Back
to the Future in Guatemala
The
Return of General Ríos Montt
By Jeffrey
St. Clair
Counter Punch
17 July, 2003
Efrain Ríos Montt,
the genocidal general known as the Pinochet of Guatemala, is suddenly
back in business. On July 14, the supreme court of Guatemalan overturned
a 1985 constitutional ban and permitted the former military dictator
to run for president of the Latin American nation in elections slated
for November.
"Twenty years ago General
Ríos Montt ran a military regime that killed thousands of people,"
says Jose Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division
of Human Rights Watch. "Today he should be on trial, not running
for president."
Ríos Montt, who now
serves as president of the Guatemalan National Congress, has run for
president three other times. In 1974, the general narrowly won the presidential
vote, but his election was never recognized. He tried again twice in
the 1990s, but both times was prohibited by a provision of the Guatemalan
constitutional banning people who had participated in military coups
from becoming president.
In March 1982, Ríos
Montt seized power in a bloody coup d'etat that was quietly backed by
the CIA and the Reagan White House. He and his fellow generals, Maldonando
Schadd and Luis Gordillo, deposed Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia and set up
a military tribunal with Montt at its head. The junta immediately suspended
the constitution, set up secret tribunals and began a brutal crackdown
on political dissidents that featured kidnapping, torture, and extra-judicial
assassinations.
The generals also unleashed
a scorched earth attack on the nation's Mayan population that, according
to a UN commission, resulted in the annihilation of at nearly 600 villages.
Within 18 months, more than 19,000 people had perished at the hands
of Ríos Montt 's death squads. The killings continued even after
Ríos Montt was eased from office in 1983. By 1990, more than
200,000 people had died in Guatemalan's bloody civil war, with more
than 90 percent of the dead killed by government forces. Of those, more
than 83 percent were indigenous Mayans.
Perhaps as many as one million
more Guatemalans, many of them Mayan peasants, were uprooted from their
homes, many of them forced to live in "re-education" camps
enclosed with barbed wire and armed guards. Many were later forced to
work in the fields of Guatemalan land barons.
"Not even the lives
of the elderly, pregnant women or innocent children were spared,"
declared the Guatemalan Council of Catholic Bishops in 1982 about the
massacres under Ríos Montt. "We have never in our history
seen such serious extremes."
Ríos Montt shrugged
off such talk as leftwing propaganda. "We don't have a policy of
scorched earth," he sneered. "We have a policy of scorched
Communists."
The Reagan administration
saw the slaughter the same self-sanitizing light. Even though the US
ambassador to Guatemala cabled Washington that Ríos Montt was
behind the wave of killings, Reagan continued to embrace the general
and his regime. Reagan paid a visit to Guatemala City in 1982 where
he hailed Ríos Montt "a man of great personal integrity
and commitment" and assured the troubled nation that the man who
came to power in a military coup was "totally dedicated to democracy."
The general's ties with the
United States military go all the way back to 1950 when he received
training by the Pentagon at the School of the Americas in Panama. In
1954, the young officer aided the CIA in engineering the overthrow of
Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, whose nationalistic policies had irritated United
Fruit.
From then on, Ríos
Montt's rise was steady and almost unimpeded. In 1970, he became a general
and chief of staff for the Guatemalan army, which ruthlessly suppressed
peasant uprisings and served as armed guards for the big land barons.
His career suffered a minor setback in 1974, when his apparent victory
in the presidential elections was invalidated.
Ríos Montt apparently
blamed his defeat on the meddling of the country's Catholic priests,
who he saw as agents of the left. In 1978, he left the Catholic Church
in a huff and became a minister in the California-based evangelical
Church of the Word. He now counts among his closest prayer friends Jerry
Falwell and Pat Robertson, the reverend who recently beseeched the Almighty
to smite three supreme court justices so that more conservatives could
ascend to the high bench.
When the born-again general
took power in 1982, his messianic fervor poured forth in bizarre torrents.
"God gives power to whomever he wants," Ríos Montt
raved. "And he gave it to me." Of course, Ríos Montt
had plenty of secular help in the form of the CIA and the Pentagon,
which sent advisors into his inner circle. Moreover, six of Ríos
Montt 's top nine generals were also educated at the School of Americas
in the arts of coup-making, political repression, torture, assassination
and fealty to Washington.
The level of violence these
generals perpetrated during their brief tenure was appalling and bloodthirsty.
Indeed, it amounted to a form of state-sanctioned sadism whose purpose
was not just to kill but to invoke terror and submission, a strategy
with clear echoes of the CIA's Phoenix Program in Vietnam. A report
on the slaughter by Amnesty International succinctly describes the kinds
of atrocities that became commonplace in Ríos Montt 's Guatemala:
"People of all ages were not only shot, they were burned alive,
hacked to death, disemboweled, drowned, beheaded. Small children were
smashed against rocks or bayoneted to death."
