by W. E. Gutman
To reports of “irregular” detention procedures and the torture of detainees during interrogation by the police, particularly at the hands of its military branch, soon was added evidence of intimidation and harassment of human rights monitors, lawyers, activist priests and nuns, trade unionists and journalists. Relations between the military and the press deteriorated when a group of journalists filmed a murder in Honduras’ second largest city, San Pedro Sula. The killers were identified as members of the armed forces. The journalists were threatened. One was attacked. Another had to flee Honduras.
While there were no reported “disappearances” under the late Honduran President Carlos Roberto Reina’s administration (1994-1998), serious human rights violations persisted and many of the victims were among Tegucigalpa’s 1,000 to 1,500 homeless children. Investigations into charges stemming from the illegal detention, mistreatment and torture of minors were postponed “indefinitely.”
A large number of SOA graduates are still “pulling strings” in Honduras and helping shape national policy.
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Breathtaking mountain vistas, an idyllic climate, pristine rain forests, golden beaches stretching along two coasts, an exuberance of fauna and flora, Coast Rica has it all, and then some. But what makes Costa Ricans proudest of all, what they enjoy telling the world is that their small Central American nation has had no army since its abolition in 1948. Look Again.
The SOA has trained about 5,000 Costa Rican soldiers since 1949. The courses they took include military intelligence (the second most popular specialty after military police and infantry training), psychological warfare, sniper and commando tactics, airborne, combat engineering, jungle operations, mortars, “irregular warfare,” counterinsurgency, “nuclear war and pedagogy,” radio operation and maintenance, “special tactics,” mine-sweeping, basic weapons and combat trauma medicine.
Costa Rica has also contributed instructors at the SOA. One of them, Lt. Col. Walter F. Novarro Romero, SOA Class of 1989 (psychological warfare) served as SOA base sub-commandant. Asked to comment, then SOA Public Affairs Officer Maj. Gordon Martel dismissed any inference of impropriety in the existence of a military presence in Costa Rica:
“This is a kind of police force not unlike the U.S. National Guard. Its members are trained to perform civil and rural guard duties. They also go on drug interdiction missions.”
“Drug interdiction” has often been a code for counter-insurgency operations.
“So it is a militarized corps, isn’t it,” I asked.
“Not in the strict sense of the word.”
“You’re splitting hair, Major. If a man dresses like a soldier, trains like a soldier, carries weapons like a soldier and takes part in military exercises, then he IS a soldier, isn’t he?”
Understandably, Maj. Martel demurred and recited standard SOA public relations fluff. His rationale was tenuous. In Costa Rica, as in the rest of Central America, police and army are interchangeable. Given the nature, complexity and sophistication of the courses taken by Costa Rican soldiers at an elite combat school such as the SOA, “civil and rural guard duties” are nothing but clever euphemisms crafted for public consumption. For this nation of three million, such rigorous training looks more like a state of military readiness than domestic peacekeeping or the preservation of nature’s virgin beauty against human depredation. Moreover, a narcotics surveillance radar network donated and installed by the U.S. has long since fallen into disuse, allegedly the victim of cost cutbacks. Credible sources told me that the facility was shut down because it threatened to drastically diminish the flow of drug money into the private coffers of high-ranking government officials. Such action, at a time when Costa Rica has been called a “benevolent land bridge” between Colombia’s cartels and North America, invalidates Maj. Martel’s assertions and raises doubts about the legitimacy of Costa Rica’s war on drugs. Out of 2,500 graduates, fewer than a dozen ever took the so-called “counter-narcotrafficking” course. Measured against the hundreds of students who trained in intelligence, counter-insurgency, infantry and military police, drug interdiction does not seem to have been a burning preoccupation in Costa Rica.
