Peace finally arrives in Central America

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): Very belatedly, after 100,000 unnecessary deaths, 40,000 "disappearances" and 440 decimated villages, peace formally comes to the last redoubt of the Central American war zone, Guatemala, on Dec. 29.

Put it up there with Rwanda, Burundi, Cambodia and ex- Yugoslavia as one of the great killing fields of the "post-war" world. The violence never reached the crescendo it did in neighboring El Salvador, nor did as many people just "disappear" as happened in Chile and Argentina, nor did the war stretch on as long as it has in Peru or Colombia. But no country in Latin America came near it for long-term, systematic, assassination and torture.

Before my first trip to this wretched country in 1980 I went for a briefing from the Secretary-General of Amnesty International, Thomas Hammarberg. "Are you sure you want to go?" he asked. "In Guatemala there are no political prisoners, only political killings". "This country", he added, "has the worst human rights record in the whole of torture-riddled Latin America and the military is not very fond of the press snooping around."

But I did go to this breathtakingly beautiful, high mountainous, country, many times, once walking the circumference of Lake Atilan, a massive, silver sheen of wide water, lying beneath three extinct cloud-covered volcanoes, the heartland of one of the major guerrilla groups fighting on behalf of the overcrowded, highland, Indian, communities. The three day hike taught me a lot, not just of the hardship and impoverishment of an Indian people barely touched by the advances and conveniences of modern life but of brave North American priests who lay down their lives in order to relay to the outside world the massacres and mayhem that happened in their parishes, of incognito human rights workers who discovered the secret caches of corpses and who identified the victims of guerrillas who I never recognized who simply melted into the surrounds as unremarked upon as the clay pots, the whitewashed churches or the furrowed fields on the slopes of the almighty volcanoes.

I also tried to keep my eyes open, as I did on every trip, for signs of American involvement. Like everyone else, perhaps even the American president himself, I was duped. Now, late in the day, we know that the last president to tell the truth about U.S.-Guatemalan relations was Dwight Eisenhower who publicly acknowledged the CIA's role in overthrowing the mildly reformist, democratically-elected president, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, back in 1954, an act of political vandalism that, not only rendered still-born all hopes for giving the Indians a modicum of justice, triggered the Marxist-led guerrilla uprising and emboldened the military to engage in an utterly ruthless repression.

When President Jimmy Carter came into office he publicly promised that the CIA would never be used for secret counter- insurgency work. Was he duped too? (Anthony Lake, now the candidate director of the CIA, might soon, if he can outmaneuver the CIA's attempt to deny him the post, be able to enlighten us there). Or was the policy reversed by Ronald Reagan? Or did the CIA just do its own thing, ending two weeks ago in stripping Richard Nuccio, a State Department official, of his high-security clearance and rendering him effectively jobless? Nuccio was the brave official who last year informed Congress what the CIA knew about two political killings in Guatemala earlier in the decade.

The fact that President Bill Clinton has not intervened to rescue this honest whistle-blower's reputation perhaps speaks volumes about Clinton's own fear of challenging the CIA at this level and that is one important reason why it looks as if Lake's nomination is in trouble.

The CIA may not itself have killed in Guatemala but its operatives provided material and moral support for the activities of the Guatemalan military. And they, and their colleagues in the U.S. embassy in Guatemala, sought all along to disseminate the big lie that the death squads were not part of the official apparatus but rather financed and controlled by secret rightist groups.

After my first trip to Guatemala I broke the story in The New York Times that the death squads were under the direct authority of the Guatemalan presidential office. There was a deafening silence from official Washington where Ronald Reagan was the new Teflon president. Nor did any other newspaper, to my knowledge, show much interest in following the story up.

This is now a story both the president and the press have a duty to get to the bottom of. It is arguably the greatest living stain on America's conscience. Out of a minimal respect for the thousands of murdered innocents the truth should be finally told.