by W. E. Gutman
Robert Wolfe, historian at the U.S. National Archives wrote:
“U.S. Army intelligence accepted Reinhard Gehlen’s offer to furnish alleged expertise on the Red Army -- and was bilked by the many mass murderers he hired.”
In appreciation for his work, Gehlen, Hitler’s Eastern Front intelligence chief who organized and took part in atrocities against Jews, Gypsies and Slavs, was awarded the Knights of Malta’s highest decoration, the Grand Cross of Merit. (In 1988, Ronald Reagan received the Knights of Malta’s Grand Cross for his “devotion to Christian principles.”) People in Central America still remember Reagan as the man who funneled millions of tax dollars to repressive regimes whose U.S.-trained death squads murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
One of the Knights of Malta’s main spheres of influence is Latin America, where fascists and escaped Nazis were given a warm welcome. The late Chilean strongman, General Augusto Pinochet, a CIA-stooge and convicted human rights violator, was a Knight. So is deposed Peruvian dictator, human rights violator and embezzler, Alberto Fujimori, America’s “man in Lima” until his arrest in 2005. So was the late Argentinean president Juan Peron who, recently declassified CIA documents suggest, laundered Nazi gold through the Vatican Bank subsidiary, Banco Ambrosiano, which collapsed in 1982. The Vatican Bank is widely believed to have channeled covert U.S. funds to Poland’s Solidarity trade union and transferred laundered money from the illegal sale of arms to Iran to the Contras through Banco Ambrosiano.
The scandal, “characterized by persistent duplicity and inordinate secrecy,” would prompt the U.S. Congress to conclude that “a cabal of zealots” (members of Reagan’s cabinet, later the Bush-1 administration) violated the Hughes-Ryan Act and the Boland Amendment by failing to inform congressional intelligence committees about its covert actions in the Middle East and Central America. [Passed in 1974, the Hughes-Ryan Act requires the president of the United States to report all covert operations of the CIA to at least one Congressional committee. The Boland Amendment was a triad to amendments enacted between 1982 and 1984 aimed at limiting U.S. assistance to the CIA-financed Contras in Nicaragua]. There are those who wonder to this day why Ronald Reagan wasn’t impeached and George H. W. Bush indicted for their approval of black missions.
“After World War II,” Roman Catholic writer Penny Lernoux writes in her People of God,
“the Vatican, the OSS, elements of the SS, and various branches of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta joined … to help Nazi war criminals escape….”
Documents reveal that New York Cardinal Francis Spellman, head of the Knights in the U.S. from the 1940s to the 1960s was directly involved in the 1954 right-wing military coup in Guatemala during which at least 200,000 indigenous Maya were massacred and in which the CIA has acknowledged complicity. Spellman was also linked to organized crime by his long involvement with Archbishop Paul Macinkus of Chicago, former head of the Vatican Bank, and a suspect in the highly suspicious death of Pope John Paul I a month after his election.
*
The Catholic Church no longer relies on inquisitorial torture chambers and auto-da-fés. It now engages in psychological extortion by exacting unconditional obedience from its crestfallen congregants.
Growing disenchantment with the Vatican’s archaic and unyielding mandates will have woeful historical consequences. Virulent opposition to reproductive rights, vicious attacks on feminism, an eagerness to coddle Jewish and Islamic hard-liners when their fanatical anti pro-choice, anti-progressive, homophobic agendas converge, and refusal to accept moral responsibility for the political crimes committed by the right-wing regimes it favors, all demonstrate how desperate and estranged the Church has strayed from reality. Worse, attempts to demonize grass-roots religion by equating it with communism has had a dispiriting effect on the faithful, especially those in Latin America who, benumbed by years of armed conflict, dislocation, oppression and privation, have tried desperately to wrest their nation’s politics from the merciless clutches of a privileged few.
