This is just a simplified guide. The questions are not central to the discussion in this class, but rather basic starting points. Jorge Majfud
- (Review the Theology of Liberation from the previous class)
- Who was Oscar Romero, and why was he assassinated in his church?
- Who killed the four American nuns in El Salvador? Why?
- Who was Father Carlos Mugica?
- Who was Efrain Rios Montt, and why did Ronald Reagan and Pat Robertson support him?
- Who was responsible for the 1989 massacre of Jesuits in El Salvador? Why?
Killed in El Salvador: An American Story | Retro Report | The New York Times
NPR: What Archbishop Romero’s Beatification Means For El Salvador Today
NPR: What Archbishop Romero’s Beatification Means For El Salvador Today
They will gather to pay tribute to former Archbishop Oscar Romero, a beloved priest and staunch defender of the poor, who was murdered while celebrating Mass in 1980.
Download audio file: 20150522_atc_el_salvador_to_beatify_archbishop_oscar_romero_a_prophet_of_our_time.mp3
Nov 16, 1989 Jesuits Killed in El Salvador | Video ABC News
CIA and Religion (from CIA’s web site)
CIA and religion.pdf
Clinton Presidential Records
National Security Council
Office of the National Security Advisor (Lake, Anthony)
OA/Box Number: 1466
640bd95654c283a9254764a1b06fd57a.pdf
Church and State: https://churchandstate.org.uk/2012/10/cia-and-the-vaticans-intelligence-apparatus/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
The «Banzer Plan«:
• “Only the church’s progressive sector is to be attacked, not the church as an institution nor the bishops as a group.”
• “The foreign clergy especially is to be attacked.”
• “The CIA promised to reveal full information on certain priests, especially those from the United States.”
• “Arrests should be made preferably in the countryside, on deserted streets, or at night.”
Ideological represion in the church https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3677&context=etd
Duration: 2:07
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jj6LHwEvShY
The Center for JusticeThe Center for Justice & Accountability
The Center for Justice & Accountability
(Nov 2017) EL SALVADOR JESUITAS España abre una puerta para juzgar a ideólogos de la matanza de los jesuitas
España podrá juzgar al inductor del asesinato del jesuíta Ellacuría
EEUU entrega al coronel salvadoreño Inocente Orlando Montano para ser juzgado por su responsabilidad en la masacre de seis padres jesuitas y dos mujeres en El Salvador en 1989
http://cadenaser.com/ser/2017/11/29/tribunales/1511954742_215388.html
American Founding Fathers
«If Christian Preachers had continued to teach as Christ & his Apostles did, without Salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I imagine Tests would never have existed: For I think they were invented not so much to secure Religion itself, as the Emoluments of it.— When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, ’tis a Sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.»
Benjamin Franklin. Letter to Richard Price (1780)
“The Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
George Washington. Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island (1790)
“The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
John Adams. Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11 (1797), signed by Adams and unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate
“It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
Thomas Jefferson. Notes on the State of Virginia (1782)
“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”
Thomas Jefferson. Letter to the Danbury Baptists (1802)
“Religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”
James Madison. Letter to Edward Livingston (1822)
“The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man.”19 – April, Tr. 9: The Church under attack
James Madison. Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments (1785). Madison, often called the Father of the Constitution, was also a staunch defender of secular governance.
“My own mind is my own church.”
Thomas Paine. The Age of Reason (1794)
“Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.”
Thomas Paine. The Age of Reason (1794)
The following chapters related to this topic are from the book The Wild Frontier: 200 Years of Anglo-Saxon Fanaticism in Latin America. They are not required reading for this course.
1980. The Aryans of Bolivia
La Paz, Bolivia. July 17, 1980—Drug traffickers pressure President Lidia Gueiler to appoint her cousin and graduate of the School of the Americas, General García Meza, as Army Commander. General Mesa is a trusted aide of former dictator Hugo Banzer and belongs to the right-wing faction of the Bolivian army, which is upset by investigations into human rights abuses in the country. In this bloody “Coca Coup,” Nazi Klaus Barbie, a CIA official, plays a significant role.
Just as in the United States the powerful racist ideology of Anglo-Saxon superiority spanned the last century and ultimately influenced and inspired even Adolf Hitler himself, the German Nazis had a significant ideological and moral influence on American high society before World War II, until the traumatic experience turned them into official enemies and banished them to the basements of their lofty executive towers. Once the war ended and the hunt for Nazis began, these same agents would be crucial to the establishment of the CIA in Europe and the founding of NASA through Operation Paperclip. Around this time, a foundational shift occurred: the United States’ main ally against Germany, the Soviet Union, became the sole remaining enemy and, consequently, almost the sole obsession and excuse for continuing a tradition of illegal and forceful interventions dating back to the previous century. One of the key groups in Washington reporting on Soviet activities was the Gehlen Organization, a spy network created by Hitler and adopted by the CIA. Leadership fell to General Reinhard Gehlen, assisted by a hundred other Nazi war criminals, former members of the Gestapo, and other divisions of the SS paramilitary group. For the Nazi old guard, the communists were the main enemies. The alliance with Washington was not only an opportunity for revenge but a necessity for survival. For this reason, informants within this Nazi spy network exaggerated the military and operational capabilities of the Soviets, who were then struggling to recover from the devastation of the war—a devastation that never affected the United States in the same way, but quite the opposite (World War II had ruined the major European powers that, until then, had dominated the geopolitical landscape) . Similarly, both CIA propaganda in Latin America and that of the Latin American upper classes and ruling elites employed this method: the CIA exaggerated Moscow’s capacity to act in Latin America, while the local ruling classes in power stirred up the specter of communism to ensure the flow of millions in aid from Washington to their military dictatorships or far-right paramilitary groups.
