May 12, 2013

Today in Guatemala City, the right wing demonstrates. Anti-foreign/Anti-communist march

A better picture of Mendez-Ruiz taken a few days ago. The woman in red is Montt's daughter


These are the same guys who filmed the Maya Ixil witnesses and courtroom attendees as they'd leave to intimidate them

May 12, 2013

Reagan supplied the weapons, Rios Montt used them

When Former Guatemala President Efrain Ríos Montt Gets Out Of Prison, He'll Be 166 Years Old
Sunday, May 12, 2013

Reagan supplied the weapons, Rios Montt used them



We've mentioned Ríos Montt before-- first in 2007, when crooked Illinois Republican Congressman Jerry Weller (now retired) married the former dictator's daughter and absconded to Guatemala with all his loot. More recently we looked at Reactionary Mind author Corey Robin's review of a book by Greg Granlin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. How, I wondered, could any serious examination of the reactionary mind-- particularly the American reactionary mind-- not deal with the enormity of what was visited (by reactionary minds) on the Mayan native people of Guatemala, the ones whose ancestors had managed to escape being slaughtered in previous centuries by Spanish imperialists? And whose reactionary mind-- albeit an extraordinarily weak one-- would be better to start with than Ronald Reagan's?
---------

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.’ It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity... totally dedicated to democracy’, and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting ‘a bum rap’ from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.

Amid the hagiography surrounding Reagan’s death in June, it was probably too much to expect the media to mention his meeting with Ríos Montt. After all, it wasn’t Reykjavik. But Reykjavik’s shadow-- or that cast by Reagan speaking in front of the Berlin Wall-- does not entirely explain the silence about this encounter between presidents. While it’s tempting to ascribe the omission to American amnesia, a more likely cause is the deep misconception about the Cold War under which most Americans labour. To the casual observer, the Cold War was a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought and won through stylish jousting at Berlin, antiseptic arguments over nuclear stockpiles, and the savvy brinkmanship of American leaders. Latin America seldom figures in popular or even academic discussion of the Cold War, and to the extent that it does, it is Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua rather than Guatemala that earn most of the attention.

But, as Greg Grandin shows in The Last Colonial Massacre, Latin America was as much a battleground of the Cold War as Europe, and Guatemala was its front line. In 1954, the US fought its first major contest against Communism in the Western hemisphere when it overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had worked closely with the country’s small but influential Communist Party. That coup sent a young Argentinian doctor fleeing to Mexico, where he met Fidel Castro. Five years later, Che Guevara declared that 1954 had taught him the impossibility of peaceful, electoral reform and promised his followers that ‘Cuba will not be Guatemala.’ In 1966, Guatemala was again the pacesetter, this time pioneering the ‘disappearances’ that would come to define the dirty wars of Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. In a lightning strike, US-trained security officials captured some thirty leftists, tortured and executed them, and then dropped most of their corpses into the Pacific. Explaining the operation in a classified memo, the CIA wrote: ‘The execution of these persons will not be announced and the Guatemalan government will deny that they were ever taken into custody.’ With the 1996 signing of a peace accord between the Guatemalan military and leftist guerrillas, the Latin American Cold War finally came to an end-- in the same place it had begun-- making Guatemala’s the longest and most lethal of the hemisphere’s civil wars. Some 200,000 men, women and children were dead, virtually all at the hands of the military: more than were killed in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador combined, and roughly the same number as were killed in the Balkans. Because the victims were primarily Mayan Indians, Guatemala today has the only military in Latin America deemed by a UN-sponsored truth commission to have committed acts of genocide.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n22/corey-robin/dedicated-to-democracy

...

