The Missing Link: Guatemalan Genocide and U.S. Imperialism

There is a decades-long history of direct aid from the U.S. political and military establishment to dictators and military coups in Latin America. Since the CIA orchestrated one such coup against the President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954, the USA has been complicit in genocides throughout the continent. U.S. capitalists used these dictators as a bulwark in the so-called, “crusade” against communism, particularly after the triumph of the rebel movement in Cuba in 1959.
Actually this “crusade” was to maintain control over the natural resources, labor and markets throughout Latin America which the USA, and companies like United Fruit, considered to be their “backyard.” Guatemala is now again in the news with the trial of Efraín Rios Montt, one of the USA’s front-men dictators.
Since implementing the Monroe Doctrine in the 1820s, the USA has tried to oust European colonial powers and establish U.S. hegemony. In recent decades, Russia, European nations, and China have all gained influence and some control on this continent. This has intensified the USA’s desperation to control the capitalist rulers throughout Latin America. The mass genocide
was revealed in the ongoing trial of Rios Montt (see below) ignoring a century of inter-imperialist rivalry.
The main purpose of the Guatemalan genocides was to destroy the worker-peasant movement that was fighting to protect its land and resources.
Rios Montt on Trial:
Deafening Silence about U.S. Imperialism
In 1981, U.S. president Reagan escalated the genocide against the population and the guerrillas in Guatemala, El Salvador and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The extermination of the indigenous population in Guatemala was so brutal that Washington tried to cover up its involvement. One example: the U.S. military sent arms via the government of Israel to Guatemala. When a military coup imposed the genocidal “Evangelical Christian” General Rios Montt in 1982, Reagan administration officials enthusiastically embraced him as an ally. The Reagan White House received him, in person, to finalize military support.
Rios Montt answered criticism about the mass murder of indigenous people: “It’s not that we have a policy of scorched earth, just a policy of scorched communists.” The U.S. government knew then, and we know now, that 90% of the dead were civilians. In 1983, Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State, defended the genocidal Rios Montt, stating that he had “brought considerable progress” on human rights.
The U.S. supplied helicopters, mortars, grenade launchers, machine guns and troops. The U.S. military supplied “trainers” in the field that produced death squads who led the massacres against civilians. In the 1990s, it was revealed that the CIA had many senior military officials on its payroll, including Otto Perez Molina (the current Guatemalan President). U.S. imperialists, through “private” dictators like Rios Montt, are primarily responsible for these atrocities — the murder of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants. 
These genocidal policies led hundreds of thousands of indigenous people to migrate to survive. They become refugees throughout Central America and the USA. Of the over one million Guatemalan exiles in the USA today, the greater part came in this period.
Yet Eliot Abrams, U.S. military officers and Reagan were hardly mentioned at the current trial of Rios Montt, nor was the USA’s ongoing manipulation of resources and politics within Guatemala
Racism, Part and Parcel
of Imperialism
Institutional racism, created under capitalism, has sentenced indigenous peoples to isolation, segregation and oppression for centuries.  It facilitated the work of the exterminators, providing ideological justification for genocide in Guatemala. Mostly of Mayan descent, the indigenous peoples where labeled “violent,” a “threat to the nation” and “uncivilized.”
Under Rios Montt, religion added to the mix since his Evangelical Christian ideology labeled them “non-believers.” His assassination of “subversives” or “trade unionists” in the Guatemalan cities became mass genocide of the rural population. A spokesman for Rios Montt, Francisco Bianchi, ranted that he must kill the indigenous population, because they were all collaborators with the “subversives” (i.e., communists). The economic reality behind this is that the Guatemalan military took over indigenous lands in order to exploit petrochemical resources.
Testimony of the cruelty of these massacres emerged in Rios Montt’s trial. In indigenous towns, villages, and communities, soldiers killed en masse with horror and cruelty. Many people had their hearts cut out. Women were raped. Those who were pregnant had the fetus cut out or were thrown against trees to kill the baby and then their bodies were burned. Children’s heads were cut off. Whole towns where burned to the ground. Captain Jesse Garcia, a U.S. Army officer, told a reporter from the Washington Post how they trained Guatemalan soldiers in these techniques of destroying entire villages. (As in Vietnam; see: “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.” by Nick Turse)
Rios Montt Was Not Alone
It was revealed that “Tito Arias,” a name used by Otto Pérez Molina (Guatemala’s current President) was one of the perpetrators of the massacres ordered by Rios Montt. There are videos on the Internet where this sinister “Tito” explains just how effective helicopters and recoilless bazookas, designed as anti-tank weapons, are against people or thatched huts. (These weapons came from the U.S. military.)
Recently, the same President Pérez Molina ordered martial law and the suspension of all civil liberties in response to a protest about the environment and pollution in four mining towns. He now is requesting military aid against “narco-traffickers.” (NYT, 5/13/13) This executioner will attack the working class, not the drug dealers. Terror against the civilian population is part and parcel of the “war on drugs,” particularly in Mexico and Central America. Whole populations are terrorized, both by the “narco-traffickers” and by various U.S.-backed governments.
Histories like this in Guatemala shows that the fight against ideological and institutional racism is vital to the life and death of the international working class.  Capitalists promote racist divisions around the world to exploit all working people and justify massacres for conquest.
Workers everywhere should remember these exterminations of whole communities that simply dared to fight for a better life. We must honor them as we fight throughout our lives to eradicate capitalism and imperialism — the true creators of these genocides against the working class — from the face of the earth.
This capitalist nightmare will not end until the working class rises up as one to destroy the capitalist and imperialist oppressors. The Progressive Labor Party is unifying all workers the world over toward this goal. Join us!

(See numerous writings from Allan Nair — Guatemala Genocide Case: Testimony Notes Regarding Rios Montt www.allannairn.org; May 9, 2013: NACLA Report on the Americas, Allan Nairn)