It is no coincidence that coup-plotting military officers now display a flag bearing the Nazi swastika, nor is it a coincidence that this tradition survives—albeit in the basements of some barracks—well into the 21st century. Decades earlier, the CIA had sent some of these Nazi criminals, such as Otto von Bolschwing and Klaus Barbie, to advise the dictatorships in their “struggle for freedom.” [1] Von Bolschwing is a veteran criminal from Hitler’s secret service, the paramilitary SS, which was directly responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews and other “inferior races” until the end of World War II. The CIA hired him as a spy after he served briefly in the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps. Bolschwing’s boss, Adolf Eichmann, was kidnapped in Argentina by the Mossad and executed in Israel in 1962, but Bolschwing remains untouchable due to his service against all kinds of popular movements in Europe. To avoid extradition to Israel, he was sent to California, where he worked as vice president of the Trans-International Computer Investment Corporation, a company that held contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense. This year, some details about Bolschwing’s Nazi past were made public. A year later, the Department of Justice will have no choice but to prosecute him, accusing him of lying by concealing his true past. Bolschwing will die on March 7, 1982, at the age of 73, in a nursing home.
Like Eichmann and so many others, Klaus Barbie had managed to escape via the infamous rat route with the help of the victors. Unlike Eichmann, Barbie had managed to get on the payroll of U.S. and German intelligence agencies in 1947 and supplemented his income by selling quinine and, along with two other prominent Nazis, Friedrich Schwend and Hans Rudel, by trafficking arms. According to an internal 1986 document that the CIA released in 2010, Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz, had been captured by agents from Washington in 1947 in Austria, and had been reported dead that same year in Europe and later several times in South America (before reappearing in Peru, Paraguay, Argentina, and marrying in Uruguay), as were other war criminals such as Friedrich Schwend, sent to Peru, and Walter Rauff, supervisor of the SS gas chambers, responsible for the deaths of 100,000 people and an employee of the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, and Augusto Pinochet’s secret police, the DINA. According to the report published in issue 25 of CovertAction, republished by the CIA on June 3, 2010, “all collaborated in the repression against leftists, especially when the CIA had to organize the coup d’état against Allende.”
Following the Bolivian Revolution of 1952—which Harry Truman did not dare to suppress in one fell swoop due to the absence of a powerful national army and the presence of strong, heavily armed popular militias—the United States pursued a more gradualist strategy. To support a process ofrestoring democracy in Bolivia, in the 1950s the U.S. government pressured President Víctor Paz Estenssoro to rearm the army and disarm the popular militias. The sacred Second Amendment in the United States, considered by the country’s conservatives as the main reason why, apparently, there has never been a dictatorship in the United States, did not apply to poor countries populated by Indigenous peoples who do not know how to govern themselves.
Around this time, the neighboring country (Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, one of the CIA’s and Washington’s protégés) maintained the infamous and paradoxical Colonia Dignidad, founded by the German Nazi Paul Schäfer Schneider. Although this colony would later be known for its systematic sexual abuse of hundreds of children and young people, at the time it was recognized in Santiago’s military barracks for its expertise in torture. Making an individual suffer for hours and days without dying is an art that Colonia Dignidad contributed to the new Chilean government, which until then had been inexperienced in the matter.
Since the 1960s, Klaus Barbie had earned the respect of Bolivia’s German community (many of whom were Jewish) and, in particular, by Cochabamba’s high society under the name Klaus Altmann. Barbie was acquainted with prominent members of society, such as the graduate of the School of the Americas in Georgia and dictator Hugo Banzer, Alberto Natusch Busch—grandson of former President Germán Busch and himself president for two weeks in 1979—and his successor, Lidia Gueiler Tejada.[2]
In 1980, Klaus Barbie, also known as the Butcher of Lyon for his systematic murder of French prisoners during Hitler’s heyday, once again distinguished himself as part of the intelligence apparatus behind General Luis García Meza’s bloody coup against President Lidia Gueiler.
Gueiler also belonged to the German community, but she was Jewish and somewhat left-leaning.
1980. Ecuador is drawn into the terrorism of Operation Condor
Santa Marta, Colombia. December 1980—At the summit of presidents, El Salvador’s dictator, José Napoleón Duarte, runs into Ecuador’s president, Jaime Roldós, and Roldós refuses to greet him. Annoyed, Napoleón Duarte uses his speech to mock his young colleague, whom he accuses of being inexperienced. Roldós commits a mistake or an unexpected act of courage. Without a tremor in his voice, he responds to one of Washington’s protected dictators: “I may be inexperienced, but my government rests on a mountain of votes and yours on a mountain of corpses.” Almost at the same time, Roldós declines Washington’s invitation to attend President Ronald Reagan’s inauguration on January 20.