Costa Rica’s overblown reputation as nature conservator and premier tourist attraction has obscured a less than golden human rights record. As recently as 1993, the Cobra Commando, a shadowy paramilitary shock unit, was keeping the narcotics pipeline open while terrorizing indigenous groups in the Talamanca jungles bordering Panama. Once a thriving and proud people, caught between the sword and the cross, Costa Rica’s indigenous tribes have dwindled to a precious few and are headed toward extinction. This could explain Costa Rica’s reluctance to acknowledge the very existence of an antecedent civilization.
“If we don’t talk about them, they don’t exist,” an editor at La Nación admitted privately.
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“SOA grads have seriously hindered the establishment and strengthening of democracy in Latin America,” charges SOA Watch founder, Father Roy Bourgeois, a Maryknoll priest who spent two years in prison for spearheading protests against the School. A decorated Vietnam veteran, Bourgeois has long claimed that “the SOA does not screen soldiers who are assigned to it. Known perpetrators of serious war crimes come and go as they please.” Indeed, a number of officers cited by the U.S. Truth Commission attended the SOA after they’d committed documented atrocities.
“Funded by U.S. tax dollars,” Bourgeois argues, “the SOA steals from the poor. Graduates return to their countries to enrich the rich and keep the poor in their place.”
Defenders of the SOA, which operates on a multi-million-dollar yearly budget (the School underwent a $30 million renovation), insist it is getting a bum rap. Rejecting all criticism, Maj. Martel told me:
“The SOA is a legitimate military institution where legitimate military skills are taught. It is not the School’s fault that a fraction of graduates has engaged in reprehensible behavior.”
The difference between artful equivocation and unadulterated bullshit depends on the sensitivity of one’s sense of smell.
Others argued, with considerably less success, that the SOA had promoted democracy in Latin America. These are obscurantist arguments that even the Pentagon stopped short of endorsing. A senior U.S. intelligence analyst told me on condition of anonymity that the SOA “has systematically encouraged the transplantation of military structures into and facilitated the propagation of military power and objectives against legitimate civilian governments.”
The future of the SOA may hinge not so much on ethical but prosaic considerations, including cutbacks in military spending. It is hard to explain why the SOA should survive when several dozen military bases in the U.S. were closed “to maintain a maximum state of readiness with existing financial resources.” In what way is the SOA indispensable to a “maximum state of readiness?” What future conflicts is it preparing to thwart in Latin America when it brags -- falsely -- that it helped reestablish democracy in the region?
A healthy intolerance for the absurd should also have helped bring down the SOA. To soak up U.S. “culture” and values, SOA students are routinely treated to baseball games, excursions to Disney World and other perks, compliments of U.S. taxpayers. It is doubtful that a term or two at a school that teaches, among other useful tricks, how to filet a human being in less time than it takes to read this sentence, can imbue a Latin American hooligan with the Jeffersonian perspective. Most of the soldiers who attend the SOA were already infused with or soon acquired America’s dark view of activist priests, social workers, journalists and liberal intellectuals. To them they are all dangerous subversives. The parsimonious 12-hour “human rights” course offered guest instructors should not be expected to alter deeply rooted biases and susceptibilities. After all, this is “gringo” rhetoric and it will be swiftly discarded as a hindrance to more utilitarian objectives once they get back home.
Few as they are, what SOA supporters must grapple with now that some of its alumni’s crimi
nal history spreads like blood in bath water, is whether keeping the school open sends the wrong message, both in the U.S. and abroad. False prophets, of course, are useful. They give the truth a good name. Ultimately, they also remind the world that power struggles, particularly those engineered to take place in other people’s backyard, sharpen plutocratic dominance, end in abuse and hasten the sacrifice of the innocent. They do not curb the bloodlust.
On January 17, 2001 the SOA was quietly renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The result of a Department of Defense proposal included in the Defense Authorization Bill for Fiscal 2001, the name-change measure passed when the House of Representatives defeated a bipartisan amendment to close the SOA and conduct a congressional investigation by a narrow seven-vote margin.
When doing the “right thing” threatens special interests, justice goes down the toilet.
