Banking on Violence? Guatemalan Genocide and US Security

[Judi Lynn]

Weekend Edition
August 19 / 20, 2006

Banking on Violence?
Guatemalan Genocide and US Security
By BARBARA ROSE JOHNSTON

On July 7, 2006, Spanish National Court Judge Santiago Pedraz issued an international arrest order for two former Guatemalan military dictators, Efrain Rios Montt and Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, along with five others accused of genocide and other crimes against humanity during Guatemala's civil war. His action follows an aborted effort to depose Rios Montt and others in Guatemala the previous week, and signals Spanish intent to proceed with the case filed by Guatemalan Nobel Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú, whose father and 38 other people were killed during a government siege on the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City in 1980. The warrant cites an array of actions and events including the Río Negro massacre, orders a freeze upon the financial assets of the accused, and has been lodged with Interpol and Europol making the warrants and financial freeze of assets effective throughout the world. Amazingly, this news of a renewed effort to prosecute parties responsible for genocide in Guatemala received scant mention in the Washington Post and no mention in the New York Times.

The lack of interest in reporting the news that a Spanish court had issued warrants for the arrest of three former Guatemalan heads of state who are charged with genocide is perhaps explained by the long historical friendship between the accused and the United States, as well as the fact that Guatemala is a very busy place these days. President Berger has passed a decree to implement CAFTA and signaled strong support for Plan Puebla-Panama ­ a massive effort to develop and connect the resources, labor and products of Central America to its' northern neighbors. Construction has begun on an electrical grid to connect Guatemala to the Mexico and the United States. Expansion in the mining sector suggests the promise of fortunes to be made in Guatemalan gold, nickel, copper, and uranium by Canadian operators and their investors. The World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and other international financial institutions are underwriting transportation and energy development to move the country and its supply of natural gas, minerals, and other resources further into the global market.

Business is good and Guatemala's international star appears to be rising. Guatemala has been elected to a seat on the UN's new Human Rights Commission. The United States is lobbying for Guatemala as candidate for the Latin America seat of the UN Security Council. Mexico's Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez has announced his support for Guatemala over the other candidate, Venezuela. Yet, while business is good, true, meaningful security remains elusive.

Much of the economic expansion is occurring in the Mayan countryside where villagers struggle to patch together a life after surviving decades of violence and the related loss of land and livelihood. Over a million Guatemalans were displaced during the nation's internal conflict, and over 200,000 people killed in a campaign of state-sponsored violence against a largely Mayan population. In 1999, the United Nations-sponsored Commission on Historical Clarification (CEH) reported the findings from exhumations, forensic analysis, and witness testimony: some 83% of the 42,275 named victims were Mayan civilians, 93% of the atrocities committed during the conflict had been the work of the armed forces, and, as evidenced by a number of exemplary cases, massacres were the result of a policy of state-sponsored violence on a Mayan civilian population. The Government of Guatemala and its military dictators were responsible for genocide and other crimes against humanity.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/johnston08192006.html



Efraín Ríos Montt