“We could never sleep in the same place for too long. We didn’t see our families. It was constant suspicion, unending fear… we didn’t know what was going on. But we knew that bodies were appearing everywhere around us, so we knew enough.”
By 1978, things were changing for Central America. In Nicaragua, a left-wing guerrilla group inspired by the Cuban revolution, the Sandinistas, was poised to win power. In El Salvador, the government responded to protests against an obviously rigged election with a massacre. Hundreds were killed. Then a coup there led to a civil-military regime, which also devolved into murderous repression, leading the civilians to quit, and support grew for leftist guerrillas.27
All this made Guatemala’s government nervous about its own survival. At home, new guerrilla groups were taking over for the older MR-13 and FAR, which had been crushed by the US-backed insurgency campaign. The most prominent new group was the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres (EGP), or the Guerrilla Army of the Poor. Unlike the FAR, which followed Che Guevara’s “foco” (focus) strategy of organizing small guerrilla units, the EGP sought to enlist the larger rural population in the guerrilla struggle, emulating the victorious Viet Cong.28
The Guatemalan government began to kill indigenous people en masse simply because of their ethnic background. Entire ethnicities, whole tribes, complete villages were marked as either communist or liable to become communist. They were often people who had only a vague idea of what Marxism or the guerrilla groups were. This was new, different from the urban terror tactics, in which government forces kidnapped individual people. For the Mayans and other indigenous groups, the Army would come and simply kill every single one of them.
The close collaboration of US officials with Central American dictatorships as they slaughtered their own populations is well documented, far better than US activities in Indonesia leading up to October 1965.29 The scale of the violence, however, and the consequences of the actions are often underestimated.
Miguel Ángel Albizures and others who lived through the late 1970s and ’80s in Central America always stress that these new Central American guerrilla movements emerged after attempts at peaceful transition to democracy were brutally suppressed or, indeed, exterminated. They say that almost every political ideology in the world—not just the socialism and Marxism dominant in those guerrilla groups—allows for armed resistance against tyrants, and that includes the US revolutionary tradition. Nor is it surprising that the surviving movements were left-wing militants: by the late ’70s, most of the moderate dissidents were dead.
In January 1979, the Khmer Rouge fell, and the world found out what had been happening in Cambodia. The government, if it can be called that, fell because the Vietnamese Communists realized what Pol Pot had been doing—and also because he bafflingly attacked his more powerful former allies. Vietnam invaded and easily toppled the secretive, psychotic cabal that had been terrorizing the country since 1975. The Khmer Rouge were driven into the forests and mountains along the Thai border. Vietnam took over most of the country, closed down the killing fields, and allowed Cambodians to return to the cities under a government of their own creation. Around a quarter of Cambodians were dead.30
The United States did not celebrate the fall of the murderous Khmer Rouge. China, which had been moving closer to Washington since Nixon’s visit in 1973, was allied with Pol Pot. Deng Xiaoping was furious, and unwilling to tolerate what he perceived as Vietnam’s aggression against China’s ally. He resolved to invade Vietnam, and told the US about the plan.
President Carter said he could not openly condone an attack but assured Deng he understood that “China cannot allow Vietnam to pursue aggression with impunity,” and he privately promised to support Beijing if the Soviets threatened to assist the Vietnamese.31
The Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979 is often forgotten, for two reasons. First, it complicates narratives about the putative international communist conspiracy, or at least the supposedly monolithic Asian communist movement. According to uninformed Western thinking, China and Vietnam were supposed to be on the same side. But more importantly, the episode has been forgotten because the Vietnamese immediately defeated and humiliated the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. After decades of battle with France and the US, the Vietnamese were too good for the nation that had once ruled them for more than a thousand years.32
Clashes with China in the second half of the 1970s also led to the worst human rights violations under the new communist regime in united Vietnam. Partly as a way to undermine the power of ethnic Chinese in Vietnam—seen as potentially disloyal—Hanoi announced the nationalization of all private businesses. Hundreds of thousands of refugees set off, including the so-called “boat people,” penniless and looking for a new life, and tens of thousands died.
At the time, Benny was in Thailand. He had finished his stint in Chile, and returned to Bangkok with the UN. Not long after he arrived, a colleague of his, a young Australian, came back from the Cambodian-Thai border with wild tales. There were Cambodians stumbling out of the jungle, starving and collapsing on Thai soil, he said. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, they were fleeing to whomever might help them.
Benny went to see for himself. At the border, he broke down in tears. He saw “refugees in rags, fleeing the country by the tens of thousands, often emaciated and barely able to walk, seemingly unable to speak or smile,” and immediately sent a cable to New York. “Please, send me to Cambodia.”33 He was sent to New York instead, where he had to witness something just as shocking. The United States chose to recognize the remnants of the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations, keeping its tiny regime alive, and refusing to recognize the Vietnamese-allied government. This would last for years. Partly, it was a way to appease Carter’s new ally in Beijing. But Benny knew that it was something else too.
