The Shape of Silence

The Shape of  Silence

Many amazing and turbulent movements are underway in the world at this moment that have significant impact on the coming century. The US remains a Super Power, some say a Uni-power, yet significant light is being directed upon what that power constitutes, how it was accrued and sustained and with what types of methods it has been spread.

In Latin America, in many countries, perpetrators of human rights abuses from the Cold War era dictatorships are being brought to justice. In Guatemala, Rios Montt, the former President responsible for genocide, will stand trial this month for actions that led to the death of some 200,000 people. Videla of Argentina is serving a 50-year prison term but many other military figures from the Junta are being brought to justice, some thirty years after their vicious and vast scale atrocities.

A new Pope, the first from Latin America, takes on the leadership of the Catholic Church. Already, his possible affiliation with junta figures, including Videla, is under intense scrutiny. As the leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, during the period of State Terrorism, investigations pursue both what he did at a time when thousands of citizens were being rounded up, tortured and disappeared, and, as importantly, what he did not do.

A world spotlight is swinging towards Latin America. As the landscape of intense struggle, of assassinations, coups, and state terrorism is illuminated, US citizens are going to realize what their government has conducted in Latin America for the past sixty years. The sixty years is an arbitrary figure. The continent has been exploited since the indigenous populations saw the ships arriving from the sea and genocide has been the method of operation since that onslaught of invaders.  Yet in 1954, 58 years ago, the US CIA instigated a coup, which overthrew a democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala. Arbenz was democratically elected in 1951, following a string of ruthless dictators. He garnered 65% of the vote.

US corporate interests were heavily invested in Guatemala. While one who hasn’t studied the dynamic of corporations functioning under dictatorships might imagine that a democratically elected President would be a great asset to business, in Latin America, the opposite has been true. Arbenz instituted many initiatives and began many projects that wrested control away from huge US owned corporations, United Fruit, railway monopolies, the US controlled utilities, etc. His greatest dream however was an agrarian reform policy. “The Agrarian Reform managed to give 1.5 million acres to around 100,000 families for which the government paid $8,345,545 in bonds. Among the expropriated landowners was Arbenz himself, -who had become into a landowner with the dowry of his wealthy wife- and his later Foreign Minister, Guillermo Toriello. Around 46 farms were given to groups of peasants who organized themselves in cooperatives. “http://www.unitedfruit.org/arbenz.htm

The government appropriated 209 thousand acres of uncultivated land from United Fruit Co, and offered a compensation using the valuation of $2.99 per acre, the figure United Fruit had valued the land at for tax purposes. The US Department of state complained to Arbenz, claiming the land was worth $75 dollars and acre and that should be the sale price. A stand off escalated with more land appropriated, half a million offered as compensation and rejected and relations grew worse. The bottom line was the US governments saw Arbenz as too radical and they wanted him removed.  The CIA accomplished a coup d’état, supporting the troops of Carlos Castillo, a general who had assembled a rebel army in Nicaragua with the support of the infamous President Anastasio Somoza, in an invasion on the Arbenz government.

 Arbenz saw the impossibility of thwarting this attempt and, wanting to avoid huge death tolls toward no end, as well as avoid being assassinated (no doubt) he resigned the Presidency. In his speech he included the following statements that, I believe, frame an ugly dynamic that effectively has claimed the lives of millions of innocent people.

“"They have used the pretext of anti-communism. The truth is very different. The truth is to be found in the financial interests of the fruit company and the other US monopolies which have invested great amounts of money in Latin America and fear that the example of Guatemala would be followed by other Latin countries.[...] I was elected by a majority of the people of Guatemala, but I have had to fight under difficult conditions. The truth is that the sovereignty of a people cannot be maintained without the material elements to defend it.[...] I took over the presidency with great faith in the democratic system, in liberty and the possibility of achieving economic independence for Guatemala. I continue to believe that this program is just. I have not violated my faith in democratic liberties, in the independence of Guatemala and in all the good which is the future of humanity.[...]"  Arbenz in his resignation speech(quoted by Schlessinger & Kinzer, 1990: 200)

It is no small side note to add that among the major shareholders of United Fruit Company, a controlling interest would end up  being purchased by Zapata Corp. in which George HW Bush had large interest. The history of United Fruit Co. is enmeshed in the history of the exploitation of Latin America and should be examined.

