Genocide in Latin America & Caribbean 1492 – 2010
While the population of the Aboriginal peoples in North, Central and South America at this time is a matter of debate, various estimates put the pre-colonial population somewhere between 8 million to well over 100 million. On the island of Hispaniola alone, it is estimated that close to 3 million Taino people lost their lives between 1492 and 1550.
Regardless of the overall population at the time of contact, the initial wave of Spanish colonialism and subsequent colonial expansion from other European countries such as Britain, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands decreased the overall population of the region by as much as 90-95% in a little over 100 years from the time of Columbus’ arrival.
The reasons for this drastic decrease were varied. Some were directly murdered by Europeans through warfare, death marches, forced relocation to barren lands, destruction of their main food supply, and poisoning. The European colonizers carried out these killings in the name of their Christian god, as they believed the Aboriginal peoples to be uncivilized sub-humans who had to be either converted or killed. Race played an important factor here as the Europeans saw themselves as superior to the Aboriginal peoples who were darker skinned and thus believed to be evil.
Aboriginal peoples were also killed as a means for the colonizers to steal vast quantities of wealth, including gold and silver, which they used to further their colonial exploits. Many Aboriginal peoples in the Americas also died indirectly as a result of contact with introduced diseases for which they had no resistance -- mainly smallpox, influenza, and measles.
Oppression continues into the 21st century, through actions by transnational corporations, governments, and religious organizations which systematically destroys Aboriginal culture and religious heritage. Yet, Aboriginal peoples from across the Americas continue to resist today, as they have done over the past 500 plus years. This past year, tens of thousands of Aboriginal peoples from across the Americas protested the anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas and the continued repression they face due to systemic racism, sexism, and classism.
The genocide against the Aboriginal peoples of the Americas was one of the most massive and longest lasting genocidal campaigns in human history. It started, like all genocides, with the oppressor treating the victims as inferior. It continued until almost all people were wiped of the face of the earth, along with much of their language, culture, and religion.
“Silent Holocaust”
El Mozote massacre
| El Mozote Massacre | |
|---|---|
 The memorial at El Mozote | |
| Location | El Mozote, El Salvador |
| Date | December 11, 1981 |
| Target | civilian residents of Mozote and neighbouring villages |
| Attack type | Shooting, grenades, decapitation |
| Deaths | 733–900 |
. Following a "certification" by the administration of US President Ronald Reagan that no massacre had taken place and that Salvadoran forces were working to respect human rights, the Democratic-controlled Congress agreed to continue aid.
While democracies and respect for human rights were never honored in Central American history, brutal military dictatorships which committed mass murder of local populations were a particular feature of the historical landscape between the 1930s and the 1990s and new forms of violence continue. During the days of the death squads and military dictatorships, governmental and landowning elites would order the killing of dissidents with impunity; such as the case of the 33,000 peasants massacred in El Salvador in 1933, 150,000 peasants who were slaughtered during the Guatemalan civil war between 1954 and 1996, the 70,000 killed by the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua in the 1970s, the 50,000 Nicaraguans who lost their lives in the US supported Contra war against Nicaragua in the 1980s, or the 75,000 Salvadorans killed in the 1980s.
Guatemalan Mayan Genocide
Guatemalan Genocide against Mayan Peoples
Death Toll: 250,000
200,000 murdered, 50,000 “dissapeared”
Guatemalan Genocide exceeded that of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Chile combined.
500,000 to 1.5 million Mayan civilians fled to other regions within the country or became refugees abroad
In 1968 the Guatemalan Army began the systematic slaughter of the native Mayan population. This period of massacre is sometimes referred to as the “Silent Holocaust”, and led to extermination en masse of native Mayan communities. The death toll in the Guatemalan Genocide exceeded that of El Salvador, Nicaragua, Argentina, and Chile combined. Guatemalan government forces – buoyed by financing and training from the United States – committed over 90% of the human rights violations during the war.
