The US in Guatemala

Abu Juwairiya

Junior Member
Guatemala, a small country in South America, was in a civil war between 1960-1995. The United States under nine Presidents supported the State. shortly after the war ended Bill Clinton, one of the nine US Presidents, apologised for American interference and said the US would never again side with the aggressor. It was not until 1998-99 however, that the full details of war crimes emerged through a special commission. I enclose some of their findings below-

“ [the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH)] charged the Guatemalan military with genocide: “The CEH concludes that agents of the State of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people....

“The Reagan administration in 1980 resumed $300 million in military aid [to Guatemala]... ‘In addition to more than 3, 500 pages of information on atrocities, including more than 600 massacres, the commission found the state responsible for more than 93 percent of the violations’... “And they called it genocide,”.

‘The purpose of the terror
in this and countless other villages, the commission forcefully charged,

was to intimidate and silence society as a whole, in order to destroy the
will for transformation, both in the short and long term’...


‘The commission documented that 200, 000 people were killed or disappeared throughout Guatemala over more than three decades of war.’...

‘During the most intense period of the military onslaught, from 1981 to 1983, as many as 1.5 million people were internally displaced or had to flee the country, including about 150, 000 who sought refuge in Mexico” (Source: “Annihilating Difference, the Anthropology of Genocide By Alexander Hinton, P 308-9)
 
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