And then there was the report almost exactly a year ago that the ex-Presidente was in custody, along with a This American Life program about one particular Guatemalan massacre. What struck me about it-- aside from the cold blooded and horrific murders of all the women and children-- was the impetus to "let bygones be bygones" and just move on. Oligarchs and ruling elites across the world have seen to it that social orders are organized by, of, and for the one percent. Under those circumstances accountability is almost nonexistent. The U.S. has no moral standing to complain about Syria, I wrote at the time, until Bush and his cronies are hanging or rotting in prison cells. Our entire society is rotting from inside because there is no accountability at the top.

Reagan ally and mass murderer, former Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt, now 85, has finally been arrested. Since he was responsible for the brutal deaths of between a hundred and two hundred thousand innocent Mayan Indians, it's nice he's been indicted and is languishing in his mansion under house arrest. But the drumbeat to let bygones be bygones is already sounding and the current fascist in control of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, is carefully weighing his options.

For those not familiar with Ríos Montt, here's the briefest of summaries: In 1951 he attended the U.S. terrorism school in Georgia, School of the Americas, which indoctrinates budding young Latin American fascists and trains them to keep their countrymen down fight Communism. Three years later he was part of the CIA plot to overthrow populist Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. A religionist fanatic and close associate of both Pat Robertson's and Jerry Falwell's, Ríos Montt preached that a true Christian had the Bible in one hand and a machine gun in the other. He soon seized power with the help of the CIA. He immediately targeted labor unions-- literally targeted... and not with Bibles, with the other hand. Tens of thousands of deaths mounted and mounted, mostly of impoverished, maginalized Mayans, and over a million were displaced and forced to live in concentration camps and to work in the fields of Guatemalan land barons, that country's one percent.

http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2013/05/when-former-guatamala-president-efrain.html

May 11, 2013

When The Mountains Tremble

Related post: Video How To Nail A Dictator - Amazing film: link:http://www.democraticunderground.com/110816733#post11

Here is the more important film, the one for which the Latin American and US Right Wing absolutely vilified Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu. Once again, with the Genocide trial of Rios Montt, the neocon and neoliberal butchers of humanity have been proven as the liars they are.

Part 1

Part 2


Part 3


Part 4


Part 5


Part 6


Part 7


Part 8


Part 9

May 11, 2013

When The Mountains Tremble - Sorry wrong forum!

My apologies. I meant to post this in the Latin America forum so am editing my post now. It's now here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/110816771

May 11, 2013

A Formal Legal Mandate for a Criminal Investigation of Guatemala's Current President

Saturday, May 11, 2013

A Formal Legal Mandate for a Criminal Investigation of Guatemala's Current President, Perez Molina

General Efrain Rios Montt has been found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has already begun his "irrevocable" sentence of 80 years in prison.

The court that convicted Rios Montt has also ordered the attorney general to launch an immediate investigation of "all others" connected to the crimes.

This important and unexpected aspect of the verdict means that there now exists a formal legal mandate for a criminal investigation of the President of Guatemala, General Otto Perez Molina.

As President, Perez Molina enjoys temporary legal immunity, but that immunity does not block the prosecutors from starting their investigation.

Last night, in a live post-verdict interview on CNN Espanol TV, Perez Molina was confronted about his own role during the Rios Montt massacres.

The interviewer, Fernando del Rincon, repeatedly asked Perez Molina about his filmed interviews with me when he was Rios Montt's Ixil field commander.

At that time, Perez Molina, operating under the alias "Major Tito Arias," commanded troops who described to me how, under orders, they killed civilians.

At first, Perez Molina refused to answer, then CNN's satellite link to him was cut off, then, after it was restored minutes later, Perez Molina replied that women, children and "complete families" had in fact aided guerrillas.

Offering what appears to be a rationale for killing families may not be a sufficient defense. But that is up to Perez Molina.

He too deserves his day in court.


Allan Nairn

http://www.allannairn.org/2013/05/a-formal-legal-mandate-for-criminal.html

Permission granted to post in full

"his filmed"

"interviews"

"with me"

Thursday, May 9, 2013
The Guatemala Genocide Case: Testimony Notes Regarding Rios Montt

By Allan Nairn


The case against General Rios Montt has included vast amounts of evidence.

