Part
3 - Man of integrity?
One of the
most haunting massacres committed during this period was the
destruction of the El Petén district village named Dos Erres. Ríos
Montt’s Israeli-trained soldiers burned Dos Erres to the ground.
First, however, its inhabitants were shot. Those who survived the
initial attack on the village had their skulls smashed with
sledgehammers. The bodies of the dead were stuffed down the village
well.
During a
court-ordered exhumation in the village, investigators working for
the 1999 UN Truth Commission cited the following in their forensics
report: “All the ballistic evidence recovered corresponded to
bullet fragments from firearms and pods of Galil rifles, made in
Israel.”
Then US
President Ronald Reagan – whose administration would later be
implicated in the “Iran-Contra” scandal for running guns to Iran
through Israel, in part to fund a paramilitary force aiming to topple
Nicaragua’s Marxist government – visited Ríos Montt just days
before the massacre.
Reagan
praised Ríos Montt as “a man of great personal integrity”
who “wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans
and to promote social justice.” Reagan also assured the
Guatemalan president that “the United States is committed to
support his efforts to restore democracy and to address the root
causes of this violent insurgency.” At one point in their
conversation, Reagan is reported to have embraced Ríos Montt and
told the Guatemalan president he was getting “a bum rap” on human
rights.
In November
2016, however, judge Claudette Dominguez accepted the Guatemalan
attorney general’s request to prosecute Ríos Montt as intellectual
author of the Dos Erres massacre, pressing him with charges of
aggravated homicide, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Among the 18
arrested this year was Benedicto Lucas García, former army chief of
staff under his brother Romeo Lucas García’s military presidency.
Benedicto, who was seen by some of his soldiers as an innovator of
torture techniques for use on children, described “the Israeli
soldier [as] a model and an example to us.”
In 1981,
Benedicto headed the inauguration ceremony of an Israeli-designed and
financed electronics school in Guatemala. Its purpose was to train
the Guatemalan military on using so-called counterinsurgency
technologies. Benedicto lauded the school’s establishment as a
“positive step” in advancing the Guatemalan regime to world-class
military efficiency “thanks to [Israel’s] advice and transfer
of electronic technology.”
In its
inaugural year alone, the school enabled the regime’s secret
police, known as the G-2, to raid some 30 safe houses of the
Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms (ORPA).
The G-2
coordinated the assassination, “disappearance” and torture of
opponents to the Guatemalan government.
While
Guatemalan governments frequently changed hands – through both
coups and elections – during the 1980s, Israel remained Guatemala’s
main source of weapons and military advice.
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