U.S. has stake in Guatemala's ascent to peace

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 4, 1996

In this bloodiest of centuries, it is cause for wonder that a nation like Guatemala, trailing horrific episodes of internal violence, manages to climb to a plateau of peace.

In many ways like South Africa and Chile, El Salvador and Haiti, Argentina and Brazil and others around the globe, Guatemala finally seems ready to concede to the groaning for human dignity and a more inclusive and credible democracy (see story page 6).

The process - as tentative in Guatemala as it is in all those other places - will require considerable nurturing if it is to take firm hold. Preventing any further such episodes in this hemisphere will also require a much deeper look than we have been willing to take at the shameful role the United States has played in Guatemala's modern history.

The negotiations that led to the signing of a peace accord Sept. 19 in Mexico City were conducted over six years and led to provisions for sharply reducing the size and authority-of a military, that has battled guerrilla insurgents and terrorized the general population for the last 35 years. The military's power had already been curbed by civilian President Alvaro Arzu Irigoyen before the two sides - the government delegation led by Gustavo Porras Castejon and the rebel delegation led by Commander Rolando Moran - met to sign the accord, which also cut the military budget by one third.

An enormous amount of ground has been covered on the road to these most recent accords. At least as much lies ahead in the pursuit of true and lasting peace.

An essential element of the journey to true peace will be the enormous work of human forgiveness, its beginnings already evident, that will have to accompany the political accomplishments.

Forgiveness does not happen, unless the culpable own up to their sins. And here, the United States has a marvelous opportunity to perform an unprecedented act of cultural courage, for we have been hip deep for decades in the blood of Guatemalans. What has gone on there since the mid-1950s is nothing less than a relentless, low-level war against the poorest segments of the population, particularly the large indigenous Mayan population.

The war has been manipulated, at various times and often in concert, by the State Department, the CIA, an endless string of U.S. businesses, the tiny percentage of people who own most of the land and resources in Guatemala and, for far too long, the church.

The story, unfortunately, is without much subtlety - and it is well documented. Even the most staid publications now blithely recount the beginnings of Guatemala's civil war: a CIA overthrow in 1954 of the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the last duly elected civilian until the mid-1980's, when the first serious peace initiatives surfaced in Guatemala and neighboring El Salvador.

That initial CIA intervention was a direct response to an alarm sent by the mighty United Fruit Co. to the Eisenhower White House when the company sensed a threat in the independent Arbenz and his stated intent to nationalize a portion of the immense United Fruit landholdings.

Neither U.S. business nor the CIA has much distinguished itself since. Each has been complicit in greedy land grabs and exploitation of what amounts to a slave labor force. The CIA and the U.S. government have propped up some of the bloodiest dictators in the hemisphere. Except during the Carter administration's ban on military aid, the U.S. has helped or turned a blind eye to a string of brutal regimes in vicious attacks against peasants, Indians, academics, clerics, journalists and anyone else suspected of opposing the state.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, the regimes of Gen. Lucas Garcia and the born-again Gen. Efrain Rios Montt were particularly ghoulish periods when state-sponsored torture and killing reached hellish levels.

Rios Montt, embraced as a savior by then President Ronald Reagan and by some of the more notable TV preachers in the United States, oversaw a campaign of "pacification" in the countryside that devastated Mayan populations in a wide area. Hundreds of Indian villages were destroyed in a racial and genocidal purge that killed most of the inhabitants or sent them running over the border into Mexico.

To its credit the Catholic church in this period spoke out strongly against the abuses and paid dearly for doing so. Catechist, priests and nuns were hunted hunted down, tortured and eliminated or driven from the country. Consequently, today, the church's voice resounds as one of the most credible seeking peace and reconciliation.

It is best left to Guatemala's historians to explain how the country has managed to turn, however imperfectly, from the nightmare of its long civil war. But only the United States can explain how we so consistently trampled the principles of our own founding documents in our dealings with Guatemala.

News of the latest peace accords came almost simultaneously with the release by the Pentagon (see story page 3) of an admission that its School of the Americas was indeed a training ground for Latin American torturers and assassins.