Dr. Roldós is the first democratically elected president after ten years of friendly dictatorships and supports President Jimmy Carter’s idea of making human rights a condition of any policy. But this weakness of the empire is short-lived. Jimmy Carter has failed in his bid for reelection, and in exactly one month, Ronald Reagan will take office in the White House.
A few months later, on May 24, 1981, President Roldós will die in a plane crash along with his wife Martha Bucaram and seven other passengers. His ally in the region, Panamanian President Omar Torrijos, would die in another plane crash two months later, on July 31.
Roldós had been elected president in 1978, ending another military dictatorship that had begun in 1963 when the CIA overthrew constitutional President Carlos Julio Arosemena.
Although Arosemena had distanced himself from any suspicion of sympathies with the communist left, confirming his protection of private property and his support for the free market, Washington was not satisfied. Arosemena had not yielded to its international pressure for Ecuador to break off relations with Cuba. In less than three years, he had implemented social policies and promoted a utopian human rights agenda for a continent suffocated by multiple military dictatorships, all supported directly or indirectly by Washington and transnational corporations. The last straw came one afternoon when, after a couple of drinks too many, President Arosemena received an official from the U.S. company Grace with words that did not please him. The president showed neither unconditional loyalty to Washington nor submission to the sanctity of international corporations.
As had happened with Salvador Allende in Chile seven years earlier and with João Goulart in Brazil nearly two decades prior, Plan A for Washington’s secret agencies was to prevent a Roldós victory at the polls, and following the failure of the CIA’s propaganda operations, they had proceeded to the well-known Plan B. That same year, 1978, Ecuador unwittingly joined the Plan Condor club led by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Immediately, on March 31, in its secret report on terrorism, the CIA reported on the activities of “an Argentine military officer tasked with overseeing the telecommunications system of Ecuador’s Ministry of Defense” with the aim of monitoring any moves by the new government. This operation by the international mafia relied on various resources, such as near-total control of information and the dissemination of convenient information. As revealed by a Washington Post investigation published on February 11, 2020, the Crypto AG machines developed in Switzerland—which were supposedly capable of encoding encrypted messages (cryptography) to keep them secure and under each country’s control, had in fact been programmed to be controlled by the CIA and the NSA (and by German intelligence until 1993), meaning that each country’s so-called state secrets were received daily in Bonn and Washington. In reality, this revelation will come as no surprise. Former CIA agent Philip Agee, stationed in Ecuador among other posts, had already revealed this in his memoir Inside the Company, published in 1975. Agee would be fiercely discredited because, years after fleeing from one country to another, he would take refuge in Cuba, where he died in 2008. Other agents who remained loyal to the CIA until their dying days would reveal, time and again, the same things Agee did, but they would be considered heroes and patriots.
Now, the threat of another president who is too independent and concerned about human rights in an insignificant country in the South is not good news. By a miraculous coincidence, two of the continent’s four rebellious presidents will die in two plane crashes, just weeks apart.
In 2014, when it no longer matters and no one is listening, the CIA will allow the declassification of some documents mentioning Ecuador’s incorporation into Plan Condor operations, which, according to the State Department, “aimed to keep Latin America as the United States’ backyard.”
For seven years now, both Plan Condor and the CIA have been directly involved in the assassination of thousands of dissidents in various countries, such as the car bomb assassination in the very capital of the United States of Allende’s deposed minister, Orlando Letelier, which will be quickly buried under the heavy media rhetoric about democracy and the freedom of capitalism in the West.
Ecuador will be no exception. Vice President Osvaldo Hurtado Larrea will become president and, to stay the course, will announce an austerity plan targeting public services “to prevent an economic crisis.” As in many other countries in the Global South, the crisis in Ecuador will erupt anyway in 1982. By then, the Fed will have raised interest rates sky-high to protect the United States from inflation. As a result, soft loans (with floating interest rates that Washington approved for the region’s military dictatorships to support the new neoliberal policies) will become unpayable and will sink even the so-called “miraculous” economies of the Southern Cone countries, such as Chile’s. As in Argentina, Hurtado will nationalize private debts incurred abroad, turning them into more foreign debt for the Ecuadorian people.
1981. The enemy is numerous and armed with children and women
Morazán, El Salvador. December 10, 1981—The army’s Atlacatl battalion heads to the battlefield, confident of a historic victory. The enemy outnumbers them, but the leaders of the famous battalion have been trained at the School of the Americas and know what they’re doing. Defeat is not an option, the soldiers tell themselves, though they don’t know where the School is. Within a few hours, just a stone’s throw from Honduras, they surround the village of El Mozote. The village is accused of harboring traitorous guerrillas from the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front.[3] The soldiers enter each of the modest homes, drag out the occupants, take the few worthless items they find, and herd the villagers into the central square.
