I made the points in the attached memorandum in a private conversation I
had with Ambassador Mein
yesterday prior to the IRG meeting.2
These views are based on my experience as DCM in Guatemala and upon a close following of events since
I left.3 They are the
product also of extended reflections on the situation and my experience
there. As I told Ambassador Mein
I feel somewhat like Fulbright says he felt about the Tonkin Gulf
resolution—my deepest regret is that I did not fight harder within
Embassy councils when I was there to press these views. I can in any
case understand quite well how easy it is to be complacent or
rationalize things.
Because I do feel so very strongly about the problem, I felt compelled to
repeat these points to you with the hope they may receive a
hearing.4
Attachment
GUATEMALA AND COUNTER-TERROR
The Guatemalan Government’s use of “counter-terror” to combat
insurgency is a serious problem in three ways:
- a)
- The tactics are having a terribly corrosive effect on
Guatemalan society and the nation’s political
development;
- b)
- they present a serious problem for the U.S. in terms of
our image in Latin America and the credibility of what we
say we stand for;
- c)
- the problem has a corrosive effect on our own judgments
and conceptual values.
A. Impact on the Country
Counter-terror is corrosive from three points of view:
- 1.
-
The counter-terror is
indiscriminate, and we cannot rationalize that
fact away. Looking back on its full sweep one can cite
instances in which leftist but anti-Communist labor
leaders were kidnapped and beaten by the army units; the
para-military groups armed by the Zacapa commander have
operated in parts of the northeast in war-lord fashion
and destroyed local PR organizations; people are killed
or disappear on the basis of simple accusations. It is
argued that the “excesses” of the earlier period have
been corrected and now only “collaborators” are being
killed. But I question the wisdom or validity of the
Guatemalan Army’s criteria as to who is a collaborator
or how carefully they check. Moreover, the derivative
violence of right-wing vigilantes and sheer criminality
made possible by the atmosphere must also be laid at the
door of the conceptual tactic of counter-terror. The
point is that the society is being rent apart and
polarized; emotions, desire for revenge and personal
bitterness are being sucked in; the pure Communist issue
is thus blurred; and issues of poverty and social
injustice are being converted into virulent questions of
outraged emotion and “tyranny.” The whole cumulative
impact is most unhealthy.
It is not true, in my judgment, that Guatemalans are
apathetic or are not upset about the problem.
Guatemalans very typically mask their feeling with
outward passivity, but that does not mean they do not
feel things. Guatemalans have told me they are worried,
that the situation is serious and nastier than it has
ever been. And I submit that we really do not know what
the campesinos truly feel.
- 2.
-
Counter-terror is brutal. The
official squads are guilty of atrocities. Interrogations are
brutal, torture is used and bodies are mutilated. Many
believe that the very brutal way the ex-beauty queen was
killed, obviously tortured and mutilated, provoked the
FAR to murder Colonel
Webber in retaliation. If true, how tragic that the tactics
of “our side” would in any way be responsible for that
event! But the point is [Page 239] that this is a serious practical
political problem as well as a moral one: Because of the
evidence of this brutality, the government is, in the eyes
of many Guatemalans, a cruel government, and therefore
righteous outrage, emotion and viciousness have been sucked
into the whole political situation. One can argue about the
naivete of the Maryknoll priests, but one should not
discount the depth of the emotion and the significance of
the reaction. One can easily see there how counter-terror
has blurred the question of Communist insurgency and is
converting it into an issue of morality and justice. How
fortunate for us that there is no charismatic leader around
yet to spark an explosion.
- 3.
-
Counter-terror has retarded modernization
and institution building. The tactics have just
deepened and continued the proclivity of Guatemalans to
operate outside the law. It says in effect to people that
the law, the constitution, the institutions mean nothing,
the fastest gun counts. The whole system has been degraded
as a way to mobilize society and handle problems. Our
objectives of helping Guatemala modernize are thus being
undermined. The effect of the money we put into civic-action
and the pilot program in the northeast is, in my personal
opinion, more than offset by the effect of the
counter-terror. The value to the nation’s political
development of Mendez completing his term is probably
already gone.
