner of fighting communism, as old-fashioned colonialism.

Likewise, the images of Reagan’s “folksy” and jovial character will yield for the true image of his inherent fascism. (snip/)

http://www.studentdiscourse.com/021901/021901d.htm

Although this info. was written by a college student, there's a mountain of information bearing out the utter horror which has unfolded in Latin America at the instigation off, and with the blessings of our right-wing, emotionally and morally twisted politicians.

[drscm]

6. What? Is he too much like Negroponte? eom

eom

[Say_What]

8. Outgoing Pres. Portillo is a self-confessed MURDERER!!

<clips>

...In December 1999, FRG swept both the Congressional elections and the Presidency, with a great deal from help from Angel Gonzalez, a curious Miami-based Mexican media mogul who, after 1981, quietly managed to gain control of more than 20 Guatemalan radio stations and seven TV channels – including all four private TV channels (#3 and #7, the most popular, plus #11 and #13) that have national coverage. (This was by no means Angel Gonzalez’s only Latin American TV venture, or his oddest acquaintance – in Peru he also reportedly collaborated with ex-Fujimori spy master Vladimoro Montesinos in an effort to buy a TV channel.)

With this kind of help, Rios Montt’s protégé, Alfonso Portillo,a former university professor and self-confessed killer who had to flee from Mexico in the 1980s because he was wanted for murdering two people, became President in January 2000, and Rios Montt became the President of the National Congress.

Portillo’s Debacle. Rios Montt should have known -- what can one expect from a murderer? In the following three years, Portillo’s self-proclaimed neoliberal FRG administration went from commanding a 65-percent electoral majority to earning the dubious distinction, as one Guatemalan newspaper put it, of being “one the most corrupt in the history of this Central American country”— given the country’s history, no mean achievement. As early as January 2001, according to investigations by two leading Guatemalan newspapers, Portillo and his cronies had already started diverting Interior Ministry funds to Panamanian bank accounts. Portillo also reportedly appointed Angel Gonzalez’ brother-in-law, Luis Rabbe, as Minister of Communications, in charge of the country’s only public TV station. A flurry of other corruption, arms and drug dealing charges followed. By January 2002, 92% of Guatemalans had lost all confidence in Portillo’s administration. By the fall of 2003, the vast majority rated Portillo Guatemala’s worst elected head of state ever.

<http://bloodbankers.typepad.com/submerging_markets/2003/11/guatemalas_upco.html#more>

[Judi Lynn]

12. What a great resource that article is

From your article:

Fast forward now to the Carter Administration (1976-80), the one exception to the rule that saw US administration after administration cultivate and abet its two key local partners, Guatemala’s military and its land-owning elite. To his credit, Carter condemned the Guatemalan junta and cut off arms shipments, although the CIA quietly maintained its connections.

But when Ronald Reagan took office in January 1981, the old public policy of mutual understanding and back-scratching returned. Indeed, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Michael Deaver’s LA/DC- based PR firm, Deaver and Hannaford, was hired by the junta’s cronies, a substantial amount of Guatemalan money reportedly found its way to the Reagan war chest, and sanctions against US arms purchases disappeared. With encouragement from officials like Secretary of State Al Haig, military aid and advice to the junta was also promoted through Israel, which provided more than 300 security advisors, built an entire factory in the northern province of Alta Verapaz to manufacture Galil rifles, the Guatemalan Army’s weapon of choice against the Mayan peoples, and also supplied a computer system for tracking “subversives.”

Meanwhile, on the political front, there was a systematic attempt to erase the bloodstains from Guatemala’s image. US Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders praised Rios Montt for his “effective counterinsurgency,” and Ronald Reagan called him “a man of great personal integrity,” “totally dedicated to democracy,” and someone who had supposedly been given “a bum rap” by Amnesty International.
(snip/...)

Jimmy Carter was a fine president who was hounded, harrassed, and mocked by our right wing.

Isn't it interesting that the unchecked savagery of death squads and wildly vicious leaders elsewhere has always been connected to our right-wing Presidents?

Ignorance is no excuse now that people can learn at home, through their computers, rather than hiking all the way to the library about what has really happening which our own media are afraid to discuss with the very taxpayers who sponsor our own country's actions!

[DUreader]

9. kick

[leesa]

10. Oh goody another overthrow! Maybe we can dispatch the fascist

Boy Scouts to take care of this one.

[Aidoneus]

11. oldthinkers no bellyfeel Usimp

so skilled, yet so casual, at re-writing history..