*
H. L. Mencken defined religion as “the illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.” Nietzsche viewed it with greater ferocity: “Religion has been reduced to not wanting to know what is true…. It is an affair of the rabble.” While conceding its fragile potential for good, I see religion as a supercilious, divisive and exclusionary artifice contrived to benefit the theocracy. Like capitalism, religion is a diseased and avaricious system driven by and dedicated to the fattening of the corporate queen at the expense of captive worker ants. Like capitalism, it is fickle, unpredictable and blind to human needs. The deep and palpable pessimism of Latin America’s poor, whose faith in the hereafter exceeds their prospects in this life, can be characterized as a rational response to an inescapable kismet that religion cannot forestall. For them, such predestination includes more of the same, compliments of the hegemonic interests of a few.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
THE POLITICS OF ASSASSINATION
Getting rid of someone is easy. Destroying popular aspirations takes more effort but you can always count on someone willing to do the dirty work. For money; favors, influence; power, mostly power. When conventional methods -- elections, plebiscites, national referenda -- fail, or when the results threaten the oligarchs, the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), a shadowy but formidable war factory billeted at Fort Benning, Georgia, will answer the call. Here, there are no petty bureaucrats taking up space and stealing time waiting for retirement. The SOA is a model institution. Its instructors are recruited from the cream of Latin America’s military establishment. The curriculum it offers includes counterinsurgency and “irregular” combat (translation: repression), military intelligence (espionage), interrogation techniques and psychological warfare (torture), sniper fire (long-distance assassination), commando tactics (dirty fighting) and jungle operations (everything from deforestation to cooking cocaine in secret hideouts). But the students are not being trained to defend their borders against foreign aggression. They are taught, at U.S. taxpayers’ expense, to make war against their own people, to subvert the truth, silence poets, domesticate unruly visionaries, muzzle activist clergy, hinder trade unionism, hush the voices of dissidence and discontent, neutralize the poor, the hungry, the dispossessed, extinguish common dreams, irrigate fields of plenty with the tears of a captive society, and transform activists and protesters into submissive vassals. Even if it kills them.
For several years, a group of U.S. legislators led by former Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-MA), the eldest son of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, campaigned to shut down the facility.
“Continued operation of this facility suggests that the U.S. sanctions the crimes its graduates have committed. The SOA costs the U.S. millions of dollars a year and identifies us with tyranny and oppression,” Kennedy told me in a three-way conference call with Father Roy Bourgeois, the spirited founder of SOA Watch, a grassroots organization that keeps close tabs on the School.
It may not be a coincidence that the young Kennedy tried to compensate for some of his charismatic uncle’s empty promises. As Howard Zinn wrote in The Twentieth Century:
“When John F. Kennedy took office, he launched the Alliance for Progress, a program of help for Latin America, emphasizing social reform to better the lives of people. But it turned out to be mostly military aid to keep in power right-wing dictatorships and enable them to stave off revolutions. From military aid, it was a short step to military intervention.”
In 1993 Joe Kennedy sponsored an amendment to the House Defense Appropriations Bill calling for an end to the training provided by the SOA. The measure was defeated. Reintroduced in 1994, the amendment was again rejected. This time the defeat was eased by a six-fold increase in the number of abstentions from the previous year. New amendments by Rep. Kennedy and other congressional backers would further erode support for the school. The SOA would eventually close and, gingerly rechristened, miraculously reopen overn
ight.
Founded in Panama in 1948 and relocated in 1984 to Fort Benning after Panamanian President Jorge Illueca evicted it -- he’d called it “the biggest base for destabilization in Latin America” -- the SOA has trained more than 100,000 Latin American and Caribbean basin soldiers and career officers. It has also produced some of the region’s most despicable tyrants, murderers and crooks.
When the military go on feeding frenzies in Latin America, as they have been wont to do with unsettling regularity in other parts of the world, accusing fingers often point to Washington. That’s what happened in 1989, when a Salvadoran Army patrol burst in the Central American University and murdered six Jesuit priests, their cook and her daughter. Some of the victims were executed lying face down on the ground. Human rights groups were quick to charge the U.S. with aiding and abetting El Salvador’s military regime. This was not an idle allegation. Nineteen of the 27 Salvadoran officers cited in a U.S. Truth Commission report as having taken part in the massacre were SOA graduates. In fact, almost three-quarters of the Salvadoran officers implicated in seven other bloodbaths during El Salvador’s civil war (including the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in September 1980) were trained by the SOA. The elite institution has left its mark everywhere in Latin America. Of the 246 officers cited for various crimes in Colombia by a 1992 international human rights tribunal, more than half had been trained at the SOA.
