The Daily Grasshopper

How's this for a hollow apology? This little gem of a story appeared in today's New York Times:

"World Briefing: Americas

CHILE: POWELL COMMENT ON COUP WELCOMED

The government has said it is pleased that the United States "now considers it was an error" to have supported the military coup that overthrew President Salvador Allende, a Socialist, on Sept. 11, 1973. In an interview last week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that encouraging the coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power for 17 years was "not a part of American history we are proud of." Chile is a member of the United Nations Security Council and the Bush administration is trying to win the support of the country's current Socialist government for a new resolution against Iraq. Larry Rohter (NYT)"

I guess the price for getting the Chileans to go along with an unpopular U.S. military intervention is to send the Secretary of State to apologize for an earlier unpopular U.S. covert operations intervention, of which they were the target. Maybe I'm just cynical.

Some of you may recall my earlier essay about U.S. involvement in the overthrow of democratically-elected Salvador Allende, "Regime Change in Chile: What Every American Should Know." If you didn't read it, it's now online at the Daily Grasshopper website:

http://www.netway.com/~pkeaney/013003korry.html

Apologizing for U.S. foreign policy has the potential to become a kind of rite of passage for U.S. presidents in the years to come. Clinton had his own comeuppance, in 1999, when he had to tell the people of Guatemala that "he felt their pain." Of course, he didn't use those words, but he did apologize (sort of) for the U.S. government's significant role in that country's tortured past. You can read about it here:

http://www.motherjones.com/scoop/scoop10.html

I bring it up because it is an important (and under-reported, as we shall see) part of our country's history and because there's a story in today's New York Times about Guatemala, where "corruption" has been "a mainstay of politics and business." Of course, another mainstay of politics and business in Guatemala and throughout the region has been the U.S. government's willingness to intervene on behalf of "our interests" (corporate and geostrategic interests, to the uninitiated) in places like Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.

The article, "Graft Aggravates Woes Plaguing Central America," fails to address the U.S. role in Guatemala's present misery. There is no mention of it. This is important for several reasons, one of which is that the reporter, David Gonzalez, has also been covering recent developments in Colombia. In some of my recent essays I have expressed confidence that we will soon be engaged militarily in that country. For the nation's newspaper of record to be publishing the work of a reporter who is so profoundly ignorant of the U.S. government's role in creating many of the problems we're facing in Latin America is inexcusable. It's just plain bad journalism. And I pay a buck a day for the Times.

What's even worse is the sense Gonzalez's story leaves with the reader that somehow, Guatemalans are more prone to graft than others, that they're somehow ethically inferior. There's a real undercurrent of racism in the article, which features sentences like "Guatemala presents a special challenge." Here's how the article ends:

"Under growing pressure, the government has set up an anticorruption commission to look at issues of inefficiency and official impunity, which are of special interest to international donors and lenders who will be meeting in May to review Guatemala's progress.

"Corruption in Guatemala is a type of social pathology that should be analyzed by a sociologist or psychiatrist," said Elfidio Cano, a member of the panel. "It has become a culture that legitimizes itself."

The whole article is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/25/international/americas/25LATI.html

Guatemala has long presented a "special challenge" to the U.S., though not the kind that Gonzalez patronizingly implies in his article today. In 1950, Guatemala elected Jacobo Arbenz, a socialist whose platform featured a plan to implement land reform in his impoverished country. The United Fruit Company, a U.S. corporation that basically ran the show in the "banana republic" of Guatemala, opposed Arbenz's plans and worked with the U.S. government (the Eisenhower administration) to have him overthrown.

Here's a description of what happened, from William Blum's "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II":

"The centerpiece of Arbenz's program was land reform. The need for it was clearly expressed in the all-too-familiar underdeveloped-country statistics: In a nation overwhelmingly rural, 2.2 percent of the landowners owned 70 percent of the arable land; the annual per capita income of agricultural workers was $87. Before the revolution of 1944, which overthrew the Ubico dictatorship, "farm laborers had been roped together by the Army for delivery to the low-land farms where they were kept in debt slavery by the landowners"...

The first plan to topple Arbenz was a CIA operation approved by President Truman in 1952, but at the eleventh hour, Secretary of State Dean Acheson persuaded Truman to abort it. However, soon after Eisenhower became president in January 1953, the plan was resurrected. Both administrations were pressured by executives of United Fruit Company - much of the vast and uncultivated land in Guatemala had been expropriated by the Arbenz government as part of the land reform program. The company wanted nearly $16 million for the and, the government was offering $525,000, United Fruit's own declared valuation for tax purposes.