The resistance is fierce. The women scream for mercy and the children scream just to scream. A group of men is executed in the village church. Some are shot, and the rest are slit at the throat—a method that takes more effort but is more economical. The younger women are taken outside the village to be raped for hours on end. Then they are executed so they won’t complain. Their children are also executed with machine-gun fire in their own homes. The youngest are grabbed by the feet and smashed against the rocks. On the third day, the patriotic army wins the arduous battle and sets the village on fire so no traces of the victory remain. In their glorious retreat through smaller villages near El Mozote, the soldiers eat, abuse, and execute the inhabitants. In just three days and three nights, shortly before the Christmas break, the heroic Atlacatl battalion (also known as “The Angels of Hell”) leaves behind a stinking carpet of a thousand dead. The bodies will remain for days where they fell, many of them burned by the fire that ravaged the village, until some relatives dare to return to bury them.
A few days earlier, some soldiers had passed through El Mozote and bought coffee and tortillas from a woman. On the day of the massacre, the woman’s son recognizes some of those men—men so important that, for some reason, they are now shooting his mother with their powerful M-16 automatics donated by Washington, while she was breastfeeding a forty-day-old baby girl until both fall dead. Immediately afterward, they go to where his brother is and riddle him with bullets. Adelio can see his intestines. They do the same to his sister in the kitchen.
Adelio Díaz Chicas is six years old, and, badly wounded, the soldiers leave him for dead. That has always been the best way to survive political brutality in Latin America: to play dead in its many forms: to keep quiet, to collaborate, to switch to the winning side, or to die of poverty, ostracism, oblivion, or under torture.
El Mozote is one of the countless massacres that accustomed the Southern Border—and, in particular, Central America—to injustice, early death for those at the bottom, and corruption and impunity for those at the top. 70,000 Salvadorans will die in what the dominant narrative prefers to call a “civil war.” Almost all these lives would be cut short in massacres perpetrated by the army and death squads supported and financed by Washington with billions of dollars and by El Salvador’s “upper class.” Others will have some luck amid the tragedy that deprives them of their families in the most violent ways. Among them is the poet Carlos Ernesto García, who had to flee his country at the age of twenty, when one night in 1980 soldiers entered his parents’ home and massacred everyone they found there.
Elliott Abrams, a current official in Ronald Reagan’s State Department and an advisor to future administrations such as those of George W. Bush and Donald Trump in the coming century, is a consistent defender of paramilitary forces in Latin America; as such, he will downplay the testimonies of Indigenous people and peasants, dismissing them as “communist propaganda.” When he can no longer deny the tragedy, he will attempt to downplay the death toll by arguing that only five hundred people lived in El Mozote, strategically ignoring the surrounding massacres.
A year earlier, Abrams himself had defended the Salvadoran paramilitary leader Roberto D’Aubuisson and exonerated him of any responsibility for the murder of Father Óscar Romero—as always, long before the contrary was proven and before the truth ceased to be dangerous or an obstacle to new ventures. D’Aubuisson had received similar support from his friend, North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms. Meanwhile,
D’Aubuisson, convicted and acquitted of other massacres and after declaring that it is necessary to “kill 200,000 people to restore peace in El Salvador” (small countries, large massacres), will found the influential far-right ARENA party, which, naturally, will define itself as democratic and receive millions in support from its traditional ally in the North. [4] In 1988, when D’Aubuisson had already become a thorn in Washington’s side due to multiple accusations of genocide (U.S. Ambassador Robert White had described him as a “pathological killer”; more than twenty years later, in 2010, Captain Álvaro Saravia would acknowledge that the order to assassinate Father Óscar Romero had come from D’Aubuisson), in an interview with his hated northern newspaper, The Washington Post, he would admit that he himself had stolen El Salvador’s intelligence files nine years earlier, with which he had managed to compile a list of names of union members, teachers, and dissidents suspected of being leftists. In 1980, on a television program, he had read the list, and within a matter of days, several of those named that night were in the morgue, adding to the statistics of victims of the so-called “civil war” in El Salvador. Aside from the details, nothing very different from the dirty wars in other countries in the region and in South America.
The search for truth and justice will become increasingly complex. Now, Washington’s involvement is increasingly cautious, but just as lethal. After anti-militarist reformers in the U.S. Congress achieved some victories in limiting the CIA’s and the government’s freedom to order assassinations, plots, and coups in other countries, a new generation of conservatives known as “the hawks” had officially taken power with Ronald Reagan’s victory in last year’s elections. [5] In one of the first discussions on the subject of Cuba, Alexander Haig, Ronald Reagan’s new Secretary of State, had told the president: “Just give me the order and I’ll turn that shitty island into an empty parking lot.” The American New Right is, naturally, militaristic and views human rights as a naive abstraction: only force legitimizes politics. His future ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick (a former socialist turned far-right), insists at a National Security Council meeting that there is no political legitimacy without the triumph of force and that “humanistic reasoning” is rubbish. Reagan hesitates; he wants no more fiascos and defeats at the hands of small countries. After Vietnam, the country needs an injection of patriotic euphoria. The heroic struggle for truth and human rights does not serve that purpose.[6]
Haig recommends intervening in a weak country. Nicaragua, tolerated by Jimmy Carter, is the golden opportunity. “This is one you can win,” the secretary assures him. His circle of influence is one of the toughest in history. Later known as the White House Hawks, Robert Kagan, Elliott Abrams, and Paul Wolfowitz would be among the names to dominate U.S. foreign policy for nearly half a century without ever having been elected to office. When Abrams was appointed Special Representative for Venezuela by President Donald Trump in 2019, he would have a prolific resume spanning several decades, including having served as Under Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor for Latin America; having participated in coup plots ranging from Chile in 1973 to Venezuela in 2002; and having persistently supported and justified terrorist groups such as the Contras in Nicaragua, the paramilitaries in Colombia, and various death squads from Argentina to Central America, justifying or dismissing as “accidents” the massacres carried out by friendly dictatorships, such as the one at El Mozote. Like Colonel North, for lying to the U.S. Congress, he was sentenced to pay $50 (fifty dollars) and serve two years in prison, a sentence he did not serve, thanks to a pardon from President G. H. Bush in 1992.
