24 Jan 2012 4:02 pm
In Guatemala, Former Dictator Is Told to Appear in CourtA Guatemalan judge has ordered a former military dictator, Efran Ros Montt, to appear in court on Thursday, the first step in a process that could lead to his being tried on genocide charges and to a reopening of the darkest chapter in Guatemala’s brutal 36-year civil war. During General Ros Montt’s 17-month rule in 1982 and 1983, the Guatemalan Army pursued a scorched-earth campaign in the Mayan highlands that included massacres that are regarded as among the most horrific in the war. To flush out small bands of leftist guerrillas, soldiers entered Indian villages and hunted down their inhabitants, slaughtering men, women and children indiscriminately. Read MoreRonald Reagan supported Rios Montt. After his election, Reagan pushed aggressively to overturn an arms embargo imposed on Guatemala by President Carter because of the military's wretched human rights record.The president's chief concern about the recurring reports of human rights atrocities was to attack and discredit the information.Sometimes personally and sometimes through surrogates, Reagan denigrated the human rights investigators and journalists who disclosed the slaughters.Reagan personally picked up this theme of a falsely accused Guatemalan military. During a swing through Latin America, Reagan discounted the mounting reports of hundreds of Mayan villages being eradicated.But the newly declassified U.S. government records reveal that Reagan's praise -- and the embassy analysis -- flew in the face of corroborated accounts from U.S. intelligence.Based on its own internal documents, the Reagan administration knew that the Guatemalan military indeed was engaged in a scorched-earth campaign against the Mayans.Apparently confident of Reagan’s sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its political repression without apology.LinkIn 1982, an Amnesty International report estimated that over 10,000 indigenous Guatemalans and peasant farmers were killed from March to July of that year, and that 100,000 rural villagers were forced to flee their homes. According to more recent estimates, tens of thousands of non-combatants were killed by the regime's death squads in the subsequent eighteen months. At the height of the bloodshed under Ros Montt, reports put the number of killings and disappearances at more than 3,000 per month. Based on the number of people killed per capita, Ros Montt was probably the most violent dictator in Latin America's recent history, more so than even other notorious dictators such as Chile's Augusto Pinochet, Argentina's Jorge Rafael Videla, and Bolivia's Hugo Banzer.Link"President Ros Montt is a man of great personal integrity and commitment. ... I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice."Ronald Reagan....December 4th, 1982I'm sure RichClem supported Montt also.