Guatemala's Former Leader Charged/Genocide P Roberts Enabler
Posted: Thu Mar 01, 2012 11:22 am
ask and ye shall recieve
Guatemala's Former Leader Charged with Genocide. Pat Robertson Enabled It.
Submitted by BuzzFlash on Thu, 03/01/2012 - 9:56am.
Guest Commentary
BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
Nearly thirty years ago, Guatemala's ruthless dictator, José Efraín Ríos Montt and televangelist Pat Robertson were practically tied at the hip. Now, Guatemala's judicial system is debating how to handle charges of genocide against the former military dictator, while Robertson, who had praised Ríos Montt for his ‘enlightened leadership,' appears to have turned his back on his old friend.
In the early 1980s, José Efraín Ríos Montt, a military general was a favorite of the Reagan Administration and U.S. Christian conservative evangelical leaders - particularly televangelist Pat Robertson -- and organizations. Ríos Montt was one of a series of military dictators that masterminded the murders of perhaps as many as 200,000 Guatemalans -- including tens of thousands of Mayan people -- as well as the destruction of a numerous Mayan villages.
Now, some thirty years later, Ríos Montt, whose rule as de-facto president lasted for seventeen months in 1982 and 1983 -- taking over in a military coup before being ousted by a subsequent military coup - has been ordered "to stand trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity," the New York Time recently reported.
Ríos Montt is accused of being responsible for at least 1,770 deaths, 1,400 human rights violations, and the displacement of nearly 30,000 indigenous Guatemalans.
This is the first time a Latin American court has charged a former president with genocide.
In late February, however, the judge in charge of the trial, Carol Patricia Flores, stepped down after being accused of being biased in the case. According to several press accounts, the new judge, Miguel Angel Galvez, who before postponing a scheduled hearing until the 1st of March, said that the charges against Ríos Montt as well as the conditions of his bail and house arrest, would remain in place.
During Ríos Montt's reign, "the military carried out a scorched-earth campaign in the Mayan highlands as soldiers hunted down bands of leftist guerrillas. Survivors have described how military units wiped out Indian villages with extraordinary brutality, killing all the women and children along with the men. Military documents of the time described the Indians as rebel collaborators, the New York Times reported."
A United Nations-backed truth commission, "set up after a peace accord in 1996, found that 200,000 people were killed during the civil war, mostly by state security forces. The violence against Mayan-Ixil villages amounted to genocide because the entire population was targeted, the commission concluded," the Times pointed out.
The Religious Right and the Ruthless Dictator
Thirty years ago, the Religious Right played a significant role in U.S.-Central American relations: vigorously supporting President Ronald Reagan's so-called low-intensity wars in the region - the contras in Nicaragua, right wing paramilitary death squads in El Salvador, and military dictators in Guatemala - a policy that was responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people. The Religious Right's support was in part couched in the struggle against communism, and in part tied to what they hoped would be the expansion of evangelical Protestantism in the region.
Guatemala's José Efraín Ríos Montt was a favorite of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, Loren Cunningham's Youth With A Mission (YWAM), and televangelist Pat Robertson.
In his book, The Most Dangerous Man in America?: Pat Robertson and the Rise of the Christian Coalition, Americans United's Rob Boston pointed out that Pat Robertson had praised Ríos Montt for his "enlightened leadership" and claimed that the dictator insisted on "honesty in government." Observed Robertson, "I was in Guatemala three days after Ríos Montt overthrew the corrupt [previous] government. The people had been dancing in the street for joy, literally fulfilling the words of Solomon who said, 'When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice.'"
According to Right Web, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies, "Within a week of the 1982 coup ... Robertson flew to Guatemala to meet with the new president. Ríos Montt's first interview as president was with Robertson, who aired it on [his Christian Broadcasting Network's program]‘The 700 Club' and praised the new military government. Robertson also urged donations for International Love Lift, a relief project of Ríos Montt's U.S. church, Gospel Outreach. Ríos Montt said that Pat Robertson had offered to send missionaries and ‘more than a billion dollars' in aid from U.S. fundamentalists. Robertson, however, claimed that he hoped to match the earlier CBN donation of $350,000 in earthquake relief and send ‘a small team of medical and agricultural experts' to Guatemala. CBN reportedly sponsored a campaign to send money and agricultural and medical technicians to help design the first model villages under Ríos Montt."
