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The Missing Link: Guatemalan Genocide and U.S. Imperialism
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- 23 May 2013 78 hits
There is a decades-long history of direct aid from the U.S. political and military establishment to dictators and military coups in Latin America. Since the CIA orchestrated one such coup against the President of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954, the USA has been complicit in genocides throughout the continent. U.S. capitalists used these dictators as a bulwark in the so-called, “crusade” against communism, particularly after the triumph of the rebel movement in Cuba in 1959.
Actually this “crusade” was to maintain control over the natural resources, labor and markets throughout Latin America which the USA, and companies like United Fruit, considered to be their “backyard.” Guatemala is now again in the news with the trial of Efraín Rios Montt, one of the USA’s front-men dictators.
Since implementing the Monroe Doctrine in the 1820s, the USA has tried to oust European colonial powers and establish U.S. hegemony. In recent decades, Russia, European nations, and China have all gained influence and some control on this continent. This has intensified the USA’s desperation to control the capitalist rulers throughout Latin America. The mass genocide
was revealed in the ongoing trial of Rios Montt (see below) ignoring a century of inter-imperialist rivalry.
The main purpose of the Guatemalan genocides was to destroy the worker-peasant movement that was fighting to protect its land and resources.
Rios Montt on Trial:
Deafening Silence about U.S. Imperialism
In 1981, U.S. president Reagan escalated the genocide against the population and the guerrillas in Guatemala, El Salvador and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The extermination of the indigenous population in Guatemala was so brutal that Washington tried to cover up its involvement. One example: the U.S. military sent arms via the government of Israel to Guatemala. When a military coup imposed the genocidal “Evangelical Christian” General Rios Montt in 1982, Reagan administration officials enthusiastically embraced him as an ally. The Reagan White House received him, in person, to finalize military support.
Rios Montt answered criticism about the mass murder of indigenous people: “It’s not that we have a policy of scorched earth, just a policy of scorched communists.” The U.S. government knew then, and we know now, that 90% of the dead were civilians. In 1983, Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State, defended the genocidal Rios Montt, stating that he had “brought considerable progress” on human rights.
The U.S. supplied helicopters, mortars, grenade launchers, machine guns and troops. The U.S. military supplied “trainers” in the field that produced death squads who led the massacres against civilians. In the 1990s, it was revealed that the CIA had many senior military officials on its payroll, including Otto Perez Molina (the current Guatemalan President). U.S. imperialists, through “private” dictators like Rios Montt, are primarily responsible for these atrocities — the murder of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants.
These genocidal policies led hundreds of thousands of indigenous people to migrate to survive. They become refugees throughout Central America and the USA. Of the over one million Guatemalan exiles in the USA today, the greater part came in this period.
Yet Eliot Abrams, U.S. military officers and Reagan were hardly mentioned at the current trial of Rios Montt, nor was the USA’s ongoing manipulation of resources and politics within Guatemala
Racism, Part and Parcel
of Imperialism
Institutional racism, created under capitalism, has sentenced indigenous peoples to isolation, segregation and oppression for centuries. It facilitated the work of the exterminators, providing ideological justification for genocide in Guatemala. Mostly of Mayan descent, the indigenous peoples where labeled “violent,” a “threat to the nation” and “uncivilized.”
Under Rios Montt, religion added to the mix since his Evangelical Christian ideology labeled them “non-believers.” His assassination of “subversives” or “trade unionists” in the Guatemalan cities became mass genocide of the rural population. A spokesman for Rios Montt, Francisco Bianchi, ranted that he must kill the indigenous population, because they were all collaborators with the “subversives” (i.e., communists). The economic reality behind this is that the Guatemalan military took over indigenous lands in order to exploit petrochemical resources.
Testimony of the cruelty of these massacres emerged in Rios Montt’s trial. In indigenous towns, villages, and communities, soldiers killed en masse with horror and cruelty. Many people had their hearts cut out. Women were raped. Those who were pregnant had the fetus cut out or were thrown against trees to kill the baby and then their bodies were burned. Children’s heads were cut off. Whole towns where burned to the ground. Captain Jesse Garcia, a U.S. Army officer, told a reporter from the Washington Post how they trained Guatemalan soldiers in these techniques of destroying entire villages. (As in Vietnam; see: “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.” by Nick Turse)
Rios Montt Was Not Alone
It was revealed that “Tito Arias,” a name used by Otto Pérez Molina (Guatemala’s current President) was one of the perpetrators of the massacres ordered by Rios Montt. There are videos on the Internet where this sinister “Tito” explains just how effective helicopters and recoilless bazookas, designed as anti-tank weapons, are against people or thatched huts. (These weapons came from the U.S. military.)
