Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/americas/guatemala/index.html#ixzz16QRd3dGz
Slide showVoor me op mijn bureau ligt een brief van Unicef, het kinderfonds van de wereldgemeenschap. Op de enveloppe staat:
Bijna 1 miljoen kinderen in Guatemala zijn ondervoed. Zij willen maar één ding: zonder honger naar bed.
Waarom hebben deze kinderen honger? Doordat we de Amerikaanse terreur al heel lang steunen. Leest u maar:
Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (Spanish pronunciation: [xaˈkoβo ˈarβenð ɣuðˈman]; September 14, 1913 – January 27, 1971) was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as Defense Minister of Guatemala from 1944–1951, and as President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954.
He was ousted in a coup d'état engineered by the United States government and CIA, and was replaced by a military junta, headed by Colonel Carlos Castillo.
He went into exile after the coup and died in Mexico in 1971...
Historical background
In the 1890s, the United States began to implement the Monroe Doctrine, pushing out European colonial powers and establishing U.S. hegemony over resources and labor in Latin American nations. The dictators that ruled Guatemala during the late 19th and early 20th century were generally very accommodating to U.S. business and political interests. So unlike other Latin American nations, such as Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba, the U.S. did not have to use overt military force to maintain dominance in Guatemala, and the Guatemalan military/police worked closely with the U.S. military and State Department to secure U.S. interests. The Guatemalan government exempted several U.S. corporations from paying taxes, privatized and sold off publicly owned utilities, and gave away huge swaths of public land.[3]
In 1930, the dictator General Jorge Ubico came to power, backed by the United States, and initiated one of the most brutally repressive governments in Central American history. He created a widespread network of spies and informants, and had large numbers of political opponents tortured and put to death. A wealthy aristocrat (with an estimated income of $215,000 per year, in 1930s dollars) and a staunch anti-communist, he consistently sided with landowners and urban elites in disputes with peasants. He implemented a system of debt slavery and forced labor, and passed laws allowing landowners to execute workers as a "disciplinary" measure.[4][5][6][7][8] He also openly identified as a fascist; he admired Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler, saying at one point: "I am like Hitler. I execute first and ask questions later."[9][10][11][12][13] Ubico was disdainful of the indigenous population, calling them "animal-like", and stated that to become "civilized" they needed mandatory military training, comparing it to "domesticating donkeys". He gave away hundreds of thousands of hectares to the United Fruit Company (UFCO) and exempted them from taxes, and allowed the U.S. military to establish bases in Guatemala.[4][5][6][7][8]
Ubico considered himself to be "another Napoleon". He dressed ostentatiously, and surrounded himself with statues and paintings of the emperor, regularly commenting on the similarities between their appearances. He militarized numerous political and social institutions—including the post office, schools, and symphony orchestras—and placed military officers in charge of many government posts. He frequently travelled around the country performing "inspections", in dress uniform, followed by a military escort, a mobile radio station, an official biographer, and cabinet members.[4][14][15][16][17]
Ubico's repressive policies and arrogant demeanor eventually led to a widespread popular insurrection, led by middle-class intellectuals, professionals, and junior army officers. In July 1, 1944 Ubico resigned from office amidst a general strike and nationwide protests. Initially, he had planned to hand over power to the former director of police, General Roderico Anzueto, who he felt he could control. But his advisors noted that Anzueto's pro-Nazi sympathies had made him very unpopular, and that he would not be able to control the military. So Ubico instead chose to select a triumvariate of Major General Bueneventura Piñeda, Major General Eduardo Villagrán Ariza, and General Federico Ponce Vaides. The three generals promised to convene the national assembly to hold an election for a provisional president, but when the congress met on July 3, soldiers held everyone at gunpoint and forced them to vote for General Ponce, rather than the popular civilian candidate Dr. Ramón Calderón. Ponce, who had previously retired from military service due to alcoholism, took orders from Ubico and kept many of the officials who had worked in the Ubico administration. The repressive policies of the Ubico administration were continued.[4][18][19]
Opposition groups began organizing again, this time joined by many prominent political and military leaders, who deemed the Ponce regime unconstitutional. Among the military officers in the opposition were Jacobo Árbenz and Major Franciso Javier Araña. Ubico had fired Árbenz from his teaching post at the Escuela Politécnica, and since then Árbenz had been in El Salvador, organizing a band of revolutionary exiles. On October 19, 1944 a small group of soldiers and students, led by Árbenz and Arana, attacked the National Palace.[20]
By 1950, a handful of U.S. corporations controlled Guatemala's primary electrical utilities, the nation's only railroad, and the banana industry, which was Guatemala's chief agricultural export industry.[3] By the mid-1940s, Guatemalan banana plantations accounted for more than one quarter of all of United Fruit Company's production in Latin America.[21]
[edit]Election
In March 1951, Árbenz assumed the presidency after Guatemala's second-ever universal-suffrage election, marking the first peaceful transition of power in Guatemala's history. He campaigned as a reformer and garnered 60% of the vote by promising to make Guatemala an economically independent, socialist state that would shed its colonial-era dependence on the U.S. His predecessor, Juan José Arévalo, had successfully begun a series of reforms to open the political process to all citizens. Arévalo's extension of voting and labor rights threatened the power of the traditional elite and led to more than twenty failed coup attempts to oust him.