“The first CIA effort to overthrow the Guatemalan president--a CIA collaboration with Nicaraguan dictator Anastacio Somoza to support a disgruntled general named Carlos Castillo Armas and codenamed Operation PBFORTUNE--was authorized by President Truman in 1952. ….. PBSUCCESS, authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953, carried a $2.7 million budget for "psychological warfare and political action" and "subversion," among the other components of a small paramilitary war. But, according to the CIA's own internal study of the agency's so-called "K program," up until the day Arbenz resigned on June 27, 1954, "the option of assassination was still being considered……

Although Arbenz and his top aides were able to flee the country, after the CIA installed Castillo Armas in power, hundreds of Guatemalans were rounded up and killed. Between 1954 and 1990, human rights groups estimate, the repressive operatives of successive military regimes murdered more than 100,000 civilians.”

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/index.html

I mention Guatemala and the 1954 US led coup, in part because it was the first purely US directed overthrow of a democratically elected leader. In the meantime we were helping stage a coup of the same nature in Iran with Mossadegh. Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, both Arbenz and Mossadegh had been Times Magazines, “Man of the Year.” Both were democratically elected. The current import is that this month, Rios Montt, will stand trial for crimes against humanity. The Guatemalan leader who precipitated and conducted a program of genocide, in which up to 200,000 people were killed, was supported by a man who for many has been a figurehead of American (US) leadership, courage, and ethics…a man who personified the American Way and the quest to spread freedom, former President Ronald Reagan.

It would take volumes to chart through the US actions in Latin America, the numerous examples of assassinations, coups, economic warfare,  CIA training and support in paramilitary groups and death squads, and to follow the trail of mercilessness from the boardrooms of huge corporations to the mass graves in which the hundreds of thousands of civilians were dumped. There are, fortunately, volumes of books investigating these offenses, university courses devoted to them, and vast reports from human rights commissions elucidating the details, scope, and nature of these crimes as well as pointing out US complicity if not direction.

Suffice it to say in this little blog that under the ruse of preventing Communism from overtaking Latin America, US leadership, either personally heavily invested in corporate presence in Latin America or heavily influenced (read funded) by these corporate interests, has through many agencies including the CIA and SOA/Whinsec, helped to design and conduct a great number of criminal offenses that have led to the installation and support of dictators as well as to human rights atrocities on the greatest of scales.. to genocide.  Anyone who would like to contest these facts with me or with the vast amount of literature and reportage detailing these facts is welcome to try.

Having said this my question for each of you, who have read this far, is:

Why is this all right with us? 

I would like to pose that question a number of different ways, briefly, as it occurs to me in various shades. Answering any answers  the central question.

1. Given the widespread, easily accessible and well researched and documented information detailing the aggressiveness of much of US foreign policy (around the world), and of the historic US willingness to resort to ruthless measures, to measures described as “terrorism” in our press and by our leaders when others effect them, how do you, as a citizen, feel justified in remaining silent?
2. What rationale have you, as a citizen of the US, for remaining silent about great injustice and great crimes, committed on behalf of the US against peoples of other countries, particularly those with whom we have not declared war?
3. Are the motivations for inaction, complacency, fear, a feeling of impotence…that nothing one person can do will change anything? Or do you agree with the way we conduct policy? Perhaps you feel that, as the”others” whomever they are, act in these manners, we must as well.
4. Following the last question, do you justify American terrorism by attributing the necessity for these measures to those of “enemies?” Must we torture because they do? Must we support dictators because they will if we don’t?
5. When is it “ethical” to leave ethics at the door or are we doomed, as some dark aspect of our human nature, to give reign to our apparently bottomless reserve for violence? When may we leave the teachings, laws, and ethical content of our religious or philosophic roots outside…justifiably, morally?

If I hear, through the walls of my apartment, a man, my neighbor, beating his wife,  I believe I become complicit in that beating if I decide to do nothing. At least, I should contact the police.  The decision to do nothing when one becomes aware of the victimization of another human being is not a neutral position. It is supportive by default. Certainly you and I cannot respond to every offense we become aware of as our access to information is like a dark tree with millions of leaves, each leaf, another revelation of injustice. Yet when we respond to nothing, when our response is to ignore the realities clearly illuminated before us…or worse, when we choose to “go into denial,” about these matters, we have helped the perpetrators to succeed and we lay the groundwork for more of the same. I would like to see my country become better than it is. I am incensed by those in power, on any side of the political spectrum (and this is certainly not a partisan problem), who uses their position to trample human beings for political or monetary gain. The opinions presented in this blog are my opinions. I invite and welcome your thoughts.