johnny asia

Modern "Apocalyptos"

An honest accounting of what actually happened under Reagan's
presidency became a political taboo in the United States. Even when
hard evidence surfaced about those human rights crimes, the
information was quickly brushed aside and forgotten.

On Feb. 25, 1999, for instance, a Guatemalan truth commission
issued a report on the human rights catastrophe that Reagan and his
administration had aided, abetted and concealed.

The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human
rights body, estimated that the Guatemalan conflict claimed the lives
of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in
the 1980s. Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the
panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist
guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.

The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626
massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated
entire Mayan villages . are neither perfidious allegations nor
figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's
history," the commission concluded.

The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed
their livestock and crops," the report said. In the northern
highlands, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide."

Besides carrying out murder and "disappearances," the army
routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during
torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the
military and paramilitary forces, the report found.

The report added that the "government of the United States,
through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and
indirect support for some [of these] state operations." The report
concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to
Guatemalan military units that committed "acts of genocide" against
the Mayas.

"Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and
the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle,
without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical
and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance
of human morals," said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a
German jurist.

"Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried
out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of
the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the
Mayan people," Tomuschat said.

In other words, the Reagan-supported Guatemalan security forces
had conducted many apocalyptos against the descendants of the Mayas
whose torment five centuries earlier was fictionalized in Mel Gibson's
box office blockbuster.

Like their ancestors in the movie, these Mayas had their
communities surrounded and attacked, albeit with more efficient
weapons and vastly more lethality. As in the movie, young women were
dragged off to be raped, but in the 1980s, the attackers were more
interested in killing everyone in the village rather than enslaving them.

If anything, the actions by Ronald Reagan's allies were more
ruthless, more bloodthirsty and more barbaric than the actions of
Gibson's fictionalized Mayan city-state.

Instead of a crazed priest hungry for human sacrifices to appease
the gods, the Reagan-era slaughters were justified by well-dressed
politicians and bureaucrats back in Washington eager to score some
geopolitical points against their Cold War adversaries in Moscow.

During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President
Bill Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing
regimes in Guatemala.

"For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that
support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in
violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States
must not repeat that mistake," Clinton said.

But the story of the Reagan-supported genocide of the Mayan
Indians was quickly forgotten, as Republicans and the Washington press
corps wrapped Reagan's legacy in a fuzzy blanket of heroic mythology.
The atrocities inflicted on actual Mayan descendants just a quarter
century ago are now less real to many Americans than the abuses
suffered by the fictional Mayas in Mel Gibson's made-up story of five
centuries ago.

[Many of the declassified Guatemalan documents have been posted on
the Internet by the National Security Archive.]
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB32/vol2.html

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/121706D.shtml

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s
for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy &
Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty From Watergate to Iraq, can be
ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com.

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Johnny Asia, Guitarist from the Future
http://www.mp3.com/johnnyasia

Want to know what's really going on in Iraq?
http://www.angelfire.com/co/COMMONSENSE/wakeup.html

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