THE RIGHT, THE CROSS AND THE CIA
In a 1992 CNN interview with Larry King, headlined “Reagan, the Pope, Solidarity and the Fall of Communism,” Time Magazine’s Carl Bernstein made an astonishing if persuasive assertion. The Vatican, he said, had offered to help buttress Poland’s ailing pro-western Solidarity Party and, later, propped up Lech Walesa’s torpid presidency in exchange for a stiffening of conservative values and the establishment of the Christian Right as a viable political force in the United States.
My own research, conducted a year earlier into state-sponsored massacres of Guatemalan street children, hinted that a political “fifth column” had indeed taken root in the U.S. and simultaneously sprouted in Central America where U.S. strategic interests were at an all-time high. Other sources added convincing arguments to allegations that politicians, intelligence agencies, religious leaders, “relief” organizations and multinational corporations were engaged in a hemispheric cabal aimed at synchronizing global Christian evangelical interests with U.S. foreign policy objectives.
I wrote Bernstein, asking for details. He didn’t reply. A second and a third request remained unacknowledged. And his diclosures, which should have outraged social democrats everywhere, went in one ear and out the other of a world entering the final year of the Cold War, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet Union and feeling the first stirrings, with the response by coalition forces to Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, of the unresolved conflict in Iraq and the illegal, immoral and unwinnable war in Afghanistan.
I returned to Guatemala in search of answers. Soon, fresh leads surfaced as I probed deeper into the murky world of Central American politics and the Byzantine role the U.S. plays in the Isthmus.
Guatemala had already earned a reputation for gross human rights violations that included “disappearances,” tortures and wholesale murder. Although a civilian government had been in place since 1986, democracy limped along, stunted by the legacy of a brutal past and further obstructed by a corrupt and apathetic judicial system disinclined to prosecute. Gone berserk, the U.S.-trained military, the national police and urban constabularies had splattered the “Land of Eternal Spring” red with blood.
Shortly after my return to Guatemala, Mi Casa, an orphanage for boys founded by American John Wetterer, came under scrutiny. A peripheral figure in my investigations, Wetterer, his reputation now challenged, unwittingly exposed strange bedfellows in a tryst involving the religious right, U.S. spy services and the military, and lay bare the magnitude of their collective agenda.
Who helped bankroll Mi Casa? Wetterer’s crumbling defenses now revealed that compassionate U.S. private donors were not the shelter’s sole source of support. Benefactors included an oddball assortment of powerful confederates, among them Robert Macauley (1923-2010), founder and chairman of AmeriCares, the New Canaan, Connecticut-based relief agency, a coterie of high-level officials at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala, and Alvaro Arzú (then foreign minister and later president of Guatemala). Most distanced themselves from Wetterer when his private life turned public; most, except Alvaro Arzú (a cousin of Roberto Alejos Arzú, whose plantation served as a CIA training facility for the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion) and whose interest in Mi Casa may have been less than altruistic.
Other high-rollers who helped replenish Mi Casa’s coffers included members of the Knights of Malta (the Vatican’s mouthpiece, a patron of the CIA and a regular conduit into Latin America); perennial U.S. presidential hopeful, Pat Buchanan and W. R. Grace Company head, J. Peter Grace, a man associated with CIA-assisted coups and known to have tried to scuttle progressive international labor movements. Grace, who once referred to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo as “a homo” and to former New York Mayor David Dinkins as “a pinkins,” also had a fondness for Nazis. In 1958, he appealed to the U.S. Ambassador in Germany to facilitate the immigration of Dr. Otto Ambros, a developer of Zyklon-B, the deadly gas used in Nazi extermination camps. Convicted at the Nuremberg trials for mass murder and for supplying slave labor to Germany’s war machine, Ambros was later hired by Grace as a consultant. Other players would soon be identified, all the instruments of a strategy aimed at destabilizing left-leaning regimes and replacing them with compliant plutocratic minions willing to underwrite the Vatican’s theocratic crusade.
