Guatemala Hires Otto Reich

So it seems the Guatemalan government is hiring Otto Reich to help change its image.

Otto Reich Assocs., under a subcontract with Peck, Madigan, Jones & Stewart, is working to "improve the perception, reputation and the understanding of the reality of Guatemala," according to the contract. 

Reich will help devise a strategy to "move forward on the change of narrative from Guatemala to Washington, allowing representatives of both North American political parties that are willing to abandon the reference of the Guatemala of the 1970s and 1980s," according to the pact, which is referring to the era when the country was rocked by civil war and rampant abuses of human rights. 

Reich also will advance military cooperation between Guatemala and the US.

There are multiple layers of irony here. Reich was a part of Ronald Reagan's Central America policy, which helped produce the problems we see today, and now he's being hired to make everyone forget that fact. He was also part of a 1980s policy of strong military engagement, and he's being hired to resurrect that, at least to some degree.

It makes sense, though, for Otto Pérez Molina to hire someone who has experience putting Central America on the policy map. That the outcome was disastrous for Guatemalans is not mentioned, though OPM assuredly considered it necessary in the war against Marxist subversion.

CEPR also links to the disclosure document. Somehow the Cold War just never fully goes away.

Genocide in Guatemala

The Guatemalan legislature approved a non-binding resolution denying that genocide took place there. And, somehow, this was supposed to contribute to reconciliation.

It seems to be a way of saying that even if over 200,000 people were killed by the government, it does not rise to the level of "genocide." Given that many people, including a bishop, were murdered in the post-civil war era simply for talking about accountability, this sort of argument shouldn't come as a surprise.

As for the fact, the Guatemala truth commission lays everything out in horrific detail. Put simply, there were times when the Guatemalan government wanted to raze the countryside in order to kill all real or imagine "subversives," which meant 83% of victims were Mayan. The army was proficient at this in a way that sometimes defies description. That is something not up for debate.

According to the United Nations, genocide is defined as follows:

The convention defines genocide as any act committed with the idea of destroying in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. This includes such acts as:

Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to physically destroy the group (the whole group or even part of the group)
Forcefully transferring children of the group to another group

The criteria sound like Guatemala.

So why is all this happening? Because there are trials going on, and the debate about the resolution centered on questions of "revenge" and unfairness. If a trial is about some Indian deaths, that's one thing. If it's about genocide, that takes it up a notch. The resolution is not a law so cannot affect the judiciary directly, but it sends a message and seeks to change the context.

Supporters of the resolution openly said that the way to achieve reconciliation was to forget the past. "Forgetting" is the language of perpertrators and has played out in similar fashion across Latin America. There was this big conflict, mistakes were made on both sides, so let's not dredge up the past anymore and just move forward without revenge. In practice, of course, that would mean denying victims any justice at all.

Nicolás Maduro Channels John Foster Dulles

Nicolás Maduro argues that the protests in Venezuela are not homegrown and legitimate. Instead, they were cultivated, trained, and financed by an external power seeking military intervention:

Advirtió que en Venezuela se está aplicando un plan para llevar al país al "caos social, político y militar (...) para generar una espiral creciente de odio y confrontación de pueblo contra pueblo y luego justificar lo injustificable: el llamado a una intervención extranjera militar en los asuntos internos de Venezuela".

This sounds remarkably like the argument made by the U.S. as it pushed for the Declaration of Caracas in 1954. Focusing on Guatemala, Communism was an external threat for all:

This declaration of foreign policy made by the American republics in relation to dangers originating outside this hemisphere is designed to protect and not to impair the inalienable right of each American State freely to choose its own form of government and economic system and to live its own social and cultural life.

John Foster Dulles followed this up with a speech a few months later after the U.S. overthrew Jacobo Arbenz:

Above all, we can be grateful that there were loyal citizens of Guatemala who, in the face of terrorism and violence and against what seemed insuperable odds, had the courage and the will to eliminate the traitorous tools of foreign despots.

Of course, the contexts are different. But the language is very similar. The best way to demonize your political opponent is to claim they are puppets of a foreign power that seeks to overthrow the system and establish something antithetical to the interests of the region. The "region" for the Eisenhower was the hemisphere whereas for Venezuela now it is Latin America.

Outlawing Parties and Blowback in Latin America and Egypt

Outlawing political parties you don't like has a long history in Latin America. So as Egypt declares the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization we can look at, among other things, the Communist Party in Latin America.

I thought immediately of the ironically named Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy in Chile, which outlawed the Communist Party in 1948 and lasted for a decade. During that time, however, the party became even more popular than before and in a short time joined the coalition that brought Salvador Allende to the presidency. As in Egypt, outlawing the party was done in the name of national security but under it lay concern (or in the Egyptian case, knowledge) that the party could win elections. It needed to be proscribed so it could not have that chance.

Or you could look at the Guatemalan Labor Party, which was the Communist Party and had influence in Jacobo Arbenz's government when--like Mohamed Morsi--he was overthrown and the party was outlawed. The result was radicalization and decades of civil war.

