The Aftermath of the Boston Bombing...
And the Far Greater U.S. Crimes in Guatemala

May 12, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Update: On Friday, May 10, Efraín Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide by the Guatemalan Court, and was sentenced to 80 years in prison. According to news reports, indigenous activists and their supporters applauded the verdict but are concerned that Guatemala's current president, Otto Pérez Molina, was himself implicated in the massacres, and that Rios Montt might be released on some pretext. The conviction is the first time a former ruler has been found guilty of genocide by courts in his own country, and is most of all a product of decades of heroic struggle by the survivors of the Guatemalan genocide, and their supporters. It is a step towards justice—but the full role of the U.S. and Ronald Reagan—who consistently endorsed and armed the Ríos Montt regime in carrying out genocide in Guatemala—continues to cry out for exposure and justice.

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On April 15, explosive blasts at the finish line of the Boston Marathon killed three people, including an 8-year-old boy. Dozens more were injured, many very seriously. Scenes of bloodshed and terrorized race participants and spectators stunned people on the scene and hundreds of millions who saw it on TV. Whoever turns out to be behind this attack—acts such as this cause great harm and have nothing to do with genuine emancipatory revolution.

But almost instantly, a chorus of politicians, law enforcement officials, and the ruling class media seized on this incident to whip up an atmosphere of rallying around the flag of an empire that carries out the greatest crimes in the world.

Meanwhile, at the very same time that the attack on the Boston Marathon was being given all-out media coverage, a trial of great significance was taking place in Guatemala concerning a U.S.-backed criminal genocide which claimed the lives of 200,000 people in the 1980s. And yet news of this historic trial and of the U.S. role in the crimes that took place were all but impossible to find in the U.S. media. This was the trial of Efrain Ríos Montt, former ruler of Guatemala who presided over horrific massacres of 200,000 indigenous people, and who was praised by Ronald Reagan—one of the most celebrated, promoted, and worshipped dead U.S. presidents—as "a man of great personal integrity and commitment."

In three years, the Guatemalan army destroyed 626 villages, killed or "disappeared" more than 200,000 people—mostly indigenous Mayan people—and displaced an additional 1.5 million people, about a fifth of the entire population. The Guatemalan government had a "scorched earth" policy—destroying and burning buildings and crops, slaughtering livestock, fouling water supplies, and violating sacred places and cultural symbols.

The trial of Ríos Montt opened on March 19 in Guatemala City. Courageous witnesses testified in their native Ixil Mayan language. They described the massacres of people too old to flee. They testified to seeing infants tossed into the flames of burning houses and fetuses being cut out of pregnant women's uteruses. They described people raped in churches. A Guatemalan soldier who had been part of carrying out these crimes testified that his orders were "indio visto, indio muerte." ("An Indian seen is an Indian killed.")

One survivor of this horrific genocide said, "When you have lived with what we lived, it never leaves your head." And, he said. "You can never forget."

Painful as it is to reflect on this, think about this happening on a mass scale, for years, literally ripping the hearts out of people and choking the rivers with bodies of the tortured. And ask yourself how can it be that such crimes are buried.

And yet it was buried.

Diverting Pain and Shock into Rallying Around the Flag for Greater Crimes

In the wake of the Boston bombing, Republican senators demanded the surviving suspect be denied a criminal trial and instead be detained as an "enemy combatant." On April 23, former Republican Rep. Joe Walsh from Illinois recommended that the U.S. begin profiling "our enemy ... young Muslim men." And Fox "News" contributor Erik Rush said of Muslims on Twitter, "Yes, they're evil. Let's kill them all."

As this kind of rhetoric spewed forth, Barack Obama seized the moment to proclaim the moral superiority of the USA, to uphold and justify what it does around the world, and to rally people—including people in this country who are repelled by the kinds of fascist responses coming from Republican spokesmen—behind the USA and its flag and agenda around the world. At a church service on April 18, Barack Obama said "in the face of evil, Americans will lift up what's good. In the face of cruelty, we will choose compassion. In the face of those who would visit death upon innocents, we will choose to save and to comfort and to heal. We'll choose friendship. We'll choose love."

