The release on Feb. 25 of the report of the UN-sponsored Guatemalan truth commission is a painful but essential step in that country’s healing after a harrowing civil war.
The scathing report mainly blames the Guatemalan army for atrocities that left as many as 200,000 people–most of them Mayan Indians–dead or missing. But it doesn’t spare other actors, including the United States government.
American Ambassador Donald Planty rightly rejected some of the report’s allegations, including those that overreached in an attempt to link unscrupulous business dealings by U.S. corporations to the fratricidal bloodbath that lasted nearly four decades.
Yet it cannot be denied that the U.S. played a crucial and often infamous role in Guatemala’s 36-year civil war–primarily by supporting the army’s savage anti-insurgency campaigns–and now should play a commensurately important part in fostering that country’s internal reconciliation and its halting moves toward democracy.
Under the terms of the commission’s creation, the report does not name names and its findings are not supposed to have “judicial effects.” Those restrictions enrage victims’ relatives and human rights activists, but were an integral part of post-war reconciliation in El Salvador, Argentina and Chile.
Cynics also recall the murder of Guatemala City’s Bishop Juan Gerardi last April, just two days after he released the Catholic Church’s own report on war atrocities. An almost clownish investigation by the government so far has implicated a vagrant, a gay priest and even Gerardi’s arthritic old dog–but has not explored the possibility that military officers, afraid of exposure, might have been involved.
American participation in the Guatemalan horror dates back to the CIA-engineered overthrow of leftist President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. After that, the U.S. poured in military aid and trained numerous officers who later were implicated in atrocities, some of them even against Americans living there.
Following the 1996 pact that ended the war, the U.S. pledged about $260 million over four years to aid in implementation of the peace accords and to develop an effective Guatemalan judiciary.
Washington ought to do more. It should pressure Guatemala for a resolution of the Gerardi murder before the trail grows even colder. It should explicitly support the truth commission’s recommendations regarding compensation of victims by the government and the issuance of an official mea culpa for its role in the atrocities. The U.S. also should speed up the declassification of documents about our involvement in the Guatemalan war.
The truth-seeking process that may eventually exorcise some of the demons of Guatemala’s civil war has just begun. The U.S. should facilitate the search for facts–and encourage others to do the same–even if nothing can ever fully explain the horror that tiny country endured.
