While CIA intelligence was being dismantled, operations were running amok. Colonel John Waghelstein, who headed the U.S. military advisory team in El Salvador, stated, “Real counterinsurgency techniques are a step toward the primitive.” That description could be applied to the efforts of U.S.-backed and trained government forces in El Salvador and Guatemala and to the U.S.-run insurgency in Nicaragua. These “freedom fighters,” as Reagan called them, routinely raped, tortured, castrated, mutilated, decapitated, and dismembered their victims.19 To harden Guatemalan soldiers to the point where they were able to kill some 100,000 Mayan peasants between 1981 and 1983, army recruits were beaten, degraded, even submerged in sewage, and forced to remain covered in shit for extended periods of time. Broken and dehumanized, they carried out brutal acts. In December 1982, in the village of Dos Erres, the army slaughtered over 160 people, swinging the 65 child victims by their feet and smashing their heads against the rocks. Just the day before, Ronald Reagan had visited Guatemala as part of a tour of Latin America and complained that its president, General Efraín Ríos Montt, a born-again evangelical Christian who had recently seized power in a military coup, had received “a bum rap,” assuring reporters that the dictator was “totally committed to democracy.” Reagan called him “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.”20 In fact, he said that in light of Guatemala’s improved human rights record, he was considering restoring military aid, which Carter had cut off in 1977 because of the government’s deplorable human rights record. Reagan was apparently comfortable with Ríos Montt’s explanation that “we have no scorched-earth policy. We have a policy of scorched communists.”21 U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin announced, “The killings have stopped…. The Guatemalan government has come out of the darkness and into the light.”22
Reagan also met that day with Honduran President Roberto Suazo Córdova, who was waging his own U.S.-backed counterinsurgency war. According to the Los Angeles Times, the meeting occurred in a “drab building” at “a heavily guarded military airport in eastern Honduras. Soldiers manned anti-aircraft guns in the sugar cane fields bordering the runway, and military helicopters patrolled overhead…. The weather was hot and humid, and the pinstripe suits worn by White House officials looked conspicuously out of place.” Secretary of State George Shultz whispered to one reporter, “This is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”
The trip had its share of unscripted moments. In Costa Rica, Sergio Erick Ardón, head of the People’s Revolutionary Movement, rose in the balcony of the National Theater and loudly indicted the U.S. president and his “militarization of Central America.”23
In Colombia, Reagan was blindsided by President Belisario Betancur Cuartas, who used his toast to criticize Reagan’s efforts to “isolate” and “exclude” Cuba and Nicaragua from hemispheric peace and development efforts while tolerating murder by right-wing governments: “Our responsibility as heads of state does not allow us to remain unmoved by the daily opening of gravesites in the ground of our common geography: 30,000 graves in El Salvador, to mention only one nation, shock the drowsy conscience of leaders.” The Reagan entourage was furious with this attack. Nor were they pleased with the riots and demonstrations in downtown Bogotá or the crowds lining the streets greeting Reagan’s speeding motorcade with shouts of “Fuera!” or “Yanqui go home!”24 Unable to get all the “individual countries” straight, Reagan insulted his hosts in Brazil by saluting “the people of Bolivia.”25
Reagan’s sorry spectacle of giving absolution to murderous dictators did not go unremarked back home. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis began an op-ed piece, appropriately titled “Howdy, Genghis,” with “Under the name of ‘anti-Communism,’ the President of the United States has just had a friendly meeting with a tyrant who makes a policy of mass murder. That is what has happened, in Ronald Reagan’s administration, to Americans’ belief that their country stands for basic human decency in the world.” Lewis described reports of Guatemalan soldiers descending on rural villages in helicopters, hacking women to death with machetes, torching huts, and gouging out eyes as part of a campaign to take the countryside back from the guerrillas. Lewis quoted the Boston Globe’s assessment of this antiguerrilla campaign as falling “somewhere between a pogrom and genocide.” He noted the fact that Reagan’s embrace of “torturers and murderers” extended beyond the leaders of Guatemala and El Salvador to include recent visits to Washington from the dictators of South Korea and the Philippines and an upcoming one from Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan, who since taking power in 1977 “has eliminated the political opposition and resorted regularly to torture.” Lewis ended with a poignant reminder that has rung true throughout all the decades of the American Empire: “The shame marks all of us. When the economic follies of the Reagan Administration have been forgotten, its insensitivity to human cruelty will still stain the name of the United States.”26
The sense of outrage so eloquently expressed by Lewis was reinforced by reports released by Amnesty International, Americas Watch, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, and other human rights groups, detailing the ongoing murders and atrocities, and by remarks by a Guatemalan Jesuit priest, Reverend Ricardo Falla, S.J., at a press conference arranged by the American Anthropological Association. Falla, who was trained at Georgetown, charged that the purpose of organized massacres of Indians was to leave “no survivors” and hence “no memory” of what happened. He elaborated, “That is why babies and children are killed. It’s really incredible. These children, if they survive, will avenge the death of their parents…. These little ones are slit open with knives, or their heads are broken against rocks or beams of houses.” Father Falla described a massacre at San Francisco de Nentón, which transpired over an eight-hour period and included a break for dinner: “After killing the women and children, they stopped to eat the steaks which they had roasted from a bull they killed shortly after their arrival. They laughed at old people who cried out like sheep when the blunt knives did not cut their throats. They sang while they listened to the radios they stole from the Indians later in the evening, when the massacre was finished.”27
In January 1983, Reagan ended the embargo on military aid. He authorized sales of military hardware. But Congress’s resistance forced Guatemala to rely on military aid primarily from close U.S. allies Israel and Taiwan. Israel was also providing military aid to El Salvador and the Nicaragua contras. CIA support for the Guatemalan military continued unabated. In August 1983, Óscar Humberto Mejía Victores overthrew Ríos Montt in a coup, ending the period known as “La Violencia” but not the violence itself. Following the coup, the CIA and State Department reported an increase in political killings and abductions. In February 1984, Ambassador Frederic Chapin cabled Washington about what he called “the horrible human rights realities in Guatemala.”28 The very next day, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliott Abrams and two other State Department officials approved a secret report urging Congress to resume military aid to Guatemala in light of its improved human rights record.
In 1986, in a secret report, the State Department acknowledged a systematic campaign by “security forces and rightist paramilitary groups” to kidnap and murder potential rural social workers, medical personnel, and campesinos dating back to 1966 and peaking in 1984. Guatemala’s official Historical Clarification Commission issued a report in 1999 detailing the 626 massacres of Mayan villages carried out by the Guatemalan army, which it termed a “genocide.” It charged the CIA and other U.S. government agencies with providing direct and indirect support for the Guatemalan slaughter, whose death toll it estimated at 200,000.29