“After having killed our wives, they brought out our children.
They grabbed their feet and beat their heads against the house posts. I had six children. They all died, and my wife as well.. All my life my heart will cry because of it.”- sole survivor of San Francisco massacre in Huehuetenango, Guatemala
On July 18, 1982 the President of Guatemala, Gen. Rios Montt, explained his own stark domestic policies to a nation that was enduring its fourth decade of civil war. “If you are with us,” Gen. Montt explained, “we’ll feed you; if not, we’ll kill you.” Indeed, during his two-year rule, Gen. Montt’s paramilitary death squads killed tens of thousands of mostly indigenous Guatemalans who insisted on feeding themselves. Among those who died at Montt’s hands were hundreds of villagers at Plan de Sanchez, who were cut down just hours after Mott’s callous remarks.
According to a 2004 report on the massacre by the Inter-American Court on Human rights, Montt’s forces separated the children and the young women aged from about 15 to 20. Then the massacre began. First they tortured the old people, saying they were guerrillas, then they threw two grenades and fired their guns. Finally they sprayed petrol around and set fire to the house… The next day, Buenaventura Manuel Jeronimo emerged from his hiding place to see the destruction they had caused. Along with Eulalio Grave Ramírez and his brothers Juan, Buenaventura, and Esteban, they put out the flames that were still consuming the bodies. Those that weren’t totally charred showed signs of torture, as did the naked bodies of the youngest women.
Jeronimo told a reporter two decades later that the terror continued for days after the killings stopped:We survivors hid in the forests those nights, as soldiers were still patrolling, looking for any villager they could find. In the night, dogs would come and eat at the bodies of our loved ones. We would try and bury them, but we didn’t have enough time, and still the dogs would come, dig them up, and eat at them.
Predictably, US president Ronald Reagan celebrated the anti-communist sensibilities of Gen. Montt, who was an evangelical Christian minister and a personal friend of both Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
“President Ríos Montt,” Reagan explained, “is a man of great personal integrity and commitment . . . . I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.”
I think reagan is right people like him n rios montt must be slaughtered to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice !!!
Truth denied
The Guatemalan Government never officially acknowledged the report; there has been no attempt to bring those responsible to justice. After its release the Minister of Defence said the report was ‘a partial truth’, while the state tourism bureau complained the negative publicity would scare away visitors. Meanwhile, nothing changed for the Mayan majority and human rights violations continue today in the face of worsening poverty.
Before the Genocide
Guatemala is a mainly mountainous country in Central America, just south of Mexico and less than half the size of the UK. It was once at the heart of the remarkable Mayan civilisation, which flourished until the 10th century AD. When Spanish explorers conquered this region in the 16th century, the Mayans became slaves in their own ancient home. They are still the underprivileged majority of Guatemala’s 12.3m population.At the end of the 19th century Guatemala came under the rule of a dictator who put his country on the economic map by encouraging landowners to buy and run coffee plantations. The Roman Catholic church was deprived of its lands for the purpose, and within 30 years Americans were the major investors. A powerful army and police force were set up to protect the wealthy landowners and their flourishing businesses. The Indians, with the status of peasants and labourers, saw nothing of the wealth being generated under a series of grasping dictators.
But in 1944 the current dictator was overthrown, and a new, enlightened government introduced reforms which put the interests of the native people first. Indians in both town and country were given consideration, social security, and education. Labourers could now set up workers’ unions, and this gave them political strength as well.
However, attempts at land reform brought Guatemala’s ‘Ten Years of Spring’ to an end. When the Guatemalan government planned a programme of compulsory purchase of land so that it would come under State ownership, the USA, its business interests threatened, set up a scare: ‘hostile communists were at work’.
America organised and trained a corps of eager Guatemalan exiles, then launched an invasion to bring down the government. In and after this blood-stained encounter – in which thousands died – workers’ unions and political parties were suppressed, other reforms cancelled, and dissidents hunted down for assassination.