Recently, the same President Pérez Molina ordered martial law and the suspension of all civil liberties in response to a protest about the environment and pollution in four mining towns. He now is requesting military aid against “narco-traffickers.” (NYT, 5/13/13) This executioner will attack the working class, not the drug dealers. Terror against the civilian population is part and parcel of the “war on drugs,” particularly in Mexico and Central America. Whole populations are terrorized, both by the “narco-traffickers” and by various U.S.-backed governments.
Histories like this in Guatemala shows that the fight against ideological and institutional racism is vital to the life and death of the international working class. Capitalists promote racist divisions around the world to exploit all working people and justify massacres for conquest.
Workers everywhere should remember these exterminations of whole communities that simply dared to fight for a better life. We must honor them as we fight throughout our lives to eradicate capitalism and imperialism — the true creators of these genocides against the working class — from the face of the earth.
This capitalist nightmare will not end until the working class rises up as one to destroy the capitalist and imperialist oppressors. The Progressive Labor Party is unifying all workers the world over toward this goal. Join us!
(See numerous writings from Allan Nair — Guatemala Genocide Case: Testimony Notes Regarding Rios Montt www.allannairn.org; May 9, 2013: NACLA Report on the Americas, Allan Nairn)
MEXICO, May 22 —The labor and educational reforms, approved at the beginning of President Peña Nieto’s sixth term, legalized layoffs, wage cuts, the elimination of pensions and social security. Just like that, in one single stroke, and with the backing of state violence, the capitalists destroy our lives to solve their crisis.
The recently approved telecommunications reform and the upcoming energy reform concentrate even more wealth in the hands of the mostly Mexican and U.S. billionaires.
All these changes only benefit the capitalist class, further reduce the cost of labor, and help turn education into another business. These events demonstrate that capitalist laws serve the class in power against the oppressed and exploited class.
One Class, One Party
To eliminate the root cause of all exploitation and oppression, we workers need to take power into our own hands and organize the whole society under the principle of “from each according to their commitment and to each according to their needs.”
We need a society of social equality, communism. To achieve it we organize ourselves as a party, PLP. Our Party will unite the working class from around the world. We do not participate in elections because the bosses will never concede power peacefully. Organized into a revolutionary party, millions of workers, students, unemployed and soldiers could wrest the power from our exploiters through an armed insurrection.
War on the Horizon
To survive the current crisis of their system, the bosses attack the living conditions of the working class.
Competition between an important sector of the Mexican ruling class allied with the U.S., against the Chinese bosses, has led to cuts in wages and services of workers in Mexico, as well as to an increase in the length and intensity of the work-day.
Recent changes legalized these working conditions. The attack against workers has benefited a group of bosses in Mexico who in the last decade have regained market shares in the U.S. But the worst is yet to come. The rivalry between the U.S. and China for control of global resources, markets and cheap labor is getting sharper every day. It will probably be resolved through a worldwide war. The bosses will try to use workers as cannon fodder to fight in their war.
Workers in Mexico cannot remain distant from the confrontation; Mexico shares a border with the U.S. and is one of its most important suppliers of oil, labor, food, and other resources. Thousands of migrant workers, lured by the promise of getting U.S. citizenship, will be forced to fight. We must organize and unite across borders to confront imperialist war with revolutionary class war.
We have the opportunity to turn the guns around against the bosses instead of using them against our class brothers. That’s the importance of an international party and this is the meaning of May Day: we must realize our power as the working class who produces all the wealth in the world. The history of May Day and the revolutions of the 20th century demonstrate the potential of our class to fight for a communist world. Workers of the world, unite!
Nationalism, A Deadly Trap
The last decade has seen the largest mining of oil and minerals than any other period in history. In addition, the price of oil, gold and silver has been rising. These sales have produced billions in profits.
During the same period poverty has increased and working conditions have worsened, while the wealth and the number of billionaires has increased. This demonstrates the falsehood that oil in the hands of the state benefits all Mexicans.
