by W. E. Gutman
Wetterer’s arrest -- he was hastily shuffled off to jail while his good friend, Alvaro Arzú, was out of the country, then promptly released when Arzú returned -- polarized Guatemalan society (pro-Tio Juan demonstrations nearly turned to riot) and embarrassed the U.S. government. Faced with mounting evidence of Wetterer’s misdeeds, the U.S. Embassy issued a carefully worded but ambiguous statement favoring extradition while finding words of praise for his work.
Wetterer was later re-indicted on charges he diverted $60,000 of orphanage funds to help his brother, Gary Wetterer, purchase waterfront property in Babylon, Long Island. Motions for an appeal to re-indict John Wetterer on the original charges were filed with the Justice Department in Washington but remain unheeded. Persistent rumors allege that Wetterer is being protected by powerful allies within Guatemala. A source of unimpeachable integrity told me that Alvaro Arzú and a former mayor of Guatemala City (and former president of Guatemala), Oscar Berger, were frequent guests at Mi Casa, where, it is alleged, they routinely “cavorted” with young boys. When Tio Juan was issued a restraining order ordering him to keep away from minors, Berger donated the orphanage a piece of land. He is said to have invited Wetterer and several of the kids to his home, basically snubbing the judicial order.
Requests for audiences with Alvaro Arzú and U.S. Ambassador Thomas Strook, were denied at the last minute. Arzú offered no explanation and repeated attempts to reach him were deftly stonewalled. Strook, in a telephone conversation a week or so later, told me that an “ongoing drug interdiction operation” had prevented him from seeing me. An Embassy official who agreed to a hasty, furtive encounter outside embassy walls -- “I could lose my job if I’m seen talking to you” -- put it to me succinctly. Jabbing a nervous finger into my breastbone, a mixture of anxiety and annoyance etched upon his face, he said: “I wouldn’t get too close to this story if I were you.” Only time will tell, I mused, whether this is a warning or just friendly advice. The next day, I found a funeral wreath propped against the door of my room at the Casa Grande Hotel, which adjoins the U.S. Embassy.
It may be years before Tio Juan Wetterer is brought to trial in the U.S. He is now said to be keeping “a very low profile.”
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AmeriCares, which received government funding through the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), did more than wave the Stars and Striped in Latin America. It helped plant it on foreign soil, an act of colonial arrogance championed by the Knights of Malta and orchestrated by Gen. Richard Stillwell (1917-1991), an architect of counterinsurgency in the Philippines and, later, Ronald Reagan’s Pentagon intelligence czar. Stillwell’s benevolence goes back to the Vietnam War when he was a key proponent of the “Strategic Hamlet” program in which millions of villagers were evicted from their homes and herded into concentration camps to prevent contact with the nationalist Viet Cong.
This immaculate deception was later used against Guatemalan campesinos with brutal efficiency. In 1983, then a deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, Stillwell co-founded a super-secret Army spy unit, the Intelligence Support Activity, which operated in El Salvador, Nicaragua and parts of Africa.
In 1984, while AmeriCares flew missions to Afghanistan, the Knights of Malta distributed $14 million in “aid” to Contra-held facilities in Honduras and to Guatemalan military commandos engaged in counterinsurgency sweeps which resulted in the death or “disappearance” of tens of thousands of men, women and children in the highlands.
Since 1983, AmeriCares shipments were handled exclusively by the Knights of Malta. In El Salvador, local KoM head Gerald Coughlan, a retired FBI agent and an executive of International Harvester, donated warehouse space. Another Salvadoran Knight, Miguel Salavarria, the manager of a large coffee plantation, befriended fundamentalist TV preacher Pat Robertson and helped launch his Latin American crusade.