Land reform
Arbenz set land reform as his central goal as only 2 % of the population owned 70 % of the land.
[22]
Árbenz continued Arévalo's reform agenda and, in June 1952, his government enacted an agrarian reform program. The agrarian reform law (decree 900) gave the government power to expropriate only uncultivated portions of large plantations. Estates of up to 670 acres (2.7 km2) were exempted if at least two thirds of the land was cultivated; also exempt were lands that had a slope of more than 30 degrees (a significant exemption in mountainous Guatemala). The land was then allocated to individual families. Owners of expropriated land were compensated according to the worth of the land claimed in May 1952 tax assessments. Land was paid for in twenty-five year bonds with a 3 percent interest rate.[23] Arbenz himself, a landowner through his wife, gave up 1,700 acres (7 km2) of his own land in the land reform program.[24]
While Árbenz's proposed agenda was welcomed by impoverished peasants who made up the majority of Guatemala's population, it provoked the ire of the upper landowning classes, powerful U.S. corporate interests, and factions of the military, who accused Árbenz of bowing to Communist influence. This tension resulted in noticeable unrest in the country. Carlos Castillo, an army officer, rebelled at the Aurora airport in the early 1950s, was defeated and shot, surviving his injuries. Castillo then spent some time in a Guatemalan prison before escaping and going into exile in 1951.[citation needed]
Coup
May 1975 CIA internal memo, released under the Freedom of Information Act, describing the CIA's role in the overthrow of Árbenz. (1 of 5)
Instability, combined with Árbenz's relative tolerance of Guatemalan Party of Labour (PGT) and other leftists influences, prompted the CIA to draw up a contingency plan entitled Operation PBFORTUNE in 1951. It outlined a method of ousting Árbenz if he were deemed a Communist threat in the hemisphere.
The United Fruit Company - now renamed Chiquita - a U.S.-based corporation, was also threatened by Árbenz's land reform initiative. United Fruit was Guatemala's largest landowner, with 85% of its holdings uncultivated, vulnerable to Árbenz's reform plans. In calculating its tax obligations, United Fruit had consistently (and drastically) undervalued the worth of its holdings. In its 1952 taxes, it claimed its land was only worth $3 per acre. When, in accordance with United Fruit's tax claims, the Árbenz government offered to compensate the company at the $3 rate, the company claimed the land's true value was $75/acre but refused to explain the precipitous jump in its own determination of the land's value.
In 1952, the Guatemalan Party of Labour was legalized; Communists subsequently gained considerable minority influence over important peasant organizations and labor unions, but not over the governing political party and won only four seats in the 58-seat governing body. The CIA, having drafted Operation PBFORTUNE, was already concerned about Árbenz's potential Communist ties. United Fruit had been lobbying the CIA to oust reform governments in Guatemala since Arévalo's time but it wasn't until the Eisenhower administration that it found an ear in the White House. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration was still flush with victory from its covert operation to topple the Mossadegh government in Iran the year before. On February 19, 1954, the CIA began Operation WASHTUB, a plan to plant a phony Soviet arms cache in Nicaragua to demonstrate Guatemalan ties to Moscow.[25]
As it happened, WASHTUB was unnecessary. In May 1954, Czechoslovak weaponry arrived in secret into Guatemala aboard the Swedish ship Alfhem. The ship's manifests had been falsified as to the nature of its cargo. The U.S. took this as final proof of Árbenz's Soviet links. The Czechoslovaks supplied, for cash down, obsolete and barely functional German WWII weaponry.[26]
"The direct contacts between the Soviet Union and the Árbenz Government consisted of one Soviet diplomat working out an exchange of bananas for agricultural machinery, which fell through because neither side had refrigerated ships. The only other evidence of contact the CIA found after the operation were two bills to the Guatemalan Communist Party from a Moscow bookstore, totalling $22.95."[26]
The Árbenz government was convinced a U.S.-sponsored invasion was imminent: it had previously released detailed accounts of the CIA's Operation PBFORTUNE (called the White Papers) and perceived US actions at the OAS convention in Caracas that year as a lead-up to intervention. The administration ordered the CIA to sponsor a coup d'état, code-named Operation PBSUCCESS that toppled the government. Árbenz resigned on June 27, 1954 and was forced to flee, seeking refuge in the Mexican Embassy.