The three highest ranking officers who supported former Guatemalan President Serrano’s 1993 attempted coup trained at the SOA, including former Defense Minister Jose Domingo Garcia and the sinister presidential chief of staff, Luis Francisco Ortega Menaldo, who had taken an advanced military intelligence course. Other Guatemalan big-league SOA alumni include ex-Defense Minister, Gen. Mario Enriquez and Congress President, Gen. Jose Efrain Ríos Montt. A former president of Guatemala (1982-83), Ríos Montt is best remembered for his “beans or bullets” policy -- beans for the compliant, bullets for the restive. The current president of Guatemala (2012), Otto Perez Molina, is an SOA alumnus and former G-2 (intelligence) chief. A CIA asset, he has been implicated in the assassination of Judge Edgar Ramiro in 1994.
In Honduras, five senior officers who organized -- with U.S. complicity -- the secret death squad known as Intelligence Battallion 3-16 in the mid-80s are SOA graduates. Captain Pio Flores, whose house was used as a detention and “interrogation” center, took four courses at the SOA. Colonel Amilcar Zelaya, from whose residence muffled screams were regularly heard, also attended the School. He specialized in torture.
The three highest ranking officers convicted in February 1994 of murdering nine university students and a professor in Peru are all SOA graduates -- as is the commander of the Peruvian military who dispatched tanks to thwart the murder investigation. (Vladimiro Montesinos, exiled President Alberto Fujimori’s chief of intelligence who was convicted of extortion and gross human rights violations, is an SOA alumnus.)
Also known as the School for Dictators -- or less kindly but with greater acronymic consistency, the School of Assassins -- the SOA has sired a number of miscreants deserving of historical scrutiny. They include:
* Omar Torrijos, of Panama; Guillermo Rodriguez of Ecuador; and Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru -- all of whom overthrew constitutionally elected civilian governments.
* Leopoldo Galtieri, ex-head of Argentina’s junta, defeated in the Falklands (Malvinas) “Dirty War” against the British. Galtieri helped create Honduras’ death squad Battalion 3-16.
* The late Hugo Banzer Suarez, Bolivian president in the 1970s, best known for crushing dissident clerics and striking tin miners with savage zeal.
* Col. Roberto d’Aubuisson, the late Salvadoran death-squad leader who plotted the assassination of Archbishop Romero and took part in the El Mozote massacre of 900 men, women and children.
* Manuel Noriega, ex-dictator of Panama, who served a 40-year sentence in a U.S. federal penitentiary, was later extradited to France and has since returned to Panama. Arrested on trumped up drug trafficking charges, his real sins include a host of transgressions initially sanctified by the CIA, for which he worked.
* Honduran General Humberto Regalado Hernández, linked to Colombian drug cartels, and General Policarpo Paz García, who led a brutal, corrupt regime in the 1980s. Hernández was inducted into the SOA’s “Hall of Fame” in 1988.
* Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas, Chief of Guatemalan intelligence in the late 1970s and early 1980, when thousands of political opponents were assassinated.
Less eminent but equally adept at making war, wielding in some cases formidable regional and local power, and exceeding the limits of their own authority, a number of SOA graduates have been known to take on less redoubtable foes. In Guatemala, a nation characterized by Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) as “a fractured society -- politically, economically, culturally and ethnically -- probably the most corrupt in Latin America,” crimes against street children had long made international headlines but were never stanched. Unloved, unwanted, disposable, society’s chaff, ubiquitous and growing in numbers, they continue to pay the price of civil strife and poverty, feudalism and social decay, enduring illegal detentions and beatings, often for petty crimes, including those motivated by hunger. Freshly spilled blood points to waves of mindless retribution by a constabulary gone amok. Their crimes continue to be overlooked by a judicial system disinclined to obey its own laws and disdainful of the international human rights accords to which the nation is a party.