The Air Commandos, a group of retired military pilots known to have had close ties with the Contras, flew large quantities of “aid” cargo. When they were not distributing ineffective or nearly expired U.S. pharmaceuticals to unwary villagers, the Air Commandos delivered shipments of Israeli weapons to the Contras. Brokered by Mike Harari (b. 1927), former Mossad station chief in Mexico, long-time friend of Panama’s Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega, and a popular visiting professor of espionage, the Israeli arms sale took the slack left by the “official” but sham U.S. arms embargo to the region. Harari also supplied weapons to Anastasio Somoza and, later, to the Guatemalan military, the national police and anyone who could afford them. (I later learned from a source at the Consulate General of Israel in New York, where I’d worked as a press officer, that the weapons had been purchased from Israel by the U.S. with the understanding that they would be channeled directly into Guatemala).
Roberto Alejos Arzú, the consummate apologist politician, found this commerce neither strange nor reprehensible.
“There is nothing wrong with friends helping friends,” he said. Alejos typifies the handful of Guatemalans who own close to ninety percent of all wealth -- including arable land -- while the rest of his people live below the poverty level and over eighty percent of the children in rural areas suffer from malnutrition, iodine deficiency and chronic respiratory disorders.
Jean-Marie Simon, author of the disquieting exposé, “Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny,” describes Alejos as “a thug in a business suit.” Alejos was involved in kidnappings, military coups and death squads. According to the North American Council on Latin America, “as with most of the Guatemalan elite, there is evidence linking Alejos to La Mano Blanca,” a death squad specializing in torture, machine-gun executions and “disappearances” of political rivals. Other victims routinely included students, liberal priests, labor organizers, journalists, teachers and indigenous activists, all labeled “Marxists” because they pressed for social and economic reform. Alan Nairn, formerly with the Council on Hemispheric Affairs and a long-time editor-at-large at The Nation, charged Alejos with having summarily executed workers on his plantation when they tried to strike or organize.
In Nicaragua, Sandinista officials continue to allege that AmeriCares and the Knights of Malta are CIA fronts. This allegation is not without merit. In 1984, AmeriCares attempted to fly a planeload of CIA-edited newsprint to the anti-Sandinista daily, La Prensa, claiming that the shipment also included medicines. That same year, the CIA used its confederates to distribute thousands of copies of a 90-page manual titled, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War to CIA-backed Contra rebels. Written in Spanish and printed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the manual urges Contra forces to kidnap Sandinista government members and to “neutralize selected officials,” a euphemism for assassination. The manual also advises hiring criminals to kill fellow rebels so they will be perceived as martyrs, and blackmailing Nicaraguan citizens into joining the rebel cause.
The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynahan (1927-2003) alleged that much of the manual had been lifted word for word from protocols for guerrilla warfare training given to Green Berets during the Vietnam War. The same lesson plans were used by the U.S. Army School of the Americas to train thousands of Latin American military officers.
Although the House Intelligence Committee concluded in December 1984 that the manual violated a 1982 decoy law which forbids U.S. personnel from taking part in the overthrow of the Sandinista government, the CIA has steadfastly denied Congressional investigators and the press an opportunity to questions the author(s) of the manual.
That same year, in a vitriolic OP/ED piece rhapsodizing his supporters on the radical right and reeking of political self-predestination, then New York Post columnist Patrick J. Buchanan set the tone for eight more years of press-bashing by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, two flamboyant and insensitive presidents sinfully out of touch with their constituents and indifferent to the worsening lot of Latin America’s poor. Buchanan warned that journalists, whose impartiality is apt to embarrass the administration, are the nation’s “mos
t dangerous adversaries.”
Exculpation by vehement denial or the concealment of incriminating evidence is not an American invention. But the artifice has served America well in foreign affairs, in the Isthmus and elsewhere around the world.
Buchanan’s penchant for right-wing causes goes back a long way and is rooted in what he describes as “the militant and uncompromising Catholicism of my youth.” To the dismay of Jewish groups, he opposed the prosecution of the late “ex” Nazi and former U.N. Secretary-General, Kurt Waldheim, and fought the deportation of John Demjanjuk and Kurt Linas, two Nazi war criminals then living in the U.S.