In her 1989 book, Spiritual Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right (South End Press), Sara Diamond wrote: "Ríos Montt's ascension to power was celebrated by the U.S. Christian Right as a sign of divine intervention in Central America."
While Robertson never delivered the sums of money Ríos Montt expected, Diamond pointed out that the promise "enabled Ríos Montt to convince the U.S. Congress that he would not seek massive sums of U.S. aid. Instead, he would rely on ‘private aid' from U.S. evangelicals. Toward that end, Ríos Montt's aide... came to the United States for a meeting with... [Presidential counselor] Edwin Meese, Interior Secretary James Watt... and Christian Right leaders Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Loren Cunningham)."
In an article written prior to the publication of her book, Diamond pointed out that Montt was a member of Gospel Outreach, a fundamentalist sect based in Eureka, California, which became the Church of the Word. Diamond noted that "The Gospel in Guatemala," a PBS documentary, "revealed the complicity of Gospel Outreach in the Guatemalan Army's administration of camps for refugees from Rios Montt's brutal counterinsurgency massacres of Mayan Quiche Indians."
In the September 25, 2006 edition of The Nation magazine, Max Blumenthal reported that, Loren Cunningham, according to Diamond "was a follower of Christian Reconstructionism an extreme current of evangelical theology that advocates using stealth political methods to put the United States under the control of Biblical law and jettison the Constitution."
These days, while Guatemalans are seeking justice, Pat Robertson is still selling snake oil on his "700 Club." One of the Grand Old Men of televangelism is no longer as significant a political figure that he once was.
"In 1996, I called Pat Robertson ‘the most dangerous man in America,' but I wouldn't do that now," Americans United's Rob Boston told me in an email. "Robertson is clearly in his dotage and is no longer the powerful political figure he once was. His influence declined greatly when the Christian Coalition collapsed. Without a large political organization behind him, Robertson became just another TV preacher ranting over the airwaves."
Boston was careful, however, to give Robertson his props. "That doesn't mean we should dismiss Robertson as an unimportant figure," Boston explained. "The model he used to launch the Christian Coalition has been copied by others, including the Family Research Council, thus ensuring that his legacy will be felt for many years to come."
Meanwhile, according to two experienced right-wing watchers, Robertson has not so much as uttered the name of his former Guatemalan contact, José Efraín Ríos Montt, on "The 700 Club."
The Other Denied Genocides From Turkey to Guatemala, Nations Deny Worst Crimes
Lesser-Known Deniers: Holocaust denial is a well-known phenomenon. But what about those, like Guatemala’s ousted dictator José Efrain Ríos Montt, who deny genocides that are less commonly recognized?
By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Published February 15, 2012, issue of February 17, 2012.
Like the Holocaust itself, Holocaust denial is a well-known if often misunderstood phenomenon. In its most naked form, it denies the historical fact that during the Nazi period, Germans, helped by many other Europeans such as Ukrainians, sought to kill the Jews of Europe and managed to slaughter roughly 6 million of them. In somewhat less brazen forms, it denies not the Germans’ perpetration of the Holocaust in its entirety, but merely central aspects of it, such as that they used gas chambers or that they killed a number close to 6 million Jews. In a still somewhat more attenuated form, Holocaust denial practitioners say little about the events themselves or about the Germans or others who slaughtered Jews, and instead attack survivors or scholars, calling them frauds when they seek nothing more than to tell the truth about what happened.
