The Horrors Committed

Yes, it is awful. Spreading syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid to a group of Guatemalans to conduct experiments and test the effectiveness of penicillin is an aberration. But isn’t it just as horrifying to have financed, supported and trained those who executed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the devastated villages? Isn’t it awful to have designed and helped to implement counterinsurgency strategies that included kidnappings, selective murders, torture, rape and other offenses against the “enemies of the regime”?

Have we already forgotten who funded and trained the group of mercenaries who staged the coup against the democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, in order to defend the economic interest of U.S. companies and to stop the so-called “communist threat”? Can we not remember the origin of the death squads, now-illegal arms groups that have captured institutions and act with impunity? Was the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification’s report, which points to the Guatemala army and the U.S. government oligarchy as responsible for the genocide, perhaps not sufficiently conclusive?

Who else could have been behind Operation Condor in the Southern Cone, in which the most egregious human rights violations were committed? Who else could have supported dictatorships throughout Latin America and trained officers at the School of the Americas? Who else could have directed covert operations to eliminate popular unions and student leaders in Guatemala and the rest of the continent during the Cold War years?

The declassified documents detail a good share of the horrors committed in our country with the support and financing of the United States. There are numerous books by Guatemalan and U.S. authors that refer to the North American intervention in Guatemala that cut short a democratic process which, had it continued, would have changed the discriminating, poverty-stricken and desolate face of the country in which we live today.

What happens is that once again the double standard of our society — which justifies crimes, massacres, torture and death squads (including extrajudicial executions committed today) and which condemns only experiments on innocent people — rears its head.

Could it be that the children, pregnant women and elderly of the 600 villages massacred were also innocent? Was living in rural and indigenous communities sufficient motive to cut the women’s wombs and to crash their fetuses against the rocks? Isn’t violating girls and young women, burning parishioners alive inside churches and torturing young men in city squares also horrific?

Nothing justifies contaminating our compatriots with venereal diseases, and nothing justifies the design, implementation, training, support and financing of dictatorships and counterinsurgency policies.

And this is not only about asking for forgiveness. It is a question of reparation and justice, to set a precedent and to prevent the strategies and practices that violate the most elemental human rights from continuing in other settings (Afghanistan and Iraq, instead of Guatemala and Vietnam).