My notes for my own scheduled testimony (for what happened see post of April 18) included the following observations:

When Rios Montt seized power on March 23, 1982, he immediately seized control of and transformed army operations.

He cut back on the urban assassinations, which had become counterproductive, and increased the massacres of the rural Mayans, the army's main "internal enemy."

He took a sweep tactic that had been pioneered by General Benedicto Lucas Garcia and made it a systematic strategy, applied across the Northwest Highlands.

A CIA report observed of Benedicto's -- later Rios Montt's -- method: "In mid-February 1982 the Guatemalan army reinforced its existing force in the central El Quiche department and launched a sweep operation into the Ixil triangle. The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and eliminate all sources of resistance. Civilians in the area who agree to collaborate with the army and who seek army protection are to be well treated and cared for in refugee camps for the duratiion of the operation."

In practice, the civilians in the camps were often survivors of army massacres who were subject to vast coercion including execution, torture, rape, forced labor, and forced service in the "civil patrols."

Colonel George Maynes, the US military attache in Guatemala, told me that he and Benedicto Lucas had developed this sweep tactic and that Rios Montt had expanded it.

A US Green Beret, Captain Jesse Garcia showed me how, under Rios Montt, he was training Guatemalan troops in the techniques of how to "destroy towns." (Allan Nairn, "Despite Ban, U.S. Captain Trains Guatemalan Military," Washington Post, October 21, 1982, page 1).

The Guatemalan Catholic Bishops Conference reported in a May 27, 1982 pastoral letter: "Numerous families have perished, vilely murdered. Not even the lives of the elderly, pregnant women or innocent children have been respected ... Never in our history has it come to such grave extremes. These assassinations fall into the category of genocide."

In an interview in the palace that May I asked Rios Montt about killing civilians. He said: "Look, the problem of the war is not just a question of who is shooting. For each one who is shooting there are ten who are working behind him."

Rios Montt's senior aide and spokesman, Francisco Bianchi, who was sitting next to him, amplified: "The guerrillas won over many Indian collaborators. Therefore, the Indians were subversives, right? And how do you fight subversion? Clearly you had to kill Indians because they were collaborating with subversion. And then they would say, 'You're massacring innocent people.' But they weren't innocent. They had sold out to subversion." (Allan Nairn, "Guatemala Can't Take 2 Roads," The New York Times, op ed, July 20, 1982).

I visited the Ixil zone in September, 1982, arriving first in Nebaj. The towns and much of the Ixil area were under army occupation.

A foreign health worker said 80% of the people were malnourished. Many were dying of hunger, measles, and tuberculosis.

Rios Montt's senior commander on scene was a man who called himself Major Tito Arias, but who was actually Otto Perez Molina, the current president of Guatemala.

Subordinates of Rios Montt and Perez Molina described how they tortured and killed civilians. The soldiers and officers described a strategy that centered on emptying and massacring entire villages.

They said they would kill a quarter to a third of the people, place a quarter to a third of them in camps, and the rest would flee to the mountains where, if the army found them, they would shoot them on sight.

The soldiers said they were still in the midst of intensive sweep operations.

They also said they were under a strict chain of command that placed only three layers of responsibility between themselves and Rios Montt. In the words of Lieutenant Romeo Sierra at La Perla they were "on a very short leash."

A number of soldiers named specific towns and villages in which they had committed massacres.

One, a corporal named Felipe, in Nebaj, listed Salquil, Sumal Chiquito, Sumal Grande and Acul.

His account was consistent with that of a man from Acul who spoke in secret and described an April massacre in which he said the army shot 24 civilians. He said the soldiers shot them in the head after sorting villagers into two groups, one of which the soldiers said they would "send to Glory" and the other "to Hell." He said: "They said that they were executing the law of Rios Montt."

The descriptions of the massacre strategy from soldiers and civilian survivors were consistent. They also meshed with accounts that I heard elsewhere in the Mayan zones.