Now, following the laws passed by the previous Congress dominated by progressive Democrats, it is more difficult to orchestrate conspiracies and assassinations in distant countries. Secret intelligence reports become more subtle, of greater literary refinement due to the awareness that sooner or later they might be declassified. Ronald Reagan invests prudently. Instead of funding Latin American militaries because they are easy for Washington to manipulate, as Richard Nixon put it, Reagan speaks of the “struggle for democracy” and, while blocking the rebellious dictatorship in Cuba, aids “friendly dictatorships” with a flood of dollars, just as previous administrations did. The genocidal dictatorship in El Salvador alone receives one million dollars a day for a decade.
According to Jeane Kirkpatrick, “traditional dictatorships are less authoritarian than revolutionary ones,” which is why it is necessary to support the former—which, incidentally and by coincidence, perfectly served the interests of Western capital. As in Latin American military dictatorships, the brutality of the armies is complemented by paramilitary forces. In El Salvador, one such group is the Maximiliano Hernández Martínez death squad, named in honor of the dictator who in 1932 massacred 25,000 peasants accused of being indigenous or Communist Party voters. This massacre was called La Matanza. According to Kirkpatrick, Salvadorans consider Hernández Martínez a national hero.
The new policies of force as a means of legitimizing politics have left 300,000 dead in Central America, one million tortured, several million exiled, corruption, violence by street gangs, and an authoritarian mindset in the name of democracy that will become entrenched—with no possibility of change—among a significant portion of the population both within and outside their countries.
By mere chance, the elite unit created by the School of the Americas for El Salvador, the Atlacatl Battalion, would be responsible—among other massacres—for the murder of six Jesuits, a staff member, and her young daughter at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University eight years later.
1982. If you can’t catch the fish, drain the sea
Las Dos Erres, Guatemala. December 6, 1982—At midnight, disguised as guerrillas, the special forces for the fight against terrorism, the fearsome Kaibiles, begin the disappearance of the town still known as Las Dos Erres, in La Libertad. They are searching for weapons stolen during an ambush or confrontation with guerrillas that occurred three months earlier, which left 17 soldiers and an unknown number of rebels dead.
The government accuses the community, an agricultural cooperative, of being a guerrilla hideout. Since the evidence does not support the official version, the soldiers rape the women they find and execute their children and brothers, whom they hunt down like dogs. At dawn, after the desperate screams of the children, the laughter, and the soldiers’ orgasms with the prettiest women, the anti-terrorist squad herds the remaining men into the church to be executed. By noon, at gunpoint, they force the remaining women to cook for the exhausted troops. After they have digested their meal and with no further sexual desires, they shoot them.
For two days, amid the dead and the rubble, the soldiers search for the weapons that justified the operation, but find nothing more than a few machetes, metates, and two-thousand-year-old metlapiles, with traces of corn tortillas still fresh. In any case, the government and the soldiers accuse the peasants of being guerrillas of the FAR (Armed Rebel Forces) and, as proof, show bags of beans marked with the acronym FAR, printed by the bean producer Federico Aquino Ruano (FAR). In total, 220 peasants are murdered. Most are children, the elderly, and women who could not escape in time. 14 are newborns and 67 are under twelve years of age (“chocolates” in military lingo). 162 are buried in mass graves so they cannot speak, neither alive nor dead. Some of those buried, with gunshot wounds to the head, are still alive, but barely moving. There are not more because many, alerted by the false rumor of an imminent government bombing of the cooperative, had fled to the mountains the day before.
Las Dos Erres is wiped off the map. Not even the name will remain, except in the inevitable yellowed paper records and in the memory of the children who were spared only to become slaves to their parents’ murderers. From now on, the abandoned region will be known as Las Cruces, and the events of 1982 will be remembered merely as one more of the four hundred massacres perpetrated by yet another friendly dictatorship. The people and the army are used to it. On March 13, on the communal lands of the Achí Maya village in Rio Negro, another four hundred peasants had been massacred to facilitate the construction of the Chixoy Dam. The soldiers and members of the Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PAC) had also raped the women before executing them. Then they killed their children. Two months later, in May, the same army returned to the riverbank to massacre another hundred undesirable villagers. The instruments of brutality are varied. In Olopa, for example, the soldiers had saved ammunition by breaking the children’s backs over their knees, as if chopping wood. Generally, the younger women are raped before being killed, and their crying children are thrown into houses burning like hell.
On March 17, 1983, Stephen Kass, the New York lawyer investigating these massacres, reported—without shocking many—that when there was no fire into which to throw the children, “they are grabbed by the feet and their heads are smashed against the rocks.”
