Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

reaction is not passive acquiescence.

GUILTY IN GUATEMALA
    June 3, 2013
    On Mother’s Day, May 12, the B OSTON G LOBE featured a photo of a young woman with her toddler son sleeping in her arms.
    The woman, of Mayan Indian heritage, had crossed the U.S. border seven times while pregnant, only to be caught and shipped back across the border on six of those attempts. She braved many miles, enduring blisteringly hot days and freezing nights, with no water or shelter, amid roaming gunmen. The last time she crossed, seven months pregnant, she was rescued by immigration solidarity activists who helped her to find her way to Boston.
    Most of the border crossers are from Central America. Many say they would rather be home, if the possibility of decent survival hadn’t been destroyed. Mayans such as this young mother are still fleeing from the wreckage of the genocidal assault on the indigenous population of the Guatemalan highlands 30 years ago.
    The main perpetrator, General Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator who ruled Guatemala during two of the bloodiest years of the country’s decades-long civil war, was convicted in a Guatemalan court of genocide and crimes against humanity, on May 10.
    Then, 10 days later, the case was overturned under suspicious circumstances. It is unclear whether the trial will continue.
    Ríos Montt’s forces killed tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Mayans, in the year 1982 alone.
    As that bloody year ended, President Reagan assured the nation that the killer was “a man of great personal integrity and commitment,” who was getting a “bum rap” from human-rights organizations and who “wants to improve thequality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.” Therefore, the president continued, “My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts.”
    Ample evidence of Ríos Montt’s “progressive efforts” was available to Washington, not only from rights organizations, but also from U.S. intelligence.
    But truth was unwelcome. It interfered with the objectives set by Reagan’s national security team in 1981. As reported by the journalist Robert Parry, working from a document he discovered in the Reagan Library, the team’s goal was to supply military aid to the right-wing regime in Guatemala in order to exterminate not only “Marxist guerrillas” but also their “civilian support mechanisms”—which means, effectively, genocide.
    The task was carried out with dedication. Reagan sent “nonlethal” equipment to the killers, including Bell helicopters that were immediately armed and sent on their missions of death and destruction.
    But the most effective method was to enlist a network of client states to take over the task, including Taiwan and South Korea, still under U.S.-backed dictatorships, as well as apartheid South Africa and the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships.
    At the forefront was Israel, which became the major arms supplier to Guatemala. It provided instructors for the killers and participated in counterinsurgency operations.
    The background bears restating. In 1954, a CIA-run military coup ended a 10-year democratic interlude in Guatemala—”the years of spring,” as they are known there—and restored a savage elite to power.
    In the 1990s, international organizations conducting inquiries into the fighting reported that since 1954 some 200,000 people had been killed in Guatemala, 80 percent ofwhom were indigenous. The killers were mostly from the Guatemalan security forces and closely linked paramilitaries.
    The atrocities were carried out with vigorous U.S. support and participation. Among the standard Cold War pretexts was that Guatemala was a Russian “beachhead” in Latin America.
    The real reasons, amply documented, were also standard: concern for the interests of U.S. investors and fear that a democratic experiment empowering the harshly repressed peasant majority “might be a virus” that would “spread