Molly Ivins December 19AUSTIN, Texas — After 36 years of one of the ugliest civil wars ever recorded, Guatemala has decided to end it all with an amnesty. Allie-allie-in-free. Assassins, torturers, slaughterers and those who did their best to commit genocide against the Mayans, everybody's in the clear. Hey, it's their choice. Their human-rights activists and other concerned citizens think they'd be better off following the South African model, where there's a system for bringing egregious killers to justice, even if they were employed by the government. South Africa seems to be doing this fairly gently — no draconian sentences. But who knows? After 36 years of killing, what good can more killing do? For those who believe that peace is much harder without justice, there is one actor in the interminable Guatemalan conflict not covered by the amnesty: the United States government. It's always interesting to see the U.S. media report something like the amnesty in Guatemala with their hands held behind their backs, whistling innocently. Isn't that nice? The Guatemalans have decided to end their civil war and grant one another amnesty. Nothing to do with us, but so happy for the neighbors. Of course, we've been in it up to our necks ever since 1954, when the CIA overthrew a democratically elected Guatemalan leader, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and replaced him with a series of right-wing governments. This led directly to the uprising in 1960. That the CIA's coup was largely responsible for Guatemala's civil war is beyond question. Of course, 1954 was not the high-water mark for American sanity on the subject of who might be a communist. We convinced ourselves that Arbenz was a bad guy because he was not fond of United Fruit, which had regarded Guatemala as a wholly owned subsidiary for many years, thus threatening our national interest in bananas. For the best book on the subject, try "Bitter Fruit" by Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger. So we ix-nay Arbenz and touch off a civil war that killed more than 100,000 people over 36 years, according to The Washington Post.
In addition to an estimated 100,000 dead, there are 40,000 Guatemalans missing and presumed dead and more than 440 villages destroyed. The Post reported that the war has created more than 200,000 orphans and 80,000 widows and displaced more than 1 million people from their homes. Most of the victims were Indians, who make up 60 percent of the population. And we were players right to the end. Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez is not only a graduate of our School of the Americas; like many other Guatemalans, he also has been a paid agent of the CIA. It turns out that Alpirez was responsible for, among others, the deaths of an American innkeeper in Guatemalan and the rebel husband of American lawyer Jennifer Harbury. After the CIA lied to Harbury and other human-rights activists about its involvement in these deaths, the agency then lied to Congress. The truth came to the attention of Robert Nuccio, a Latin American scholar at the State Department, who in turn gave it to Rep. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, who was cleared for the information and entitled to it under law. When Torricelli went public with it, the CIA decided to punish Nuccio, whose career is now apparently destroyed and who was stripped of his security clearance by the CIA. Let me just reprise that: The CIA lied to everybody, including Congress, about its own illicit activities — including complicity in murder — and then managed to punish the person who lawfully and correctly told the truth. The peace treaty in Guatemala will be signed Dec. 29, but the CIA grinds on. We read stories constantly saying that morale at the CIA is the pits because the last two directors haven't been part of the "good-ol'-boy network." Aw. Would someone finally take these superannuated James Bond fantasists and get rid of them? *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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