Holocaust denial consists of more than outright denial of the Holocaust. It includes a variety of attempts to cast doubt on, cover up and confuse people about the Holocaust, in essence to falsify the history of this period and to fabricate a fictitious version, because it serves many people in diverse ways, primarily politically, to have such a fictitious history become accepted. Defenders of the name and honor of Germans or of Ukrainians or other Europeans, anti-Semites, enemies of Israel, propagandists of many stripes and sensibilities, all see the truth about the Holocaust to be inimical to their agendas. In this sense, the original name that the Holocaust deniers gave themselves, “Holocaust revisionists,” is correct insofar as they used a variety of strategies, many of which were not outright denial, to revise (albeit falsely) the understanding of the Nazi period and what the Germans and others did to Jews.
If Holocaust denial is the best-known and most widely practiced form of genocide denial, it is neither the only one nor the oldest. Already this year, in the span of just a few days at the end of January, we saw a few potent examples of the pushback against those who would try to bury the memory of mass murder. The French legislature criminalized the denial of the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians in World War I. A few days later, a Guatemalan judge ruled that the country’s former dictator, José Efrain Ríos Montt, the mastermind of much of the genocide of 200,000 Mayas in the early 1980s, must face trial, despite the hegemonic denial movement in Guatemala. The International Criminal Court in The Hague also ordered a trial for several of the Kenyan political organizers of the postelection eliminationist assault that in 2008 took the lives of more than 1,000 people and expelled from their homes and ruined the lives of 600,000 more — violence that Kenyan leaders have falsely insisted was simply spontaneous, local and ethnic flare ups. And Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish judge who had exercised the controversial legal doctrine of universal jurisdiction against mass murderers, was himself put on trial in what may be a political vendetta for his having investigated the routinely denied crimes of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, responsible for the death of perhaps 200,000 Spaniards during the middle part of the 20th century.
Whatever their differences, these events are each responses to, or the expression of, attempts to deny the large-scale mass murder and eliminationist assaults that took place in each of these countries. Every denial movement is organized and led by political leaders, often at the helm of a state, who place enormous obstacles to the truth being told or to justice done. Denial movements cast doubt on, and confuse people about, the Hutu mass annihilation of Tutsi in 1994, the Serbs’ genocide of Bosniaks in the former Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1994 and, in China, the colossal mass murders perpetrated by the communists under Mao Tse-tung.
The Turks’ denial of their slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians is the oldest, most consistent and, probably, most effective large-scale genocide denial phenomenon. It differs from Holocaust denial in that Turkey has actually criminalized telling the truth about the genocide, and the Turkish state, whether under military or civilian, secular or religious leadership, has continuously made falsifying this history a central foreign policy stance, threatening and sanctioning and influencing countries and individuals (including scholars) who would otherwise speak the truth about it. Germany, for all its shortcomings, serves as a model of honesty for its political leaders and elites, in acknowledging the past, in its media’s extensive treatment of Holocaust themes, in its educational system’s instruction and in making amends with the survivors. While Germans have all been confronted repeatedly with the truth about their countrymen’s perpetration of the Holocaust, most Turks have been fed lies by their government, have never been exposed to how their countrymen exterminated Armenians and believe that claims about the genocide are merely attempts to blacken Turkey’s name.
Survivors of all genocides say the same thing: We want the truth told. We want people to know what happened so that it will not happen to others. I heard this again and again from survivors around the world when working on my film “Worse Than War,” including in Guatemala, where survivors also called for Ríos Montt to be put on trial. When I interviewed Ríos Montt for the film, he defiantly said, “If I was responsible, I would be in jail,” implying that his freedom proved his innocence. Now his claim rings even hollower. Now his surviving victims may get their wish. Now the powerful denial movement in Guatemala, which for decades obscured even the basic facts of the genocide, should be powerfully counteracted.
We should honor the survivors’ wishes everywhere for truth and justice, and this means that, whatever the momentary political costs, we must insist that the truth be told about all genocides, the Turks’ murder of the Armenians included. Those who fail to do so perpetrate a moral and human scandal, and cast a bad light on themselves and others when they rightly condemn and combat Holocaust denial.