“They hated Vietnam too much,” Benny said. “They couldn’t forgive them for winning the war.”
Much to his chagrin, ASEAN, the organization of Southeast Asian states that Indonesia had helped found in 1967, backed the Khmer Rouge too.34
In Central America, however, Jimmy Carter’s government tapped the brakes a bit on brutal realpolitik. In this era, after both Watergate and the 1975 Church Committee investigations into the CIA and FBI, the US media were less reflexively uncritical of Washington’s covert and overt Cold War schemes abroad. Outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post played crucial roles in publicizing the massacre at Panzós, Guatemala, the village where the military was caught gunning down men, women, and children in 1978.35 Washington banned the sale of weapons to regimes that did not meet basic human rights criteria. Rather than even try, the Guatemalan dictatorship, now run by a man named Fernando Romeo Lucas García, turned to Israel and Taiwan, which stepped in to supply the weapons and assistance instead. US-Guatemala collaboration continued at a number of levels, but Carter’s position was enough to enrage some of the most committed anticommunists in the hemisphere.36 Mario Sandoval Alarcón, one of the founders of La Mano Blanca and now vice president, accused the Carter administration’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of being “a Marxist instrument that has used the cause of human rights as a tool for slander.”37
In July 1979, the Sandinistas took Managua and set up a government in Nicaragua. For leftists across Central America, this was a moment of effervescence, just as 1970 had been for Chilean socialists. The Sandinistas had not only won; they had gotten away with it. Even the Clash, the punk band over in England, sang ecstatically about the shocking development:
For the very first time ever
When they had a revolution in Nicaragua
There was no interference from America
Human rights in America
The people fought the leader and up he flew
With no Washington bullets what else could he do?38
In its early days, the Communist Party in Nicaragua had opposed the Sandinistas’ emphasis on armed struggle. Over the years, the Frente Sandinista de Li
beración Nacional (FSLN) split into three factions. The group that won out, the relatively moderate third faction known as the terceristas, favored a broad tactical alliance with the “bourgeoisie.”39 It was this group, led by Daniel and Humberto Ortega, that took power as the dominant part of a coalition government.40 The terceristas would stand in democratic elections.
Like Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Árbenz, Fidel, Sukarno, and Allende before them, the terceristas initially hoped to set up a government that Washington could tolerate. Infamously, these hopes would be dashed when Reagan took over and began funding the Contra rebels. But the leaders of Operation Condor did not wait for a go-ahead from Reagan to handle the leftist government taking root in Central America.
In 1977, convinced that Carter had abandoned them in their “holy war” on communism, Argentine officials began providing military training to the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. After the 1979 Sandinista victory, they set up a base in Honduras to teach Guatemalans and Nicaraguans the arts of counterrevolution and repression.41 Central American soldiers went to Chile for training in anticommunist counterinsurgency tactics.42 The 1980 meeting of the Latin American chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, held in Buenos Aires, enabled death squad leaders to form even closer ties with South American governments, as well as US Republican congressmen.43 The methods that were used in Central America in the following years reflected the defining features of Operation Condor: targeted abductions and murders by multinational “hunter-killer” squadrons, often made up of Contras and Honduran commandos in civilian clothes; clandestine transfers of prisoners across borders; methods like disappearance, torture, and assassination of victims, including the use of electric shock, the “capucha” (asphyxiation), and the throwing of live people from helicopters; interrogations of prisoners by officers from several countries; and detention centers for foreign disappeared prisoners.44
When Reagan took over, Washington returned to more open and aggressive anticommunist tactics than had been seen in two decades. The CIA eagerly joined the Argentines in Honduras and, in the biggest Agency operation since the Bay of Pigs, began training and funding the Contra rebels. The Contras were not a regular army, and never seriously tried to best the Sandinistas in a direct confrontation.45 They were a well-funded terrorist group, seeking to destabilize the regime however they could.46 And their worldview and tactics were radically transformed by the fanatical anticommunism of their sponsors.
The former “public relations” chief of the Contras, Edgar Chamorro, made clear that the powerful ideological influence of the Argentine officers and CIA operations reshaped their movement. Historian Patrice McSherry writes that “the anti-Sandinistas were originally concerned with retaining their private property and oligarchical power and privilege, or pursuing revenge… but the messianic anticommunist ideology of the Argentines and the Americans began to reshape their rationale for the war.”
