May 19, 2013

What Guilt Does the U.S. Bear in Guatemala?

Introduction

Jorge Silva/Reuters Dozens of remains were reburied in 2001, after being found in one of hundreds of secret gravesites in Guatemala.

Guatemala’s former dictator, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, has been convicted of genocide in the slaughter of as many as 200,000 members of indigenous groups during the 1980s in a long bloody fight against the left.

But little was said at the trial about U.S. involvement in Guatemala. A United Nations truth commission in 1999 said the United States bore much responsibility for advising, training, arming and financing the troops, even teaching torture, as part of the Reagan administration’s campaign against communism.

What guilt does the United States bear in Guatemalan atrocities?

Read the Discussion »

Debaters

Slaughter Was Part of Reagan’s Hard Line
Greg Grandin, Writer
The White House was less concerned with the massacres than with their effectiveness, or with countering the bad publicity.
Blaming the U.S. Is Easy Propaganda
J. Michael Waller, Institute of World Politics
Few had clean hands in the battle over Central America in the 1980s. Why say only one side was villainous?
We Enabled Genocide, but the Elite Committed It
Anita Isaacs, Haverford College
The U.S. turned a blind eye to the upper class's uniquely virulent racism that permitted slaughter in the name of anticommunism.
Guatemala Suffered for U.S. Foreign Policy
Irma Alicia Velasquez Nimatuj, Guatemalan activist
By financing and training counterinsurgency forces that slaughtered indigenous people, the United States shares blame for genocide.