(Much of the following text is drawn from Allan Nairn, "The Guns of Guatemala: The merciless mission of Rios Montt's army," The New Republic, April 11, 1983, and from my work in the 1983 documentary film "Skoop!" also known as "Deadline Guatemala" and "Titular de Hoy," done with Jean-Marie Simon and directed by Mikael Wahlforss, EPIDEM Scandinavian TV):

Just outside Nebaj, more than 2,500 campesinos had been resettled on an army airstrip. "They didn't want to leave voluntarily," explained Corporal Felipe, who manned a .50 caliber machine gun in the Nebaj church belfry. "The government put out a call that they would have one month to turn themselves in," he said, referring to a nationwide order from Rios Montt. "So now the army is in charge of going to get all the people from all these villages."

Sergeant Miguel Raimundo, who was guarding a group of 161 suspected guerrilla collaborators (which included 79 children and 42 women), said, "The problem is that almost all the village people are guerrillas." According to camp records, they had been rounded up in sweeps through the villages of Vijolom, Salquil Grande, Tjolom, Parramos Chiquito, Paob, Vixaj, Quejchip, and Xepium.

Sergeant Jose Angel, who commanded a La Perla platoon explained:"Before we get to the village, we talk with the soldiers about what they should do and what they shouldn't do. They all discuss it so they have it in their minds. We coordinate it first—we ask, what is our mission?"

Lieutenant Sierra had noted that the sweep commanders had hourly radio contact with headquarters. He said the superior officer "knows everything. Everything is controlled." All field actions had to be reported in the commanders' daily "diary of operations" which was reviewed and criticized in monthly face-to-face evaluations.

Sergeant Jose Angel explained the village-entry procedure: "One patrol enters the village from one point, on another side another patrols enters. We go in before dawn, because everyone is sleeping. If we come in broad daylight they get scared, they see it's the army, and they run because they know the army is coming to get them,"

Rios Montt's army had a clear policy about the meaning and consequences of such behavior. "The people who are doing things outside the law run away," sergeant Jose Angel said. "But the people who aren't doing anything, they stay." He said he had seen cases where "lots of them ran, most of a village. They ran because they knew the army was coming."

Sergeant Miguel Raimundo cited three cases where villages fled en masse. "All the villages around here, like Salquil, Paob, or here in Sumal, they have a horn and there's a villager who watches the road. If the soldiers come, he blows the horn. It's a signal. They all go running."

The soldiers explained that they routinely killed these fleeing, unarmed civilians.

I asked Corporal Felipe how the villagers react when the troops arrive.

"They flee from their homes. They run for the mountain."

"And what do you do?"

"Some we capture alive and others we can't capture alive. When they run and go into the mountains that obligates one to kill them."

"Why?"

"Because they might be guerrillas. If they don't run, the army is not going to kill them. It will protect them."

"Among those you have to kill, what kind of people are they? Are they men or women?"

"At times men, at times women."

"In which villages has this happened?"

"Oh, it's happened in lots of them. In Acul, Salquil, Sumal Chiquito, Sumal Grande."

"In those villages, about how many people did you kill?"

"Not many, a few."

"More than ten? More than twenty? More than a hundred?"

"Oh no, about twenty."

"In each village?"

"Yes, of course. It's not many. More than that were captured alive."

Sergeant Jose Angel recalled a similar experience in the village of Chumansan in the province of Quezaltenango. "When we went in, the people scattered," he said. "We had no choice but to shoot at them. We killed some. . . . Oh, about ten, no more. Most of them got away."

After tracking and shooting the unarmed civilians who fled in fear, the army dealt with the unarmed civilians who remained in the village.

First, Sergeant Jose Angel explained, "We go into a village and take the people out of their houses and search the houses."

Among the items the soldiers looked for were suspiciously large stocks of grain or beans. The army took what it could use and burned the rest.