Ríos Montt and his
gang were eased from power in 1983. But they never went away and the
machinery of death they installed kept on killing throughout the decade
and beyond.
Meanwhile, Ríos Montt
formed his own political party, the ultra-right National Republican
Front, appointed himself chairman for life and rules with an authoritarian
rigidity. He has regularly toured the country giving speeches that blend
neo-fascist politics with his feverish brand of evangelical Christianity.
His children have advanced along with him. His son, Enrique Rios Sosa,
is the head of finances for the Guatemalan army, while his daughter
Zury Rios serves as vice-president of the National Congress.
Attempts to bring Ríos
Montt to justice have failed. Nobel laureate and Mayan human rights
advocate Rigobertu Menchu sought to have Spanish courts indict Ríos
Montt on charges of genocide in 1999, but in 2000 the Spanish high court
bowed to US pressure and ruled that it lacked jurisdiction to prosecute
him for crimes committed outside of Spain. Early this year, however,
the court reversed itself slightly, allowing charges against Ríos
Montt to proceed for crimes committed against Spanish citizens.
In June 2001 Center for Legal
Action on Human Rights based in Guatemala City filed a complaint against
Ríos Montt on behalf of the residents of 12 Mayan villages which
were destroyed by Ríos Montt 's troops between March and December
of 1982. More than 1,200 people were murdered in those raids on the
remote mountain villages. Although Ríos Montt maintains he has
legislative immunity from prosecution, the case continues to percolate
through the courts, backed by dozens of graphic and heart-wrenching
depositions from Mayan villagers.
Later that year, the general
got in trouble once again for his role in a more run-of-the-mill legislative
scandal. His party secretly re-wrote tax laws governing the sale of
alcohol and beer at the behest of the liquor industry. The secret meetings
were caught on tape. Charges of political corruption were brought against
Ríos Montt and 24 of his fellow FRG party legislators. Then the
legislature, under the control of Ríos Montt, passed a measure
giving the lawmakers immunity. The immunity grant was initially struck
down by the Guatemalan Supreme Court. Two days later a fusillade of
gunfire ripped through the home of the chief justice of the court. The
charges against the general were dropped once again.
This is the same court that
has now given Ríos Montt the green light to run for the presidency.
But now the chief justice is Guillermo Ruiz Wong, a childhood friend
of the general, and Ríos Montt publicly bragged about having
four judges in his pocket. He was right and that's all he needed.
So far the Bush administration
has maintained a coy distance about the prospects of Ríos Montt
becoming president of Guatemala. In June, the State Department publicly
announced that it would prefer to deal with a less tarnished figure.
"We would hope to be
able to work with, and have a normal, friendly relationship with whoever
is the next president of Guatemala," said state department spokesman
Richard Boucher last month. "Realistically, in light of Mr. Ríos
Montt's background, it would be difficult to have the kind of relationship
that we would prefer."
This was hardly a stern condemnation
of the war criminal and Ríos Montt doesn't seem the least worried
about such low-grade sniping from Colin Powell's office. The general
understands how Washington works. After all, he has old friends in the
Bush inner circle, including UN ambassador John Negroponte, John Poindexter,
Eliot Abrams and the repellant Otto Reich.
So could Ríos Montt,
even with his grim resume of torture and assassination, be elected president
of Guatemalan? The country is mired in poverty, its democratic institutions
are frail and the government is plagued by official corruption. The
current government, headed by Ríos Montt protégé
Alfonso Portillo, recently instituted an unsavory program of "compensating"
former members of civil self-defense patrols the paramilitary forces
responsible for massive abuses during the Ríos Montt's infamous
"Beans and Bullets" counterinsurgency campaign. In Guatemala,
many observers see this as a smart way to buy votes in advance of the
election from the general's natural constituency.
And it's still not safe to
publicly criticize Ríos Montt and his allies for crimes committed
20 years ago. In 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, the head of the
Catholic Church's human rights office, had his skull crushed with a
concrete block two days after he had submitted his report on the abuses
of the Guatemalan Army. He was succeeded by Bishop Mario Ríos
Montt-the general's brother. Big country, small world.
Still many people don't forget
and can't forgive. On a recent campaign swing through the Mayan highlands,
where so many perished at the hands of Ríos Montt's death brigades,
villagers pelted the general with stones.
Even so, it would be dangerously
ill advised to count the general out now that he has just gotten back
into the game.
"The last word on the
general who's maintained his presence in the country's political life
for 20 years since the coup has yet to be said," warns Hector Rosada,
a political analyst from Guatemala City. "He has an incredible
ability to be born again, and he's very good at operating from the trenches.
He retreats, digs in, waits as long as it takes, and then emerges once
again."
Jeffrey St. Clair is author
of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature
(Common Courage Press) and coeditor, with Alexander Cockburn, of The
Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press). Both books will be published in
October.