What did the unholy dalliance between Robert Macauley, J. Peter Grace, Alvaro Arzú and the Knights of Malta have in common? They all had close ties to the CIA and professed a strong penchant for right-wing causes. AmeriCares, whose declared mission is to “offer relief worldwide regardless of race, religion or political persuasion,” became active in Guatemala in the early 1980s, channeling donations to the U.S.-backed military regime. It also contributed to and took sides in U.S.-engineered armed conflicts and routinely flew its armada into ideological battlefields directly linked to U.S. strategic interests.
Macauley’s long and intimate relationship with former President George H. W. Bush (they were childhood chums) and with the U.S. intelligence apparatus Bush was to manage as CIA director, is symbolic of unflinching loyalty to the former president’s deftly marketed “Thousand Points of Light” platform which, like all ultra-conservative solutions to severe socio-economic ills, was used not to relieve misery in Central America but to further cosset the kleptocrats, at home and the Isthmus.
In 1985, Col. Oliver North got Unification Church head, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, to fund $350,000 worth of supplies to the Contras. Three years earlier, the U.S. had withheld assistance to leftist Sandinista Nicaragua, which had been devastated by a hurricane. It couldn’t get its planes in fast enough when right-winger Violetta Chamorro defeated the Sandinistas. On February 28, 1990, barely three days after the election, AmeriCares’ first shipment brought in 23 tons of medical supplies “with love, from the people of the United States to the people of Nicaragua.” Nicaraguan conservative Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo took possession of the first shipment and turned it over to the well-connected Knights of Malta for distribution. President Bush’s son, Marvin, was aboard the next AmeriCares flight that landed days after Chamorro’s inauguration. He was met by a Knights of Malta ambassador -- none other than Roberto Alejos Arzú, a man known for his long association with Guatemala’s most reactionary circles, including high-ranking military officers implicated in heinous human rights violations.
The Knights of Malta, AmeriCares’ acolytes around the world, is a 900-year-old organization formerly known as the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of the Saints John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta. Modeled after an ancient order of soldier-monks who crusaded against the “infidels,” and later merged into York Rite Freemasonry, Knights of Malta ceremonies and rituals “inculcate lessons of chivalry and courage, and inspire a militant spirit in opposition to all non-Christian ideologies and powers.” With over 10,000 members in 42 countries, the Knights are powerful and influential Vatican surrogates with extensive ties to intelligence networks and, some say, to the highest echelons of organized crime.
The American branch of the Knights of Malta, which awarded Ronald Reagan the Grand Cross of Merit in 1988 “for dev
otion to Christian principles,” counted among its members former CIA directors William Casey (1913-1987) and John McCone (1902-1991). McCone helped engineer the 1973 military coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende. Others included the zealous and paranoid former CIA chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton (1917-1987); William Buckley (1928-1985); former U.S. Secretary of State, Alexander Haig (1924-2010); former Nixon-Ford treasury secretary, William Simon (1927-2000); Reagan’s man at the Vatican, William Wilson (1914-2009); and U.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton (b. 1924), who sponsored a bill allowing U.S. Air Force transports to ship goods for AmeriCares, a privilege accorded no other charitable organization.
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First indicted in the U.S. in 1990 for mail fraud and later jailed in Guatemala, John Wetterer, a.k.a. Tio Juan, remains under U.S. extradition orders. An Interpol arrest warrant is also outstanding.
Wetterer, a Vietnam War veteran from Massapequa, New York, collected nearly a million dollars in contributions mailed from 1984 through 1988 to help run his boy’s orphanage, Mi Casa. Arguing that the funds were needed to give the boys a “healthy and wholesome environment,” he has been repeatedly accused of molesting the wards in his care.
A 25-page deposition signed by several of Wetterer’s alleged victims and a copy of the arrest warrant issued by the U.S. District Court of New York, describe in graphic details lewd acts committed on boys ranging in age from eight to 15. An affidavit signed by four Guatemalan priests charges Wetterer with showing the boys “adult films with strong sexual content.”