Next, he said, "You ask informers who are the ones that are doing things, things outside the law. And that's when you round up the collaborators. And the collaborators—you question them, interrogate them, get them to speak the truth. Who have they been talking to? Who are the ones who have been coming to the village to speak with them?"

The soldiers often went in with target lists of "collaborators." The lists were provided by G-2, the military intelligence service headed at that time by General Rios Montt's co-defendant, General Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez.

The interrogations were generally conducted in the village square with the population looking on.

I asked Jose Angel how he questioned people. He replied, "Beat them to make them tell the truth, hurt them."

"With what methods?"

"This one, like this," he said as he wrapped his hands around his neck and made a choking sound. "More or less hanging them."

"With what?"

"With a lasso. Each soldier has his lasso."

The day before, in Nebaj, an infantryman who was standing over the bodies of four captured guerrillas demonstrated the interrogation technique he had learned in "Cobra," an army counterinsurgency course for field troops. (Another soldier said the guerrillas, who had set off a grenade, had been "presented" to Perez Molina for interrogation, "But they still didn't say anything, for better or for worse.&quot

"Tie them like this," he said, "tie the hands behind, run the cord here (around the neck) and press with a boot (on the chest). Knot it, and make a tourniquet with a stick, and when they're dying you give it another twist and you ask them again, and if they still don't want to answer you do it again until they talk."

The sergeants and infantrymen of Nebaj and La Perla said the tourniquet was the most common interrogation technique. They said that live burial and mutilation by machete were also used.

The soldiers said they expected those they questioned to provide specific information, such as the names of villagers who had talked with or given food to guerrillas. Failure to do so implied guilt, and brought immediate judgment and action.

"Almost everyone in the villages is a collaborator," said Sergeant Miguel Raimundo. "They don't say anything. They would rather die than talk"

When I asked Miguel Raimundo about the interrogation method, he replied: "We say, if you tell us where the guerrillas are, the army won't kill you. . . . If they collaborate with the army, we don't do anything."

"And if they don't say anything?"

"Well, then they say, 'if you kill me, kill me—because I don't know anything,' and we know they're guerrillas. They prefer to die rather than say where the companeros are."

According to Sergeant Jose Angel, it was common for suspected collaborators to be pointed out, questioned, and executed all on the same day.

Explaining how he extracted information so quickly, he said, "Well, they don't talk like that voluntarily. You just have to subdue them a little to make them speak the truth."

After the interrogations had been completed, the patrol leader would make a speech to the survivors gathered in the village square.

"We tell the people to change the road they are on, because the road they are on is bad," said Jose Angel. "If they don't change, there is nothing else to do but kill them."

"So you kill them on the spot?"

"Yes, sure. If they don't want the good, there's nothing more to do but bomb their houses."

Jose Angel said that in Solola and Quezaltenengo he had participated in operations of this kind in which more than 500 people were killed

He and other soldiers said that smaller villages were destroyed with Spanish, Israeli, and U.S.-made grenades. Boxes of these grenades could be seen stacked in the Nebaj ammunition dump.

The soldiers said they also used a 3.5-inch U.S.- made shoulder-held recoilless rocket that was designed as an antitank weapon but is effective against people and straw huts. At the La Perla headquarters, one such launcher was sitting next to boxes of "explosive projectile" rockets from the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant.

For larger operations, Jose Angel said, patrols called in army planes and helicopters to bomb the villages. The helicopters were U.S.-manufactured Hueys and Jet Rangers. The bombs included U.S.-made 50-kilogram Ml/61As, twelve of which were stacked in the base munitions dump in Nebaj.

Lieutenant Cesar Bonilla, the officer in charge of the Nebaj airstrip resettlement camp said the helicopters were especially useful for catching villagers by surprise.

"When you go in on foot they see the patrol three kilometers away and know you're coming. But with air transport, you land different units in the area, all the units close in rapidly, and the people can't go running away."