In 1970, Buchanan, then Nixon’s White House Director of Communications and a student of Ovid and Cicero, drafted a memorandum in which he outlined how “conservative philanthropic organizations” could be used to derail groups perceived as “leftist.”
In recommending that “a countervailing power outside the government be created,” he urged Nixon to “direct an in-house group of people -- preferably outside the Administration -- to quietly undertake a study of the top 25 U.S. foundations; to identify both their leadership and power structure; and to indicate which are friendly, which are potentially friendly; and which can be counted on to carry out the Administration’s objectives.”
Buchanan’s memo further advocated “a policy of favoritism in all future federal grants to those institutions friendly to us [while directing] future funds away from hostile foundations [such as The Brookings Institution].” He also cautioned that some of the essential objectives of this new “countervailing power” would have to be “blurred, even buried, in all sorts of other activities managed by people who knew what was going on and agreed to it.”
Among those who knew and agreed were right-wing activists, including members of the John Birch Society, the Knights of Malta and the CIA.
Men philosophize about evil, sometimes to condone it.
WHEN THE ENDS JUSTIFY THE MEANS
In a letter dated March 1998, Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman wrote to assure me that he wanted “the criminals identified and prosecuted.” He added that “the United States should not tolerate the illegal, corrupt and despicable behavior of some graduates of the [U.S. Army] School of the Americas, and every effort should be made to investigate such behavior and prosecute offenders appropriately.” His assurances proved worthless. A Republican wolf in Democrat -- later “Independent” -- sheep’s clothing, Lieberman has since inched his way far up the Republican rectum and his actions and words betray a conservative, not to say reactionary perspective and agenda. It is not surprising that, ten years later, reminding him of our prior correspondence and asking him to restate his position on the SOA, Senator Lieberman responded swiftly but with characteristic evasion:
“Regrettably, due to the huge volume of mail that I receive, I am only able to research and address comments sent to me from Connecticut residents.”
Attempts to reach Lieberman after that proved fruitless.
Echoing the views of his colleague in a letter dated April 1998, the outwardly more even-handed Senator Christopher Dodd expressed
“deep concern with [the School’s] egregious human rights violations. Time has come to determine whether it is serving our national interests and furthering our goals. It is our responsibility to closely examine the record of the SOA. I read your articles with interest, and [they] lend further credibility to the view that it is time to take a serious look at the program in Fort Benning.”
Requests for a statement reflecting his current optic were ignored. So were efforts to obtain an on-the-record comment from Democratic California Senators Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein.
Government is like a whorehouse; the prostitutes come and go, the institution endures.
Writing about then-presidential contender Barack H. Obama, Nikolas Kozloff, of the North American Congress on Latin America, said:
“For a candidate who talks the talk on human rights, Obama has had little to say about the infamous School. [He] likes to employ soaring rhetoric when discussing human rights. But he failed to take a strong position opposing the SOA. When pressed, he said that he wanted to continue to evaluate the institution. What more information could Obama possibly need to reach a final decision on the matter? An Obama spokesman said the senator ‘has not committed to closing down the school [now renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation], but will take a hard look at the program and the progress it has made once he is elected.’ To put this all in perspective, Obama has staked out a position to the right of Ron Paul, many members of Congress, and mainstream labor and Church organizations. Given widespread public disgust towards torture and the like, Obama’s meekness on WHINSEC is perplexing. In the wake of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, many U.S. citizens have soured on the War on Terror. Meanwhile, the prisoner detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has become an international eyesore. Even President Bush and Defense Secretary Robert Gates have publicly said they’d prefer to close the facility. Obama also supports closing Guantánamo, which makes his statements on WHINSEC all the more befuddling. In the present political climate, what does the Senator have to lose by coming out against the former U.S. Army School of the Americas? Perhaps he fears the GOP might accuse him of being weak on defense. But Republican nominee John McCain is not likely to use torture as ammunition during the campaign -- it hardly seems a winning electoral issue for the Arizona Senator. What’s more, many voters are oblivious to WHINSEC and have little knowledge of, or interest in, U.S. policy towards Latin America. No, it’s not fear of GOP retaliation on the campaign trail that keeps Obama quiet on WHINSEC. What the Senator is really concerned about is offending the movers and shakers within the military-industrial complex. Closing WHINSEC would demonstrate that the United States has no interest in dominating the peoples of Latin America by military means. Obama however is reluctant to make a clean break from the United States’ imperialist past.”
