Guatemala: Why We Cannot Turn Away

GUATEMALA CITY -- When the trial of Guatemalan General and former de facto head of state José Efraín Ríos Montt and his then chief of intelligence José Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez began on March 19, 2013............

Ríos Montt was trained at the U.S. Army’s School of The Americas; the Guatemalan government and Army received funding, military training, weapons, and essential equipment such as helicopters directly from the U.S. (and through our allies: Israel and Taiwan, among others). President Ronald Reagan was a staunch ally of Ríos Montt, even as other lawmakers in Congress and the Senate raised concerns about reports of human rights abuses against indigenous populations. In arguing for more military aid for Guatemala, Reagan once famously said at a 1982 press conference in Honduras that the General had received “a bum rap” on human rights.

The question of who is responsible for atrocities that occurred during the Guatemalan civil war is not just a question for Guatemalans.

But the most challenging part of our reporting trip came when we traveled to the Ixil area, to interview Mayan survivors, including a woman who appeared in the tribunal as one of the appoximately 100 “querellantes,” or criminal witnesses for the prosecution.

We followed one of these war survivors to her home in San Juan Cotzal. Doña Juana Sanchez Toma offered us coffee grown in a nearby field, cooked over a fire in her dirt-floor hut. Her cat curled up nearby, and a war widow named Doña Inez crushed coffee cherries on a stone metate just outside.

Miles asked Doña Juana if she had any photographs of her family that we might be able to film, to help tell the story. She stepped away, and returned with a weathered, faded print: a smiling teenage girl, and an older woman with a sad, empty expression. The girl was a war orphan their family took in; the older woman was Doña Juana’s mother, who was captured and raped not long after her daughter suffered the same.

“They tied her arms and legs and carried her like a dog, when they kidnapped her from our home,” Doña Juana told us, weeping again. “They held her in the church, and the soldiers, all of them, they raped her for two weeks.”

The photograph was taken after. She soon died, Doña Juana told us, after suffering incalculable physical and psychological trauma.
http://boingboing.net/2013/05/09/guatemala-why-we-cannot-turn.html

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Guatemala: The science behind historic genocide trial of General Ríos Montt (video report)
http://boingboing.net/2013/05/09/guatemala-the-science-behind.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOIJ1-7LDQs&feature=player_embedded
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A "killing field" in the Americas:
US policy in Guatemala
The reality of Guatemala
Guatemala, with 10 million people, is the most populous country in Central America. It is run by an oligarchy of wealthy landowners and big business interests that reap the country's agricultural and commercial rewards at the expense of the rest of the population. The country has been headed by military dictators and figurehead-presidents. Ultimate control belongs to the Army.

Guatemala is a country without social or economic justice, especially for the 6 million indigenous Mayan Indians who make up the majority of the population. There is a marked disparity in income distribution, and poverty is pervasive. On coffee plantations, peasants, descendants of the ancient Maya, live in concentration camp-like conditions, as de facto slaves. 40% of the indigenous people have no access to health care, and 60% have no access to safe drinking water. Education in rural areas is non-existent, with the result that 50% of the people are illiterate. Half of the country's children suffer from malnutrition. Every day in Guatemala, a country in which everything grows, people go hungry.

The real power in Guatemala is in the hands of the Army, and that power has been used to violently control the people, resulting in the worst human rights record in the hemisphere. During more than 30 years of civil war, over 150,000 Guatemalans have been killed or disappeared, tens-of-thousands have been forced to flee to Mexico, 1 million have been displaced inside the country, and more than 440 Indian villages have been destroyed. 75,000 widows and 250,000 orphans have been produced out of the carnage. And, for more than four decades, the United States government has consistently supported the Guatemalan Army and the ruling class in their policies of repression.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/US_Guat.html
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