Bonilla said that this type of operation could only be executed by several helicopters at once. "With just one helicopter you scare them away and there's no control."

The United States Congress' temporary refusal to sell spare parts had grounded much of the fleet, so Lieutenant Bonilla was encouraged by reports that the Reagan Administration was considering changing the policy.

"That would be wonderful," he said. "With six helicopters, for example, the airborne troops would land all at once before they could make a move. The nicest, the ideal, the dream, would be a surprise: suddenly, pow! Helicopters with troops!" As he spoke, he made machine-gun noises and waved his Israeli Galil rifle toward the refugee shacks. "Ta, ta, ta, ta, ta! All at once from the air! Pow! No escape routes. That would be ideal."

The day before this conversation, a family in Bonilla's camp -- interviewed in their shack outside the view of soldiers -- described such an assault on their village. "Two times they came there in helicopters," said one of the men. "They would come in and land and the people would retire and they would always kill a few. They flew over, machine-gunning people from the helicopter." The family said that five were killed in the strafing.

After the torture, the executions, and the burning, strafing and bombing, the next stage of the sweep was to chase the fleeing people through the hills.

"Up here there aren't any villages anymore," said Sergeant Jose Angel, speaking of the patrol areas around La Perla. "There used to be, but then the soldiers came. We knew that such and such a village was involved, so we went to get them. We captured some and the rest of the people from the village ran away. They're hiding in the mountains. Now we're going to the mountains to look for them."

Major Tito -- Otto Perez Molina -- the commander of the Nebaj base, said in mid-September that 2,000 people from the area of Sumal Grande had fled to the mountains and would be pursued by foot patrols and helicopters.

Sergeant Jose Angel said his platoon went on such operations frequently. I asked Jose Angel what his troops did when they found refugees.

"At times we don't find them. We see them but they get away."

"But when you do find them, what do you do?"

"Oh, we kill them."

"Are they a few people or entire villages?"

"No, entire villages. When we entered the villages we killed some and the rest ran away,"

Under the policy of Rios Montt's army, a civilian found outside the army-controlled towns could be in mortal danger.

"We know the poor people from close up and far away," said Sergeant Miguel Raimundo. "If we see someone walking in the mountains, that means he is a subversive. So we try to grab him and ask where he's going; we arrest him. And then we see if he is a guerrilla or not. But those who always walk in the mountains, we know they are guerrillas. Maybe some of them will be children, but we know that they are subversive delinquents. I've been walking in the mountains for a year now, and just in the mountains, one by one, we've captured more than 500 people."

Sergeant Miguel Raimundo also explained that under the army's assumptions a civilian could also be in danger if they never went anywhere: "A woman told me yesterday that the soldiers kill people, that the soldiers killed her husband. But I told her that if the soldiers killed her husband it was because he was a guerrilla. The soldier knows whom to kill. He doesn't kill the innocent, just the guilty. And she said, 'No, my husband wasn't doing anything.' So I said, 'And how do you know it was nothing? How do you know what he was doing outside?' 'No,' she said, 'because he never went anywhere,' 'Yes,' I said, 'That's because he was a collaborator,' "

It was clear from discussions with these soldiers inside the Ixil zone that, under their orders from Rios Montt and their commanders, including Perez Molina, all civilians were potential targets. Indeed, they were the principal targets.

Lieutenant Romeo Sierra, who directed the sweeps through his patrol area of 20 square kilometers and 10,000 people, told me that thousands of civilians were displaced but that "in the time I've been here (two-and-a-half months) no subversives have fallen. Lots of unarmed people, women refugees, but we haven't had actual combat with guerrillas."

Lieutenant Sierra also said that "human rights" was an "enemy concept." In his army training he had been taught that it had been developed "by international Communism."



Years after he had been ousted from power, I interviewed Rios Montt again. I asked Rios Montt -- a firm believer in the death penalty -- if he thought that he should be tried and executed for his role in the Mayan massacres.