After the coup, Frank Wisner organised an operation called PBHistory to secure Árbenz Government documents. PBHistory aimed to prove Soviet control of Guatemala and, in so doing, hopefully provide actionable intelligence with regard to other Soviet connections and personnel in Latin America. Wisner sent two teams who, with the help of the Army and Castillo Armas's junta, gathered 150,000 documents. Ronald M. Schneider, an extra-Agency researcher who later examined the PBHistory documents, found no traces of Soviet control and substantial evidence that Guatemalan Communists acted alone, without support or guidance from outside the country.[27]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobo_Árbenz_Guzmán
Om deze terreur te legitimeren worden de commerciele media gebruikt door degenen met macht. Wie de officiele versie van de werkelijkheid doorprikt wordt te vuur en te zwaard bestreden, want waar het werkelijk omdraait in een massamaatschappij is wat Chomsky noemt: 'Manufacturing Consent.' Edward Bernays, de grondlegger van de public relations industrie en neef van Sigmund Freud omschreef dit als volgt: ´Regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.´ In zijn klassieke handboek voor media manipulatie wees hij erop dat ´intelligent minorities´ in een moderne massamaatschappij als taak hebben ´the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses.´ Een dergelijke ´engineering of consent´ was volgens Bernays juist de ´essence of the democratic process.´ Daarbij was ´controlling the public mind´ van eminent belang voor de rijken en machtigen om het volk in het gareel te houden en in de juiste richting te laten marcheren. Het belang van propaganda begreep ook Sam Zemurray, die uitgestrekte bananenplantages bezat in Midden Amerika. Eerder al had hij een staatsgreep in Honduras gefinancierd om de president ten val te brengen, aangezien die erop had gestaan dat de rijken belasting betaalden over hun grondbezit en zich ook nog eens de Hondurese wet zouden houden. Begin jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw werd Bernays door Zemurray ingehuurd om de democratische regering van Guatemala ten val te brengen omdat die van plan was grote stukken ongebruikt land van het concern van Zemurray, United Fruit, te confisqueren om het onder de arme boeren te herverdelen. Bernays adviseerde zijn client om ogenblikkelijk een mediahetze te starten. 'I have the feeling that Guatemala might respond to pitiless publicity in this country,' zo verklaarde hij later trots. Onder andere via een perscampagne werd de democratische regering afgeschilderd als communistisch. Tegelijkertijd werden prominente Congresleden bewerkt en tenslotte viel de regering dankzij een CIA-complot. Het gevolg was dat er een meedogeloze drie decennia durende oorlog burgeroorlog ontstond waarbij tenminste 200.000 doden vielen. 93 procent werd vermoord door het leger, de doodseskaders en andere door de VS opgeleide gangsters, aldus een officieel overheidsrapport. Het toont aan hoe dodelijk propaganda kan zijn. Maar daarvoor moet eerst de vijand goed in beeld zijn gebracht door leugens en vertekening van de werkelijkeid. Er moet natuurlijk een bedreigende vijand zijn, en iemand moet hem aanwijzen, anders lukt de propaganda niet.
En de vijand is in de praktijk iedereen die de positie van de arme machtelozen op aarde, onder wie de meer dan 1 miljard mensen die nu honger lijdt, fundamenteel wil verbeteren, met of zonder geweld. Vandaar de staatsgrepen, de CIA, de macht, of die nu in handen is van Chinese dictators of Amerikaanse presidenten, en vandaar ook dat er nu voor mij op mijn bureau een bedelbrief van Unicef ligt voor ondermeer die 1 miljoen hongerende kinderen in Guatemala. Wat te doen? Betalen, omdat we niet de politieke lef hebben om een eind te maken aan onze westerse terreur? Symptomen blijven bestrijden, en de ziekte laten voortwoekeren?