And a few days after the Boston attacks, Obama declared a message to "anyone who would do harm to our people. Yes, we will find you. And, yes, you will face justice. We will find you. We will hold you accountable."

From the overtly fascist "kill the Muslims" statements like those by the Fox News contributor, to Obama's rhetoric about the greatness of America , the rulers of this country are seizing on the Boston Marathon attack to rally people behind a U.S. empire that has committed some of the most monstrous crimes in history.

And this is taking place at a moment when the real nature of U.S. imperial rule around the world is bubbling to the surface with emerging exposure and protest against a number of those crimes. There is the trial of the U.S.-backed Ríos Montt in Guatemala. There is growing international and domestic outrage in response to conditions at the U.S. torture chamber at Guantánamo where over 100 prisoners are on a hunger strike. (See page 7.) And there is growing exposure of the effect of U.S. drone attacks which have instituted an ongoing reign of terror and death in a large region of the world—killing hundreds of times more innocent civilians than those killed in the attack on the Boston Marathon.

Behind the Torture and Massacres in Guatemala

While the airwaves in the U.S. were filled with frenetic speculation on who might have been involved in any way in the Boston bombing, and what kind of morality and political thinking was behind the attack... none of these voices in the mainstream media were asking the same questions about Guatemala, where hundreds of thousands of people were massacred.

There is no need to tap phone conversations or dig up secret communications to identify the immoral monster most responsible for the massacre in Guatemala—for which Ríos Montt was on trial. For decades, U.S. imperialism dominated every aspect of Guatemalan life, including the genocidal slaughter in the 1980s.

The massacres in Guatemala took place during the Reagan regime, at a time when the U.S. rulers micromanaged the affairs of this small Central American country. Plantations run by U.S. corporations on land stolen from the Guatemalan people extracted super-profits from enslaved Guatemalan laborers. In 1954, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of elected nationalist President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, who attempted to expropriate and return to peasants a small part of the 42 percent of the arable land of Guatemala that had been stolen from the Guatemalan people by United Fruit—a U.S. capitalist corporation.

Throughout the 1960s, and beyond, U.S.-backed regimes throughout Latin America faced insurgencies born of a long legacy of brutal imperialist exploitation and oppression. When anyone brought up "U.S. democracy," people around the world saw U.S. imperialism marauding around the world from Vietnam to Central America—bringing death and destruction in service of exploitation and oppression. "Yankee Go Home!" was written on the walls from Tijuana, Mexico, to the southern tip of South America and everywhere in between—and around the world as well.

By the 1980s, the Soviet Union—which by this time was a rival imperialist power—worked to use struggles against U.S. imperialism to their own advantage. But to the rulers of the U.S., the fruits of the exploitation of the people of Central America—especially Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua where insurgencies challenged their domination—were rightfully theirs—they had installed dictatorships and massacred union organizers, dissidents and radicals, overthrown governments and installed puppet dictators for generations to earn that right. Other forces were "outsiders" while, in the context of a global "cold war" with rival imperialists, the rulers of the U.S. considered Central America their "backyard."

Reagan's Visit to the Scene of the Crime

As word began to get out about what was going on in Guatemala, Reagan made a public display of support for Ríos Montt. He traveled to Honduras—which neighbors Guatemala in Central American in December 1982—where he met publicly with Ríos Montt.

During the 1982 meeting with Ríos Montt, Reagan declared: "I know that President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. His country is confronting a brutal challenge from guerrillas armed and supported by others outside Guatemala. I have assured the President that the United States is committed to support his efforts to restore democracy and to address the root causes of this violent insurgency. I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice. My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts."

After Reagan and Ríos Montt met, a reporter asked Ríos Montt about his "scorched earth" policies; he "quipped" that he had a "policy of scorched communists." And Reagan said Ríos Montt was a man of "great personal integrity" who was "getting a bum rap" from human rights activists.

During the Reagan presidency, the U.S. sent major shipments of military hardware to Ríos Montt, including millions of dollars worth of helicopter parts to ferry troops into remote Mayan villages to carry out ghastly massacres and millions more in additional military supplies.