The general leapt to his feet and shouted: "Yes! Try me! Put me against the wall!," but he said he should be tried only if Americans were put on trial too. (See Allan Nairn, "C.I.A. Death Squad: Americans have been directly involved in Guatemalan Army killings," The Nation, April 17, 1995.)

Specifically, Rios Montt cited President Reagan, who, in the midst of the killings, had said that Rios Montt was getting "a bum rap" on human rights.

Rios Montt, for his part, had said: "It's not that we have a policy of scorched earth, just a policy of scorched communists."

http://www.allannairn.org/2013/05/the-guatemala-genocide-case-testimony.html

Permission granted to post in full

May 11, 2013

You're welcome with hugs. About Otto Rene Castillo, Guatemalan communist poet and revolutionary

I feel a thread coming for the martyred revolutionary musicians of Latin American coming soon I'd never heard of Castillo before and wanted to look him up first thing in the morning.


Otto Rene Castillo



Otto Rene Castillo, born 1936, was a Guatemalan revolutionary, a guerilla fighter, and a poet. Following the 1954 CIA-sponsored coup that overthrew the democratic Arbenz government, Castillo went into exile in El Salvador, where he met Roque Dalton and other writers who helped him publish his early works. When the dictator Armas died in 1957 he returned to Guatemala and in 1959 went to the German Democratic Republic to study, where he received a Masters degree. Castillo returned to Guatemala in 1964 and became active in the Workers Party, founded the Experimental Theater of the Capital City Municipality, and wrote and published numerous poems. That same year, he was arrested but managed to escape, going into exile once again, this time in Europe. Later that year he went back to Guatemala secretly and joined one of the armed guerilla movements operating in the Zacapa mountains. In 1967, Castillo and other revolutionary fighters were captured; he, along with his comrades and some local campesinos, were brutally tortured and then burned alive.

Works:
http://vimeo.com/39080625

Apolitical Intellectuals

One day
the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the simplest
of our people.

They will be asked
what they did
when their nation died out
slowly,
like a sweet fire
small and alone.

No one will ask them
about their dress,
their long siestas
after lunch,
no one will want to know
about their sterile combats
with "the idea
of the nothing"
no one will care about
their higher financial learning.

They won't be questioned
on Greek mythology,
or regarding their self-disgust
when someone within them
begins to die
the coward's death.

They'll be asked nothing
about their absurd
justifications,
born in the shadow
of the total lie.

On that day
the simple men will come.

Those who had no place
in the books and poems
of the apolitical intellectuals,
but daily delivered
their bread and milk,
their tortillas and eggs,
those who drove their cars,
who cared for their dogs and gardens
and worked for them,
and they'll ask:

"What did you do when the poor
suffered, when tenderness
and life
burned out of them?"

Apolitical intellectuals
of my sweet country,
you will not be able to answer.

A vulture of silence
will eat your gut.

Your own misery
will pick at your soul.

And you will be mute in your shame.

--Otto Rene Castillo

Also Satisfaction

Also Before the Scales, Tomorrow


http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/castillo/

There's a more detailed biography here

Even Beneath This Bitterness

At the bottom of the night
the footsteps descend and retreat.
Shadows surround them.
Streets, drunks. Buildings.
Someone running away from himself.
A broken bottle, bleeding.
A widowed paper sailing around a corner.
A freethinker pissing on the grass,
where tomorrow the well-dressed children
will play

beneath the dew.

Far away something screams, dark metal, genital.
Asphalt and blind stones, sleeping air,
darkness, cold, police, cold, more police.
Streets, whores, drunks, buildings.
Police again, soldiers, again police.
The statistics say: for every 80,000 officers of the law
there is one doctor in Guatemala.

Then understand the misery of my country,
and my pain and everyone's pain.
If when I say: Bread!

they say

shut up!
and when I say: Liberty!

they say

Die!
But I don't shut up and I don't die.
I live
and fight, maddening
those who rule my country.