Among other sources, these testimonies—dismissed as accounts from anti-patriots and foreign radicals—will be confirmed in 2009 when hundreds of army records are discovered referring to poor indigenous people as “the enemy” and their land as a battlefield that must be razed for having been “radicalized” by the rebels. The mission is: “to exterminate the subversive elements in the area,” that is, the entire indigenous and peasant population (in a word, Marxists) who do not abandon their land to join the army’s call. Apart from the massacres and displacements, the reports from Operation Sofia include techniques defined as “psychological warfare” and sermons intended for the peasants, such as: “We are Guatemalans, not subversives who only talk about power… People of Nebaj, the subversives do not believe in God, but you do believe in God. We must repair our churches, which are the source of our faith as believers [handwritten correction: Christians]… For with the army and the people united, we will achieve peace and freedom… The army is better equipped and trained, but with God’s help and ours, we will put an end to these bandits. I say bandits because only bandits dress like that; only bandits attack at night… As Christians, we cannot demand justice with weapons in hand… They’ve drummed into our heads that we’re fighting against the rich; that’s the biggest lie. We’re not blind—we can see that we’re fighting against our own people, our own race. Aren’t the soldiers peasants just like us?”.
The official reports of the Operation are not only riddled with spelling errors and obsessive references to paratroopers, but also with definitions of coded terms. For example: “Platinum” means “eliminate him, kill him.” The helicopters and ammunition used in each “population control” operation are reported with greater precision than the dead: “Ammunition expended… 5.56 mm cartridges = 8,242, Galil A/P rifle grenades = 117…” The dead are referred to as a few hundred “evacuees” (“families threatened by subversion”). In the case of a 17-year-old boy, whose name will never be known, it is summarized in a single line: “an individual dressed in civilian clothes and without identification who attempted to flee from the patrol was eliminated.” When the patrol discovers a family hiding in a ravine, it is reported that the father shot his wife and his “chocolates (children).”
But nothing is enough to win the supposed war.
By July 22, Colonel Francisco Ángel Castellano reports that ideological efforts have not had the expected effect on the population, whose minds remain closed, and thus requests the establishment of a local radio station, a “Psychological Operations team,” and mimeograph equipment “to produce leaflets that counterbalance the bad communist propaganda.” The peasants are poor and illiterate, but not stupid. They know that the brutality of the struggle “against the insurgency” and “foreign interference” is rooted in contempt for the indigenous people and the poor, and their interests are clear. It was purely by chance that, a few years earlier, Exxon, Basic Resources, and Shenandoah Oil of Texas had begun oil exploration in the Ixil village area, leading to the population being progressively stripped of their communal lands. [7] Those who had been dispossessed began to protest against the political leaders and the transnational corporations, so the government, accusing them of being influenced by the guerrillas and by Fidel Castro, responded with more massacres, such as the one in Panzós in 1978, where more than forty peasants were murdered. In 1980, protesters occupied the Spanish embassy in protest against Shenandoah Oil (in which the president, General Lucas García, was a shareholder), and the “patriotic” army resolved the issue by firing white phosphorus, killing all 39 occupants. Although the occupation of the embassy was intended to draw international attention and request Spain’s mediation, north of the Wild Frontier neither the media nor the successful Florida senators nor the Christian puritans of Pennsylvania and New York will utter a single word about the new massacres and summary executions of capitalist terrorism, promoted and organized by Washington and private and ecclesiastical free enterprise.
Quite the contrary. On March 23, another general serving the same extreme oligarchy, Efraín Ríos Montt, seized power to take Guatemalan terror and genocide to historic levels. The good born-again evangelical Christian and general of the patriotic army has the spiritual support of El Verbo, a Pentecostal group founded in 1976. Several members of this evangelical church have been appointed ministers in his government. The new saviors claim that the Catholics from below, the liberation theologians, have been corrupted by their preference for the poor. Jesus was a capitalist and loved the success of the rich. That thing about the camel had been a joke. What’s more, the rebellious Son of God was on the side of the Roman Empire, the empire that crucified him. Now, the born-again Pentecostals are bringing the true truth to the Wild Frontier: if you believe in the resurrection of Jesus, all your sins will be forgiven and forgotten. So many years of missionary work by powerful American sects are beginning to show miraculous results. The new faithful never tire of fainting in the temples, of trembling on the floor like possessed outcasts, struck by the lightning bolt of enlightenment, and the old masters of the country never tire of sinning as they please.
To celebrate the miraculous rise of General Ríos Montt, the powerful The 700 Club in Virginia Beach organized a satellite prayer chain. Guatemala has 6.5 million inhabitants, and on that day, more than three million were sitting next to a radio or in front of a television, listening intently to the famous pastor Pat Robertson, a declared enemy of unions, feminists, and teachers. Sixty percent are indigenous. Very few can read. Many believe they know how to listen. The translation isn’t bad. The indoctrination is effective.
