Crimes against Humanity in Guatemala: How the CIA and the Pentagon Supported the Military Dictatorship

“They seemed more than any other people to love their children” – Bartolomé de las Casas

In Guatemala the trial of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt and his military intelligence chief, José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, proceeds with testimonies of surviving Mayan victims ; a soldier has given testimony implicating the current President of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, a major at the time, in crimes of the Ixil area under his responsibility. The trial can be followed online at http://www.riosmontt-trial.org/.

In rural Iowa, the Muscatine Journal finds the degree of the crime horrifying, noting the U.S. military contributed 90% of the Guatemalan army’s resources. The New York Times op. ed page, notes that the terrible details of what was done to Mayan victims aren’t likely to dignify them. As the horror under Ríos Montt’s rule is revealed in the States, any link to the military regime’s motive is ignored. The reason for the campaign of exterminating Mayan Indians appears to be military: native communities were accused of providing shelter for a guerrilla movement.

The United Fruit Company overthrow of elected President Arbenz, referred to as a CIA takeover, secured growing-land. The United Fruit Company’s motive was purely profit, which increases with an absence of local resistance, and increases again when there isn’t appropriate compensation to the peoples whose lands are used for foreign profits.

Throughout the Caribbean the barbarities of the New World’s discovery were initially fueled by the greed for gold: in the early 1500′s the genocide of the Arawak people was firmly established; forced to mine gold under such intolerable conditions that great numbers committed suicide any way they could. Other groups had resisted naked with wooden swords: the mayhem which wearied Spanish soldiers by the end of each day, cleared land for plantation use.

Guatemala’s former dictator Ríos Montt and General Sánchez are now on trial, five hundred years later, for genocide of Ixil Mayan Indians from 1982 to 1983. The trial is the first to question in a court of the Americas, Christianity’s and Europe’s history on this side of the ocean. After immunity as a Guatemalan Senator, a very old general who has outlasted his firmly diabolical strength is finally called to account for the ongoing crime so deep in North, Central and South America that we can’t see ourselves reflected in its mirror.

Ríos Montt was strongly supported by U.S. President Reagan, and Ríos Montt’s alleged crime as the country’s leader is contained compared to the crimes of Presidents Bush and Prime Minister Blair, whose victims have become an entire people of Iraq, though mostly Muslims. Guatemala is honouring its commitment to the Convention on Genocide, which the U.S. and Canada have attempted to render inapplicable domestically.

Ríos Montt supporters have demonstrated outside the trial insisting “There was no genocide,” while within the courthouse the judge must consider deaths of possibly 300,000 Mayan Indians, overwhelming evidence from previous international deliberations and current devastating testimonies. Disturbingly the protest is accompanied by March 17th kidnapping of four Indigenous leaders and execution of one of them. The Xinca people are opposing Escobal silver mine, owned by Canada’s Goldcorp and Tahoe Resources. The company is attempting to extract resources, against the wishes of the majority of the area’s Indian population.

And days before a High Court decision allowed the genocide trial to proceed , on March 15th, Guatemala’s highest court sided with the mining corporations against indigenous people by affirming the Mining Law of 1997 which denies indigenous people their voice in the use and disposition of their lands. Mining Watch Canada points out the ruling contravenes not only the Guatemalan Peace Accords, the American Convention on Human Rights, the International Labour Organization Convention No. 169 “on the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples,” but also the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The case will now go to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

more here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/crimes-against-humanity-in-guatemala-how-the-cia-and-the-pentagon-supported-the-military-dictatorship/5330071?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=crimes-against-humanity-in-guatemala-how-the-cia-and-the-pentagon