Reflecting on America's Connection to Guatemalan Atrocities

Rios Montt, the same man Reagan said "is totally dedicated to democracy... and has been getting a bum rap" is the one whom over 100 victims have testified in recent months about the atrocious acts of rape, violence, torture, and extreme human rights violations.

(GUATEMALA CITY) - My Guatemalan host brother and I are at a museum centered on the history of inequality and injustice in Guatemala, located in Guatemala City. We are pictured here watching interviews with victims and relatives of victims who underwent the extreme oppression, genocide, and torture of the U.S-backed 36-year-long civil war. I was only able to watch about a minute, but Hector watched the whole loop and was profoundly affected by these stories of extreme violence that characterized Guatemala during that war.

Most of the “counter-insurgency” action of the war was conducted for the purpose of drawing a hard line against the collective protest for human rights so as to protect the interest of big business and military dictatorship.

If you wish, please reflect, as I did while at the museum, about what it means to be a citizen of the world, and how we figure out ways to justify the most disgusting and awful ways to maintain the status quo.

Please think about how the things we do as a developed country have been built on conflicts such as these. Many of our products such as fruit, coffee, and clothing were secured for us by the American government supporting dictatorships, brutal military juntas, then scrambling to cover up these gross violations of human rights.

Trial of ex-dictator Rios Montt. BBC photo

Rios Montt, the same man who Ronald Reagan said "is totally dedicated to democracy... and has been getting a bum rap" is the one whom over 100 victims have testified in recent months about the atrocious acts of rape, violence, torture, exposition of superiority, and extreme human rights violations committed by soldiers who were ordered by Montt to do so.

This ex-dictator of Guatemala was from May 10th to May 20th convicted of being personally responsible for 1,771 of the 200,000 deaths that were taken from the primarily indigenous peoples of Guatemala.

A powerful business group called CACIF (Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations) was one of most prominent leaders in putting pressure on the Constitutional Court for having this verdict over-turned. The information on the exhibit pieces in the background are some of the official statistics about the injustices committed during the war by Guatemala’s Commission for the Clarification of History.