After more than three years in office, President Obama has yet to declare his position on the issue, let alone define a coherent strategy.
Politicians speak like poets during electoral campaigns and act like surgeons when they get into office.
Others were not as coy.
“I can think of no earthly reason why our government should [continue to] use taxpayers’ money to support the SOA,” said Rep. Sam Farr (D-California). The only two Democratic presidential contenders who expressed unambiguous opposition to the institution were long shots former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel and Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich. Republican Ron Paul said he too would shutter the school. Strange assurance from an anti-war candidate who has pledged to abolish both the CIA and the FBI to “protect individual liberties” while his flaccid and hopeless presidential campaign is being funded by Peter Thiel, founder of Pay Pal and head of Palantir Technologies, a defense contractor that profits from government espionage work for the CIA and the FBI, and which was caught organizing in 2011 an illegal spy ring targeting opponents of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, including journalists, progressive activists and union leaders. There is no hint, so far, that Thiel’s dealings with the CIA have changed Paul’s position on civil liberties.
What Kucinich, Farr and others were referring to were grudging admissions by the Pentagon that torture had routinely been included in the School’s curriculum. Founded in Panama in 1948 and now billeted at Fort Benning, Georgia, the SOA would sire a large number of thugs. Hundreds of high-ranking graduates have since been charged in the wholesale abduction, torture, murder, rape and “disappearance” of hundreds of thousands of peasants, activist clergy, trade unionists, teachers, students, human rights advocates and journalists. Many were also implicated in drug-running and money laundering schemes. Typically, the U.S. overlooked their crimes when the perceived common hemispheric enemy was communism.
In an unprecedented move to placate a growing number of SOA detractors in and out of government, and perhaps to deflect attention from a CIA mired
in scandal and controversy, the Pentagon released seven SOA training manuals. The declassification puts an end to years of speculations about the School’s pedagogic objectives. It also establishes an airtight cause-and-effect connection between the SOA and the atrocities some of its best students committed during the bloody Central American conflict of the 1980s.
In language devoid of ambiguity or paradox, the primers teach soldiers how to torture and execute guerrillas; pay bounties for enemy dead; use “motivation-by-fear;” intimidate the press; sequester “enemy” intelligence assets and their families; subvert and control rural populations; use blackmail and administer injections of sodium pentothal -- “truth serum” -- to extract information.
So much for the “democratization” of Latin America. Predictably, the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib, “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” were not far off.
Characteristically, what the Pentagon did not do is apologize. Nor is the SOA eager to comment. Nonplused by the Pentagon’s disclosures, it steadfastly rejects any hint of wrongdoing. It continues to cling to a revisionist rendering of reality that goes beyond selective amnesia. I call it exculpation by vehement denial.
HIS GRAY EMINENCE
Any lingering doubts that the inmates had taken over the asylum would be dispelled with the nomination by President George W. Bush (and the virtually unopposed confirmation by Congress) of John Negroponte as Ambassador to Iraq. A Foreign Service veteran -- former envoy to Vietnam, Honduras, Mexico and the Philippines, permanent representative to the United Nations and Director of National Intelligence -- Negroponte would be entrusted with the “pacification” and “democratization” of a nation that has never known nor understood democracy and which is now at war with itself. His mission would end in dismal failure.