Think again about what this meant to the people of Guatemala. Allan Nairn recently described on the radio show Democracy Now! how the Guatemalan forces under Ríos Montt carried out their atrocities. "The army swept through the northwest highlands. And according to soldiers who I interviewed at the time, as they were carrying out the sweeps, they would go into villages, surround them, pull people out of their homes, line them up, execute them. A forensic witness testified ... that 80 percent of the remains they've recovered had gunshot wounds to the head. Witnesses have—witnesses and survivors have described Ríos Montt's troops beheading people. One talked about an old woman who was beheaded, and then they kicked her head around the floor. They ripped the hearts out of children as their bodies were still warm, and they piled them on a table for their parents to see."

"Rebranded" U.S. Imperialism and the Celebration of a Monstrous Criminal

At the same time that images of the Boston bombing were filling the airwaves in the U.S., dozens of people who had, as children, survived the massacres orchestrated by Ríos Montt risked their lives to testify against him in Guatemala.

Death threats from people associated with Guatemala's military were sent to judges and lawyers charged with prosecuting Ríos Montt. On April 18, as the trial neared closing arguments, Ríos Montt's lawyers stormed out of the courtroom and declared the proceedings "illegal." Carol Flores, the presiding judge, then ruled that all matters in the case since November 2011 were null and void, and that the legal proceedings against Ríos Montt were suspended. At this writing, it appears the trial is resuming, but it is unclear how the proceedings against Ríos Montt will proceed at this point.

Today, the rulers of the U.S. have moved to "rebrand" their role in the world, including in Latin America. CIA coups, puppet fascist dictators, and death squads—we are told—have been replaced with micro-loans and support for "democratic institutions." The hungry, oppressed people crowding the slums and dying in the countryside of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are—we are told—in need of the blessings of U.S. democracy. And anyone who sympathizes with, or feels solidarity with, the people of the world is told to channel their energy into institutions that fit into or cover up the nature of bringing that "democracy" to the world. In fact the rulers of the U.S. and their apologists claim the trial of Ríos Montt is the result of their work to create an independent functioning judiciary in Guatemala.

But ask those who rule the U.S. and their mouthpieces, those who portray themselves as bringing enlightenment, "democracy," and progress to the world why they are covering up their role in the genocide in Guatemala. And why they continue to iconize Ronald Reagan, the U.S. president who presided over the worst of these horrors.

A Need for, and the Existence of, a REAL Alternative

The poverty, misery and death one finds throughout the world are—overwhelmingly—the product of what the U.S. spreads around the world. Sometimes, in the face of the struggles of the people, the rulers of the U.S. will make minor adjustments to how exploitation and oppression are enforced. Sometimes, as was the case in Egypt, the U.S. suddenly "discovers" that bloody tyrants it put in power and worked through for decades are tyrants after all.

But through all these maneuvers, the interests of the U.S. empire continue to be exploitation and oppression, and they are enforced most fundamentally through invasions and drones, media lies and propaganda, death squads, and torture chambers. All this, they say, is bringing "democracy" to the world.

Bob Avakian has brought forward a real, genuinely libertatory alternative to capitalism—a new synthesis of communism. And as part of doing that, he has sharply exposed the real nature what it is the U.S. brings to the world:

The essence of what exists in the U.S. is not democracy but capitalism-imperialism and political structures to enforce that capitalism-imperialism. What the U.S. spreads around the world is not democracy, but imperialism and political structures to enforce that imperialism.

BAsics 1:3

People around the world—from Egypt and Syria to the inner cities of the U.S., from the smoldering ruins of an exploded fertilizer storage facility in West, Texas, to the sweatshops of Bangladesh—anyone looking for a path to liberation: look beneath the surface at the real nature of what it means to bring "U.S.-style democracy" to the world.

Take a look at the crushed and brutalized bodies of the victims of what the U.S. spreads around the globe. Take a look at the immoral monsters these murders invoke as heroes and role models. And get into, and get with the only real alternative to capitalism on the planet: the new synthesis of communist revolution.

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Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that witnesses "testified to seeing infants tossed into the flames of burning houses and unborn children being cut out of pregnant women's uteruses." As part of the barbaric brutality of the U.S.-sponsored massacres, fetuses were cut out of pregnant women's uteruses. There is, scientifically, no such thing as "unborn children."

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