Bijna 1 miljoen kinderen in Guatemala zijn ondervoed. Zij willen maar één ding: zonder honger naar bed.
Waarom hebben deze kinderen honger? Doordat we de Amerikaanse terreur al heel lang steunen. Leest u maar:
Colonel Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (Spanish pronunciation: [xaˈkoβo ˈarβenð ɣuðˈman]; September 14, 1913 – January 27, 1971) was a Guatemalan military officer and politician who served as Defense Minister of Guatemala from 1944–1951, and as President of Guatemala from 1951 to 1954.
He was ousted in a coup d'état engineered by the United States government and CIA, and was replaced by a military junta, headed by Colonel Carlos Castillo.
He went into exile after the coup and died in Mexico in 1971...
Historical background
In the 1890s, the United States began to implement the Monroe Doctrine, pushing out European colonial powers and establishing U.S. hegemony over resources and labor in Latin American nations. The dictators that ruled Guatemala during the late 19th and early 20th century were generally very accommodating to U.S. business and political interests. So unlike other Latin American nations, such as Haiti, Nicaragua and Cuba, the U.S. did not have to use overt military force to maintain dominance in Guatemala, and the Guatemalan military/police worked closely with the U.S. military and State Department to secure U.S. interests. The Guatemalan government exempted several U.S. corporations from paying taxes, privatized and sold off publicly owned utilities, and gave away huge swaths of public land.[3]
In 1930, the dictator General Jorge Ubico came to power, backed by the United States, and initiated one of the most brutally repressive governments in Central American history. He created a widespread network of spies and informants, and had large numbers of political opponents tortured and put to death. A wealthy aristocrat (with an estimated income of $215,000 per year, in 1930s dollars) and a staunch anti-communist, he consistently sided with landowners and urban elites in disputes with peasants. He implemented a system of debt slavery and forced labor, and passed laws allowing landowners to execute workers as a "disciplinary" measure.[4][5][6][7][8] He also openly identified as a fascist; he admired Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler, saying at one point: "I am like Hitler. I execute first and ask questions later."[9][10][11][12][13] Ubico was disdainful of the indigenous population, calling them "animal-like", and stated that to become "civilized" they needed mandatory military training, comparing it to "domesticating donkeys". He gave away hundreds of thousands of hectares to the United Fruit Company (UFCO) and exempted them from taxes, and allowed the U.S. military to establish bases in Guatemala.[4][5][6][7][8]
Ubico considered himself to be "another Napoleon". He dressed ostentatiously, and surrounded himself with statues and paintings of the emperor, regularly commenting on the similarities between their appearances. He militarized numerous political and social institutions—including the post office, schools, and symphony orchestras—and placed military officers in charge of many government posts. He frequently travelled around the country performing "inspections", in dress uniform, followed by a military escort, a mobile radio station, an official biographer, and cabinet members.[4][14][15][16][17]
Ubico's repressive policies and arrogant demeanor eventually led to a widespread popular insurrection, led by middle-class intellectuals, professionals, and junior army officers. In July 1, 1944 Ubico resigned from office amidst a general strike and nationwide protests. Initially, he had planned to hand over power to the former director of police, General Roderico Anzueto, who he felt he could control. But his advisors noted that Anzueto's pro-Nazi sympathies had made him very unpopular, and that he would not be able to control the military. So Ubico instead chose to select a triumvariate of Major General Bueneventura Piñeda, Major General Eduardo Villagrán Ariza, and General Federico Ponce Vaides. The three generals promised to convene the national assembly to hold an election for a provisional president, but when the congress met on July 3, soldiers held everyone at gunpoint and forced them to vote for General Ponce, rather than the popular civilian candidate Dr. Ramón Calderón. Ponce, who had previously retired from military service due to alcoholism, took orders from Ubico and kept many of the officials who had worked in the Ubico administration. The repressive policies of the Ubico administration were continued.[4][18][19]
Opposition groups began organizing again, this time joined by many prominent political and military leaders, who deemed the Ponce regime unconstitutional. Among the military officers in the opposition were Jacobo Árbenz and Major Franciso Javier Araña. Ubico had fired Árbenz from his teaching post at the Escuela Politécnica, and since then Árbenz had been in El Salvador, organizing a band of revolutionary exiles. On October 19, 1944 a small group of soldiers and students, led by Árbenz and Arana, attacked the National Palace.[20]
By 1950, a handful of U.S. corporations controlled Guatemala's primary electrical utilities, the nation's only railroad, and the banana industry, which was Guatemala's chief agricultural export industry.[3] By the mid-1940s, Guatemalan banana plantations accounted for more than one quarter of all of United Fruit Company's production in Latin America.[21]
[edit]Election
In March 1951, Árbenz assumed the presidency after Guatemala's second-ever universal-suffrage election, marking the first peaceful transition of power in Guatemala's history. He campaigned as a reformer and garnered 60% of the vote by promising to make Guatemala an economically independent, socialist state that would shed its colonial-era dependence on the U.S. His predecessor, Juan José Arévalo, had successfully begun a series of reforms to open the political process to all citizens. Arévalo's extension of voting and labor rights threatened the power of the traditional elite and led to more than twenty failed coup attempts to oust him.