United Fruit functioned in Guatemala as a state within a state. It owned the country's telephone and telegraph facilities, administered its only important Atlantic harbor, and monopolized its banana exports. A subsidiary of the company owned nearly every mile of railroad track in the country. The fruit company's influence amongst Washington's power elite was equally impressive. On a business and/or personal level, it had close ties to the Dulles brothers, various State Department officials, congressmen, the American Ambassador to the United Nations, and others. Anne Whitman, the wife of the company's public relations director, was President Eisenhower's personal secretary. Under-secretary of State (and formerly Director of the CIA) Walter Bedell Smith was seeking an executive position with United Fruit at the same time he was helping to plan the coup. He was later named to the company's board of directors...

In March 1953, the CIA approached disgruntled right-wing officers in the Guatemala army and arranged to send them arms. United Fruit donated $64,000 in cash. The following month, uprisings broke out in several towns but were quickly put down by loyal troops. The rebels were put on trial and revealed the fruit company's role in the plot, but not the ClA's."

Eventually, the CIA succeeded in overthrowing Arbenz, after an astonishing campaign (clandestinely using U.S. taxpayer dollars, naturally) to discredit him and destabilize the entire country. You can read most of the Guatemala chapter (the first one, that is - there are two) from Blum's book here:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Guatemala_KH.html

Here's the other one:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Guatemala2_KH.html

The nightmare never ended for the Guatemalans, particularly the Mayan Indians. Some of the worst atrocities I've ever heard of were committed in Central America in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and some are continuing even today. Throughout the worst periods in Guatemala, under leaders like Enrique Peralta Azurdia and all the way up through Efrain Rios Montt, the repressive and, at times, genocidal Guatemalan military had the complete backing of the U.S. government. A good overview of the trials of Guatemala, from the conquest through to today, can be found at the Global Exchange website:

http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/guatemala/history.html

Here's the part you shouldn't miss:

"These horrifying events have become symbolic of the wave of repression carried out by the Guatemalan military against the civilian population throughout the l980s. Often referred to as the "Silent Holocaust", the campaign left 200,000 civilians dead at the hands of the military death squads, and 440 Mayan villages wiped from the map. Extreme torture became commonplace as a method of coercion and intimidation. The union movement in the capital was crushed, and the literacy and rural health movements were destroyed as well. Repression against leaders of the Catholic Church was so intense that nuns and priests were finally evacuated from the Mayan highlands, their abandoned Churches used as barracks and often torture centers by the military. Thousands of catechistas were "disappeared". Hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans either fled the country or fled inwards into the jungles, forming the CPRs, or civilian resistance populations. Many others chose to pick up weapons and leave for the mountains to join the U.R.N.G. forces.

The United States role throughout this time period was hardly illustrious. Despite the extreme and obvious repression, the U.S. continued to send massive military aid throughout most of the war. Even when such aid was temporarily suspended, arms and equipment supplies continued. The School of the Americas continued to train and graduate Guatemalan officers who became notorious for their human rights violations. Training manuals used clearly indicate practices which would violate human rights. Meanwhile, CIA officials worked closely with Guatemalan intelligence officers linked to death squad activities. Many such officers were on CIA payroll as "assets" or paid informants, despite their well known record for serious human right violations. The CIA, moreover, knowingly paid "assets" for information obtained through the use of kidnapping, torture and extrajudicial execution. Worse yet, it was not unusual for North Americans to enter areas where prisoners were being secretly detained and tortured, ask some questions, then leave the victims to their fates. The Red Cross, United Nations, police and family members were never notified.

The civil war continued for more than thirty five years, the final peace accords being signed in December 1996. The United Nations sponsored Truth Commission, or Commission for Historical Clarification, ("CEH"), presented its findings in March 1999. The Commission found that the Guatemalan army had committed some 93% of the total war crimes, and had carried out over 600 massacres. Moreover, the army's counterinsurgency campaign had legally constituted genocide against the Mayan people. The U.R.N.G. forces were charged with 3% of the violations.

A key finding of the report was the conclusion that the United States government had directly contributed to this thirty year genocidal campaign. This included not only the 1954 CIA coup against President Arbenz, but also included the training of known human rights violators at the School of the Americas and other military centers, the continued financing of such human rights violators, and the close collaboration with military intelligence units which carried out death squad activities."

The Commission for Historical Clarification report, entitled "Guatemala: Memory of Silence," can be found online in its entirety:
http://shr.aaas.org/guatemala/ceh/report/english/default.html

So maybe "graft" wouldn't be such a "special challenge" if the people of Guatemala had been allowed to develop their own country without constant U.S. intervention, which was always on the side of the most violent and corrupt forces in the country? If the few people who stood up and challenged corruption over the years didn't immediately wind up dead in a ditch or in some dank torture chamber? Is that plausible-sounding? Is it something that a reporter might at least mention, instead of referring obliquely to a "social pathology that should be analyzed by a sociologist or psychiatrist"? I don't think I'm asking for a lot here. I mean, the President of the United States did apologize for this stuff already. The least a reporter can do is pretend that it really happened.

And while we're on the subject, who's going to apologize for the bombing of Iraq in 2003?