For if I live
I fight,
and if I fight
I contribute to the dawn.
And so victory is born
even in the bitterest hours.

― Otto René Castillo



Report of an Injustice
[P align="right"]“For the past few days the personal belongings of Mrs.
Damiana Murcia widow of Garcia, 77 years of age, have
been out in the rain where they were thrown from her
humble living quarters located at 15 “C” Street, between
3rd and 4th, Zone 1.”

(Radio newspaper “Diario Minuto”
first edition, Wednesday, June 10, 1964.)[/P align="right"]

Perhaps you can't believe it,
but here,
before my eyes,
an old woman,
Damiana Murcia widow of Garcia,
77 years of ashes,
under the rain,
beside her furniture,
broken, stained, old,
receives
on the curve of her back
all the monstrous injustice
of your system, and mine.
For being poor,
the judges of the rich
ordered eviction.
Perhaps you no longer
understand that word.
How noble the world
you live in!
Little by little
the bitterest words
lose their cruelty there.
And every day,
like the dawn,
new words emerge
all full of love
and tenderness for man.

Eviction,
how to explain it?

You know,
here when you can't pay the rent
the authorities of the rich
come and throw your things
in the street.
And you're left without roof
for the height of your dreams.
That's what it means, the word
eviction: loneliness
open to the sky, to
the eye that judges, misery.

This is the free world, they say.
What luck that you
no longer know
these liberties!

Damiana Murcia widow of Garcia
is very small,

you know,

and must be very cold.

How great her loneliness!

You can't believe
how these injustices hurt.

They are the norm among us.
The abnormal is tenderness
and the hate of poverty.
And so today more than ever
I love your world,

I understand it,

I glorify

its cosmic pride.

And I ask myself:
Why do the old
suffer among us so,
if age comes to us all
one day?
But the worst of it all

is the habit.

Man loses his humanity,
The enormous pain of another
is no longer his concern

and he eats
and he laughs

and he forgets everything.

I don't want these things
for my country.
I don't want these things
for anyone.
I don't want these things
for anyone in the world.

And I say I

because pain
should carry
an indelible aura

This is the free world, they say.

Look at me.
And tell your friends
my laughter
has turned grotesque
in the middle of my face.

Tell them I love their world.
They should make it beautiful.
And I'm very glad
they no longer know
injustices

so deep and painful.

― Otto René Castillo

May 10, 2013

Public is now singing "Solo pido a díos"... while waiting for Montt to be handed to police

NISGUA ?@NISGUA_Guate 1m

Public is now singing "Solo pido a díos"... while waiting for #RíosMontt to be handed over to the police.

May 10, 2013

Courtroom singing "We only want to be human"

Here's a youtube of a song to Otto René Castillo's poem

May 10, 2013

Waiting, waiting... The courtroom is packed. 10 more minutes now...

(these photos are from earlier in the week)

May 10, 2013

Bolivian Court Keeps Che Guevara's Assassin Under House Arrest

Bolivian Court Keeps Che Guevara's Assassin Under House Arrest



La Paz, May 10 (Prensa Latina) A Bolivian court has decided to keep former military Gary Pardo Salmon - one of those involved in the assassination of Argentinean-Cuban guerrilla leader Ernesto Che Guevara and accused of plotting against the Bolivian government - under house arrest.

The magistrates rejected the request to revoke the measures of preventive house arrest for Prado, one of 39 people involved in a terrorist group that tried to divide Bolivia into two different nations and kill current President Evo Morales, under the command of paramilitary Eduardo Rozsa.

...

The continuing of the trial is scheduled for Friday, and is one of the most controversial trials in Bolivia's history.

Prado Salmon was the responsible for the capture and identification of Che Guevara in 1967. He was the one who tied his hands, beat him and reported his arrest to the US Central Intelligence Agency.

http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1398771&Itemid=1

Zamba Del CHE by Victor Jara, another victim of the imperial rightwing.