As long as there is capitalism it doesn’t matter which bosses’ hands hold the oil or electricity. Nationalism will only benefit those Mexican bosses who want to own PEMEX (state-controlled oil company) or CFE (Federal Electricity commission). But it won’t help the working class. Only in a society governed by the workers, will wealth be used for the benefit of those who produce it.
To take control of the energy wealth, the bosses will use state violence, fascism, which along with racism, nationalism and sexism, are capitalism’s ideological weapons to divide and weaken workers’ struggles. Historically, it’s been shown that only communism can defeat fascism. Join us!
A weekend before May Day, members and friends of PLP in Mexico organized three meetings to discuss its historical and international significance. We also presented the flyer we planned to distribute at the march and briefly discussed the current situation in Mexico, in relation to the reforms pushed by the new government. (See Mexico article above)
The achievements at these dinners — which we planned since the beginning of the year — were few, but important. Four friends of the Party, all CHALLENGE readers, participated in the first one; two friends and a youth who joined during our last Summer Project participated in the second, and during the third we were joined by a comrades’ family and by two CHALLENGE reader friends.
They all expressed their commitment to participate in the May Day march, since we’d be the only contingent that’s an international organization promoting the overthrow of capitalism and replacing it with the dictatorship of the working class.
In the three meetings we highlighted the imperialist struggles between China and the U.S., which will probably lead to a confrontation between these bosses and their respective allies.
There is a long road before we reach our goal and there is a lot to be done. This is the only Party that fights for collective work and the destruction of the profit system that creates inequality the world over. PLP is the only Party that struggles against nationalism and sexism, and the only one that holds that the working class should direct all aspects of society.
Each week, without exception, our PLP club meets as an active study group. We’ve already discussed the political economy documents and the majority of 2011 Challenge editorials. A new member has transcribed “Towards a New Communist Movement.” We’ve also discussed “Reform and Revolution.”
Our objective is not only to understand and discuss the Party’s ideas, but also to revise and re-edit documents to put forward revolutionary ideas clearly, in writing as well as in conversation.
We recently showed “Road to Revolution IV” (our Party’s ideas) to a militant fighter focused on reformist and pro-socialist ideals and projects. He said he wasn’t convinced we should reject the socialist and reformist ideas and instead fight for communism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
PLP aims to destroy the entire capitalist system, that much was made clear. It’s not important how intellectually equipped our opponents may be. There is no argument that can trump our Party’s politics.
We invited a worker and his family to join PLP and attend a May Day forum. In a later conversation, this worker discussed his ideas and feelings about the labor situation. Most workers are influenced by wrong ideas against their class. But through our interactions at the forum and our May Day dinner, he has expressed interest in getting involved and studying our ideas to get to know PLP better.
Red Youth
MARIKANA, SOUTH AFRICA, May 17 — A new strike wave is sweeping this country’s minefields as thousands at the Lonmin mine here wildcatted on May 14, reacting to the murder of one of their union organizers and to looming job cuts. Lonmin is the world’s third largest producer of platinum and was the site of last August’s police massacre of 34 striking miners. The strikers have vowed to stop all scabs and have blocked highways, while marching to the area of last year’s atrocity.
This month is the region’s “strike season” when tens of thousands of workers pour into the streets demanding wage increases. The bosses and the government — dominated by the African National Congress (ANC) — fear the strike wave may reach the vineyards around Capetown and the auto industry in Durban.
Meanwhile, a wildcat looms at Anglo-American Platinum — the world’s top platinum producer — which announced a layoff of 6,000.
None of the essential demands and grievances stemming from last year’s strikes have been met. “It [our wage] is too little for us for the kind of work we do,” said miner Ayanda Ndabent. “I plant dynamite…inside the mines. We can die any time,” he continued. “We know the company makes a lot of money from the work we do.”
The black capitalists who took power from the former apartheid rulers and promised “liberation” of the masses have joined with the apartheid-era bosses who still control large sections of the country’s industries. They mirror the oppression of the racist apartheid system which was enforced by the kind of police massacres that occurred here last year. Unemployment is even higher than it was previously and workers still suffer the housing squalor that existed then.
This is the capitalism which the Mandela-led ANC maintained and used to cut out a slice of the profit pie for a small black ruling class. Liberation for the masses can only come from the overthrow of capitalism and creation of a worker-run communist society in which the miners and the entire working class will reap the fruits of their labors.