Not content with this moral, evangelical, and technological support, less than a week before the new military coup, Pastor Robertson flew to Guatemala to pray, with a pained expression and alongside millions of Guatemalans, for the new savior: “God, we pray for Ríos Montt, your servant, and we thank you for bringing your spirit to Guatemala.” Apart from God, Robertson had convinced the faithful in various countries to contribute millions of dollars to his International Love Lift campaign to support friendly dictators in Africa and Latin America. Ríos Montt reveals that Robertson’s (and God’s) promise is to send more than a billion dollars in Christian and humanitarian aid to Guatemala. Apparently, God fulfills his part, but Pastor Robertson, despite millions of prayers, fails to collect the rest, which is more than half of the promise. As a secular contribution, television in the north and south continues to report on the danger of guerrilla Indians attempting to seize the country and hand it over to foreign interests.
Ríos Montt is just another general on the long list of dictators and perpetrators of genocide competing to see who can massacre more indigenous people and poor Creoles to put an end to the communist specter they themselves feed. If the previous government murdered 11,000 people, Ríos Montt’s regime will surpass that in just two years. The proud graduate of the School of the Americas in Georgia will raze 662 villages and massacre 18,000 dissenting Guatemalans. The military extermination plan, dubbed Operation Sofia, aims to rid Guatemala of Indigenous people—which is like clearing the Amazon of trees.
The scale of this genocide would not have been possible without the infamous coup d’état organized by Washington against Guatemalan democracy in 1954 to protect the astronomical profits of the United Fruit Company, nor without its continued support for successive dictatorships. Since the early 1960s, as in any other country on the southern border, the CIA has armed and financed paramilitary groups such as the G-2, now based on the fourth floor of the National Palace and in frequent communication with the Embassy. Since 1971, Israel has supplied weapons to Central American dictatorships, among others, but from 1977 to 1980 (due to President Jimmy Carter’s cut in military aid) it became the main supplier alongside the apartheid regime in South Africa. During various military governments in the region, and with Henry Kissinger’s approval, Israel also provided technical and logistical assistance in internal control and in accordance with the National Security doctrine.
As in almost all other cases, the rationale for this doctrine (the existence of subversive groups) is a consequence of the doctrine itself. Even when armed resistance exists, it is, proportionally speaking, irrelevant. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights insists that the guerrilla groups lack the weaponry and forces necessary to pose a threat to the Guatemalan government. But state terrorism needs a reason to exist. The army and paramilitaries are responsible for almost all the killings, and this is called the “Civil War.” Imported machine guns and domestic rifles are the main weapons of genocide and systematic humiliation.
These are not merely interpretations by radical anti-imperialists. In February 1982, the CIA itself had sent an updated report from the field. After years of abuses, the majority of the population supported the EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor) against the army and the government. For this reason, the report states, “for the army, the entire Ixil Maya population is the enemy…; when they encounter resistance in a village, they consider the entire village to be the enemy and raze it, and when they find no one in the village, they consider them enemies and destroy their homes…; for this reason, there are thousands of refugees in the mountains and the EGP lacks the resources to feed them all.”
Meanwhile, in the powerful north, the fanaticism that supports the massacres in the south continues. The rare years of Jimmy Carter, with no rain of dollars or only a dwindling downpour on the southern dictatorships and with dictators offended by the cutback, had ended with Ronald Reagan’s victory. In June 1980, during his presidential campaign, Reagan had pointed to the consequence as the cause of all problems: “Let’s not fool ourselves. The Soviets are behind all the protests we have today. If they hadn’t gotten involved in this game of dominoes, we wouldn’t have any conflict zones today.” In twenty seconds, the future president had erased a century of history, and the idea—as on so many other occasions when the Soviets didn’t even exist—sold like hotcakes. As President Reagan himself would say two years later at the Library of Congress, “the creation of national myths was never free of conflict; Americans did not believe what was true about the West, but rather what they believed should be true.” For Anglo-American paranoia, there is nothing more powerful than feigning an offense or inventing a mortal enemy—be it an Indian, a Mexican, a Martian, an Arab, or a socialist—and declaring that it is urgent to destroy them through defensive strikes and preventive bombings.
Two days before the Las Dos Erres massacre, on December 4, at a meeting in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, Reagan had praised Guatemala’s most recent perpetrator of genocide as “a great man of integrity who has fought for social justice in his country.” This is not a matter of naivety or lack of information. Although Reagan usually falls asleep sucking on Jelly Belly candies when intelligence reports are read to him, he is well aware of the massacres of indigenous people and peasants in the much-feared Central America. But he does not find it relevant enough to consider, much less to mention.
“Guatemala is suffering the scourge of guerrillas supported by foreign forces,” he says before the cameras. At 6:05 p.m., before passing the microphone to President Ríos Montt, he concludes: “I have told President Ríos Montt that the United States supports his struggle for the restoration of democracy.”
The influential televangelist Pat Robertson also insists on praising Ríos Montt’s moral values and lashes out at the indigenous Mayas who have fallen into the clutches of communism for fighting for their rights and their lands. The millionaire pastor Jerry Falwell would agree. In August 2002, he will warn: “unions should study the Bible instead of protesting for better wages; when people understand God, they become better workers.” Falwell preaches an ideology similar to Pat Robertson’s, which he does not want called an ideology but rather a religion. For decades, and before millions of followers, Robertson will continue to defend the Guatemalan dictator: “Ríos Montt has great support for having brought order to his country where, as in other Central American countries, Marxist guerrillas had risen up against the military regimes.” Even a broken clock is right twice a day. Robertson agrees with his friend the general: if you can’t catch the fish, you have to “drain the human sea in which the guerrilla fish swim.” In 2015 (ten years after proposing the assassination of Venezuela’s president-elect, Hugo Chávez, as the most economical option), Pat Robertson will describe Ríos Montt as “an honest man, persecuted by the left.”