They also learned lessons from abroad. A CIA officer going by John Kirkpatrick, with counterinsurgency experience in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, compiled a training course that included an assassination manual for the Contras. One section was titled “Implicit and Explicit Terror.”47
According to Argentine journalists Juan Pablo Csipka and Ignácio Gonzalez Janzen, the Argentines and the Central Americans had also discussed employing the Jakarta method. They report that in the early 1970s, before the country had fallen to the brutal Videla dictatorship, the leader of Argentina’s far-right Triple A death squad, a politician named José López Rega, was in Franco’s Spain. There he met with Máximo Zepeda, the leader of Guatemala’s New Anticommunist Organization death squad. They spoke of the “Plan Yakarta” and what it entailed: a “prophylactic coup” that would allow them to defeat the Marxists by “virtually exterminating” them after conservatives took power. These Argentine authors claim the meeting was arranged by the US ambassador to Spain, Robert Hill, and that frequent CIA collaborator Zepeda not only handed over some “Plan Yakarta” reports he held, but told his anticommunist comrade that Washington could assist him in forming “shock troops” to put the plan into action in Argentina.48
“We won’t need to kill a million like in Indonesia,” López Rega reportedly said, “because we can get it done with ten thousand.” He guessed low. Anticommunists killed far more than that in Argentina.
On March 24, 1980, Catholic Archbishop Óscar Romero began to say Mass in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. Romero had recently spoken out against the wanton human rights abuses committed by the government. After he finished his sermon that night, a man burst into the church and murdered him.
The assassination was carried out by a death squad led by Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a fanatical anticommunist who had trained at the School of the Americas in 1972.49 Whereas Fort Leavenworth is an all-purpose military academy for students from all over the world, the School of the Americas, based in the US-controlled “Panama Canal Zone,” was a training ground for Latin American “counterinsurgents.” The school became so notorious that Panama expelled it from its territory, and the school changed its name in 2000 to the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.” D’Aubuisson also attended the Political Warfare Cadres Academy in Taiwan, which by then had provided training to officials from almost every Latin American nation.50
In 1983, D’Aubuisson summed up the actually existing anticommunist ideology very well. “You can be a Communist,” he told reporter Laurie Becklund, “even if you personally don’t believe you are a Communist.”51
When the Salvadoran civil war got underway, the military backed by Ronald Reagan made scorched earth tactics a routine part of its modus operandi. On December 11, 1981, reports surfaced of a massacre at El Mozote village. Salvadoran troops executed more than nine hundred men, women, and children with US-made assault rifles. The next day, Reagan appointed a Harvard-trained former liberal named Elliott Abrams to serve as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs. Put simply, his job was to defend US-allied right-wing regimes to the press, and shield them from criticism coming from appalled human rights groups.
Abrams called the accounts of the slaughter in El Mozote, including those published in the New York Times, communist propaganda.52 This is still the most famous atrocity of the Salvadoran civil war, but it was only a tiny fraction of the violence unleashed on civilians. For years and years, the savagery dragged on and only deepened, because Washington refused to allow the right-wing government to negotiate a political solution with the rebels. Since the rebels had links to “communists” in Nicaragua, no negotiation was possible, according to Reagan’s logic.53
But it was in Guatemala, Central America’s biggest country and the site of the CIA’s first major “victory” in the hemisphere, back in 1954, that normal people faced the largest bloodbath unleashed by the Cold War in the Western Hemisphere.
The small community of Ilom is nestled between misty mountains in northwest Guatemala, closer to the Mexican border than to the capital. The people are Mayan, and speak Ixil, not Spanish, and for decades they had been either subsistence farming or working for pennies on a nearby ranch. That ranch was owned by rich white men—and sat on the land taken from the Mayans centuries ago—and over the years, it kept getting bigger and bigger.
Ilom is too far from Guatemala City to have been affected by Jacobo Árbenz’s incipient land reform program in 1954. Residents barely heard about the reforms that were snuffed out by the CIA.
In 1981, however, global politics arrived in the village. First, the EGP, the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, came to visit. Speaking Spanish, the guerrillas explained that they were on the Mayans’ side, that they were building a revolution that would help them get their land back, and they were fighting for them.
Josefa Sanchez Del Barrio, who was sixteen at the time, remembers that most of the villagers were politely receptive to this message, if a bit puzzled about the specifics. Few of them spoke Spanish. It wasn’t quite clear what these
thirty to forty revolutionaries in green fatigues planned to do, or how the villagers were supposed to help them. But the villagers thanked them, gave them the customary hospitality of thick corn tortillas and some kind words, and waved goodbye.54
Not long after, the Army sent in men pretending to be guerrillas. It didn’t take long for the villagers to figure out what was going on. The men’s costumes were shoddy—one even wore a cheap fake beard. And they were acting all wrong, asking too many questions and treating the villagers aggressively. The guerrillas hadn’t acted that way at all when they came. This was not a sophisticated undercover operation. They were clearly just some young military men trying to figure out who was most sympathetic to the rebels.
In January 1982, the military men came back. This time, they were in their Army uniforms, but with black paint on their faces. They burst into Josefa’s home. It didn’t surprise her that her family was on their list. Her father had been part of a small group that tried, back in the ’70s, to ask the local government down in the nearest city to save their land. They dragged away her husband’s father. They smashed Josefa in the head with a rock. Then several men shoved a napkin into her mouth and raped her.
All in all, thirty people were taken that day, never to return. A few days later, the soldiers came back and took Josefa’s father and brother.
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