Many appalled liberals fled into exile (including the young doctor ‘Che’ Guevara). A military dictator was helped to take over the government, followed by a string of right-wing military leaders dedicated to eliminating the left wing. In 1962 their policies resulted in a civil war that was to last over 35 years.
The oppressed people did their best. Despite the civil war, church leaders helped peasants to reclaim unwanted marshland, build co-operative villages and sustain both their traditional culture and new left-wing politics. Work was done to teach and maintain literacy and good health practices. A quiet, non-violent opposition movement for civil rights began to grow.
But so did armed resistance groups. Guerrilla organisations were founded, adopting Marxist communist views to justify their use of violence; they got some backing from Cuba. By 1981 three guerrilla groups had merged to create Guatemala’s United Front, Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG). In that year, a small group of Mayan leaders marched to Guatemala City and occupied the Spanish Embassy, in nonviolent protest against government oppression of the native people. Though the Spanish ambassador urged the government to respond peacefully, his embassy was deliberately burned down, killing all the protesters together with all the Embassy staff (the ambassador survived).
The Genocide
The Guatemalan government, using the Guatemalan Army and its counter-insurgency force (whose members defined themselves as ‘killing machines’), began a systematic campaign of repressions and suppression against the Mayan Indians, whom they claimed were working towards an communist coup.Their 2-year series of atrocities is sometimes called ‘The Silent Holocaust’.
In the words of the 1999 UN-sponsored report on the civil war: ‘The Army’s perception of Mayan communities as natural allies of the guerrillas contributed to increasing and aggravating the human rights violations perpetrated against them, demonstrating an aggressive racist component of extreme cruelty that led to extermination en masse of defenceless Mayan communities, including children, women and the elderly, through methods whose cruelty has outraged the moral conscience of the civilised world.’
Working methodically across the Mayan region, the army and its paramilitary teams, including ‘civil patrols’ of forcibly conscripted local men, attacked 626 villages. Each community was rounded up, or seized when gathered already for a celebration or a market day. The villagers, if they didn’t escape to become hunted refugees, were then brutally murdered; others were forced to watch, and sometimes to take part. Buildings were vandalised and demolished, and a ‘scorched earth’ policy applied: the killers destroyed crops, slaughtered livestock, fouled water supplies, and violated sacred places and cultural symbols.
Children were often beaten against walls, or thrown alive into pits where the bodies of adults were later thrown; they were also tortured and raped. Victims of all ages often had their limbs amputated, or were impaled and left to die slowly. Others were doused in petrol and set alight, or disembowelled while still alive. Yet others were shot repeatedly, or tortured and shut up alone to die in pain. The wombs of pregnant women were cut open. Women were routinely raped while being tortured. Women – now widows – who lived could scarcely survive the trauma: ‘the presence of sexual violence in the social memory of the communities has become a source of collective shame’.
Covert operations were also carried out by military units called Commandos, backed up by the army and military intelligence. They carried out planned executions and forced ‘disappearances’. Death squads (some of which in time came under the army’s umbrella), largely made up of criminals, murdered suspected ‘subversives’ or their allies; under dramatic names, such as ‘The White Hand’ or ‘Eye for an Eye’, they terrorised the country and contributed to the deliberate strategy of psychological warfare and intimidation.
URNG’s guerrillas could not provide assistance to the Mayan Indians: there were too few of them. There were certainly too few to be a real threat to the State, whose massive and brutal campaign was largely driven by long-term racist prejudice against the Mayan majority. Of the human rights violations recorded, the State and the Army were responsible for 93%, the guerrillas for 3%.
Throughout the period of the genocide, the USA continued to provide military support to the Guatemalan government, mainly in the form of arms and equipment. The infamous guerrilla training school, the School of the Americas in Georgia USA, continued to train Guatemalan officers notorious for human rights abuses; the CIA worked with Guatemalan intelligence officers, some of whom were on the CIA payroll despite known human rights violations. US involvement was understood to be strategic – or, put another way, indifferent to the fate of a bunch of Indians – in the wider context of the Cold War and anti-Communist action.