The point here is not that these parties are somehow paragons of democracy, but rather you cannot successfully legislate them into oblivion. Even more importantly, there is a very high probability that in doing so you will make them more popular and powerful, and perhaps even more radical than they already are.

There almost certainly will be blowback, the suffering of unintended--but in this case entirely foreseeable--consequences. Back in July 2013 I made essentially the same point about supporting coups in Egypt vs. Latin America. I also wrote a piece for Foreign Policy on the problem of boycotting elections in Egypt vs. Latin America.

FRUS: Declassifying the Guatemala Invasion

As I've mentioned multiple times over the years, I am a very big fan of the Foreign Relations of the United States series, which I find endlessly fascinating. Via the State Department Historian's Twitter feed, here is a 1981 document trying to figure out how to compile the American Republics, 1952-1954 volume. The problem is that this covers the invasion of Guatemala and the CIA wasn't willing to declassify a lot of it and the NSC didn't want some of it released. The Office of the Historian wasn't too happy.

In any declassification controversy, there is a point at which HO must opt to cut its losses, but I regard the decision to go forward with publication in this case as premature for the following reasons:

• it puts the onus for failure to publish the record of, or to account for, a well-known covert episode squarely on the Department of State and the Office of the Historian, thereby seriously eroding the credibility of the series;

• it radically changes the nature of HO's mission, in spite of its current mandate, without the sanction of higher levels in the Department of State or the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation;

• it imposes a form of self-censorship on the series, and suggests that there is compelling logic to move the threshold of self-censorship from the declassification to the collection phase of the production process;

• it eliminates the possibility of testing the CIA's claim that there is a distinction between policy and operations, and that the former may be releasable;

• it forecloses an appeal to the NSC on deletions of materials appearing almost verbatim in previously published volumes, thereby encouraging the NSC to widen this practice;

• it establishes a strong negative precedent for other Foreign Relations volumes in progress, thereby jeopardizing a substantial aggregate of documentation; and,

• it weakens the position of the Department of State in dealing with the anticipated negative reaction of the consuming public.

Good for them! In the short term, though, the State Department lost. As the Cold War ended that began to change. In 2003, an entire volume was dedicated to Guatemala, with the following press release:

The operation to overthrow Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in 1954, a decisive event in U.S. relations with Latin America early in the cold war, is the topic of a retrospective volume of the Department of State's official documentary history, Foreign Relations of the United States, released on May 15, 2003. As part of a sub-series of the Foreign Relations series that documents the foreign policy of Dwight D. Eisenhower's administration, this retrospective volume supplements the 1983 publication of Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Volume IV, American Republics. The 1983 volume—which covered multilateral and bilateral relations with 20 American republics—provided an incomplete history of U.S. relations with Guatemala by not documenting the U.S. Government-approved role of the Central Intelligence Agency in the ouster of Arbenz. 

Partly in response to this omission, Congress passed legislation in 1991, which the President signed, mandating that the Foreign Relations series “shall be a thorough, accurate, and reliable documentary record of major United States foreign policy decisions and significant United States diplomatic activity” and requiring U.S. Government departments and agencies to provide Department of State historians with “full and complete access to the records pertinent to United States foreign policy decisions and actions.” 

In the early 1990s, Directors of Central Intelligence officially acknowledged 11 covert actions during the early cold war years, including the one in Guatemala. At the same time, Department of State historians gained fuller access to the CIA's files on Guatemala. The new volume is a product of this improved access. The Central Intelligence Agency has reviewed the volume for declassification, in coordination with its review of a larger collection of documents on the Guatemalan operation that it is releasing to the public at the National Archives.

One of the really ridiculous parts of this is that the CIA's role was very well known anyway. Already by the early 1980s there was a lot of solid scholarly work on the topic. Keeping information out of the public eye had nothing to do with national interest and everything to do with keeping extremely unsavory CIA activities out of the official record as much as possible.

Guatemala-Chiapas Circular Migration

Here is a really interesting article (in Spanish) by Jéssica Nájera Aguirre from the Colegio de México on circular migration between Guatemala and Chiapas, sometimes on a daily basis, always with the intention of maintaining residence in Guatemala. We're talking 300,000-400,000 people a year.

What I don't get, however, is how there is so much demand for labor when--at least on the surface--we might expect plenty of Mexican supply already to exist.

Given the high levels of poverty in Chiapas, is there not resentment on the part of Mexicans toward Guatemalans who cross the border and sell goods (which is the second largest source of employment)? Further, why is it that agricultural demand is not being met with local supply?

I don't know the answer to those questions, but what we see is a border region that is now transnational to a much greater degree than in the past. I imagine the reasons for this can be in found to a significant degree in Guatemala. The article does not address the issue directly, but clearly Guatemalans cross the border because opportunities at home are too scarce, and in recent years--more or less the last decade--the sense of insecurity has increased. And as we know from the U.S. side, once this type of migratory pattern starts, it does not stop.