- by Graham Holton
- The Guardian
- Issue #2115
Ixil women celebrate after former Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt was found guilty of genocide against the indigenous Ixil people in the 1980s. Photo: Elena Hermosa/Trocaire – flickr.com (CC BY 2.0)
Bernardo Arévalo of the Seed Movement party (Movimiento Semilla) became president of Guatemala on 15 January 2024. The left-wing government faces powerful right-wing interests aligned against its policies of attacking corruption, the old military guard and the business and legal sectors. At his inauguration Arévalo said: “We will not allow our institutions to be bent by corruption and impunity”. This is the first progressive government since the 1954 CIA-backed coup against President Jacobo Árbenz, which caused Guatemala to collapse into a brutal civil war. Left-wing guerrilla groups such as the Organization of People in Arms (ORPA), the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), and armed factions of the Guatemalan Workers’ Party (PGT), fought against the well-equipped and trained Guatemala military. They were responsible for 93 per cent of all documented human rights violations.
During that period Israel supported the Guatemalan government, playing an important role in training and equipping the military and the death squads.
In 1972 the EGP entered the Quiche region. US advisors trained the Guatemalan police on intelligence procedures, and death squads were set up to kill opposition students, church and union leaders in a genocidal purge of the indigenous Ixil people. Israel sold weapons to Guatemala, including armoured personnel carriers, military communications equipment, light cannons, machine guns, and Uzis. Israeli Galil assault rifles became the standard weapon of Guatemala’s troops.
In the 1980s Israel built a factory in Guatemala to produce the Galils, M-16s and ammunition. Tel Aviv delivered the Arava short take-off and landing aircraft. During the 1982-83 government of General Efraín Ríos Montt, 300 Israeli advisors trained the military in Guatemala. In 1983 Ed Cody of The Washington Post wrote: “Israeli advisers – some official, others private – helped Guatemalan internal security agents hunt underground rebel groups.”
Direct military rule ended with the election of Vinicio Cerezo of the Christian Democracy Party in 1986, but the conflict went on. In an interview General Benedicto Lucas said that Israel was: “the only country that gave us support in our battle against the guerrillas.” Bishara Bahbah, in his book Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection (1986), termed Israeli military aid to Guatemala a “special case” within Israel’s military sales to Latin America. Milton Jamail wrote in his It’s No Secret, Israel’s Military involvement in Central America (1986), that Guatemala “has come to resemble the Israelis on the West Bank and Gaza: They are an occupying army … the Israeli plans at home provide a prototype for solving Guatemalan problems.”
The period is often called a “hidden/silent holocaust,” or the “Maya holocaust.” US Green Beret captain Jesse Garcia said he trained “Guatemalan troops in the technique of how to ‘destroy towns.’ ” The Maya suffered over 625 massacres, and the destruction of more than 600 villages. Over a million Maya were displaced. Overall, the procedure was similar to Israel’s actions in 1947-1948, when nearly 500 Palestinian villages were wiped from the map.
In War Against the People: Israel, The Palestinians, and Global Pacification (2015), Jeff Halper notes that Israel’s military aid and training in Guatemala were instrumental in setting up forced-settlement “re-adjustment” communities designed to monitor massacre survivors. Guatemalan military officers referred to them as the “Palestinisation” of Guatemala’s Maya lands. Israeli-trained Guatemalan colonel Eduardo Wohlers, in charge of the Plan of Assistance to Conflict Areas, admitted that “the model of the kibbutz and moshav” were used.
In 1996 the Guatemala peace accord was signed after UN-moderated peace talks between the government of Guatemala and representatives from the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity). The general language of the peace accords, and the lack of representation of several groups such as ORPA, caused challenges to its implementation. The government failed to fully implement the accords under an emerging threat of authoritarianism.
In 1999 a Guatemalan military intelligence document, known as the Diario Militar (Death Squad Dossier), was leaked. Its 74 pages listed 195 detentions and murders between 1983 and 1985. In February 1999 Guatemala’s truth commission, the UN Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) estimated that 200,000 people were killed during the 1960-1996 civil war, with 45,000 forcibly disappeared. The state was found to have violated international rules, including the use of torture. The killings were recognised as genocide in a thorough twelve-volume report, Guatemala Memoria Del Silencio (1999). In 2012 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that the Guatemalan state was responsible for the disappearance of 26 people listed in the Dossier, using “a systematic state policy of forced disappearances.”
On 10 May 2013, Guatemala began the trial of its former head of state, Rios Montt, for genocide and crimes against humanity. His conviction was overturned by Guatemala’s corrupt constitutional court. Retired Guatemalan General Benedicto Lucas García was tried at the Supreme Court of Justice in January 2016 and sentenced to prison. Dozens of prosecutors and judges who tried to prosecute military officials have been exiled or imprisoned. In 2022 Judge Miguel Ángel Gálvez fled into exile after ordering the trial of nine miliary and police officials listed on the Dossier.
The alleged architects of these crimes against humanity, military and police officials now in their 80s, are finally facing court. In May 2024 the trial of retired Guatemalan General Benedicto Lucas Garcia began in Guatemala City. Now ninety-one, Armed Forces Chief of Staff for his brother, President General Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, was the architect of the counterinsurgency war. He is accused of ordering the murder of more than 1,771 indigenous Ixil Maya between 1978 and 1982. The charges include genocide, crimes against humanity, and seeking to eliminate Indigenous Maya in the Ixil Triangle of the Quiche region.
Lucas’ attorneys have yet to present their defence, so the trial will continue. It is unlikely that Israeli officials will appear before the trial to reveal their critical role in the “Guatemala Holocaust.” Today, Israel continues to arm and train violent right-wing regimes around the world.