Land reform
Arbenz set land reform as his central goal as only 2 % of the population owned 70 % of the land.
[22]
Árbenz continued Arévalo's reform agenda and, in June 1952, his government enacted an agrarian reform program. The agrarian reform law (decree 900) gave the government power to expropriate only uncultivated portions of large plantations. Estates of up to 670 acres (2.7 km2) were exempted if at least two thirds of the land was cultivated; also exempt were lands that had a slope of more than 30 degrees (a significant exemption in mountainous Guatemala). The land was then allocated to individual families. Owners of expropriated land were compensated according to the worth of the land claimed in May 1952 tax assessments. Land was paid for in twenty-five year bonds with a 3 percent interest rate.[23] Arbenz himself, a landowner through his wife, gave up 1,700 acres (7 km2) of his own land in the land reform program.[24]
While Árbenz's proposed agenda was welcomed by impoverished peasants who made up the majority of Guatemala's population, it provoked the ire of the upper landowning classes, powerful U.S. corporate interests, and factions of the military, who accused Árbenz of bowing to Communist influence. This tension resulted in noticeable unrest in the country. Carlos Castillo, an army officer, rebelled at the Aurora airport in the early 1950s, was defeated and shot, surviving his injuries. Castillo then spent some time in a Guatemalan prison before escaping and going into exile in 1951.[citation needed]
Coup
May 1975 CIA internal memo, released under the Freedom of Information Act, describing the CIA's role in the overthrow of Árbenz. (1 of 5)
Instability, combined with Árbenz's relative tolerance of Guatemalan Party of Labour (PGT) and other leftists influences, prompted the CIA to draw up a contingency plan entitled Operation PBFORTUNE in 1951. It outlined a method of ousting Árbenz if he were deemed a Communist threat in the hemisphere.
The United Fruit Company - now renamed Chiquita - a U.S.-based corporation, was also threatened by Árbenz's land reform initiative. United Fruit was Guatemala's largest landowner, with 85% of its holdings uncultivated, vulnerable to Árbenz's reform plans. In calculating its tax obligations, United Fruit had consistently (and drastically) undervalued the worth of its holdings. In its 1952 taxes, it claimed its land was only worth $3 per acre. When, in accordance with United Fruit's tax claims, the Árbenz government offered to compensate the company at the $3 rate, the company claimed the land's true value was $75/acre but refused to explain the precipitous jump in its own determination of the land's value.
In 1952, the Guatemalan Party of Labour was legalized; Communists subsequently gained considerable minority influence over important peasant organizations and labor unions, but not over the governing political party and won only four seats in the 58-seat governing body. The CIA, having drafted Operation PBFORTUNE, was already concerned about Árbenz's potential Communist ties. United Fruit had been lobbying the CIA to oust reform governments in Guatemala since Arévalo's time but it wasn't until the Eisenhower administration that it found an ear in the White House. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration was still flush with victory from its covert operation to topple the Mossadegh government in Iran the year before. On February 19, 1954, the CIA began Operation WASHTUB, a plan to plant a phony Soviet arms cache in Nicaragua to demonstrate Guatemalan ties to Moscow.[25]
As it happened, WASHTUB was unnecessary. In May 1954, Czechoslovak weaponry arrived in secret into Guatemala aboard the Swedish ship Alfhem. The ship's manifests had been falsified as to the nature of its cargo. The U.S. took this as final proof of Árbenz's Soviet links. The Czechoslovaks supplied, for cash down, obsolete and barely functional German WWII weaponry.[26]
"The direct contacts between the Soviet Union and the Árbenz Government consisted of one Soviet diplomat working out an exchange of bananas for agricultural machinery, which fell through because neither side had refrigerated ships. The only other evidence of contact the CIA found after the operation were two bills to the Guatemalan Communist Party from a Moscow bookstore, totalling $22.95."[26]
The Árbenz government was convinced a U.S.-sponsored invasion was imminent: it had previously released detailed accounts of the CIA's Operation PBFORTUNE (called the White Papers) and perceived US actions at the OAS convention in Caracas that year as a lead-up to intervention. The administration ordered the CIA to sponsor a coup d'état, code-named Operation PBSUCCESS that toppled the government. Árbenz resigned on June 27, 1954 and was forced to flee, seeking refuge in the Mexican Embassy.
