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On Mon, 1 Mar 1999, the Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA
<[log in to unmask]> posted this Washington Post Editorial: "The Truth About
Guatemala":
The Washington Post
The Truth About Guatemala
Monday, March 1, 1999; Page A18
For whole groups of countries, what post-Cold War politics is mostly about
is moving beyond earlier horrors, some arising from rule by the left,
others from rule by the right. In this demanding passage, no country has
set a braver example than Guatemala. The latest landmark in its long trek
back from human and social disaster is a huge report on human rights
violations committed by the contestants in its 34-year fratricidal war.
The report was commissioned as part of a post-Cold War package of measures
aimed at national reconciliation, in this instance at "reconciliation through
truth." In a reflection of the military's much-reduced but still lingering
influence, the report does not name the guilty, set up trials or otherwise
point toward justice. But it tells truths whose acknowledgment can only
help Guatemala return from the dark.
Historical and cultural considerations made Guatemala a bonfire waiting to
be kindled. Political considerations supplied the torch. Fidel Castro had
come to power in Cuba, stirring in other Latin places both revolutionary
hopes and counterrevolutionary fears. In Guatemala, war -- civil, class,
ideological, racial -- exploded. When it was over, says the independent
"Historical Clarification Commission," the actual count of civilian dead
was 42,275 and of "disappeared," 6,159; the estimated total of dead was
200,000. The scale and savagery of Guatemala's losses, especially among
the communities of the majority indigenous Mayan population, made the toll
in Central America's other wars pale. Nor is it all over. Just last year
a Roman Catholic bishop who had directed a human rights study was beaten to
death with a concrete block.
The report confirms the common impression that military governments and the
armed forces were responsible for the great majority of Guatemala's violence
-- 93 percent. The share of violence attributed to the guerrillas is 3
percent. Cuba, says the report, provided the guerrillas political, logistical
and training support -- though never enough to give them a military advantage.
Meanwhile, the American role was going well beyond the report's note of
involvement in "some illegal state operations." Washington arranged a coup in
1954 to depose an elected leader whose reform program, which struck a good
number of Latin democrats as giving Guatemala a chance, struck the CIA as
incipiently communist. In some but not all of the Castro years, Washington
supported the rule of the anti-communist officers and oligarchs whose human
rights practices form the substance of the new report. The inferno
actually accelerated in some of the years when a horrified U.S. Congress
forced a
suspension of military aid, thereby removing what minimal restraint even a
feeble American presence supplied.
Whether the success of reform in the 1950s could have preempted the immense
tragedies that unfolded later must be left to the historians. The CIA still
bars the public from the full documentation. We need our own truth commission.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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