In the Wild Frontier, grassroots Catholics like Juan Gerardi have it tough. They must resist not only the new wave of capitalist evangelicals but also the old grip of the oligarchic clergy. A year after Pat Robertson’s triumphant visit in 1982, and months after his meeting with President Reagan in Honduras, Ríos Montt will receive Pope John Paul II. The pope will acknowledge his “great sorrow” over the execution of six Guatemalan dissidents, three days before his arrival on March 6, 1983, but his crusade against Liberation Theology Catholics and against the fanatical Protestants burning his portraits is more important. Unlike Father Oscar Romero, assassinated two years earlier for denouncing the massacres in El Salvador, the Supreme Pontiff would not even risk his absence. A timely cancellation of his visit would have made it clear that his call for respect for human rights was serious. In Guatemala, the Pope does not devote a single word to the executions, much less to the massacres known to all. His call for an end to “the struggle between brothers” will be a clear legitimization of terror, cloaked in wise neutrality.
Ríos Montt will not be deposed by any leftist revolution, as Pat Robertson will denounce for decades, but by another fascist military officer, in 1984. Twelve years later, without the lucrative banana trade that ravaged the country during the first half of the century and without the perfect excuse of the fight against communism that plunged it into hell during the second half, Washington would lose interest in the region for a few years, and in the 1990s, Guatemala would manage to sign a sort of peace agreement, leading to the disarmament of the guerrillas and paramilitary groups.
In 1996, the country would return to the less violent formality of a monitored democracy. For the country’s ruling class and its henchmen, the blame for everything will always lie with the rebels, who are always the displaced poor or the misfits who side with the underprivileged. For the UN and other human rights organizations, the military will be responsible for 93 percent of the 200,000 Guatemalans massacred. The peasant guerrillas, a consequence (presented as causes) of the Washington-induced dictatorships, will be responsible for three percent of the murders. Furthermore, state terrorism will leave 45,000 people missing and at least 100,000 displaced. Not to mention the kidnappings and the historical trauma of an entire country that will endure for generations.
As they await new investments from the North, few will remember the true origin of a tragic century. In 1998, Father Juan Gerardi will be murdered by members of the army. Like other priests killed on charges of being communist, Marxist, or something similar, Gerardi is known for his defense of the human and cultural rights of the Maya, and in the 1990s, he will insist on that bothersome pursuit of historical truth. He will not be canonized as a saint, nor will his church remember him as a martyr.
Like the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of genocide, Ríos Montt will not end his days in prison. In 2013, he will be convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity, but due to technical irregularities, the ruling will be overturned ten days later by the Constitutional Court by a vote of three to two.
The demigods of the civilized world will not even have to face the inconvenience of a courtroom. Never. Ever.
[1] One of the secret, far-reaching operations in Europe and Latin America was Operation Bloodstone, through which the CIA worked in coordination with several high-ranking Nazi criminals to maintain its sphere of influence in Latin America and contain the Soviet Union’s growing influence.
[2] The first husband of Jeanine Áñez (Totalvisión anchor and future de facto president following the 2019 coup d’état), Tadeo Ribera Bruckner, also has Germanic roots.
[3] The leftist guerrilla group FMLN had been founded the previous year as a defensive response to the military dictatorship’s abuses against peasants. As in other Latin American countries, the guerrillas could not be right-wing, like the governments that had dominated those countries for generations.
[4] By then, Washington would be sending an average of $1.5 million a day to support the heroic work of the paramilitaries and the armed forces in El Salvador.
Whenever funds ran short, these local groups would stir up fears of a potential “communist influence” as an automatic trigger for more financial aid, which would become a lucrative business for those at the top and a popular narrative addiction for those at the bottom. This model and dynamic would become commonplace, with their natural variations, in many other countries along the southern border.
[5] The New Right or Neoconservatives have such high messianic expectations that they will come to regard Ronald Reagan as “a useful idiot” in the service of the Soviet Union, especially when Reagan and Gorbachev reach an agreement to reduce their nuclear arsenals.
[6] Driven by religious fanaticism, a significant portion of the Union will never acknowledge defeat, as if it had never been defeated. The Confederacy will never acknowledge the decisive outcome of the Civil War in 1865 and the subsequent emancipation of Black slaves. Nor will it acknowledge the defeat at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba or the defeat in Vietnam. Nor will it acknowledge President Donald Trump’s insignificant defeat in the 2020 election.
[7] The Black communities of La Guajira in Colombia have faced the same fate since coal was discovered beneath the land they inhabited. The strategy is the same one that left most peasants landless in Mexico a century earlier; the same as that of so many other dictatorships and democracies: property titles were granted to members of communities that had survived for centuries under other forms of production and coexistence. After an apparent period of prosperity, the privatization of La Guajira will only bring corporate monopolies, pollution, and more poverty.