After the coup, Frank Wisner organised an operation called PBHistory to secure Árbenz Government documents. PBHistory aimed to prove Soviet control of Guatemala and, in so doing, hopefully provide actionable intelligence with regard to other Soviet connections and personnel in Latin America. Wisner sent two teams who, with the help of the Army and Castillo Armas's junta, gathered 150,000 documents. Ronald M. Schneider, an extra-Agency researcher who later examined the PBHistory documents, found no traces of Soviet control and substantial evidence that Guatemalan Communists acted alone, without support or guidance from outside the country.[27]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobo_Árbenz_Guzmán
Om deze terreur te legitimeren worden de commerciele media gebruikt door degenen met macht. Wie de officiele versie van de werkelijkheid doorprikt wordt te vuur en te zwaard bestreden, want waar het werkelijk omdraait in een massamaatschappij is wat Chomsky noemt: 'Manufacturing Consent.' Edward Bernays, de grondlegger van de public relations industrie en neef van Sigmund Freud omschreef dit als volgt: ´Regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.´ In zijn klassieke handboek voor media manipulatie wees hij erop dat ´intelligent minorities´ in een moderne massamaatschappij als taak hebben ´the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses.´ Een dergelijke ´engineering of consent´ was volgens Bernays juist de ´essence of the democratic process.´ Daarbij was ´controlling the public mind´ van eminent belang voor de rijken en machtigen om het volk in het gareel te houden en in de juiste richting te laten marcheren. Het belang van propaganda begreep ook Sam Zemurray, die uitgestrekte bananenplantages bezat in Midden Amerika. Eerder al had hij een staatsgreep in Honduras gefinancierd om de president ten val te brengen, aangezien die erop had gestaan dat de rijken belasting betaalden over hun grondbezit en zich ook nog eens de Hondurese wet zouden houden. Begin jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw werd Bernays door Zemurray ingehuurd om de democratische regering van Guatemala ten val te brengen omdat die van plan was grote stukken ongebruikt land van het concern van Zemurray, United Fruit, te confisqueren om het onder de arme boeren te herverdelen. Bernays adviseerde zijn client om ogenblikkelijk een mediahetze te starten. 'I have the feeling that Guatemala might respond to pitiless publicity in this country,' zo verklaarde hij later trots. Onder andere via een perscampagne werd de democratische regering afgeschilderd als communistisch. Tegelijkertijd werden prominente Congresleden bewerkt en tenslotte viel de regering dankzij een CIA-complot. Het gevolg was dat er een meedogeloze drie decennia durende oorlog burgeroorlog ontstond waarbij tenminste 200.000 doden vielen. 93 procent werd vermoord door het leger, de doodseskaders en andere door de VS opgeleide gangsters, aldus een officieel overheidsrapport. Het toont aan hoe dodelijk propaganda kan zijn. Maar daarvoor moet eerst de vijand goed in beeld zijn gebracht door leugens en vertekening van de werkelijkeid. Er moet natuurlijk een bedreigende vijand zijn, en iemand moet hem aanwijzen, anders lukt de propaganda niet.
En de vijand is in de praktijk iedereen die de positie van de arme machtelozen op aarde, onder wie de meer dan 1 miljard mensen die nu honger lijdt, fundamenteel wil verbeteren, met of zonder geweld. Vandaar de staatsgrepen, de CIA, de macht, of die nu in handen is van Chinese dictators of Amerikaanse presidenten, en vandaar ook dat er nu voor mij op mijn bureau een bedelbrief van Unicef ligt voor ondermeer die 1 miljoen hongerende kinderen in Guatemala. Wat te doen? Betalen, omdat we niet de politieke lef hebben om een eind te maken aan onze westerse terreur? Symptomen blijven bestrijden, en de ziekte laten voortwoekeren?
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