Julio Cabelleros Seigne, SOA class of 1960, may have to answer for many of these children’s lives. Head of the Guatemalan military at Nebaj, Quiché province, where some of the worst atrocities were committed against the Maya, Caballeros displaced over one million persons, many of them orphaned children, and spurred an urban migration that continues to strain the country’s stagnant economy. Former head of G-2 (military intelligence), he was twice chief of the National Police (1985, 1990), a semi-militarized corps with a lengthy record of human rights abuses, many against defenseless minors. In 1993, Caballeros was named Customs chief.
In the BBC documentary, “They Shoot Children, Don’t They,” Caballeros accused human rights organizations of “demanding justice at the snap of a finger.” He also rebuked them publicly for “making too much of a fuss about the death of one child.” The child Caballeros referred to was 13-year-old Nahamán Carmona López, kicked to death in 1990 by four of Caballero’s men. His death galvanized international attention and paved the way for a widely publicized series of legal proceedings against his executioners. Condemned to 12 years in prison during a show trial at which justice was trumped by expediency, they served less than half their sentence.
Arrogant and self-deluded, Caballeros may have underestimated the resolve of dedicated activists to take on abusive regimes. One of them, the late Bruce Harris, former director of Covenant House’s Latin American Operations, eventually filed more than 200 criminal suits against 120 policemen and 30 soldiers. Arrest warrants were issued against 18 policemen. Fewer than ten were arrested. Most served token prison sentences of less than three months and were released.
A member of the extreme right-wing Revolutionary Party, Caballeros, who lost a bid for a congressional seat, favors military rule in Guatemala. It is no secret that several former administration cabinet members itching for a political comeback favor a takeover. In an open letter to his “Querido Juan Pueblo” (Beloved John Q. Public) in Siglo Veintiuno, Caballeros blamed “dirty rich politicians” for the country’s problems. Given that the wealthy in Guatemala, as they are elsewhere in Latin America, have traditionally supported the military, Caballeros was being more than disingenuous. Playing on short memories and growing public discontent in order to agitate the masses -- it’s called disinformation in military parlance -- he was merely putting into very effective use the lessons he’d learned at his old alma mater.
Inevitably, long-simmering rumors that the Guatemalan military was being involved in criminal activiti
es burst like pus-filled boils when a number of high-ranking officers, among them Col. Carlos René Ochoa Ruíz, SOA Class of 1969, were charged with drug trafficking, car theft and murder. Ochoa was sought by the U.S. government in 1991 to face six drug-related charges, including the shipment of six metric tons of cocaine to Tampa, Florida. The extradition order was approved and signed by Judge Epamimondas Gonzalez Dubón. Judge Gonzalez was assassinated a week later. A few days after that, another judge revoked the extradition decision.
*
Next door in Honduras, the early 1980s witnessed political violence of a level unknown in earlier decades -- but quickly matched and exceeded in the past few years -- as the civil conflict in El Salvador and Nicaragua spilled across its borders. Many “disappeared” after their abduction or were summarily executed by death squads. Seven men, including the late Gen. Gustavo Alvárez Martinez, SOA Class of 1978, took part in the “disappearances” of scores of Hondurans. Alvárez was also charged with abuse of authority, homicide, assassination, torture and hindering due process of law. When Alvarez was shot to death in January 1989, the Associated Press described him in alternately glowing and muted terms. The AP writer called him a “passionate anti-communist” but neglected to point out that Alvarez had spent years hobnobbing with fascists and ultra-rightwing terrorists who made up the membership rosters of the World Anti-Communist League and its affiliated organization, the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation.
In an interview, his widow, Lillian de Alvárez, justified her husband’s actions, saying he’d “fought against disloyalty and terrorist organizations.”
Former armed forces intelligence chief Leonidas Torres Arias (SOA Class of 1962 and 1971), who’d copped a plea by accusing Alvárez of complicity in the “disappearances,” was dishonorably discharged in 1982. In 2001, now living in El Salvador where he runs three casinos, Torres Arias put an end to persistent rumors that he’d been involved in gun-running, drug trafficking and murder by admitting to charges leveled against him by the Salvadoran daily, El Diario de Hoy.