B. The Image Problem
We are associated with this tactic in the minds of many people, and
whether it is right or wrong so to associate us is rapidly becoming
irrelevant. In politics just as important as the way things are is
the way people think things are. In the minds
of many in Latin America, and, tragically, especially in the
sensitive, articulate youth, we are believed to have condoned these
tactics, if not actually to have encouraged them. Therefore our
image is being tarnished and the credibility of our claims to want a
better and more just world are increasingly placed in doubt. I need
hardly add the aspect of domestic U.S. reactions.
C. U.S. Values
This leads to an aspect I personally find the most disturbing of all—
that we have not been honest with ourselves. We have condoned counter-terror; we may even in effect have
encouraged or blessed it. We have been so obsessed with the fear of
insurgency that we have rationalized away our qualms and uneasiness.
This is not only because we have concluded we cannot do anything
about it, for we never really tried. Rather we suspected that maybe
it is a good tactic, and that as long as Communists are being killed
it is all right. Murder, torture and mutilation are all right if our
side is doing it and the victims are Communists. After all hasn’t
man been a savage from the beginning of time so let us not be too
queasy about terror. I have literally heard these arguments from our
people.
[Page 240]
Have our values been so twisted by our adversary concept of politics
in the hemisphere? Is it conceivable that we are so obsessed with
insurgency that we are prepared to rationalize murder as an
acceptable counter-insurgency weapon? Is it possible that a nation
which so reveres the principle of due process of law has so easily
acquiesced in this sort of terror tactic?
I cannot, from my own personal experience in Guatemala and what I
have seen since, honestly say to myself that the Guatemalan military
have any reason to believe that we really are opposed to this
tactic. I honestly think that on the contrary they believe we have
accepted and encouraged it—even though we have pro forma
remonstrated against excesses. We have talked to them to be sure,
but not very insistently, and the image the Guatemalan military man
gets from his total contact with the U.S. and U.S. advisors at all
levels is very much a mixed bag. It betrays, I am afraid,
intentionally or unintentionally, acquiescence and condonment.
Counter-terror is, in short, very wrong—morally, ethically,
politically from the standpoint of Guatemala’s own interest and
practically from our own foreign policy point of view.
D. What To Do?
I am frankly not sanguine we can stop counter-terror. But one thing
we can do is be honest with ourselves and admit to ourselves that
there is a problem, and that counter-terror is wrong as a counter-insurgency tactic. I just do not
think we have done that.
Beyond that there are three things to do:
- a)
- The record must be made clearer that the United States
Government opposes the concept and questions the wisdom of
counter-terror;
- b)
- the record must be made clearer that we have made this
known unambiguously to the Guatemalans; otherwise we will
stand before history unable to answer the accusations that
we encouraged the Guatemalan Army to do these things;
- c)
- most importantly, we should put our thinking caps on and
devise policies, aid and suggestions that can make
counter-terror unnecessary. It is argued that if we can
remonstrate strongly to the Guatemalans, they will say we
encouraged them to go ahead and now what do we suggest? It
is a good question, and we should ask ourselves that. If
counter-terror is justified by Guatemalans in terms of the
weakness of the legal system, is there nothing we can do to
help and prod them on legal reforms? Is there nothing we can
do to make them stop the brutality of torture and
mutilation? Is there nothing we can do to help them develop
philosophical concepts of institutions and a legal system? I
know that primitive violence has gone on a long time in
Guatemala and elsewhere. Do we just throw up our hands and
[Page 241] accept all of
its wrongness as long as it is also “effective” (and will
history’s verdict say it was “effective” in Guatemala)? If,
in fact, the GOG pleads
weakness in the conventional security apparatus, is that not
precisely what our assistance and counsel is for—to help
them perfect conventional, legal law enforcement?
If the U.S. cannot come up with any better suggestion on how to fight
insurgency in Guatemala than to condone counter-terror, we are in a
bad way indeed. But most of all, even if we cannot dissuade them, we
owe it to ourselves to come to terms with our values and judgments
and take a clear ethical stand.