The Archive’s Guatemala project has a long track record of obtaining and authenticating internal records on Guatemalan repression. In 1999, Ms. Doyle obtained a “death squad diary”—a logbook of kidnappings, secret detentions, torture, disappearances and executions between 1983 and 1985 kept by the feared “Archivo,” a secret intelligence unit controlled by President Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores.
Although the military claimed the document was a fabrication, a team of experts led by Doyle was able to establish its authenticity. The logbook has been accepted as official, authentic evidence by the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.
The appearance of the original “Operation Sofía” documents provides the first public glimpse into secret military files on the counterinsurgency campaign that resulted in massacres of tens of thousands of unarmed Mayan civilians during the early 1980s, and displaced hundreds of thousands more as they fled the Army’s attacks on their communities.
The records contain explicit references to the killing of unarmed men, women and children, the burning of homes, destruction of crops, slaughter of animals and indiscriminate aerial bombing of refugees trying to escape the violence.
Among the 359 pages of original planning documents, directives, telegrams, maps, and hand-written patrol reports is the initial order to launch the operation issued on July 8, 1982, by Army Chief of Staff Héctor Mario López Fuentes.
The records make clear that “Operation Sofía” was executed as part of the military strategy of Guatemala’s de facto president, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, under the command and control of the country’s senior military officers, including then Vice Minister of Defense Gen. Mejía Víctores. Both men are defendants in the international genocide case in front of the Spanish Court.
In 1999, the UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission concluded that the Guatemalan Army had committed “massacres, human rights violations, and other atrocities” against Mayan communities that “illustrated a government policy of genocide.”
Report: Maya Indians suffered genocide
By GLENN GARVIN and EDWARD HEGSTROMHerald Staff Writers
GUATEMALA CITY — A Guatemalan truth commission investigating the country’s vicious 36-year civil war issued a final report Thursday placing the blame for most of the 200,000 deaths on a ”racist” Guatemalan government that received considerable support from the United States.
Guatemala’s Maya Indian population, which suffered ”acts of genocide,” bore the brunt of the government’s repression, the report said. More than 80 percent of the victims of human rights abuses during the war were Indians, the Commission for Historical Clarification concluded.
”The massacres, scorched-earth operations, forced disappearances and executions of Maya authorities, leaders and spiritual guides were not only an attempt to destroy the social base of the guerrillas,” the report said, ”but above all, to destroy the cultural values that ensured cohesion and collective action in Maya communities.”
Although the report was couched in relatively moderate language when it came to assigning blame to non-Guatemalan participants, Commission Chairman Christian Tomuschat accused the United States of being responsible for much of the bloodshed.
As seething U.S. diplomats looked on, Tomuschat said the Guatemalan army carried out hundreds of massacres of civilians at a time when ”the United States government and U.S. private companies exercised pressure to maintain the country’s archaic and unjust socioeconomic structure.”
Tomuschat said the CIA and other U.S. agencies ”lent direct and indirect support to some illegal state operations.” This encouraged a Guatemalan military government that was committing genocide against the country’s Indian population, he added.
Tomuschat spoke at the unveiling of the commission’s 3,600-page report on human rights abuses during the civil war that ended in 1996. The report took 18 months to assemble.
Hundreds of spectators — many of them former Marxist guerrillas who battled the government — burst into wild applause after Tomuschat, a German law professor, finished his attack on the United States.
Cold War impact cited
The report’s 100-page executive summary, while noting that Cold War policies in both the United States and Cuba ”had a bearing” on the war, said the Guatemalan government used a relatively small Marxist insurgency as an excuse for the ”physical annihilation” of all its political opponents in a war that claimed 200,000 lives, the vast majority of them civilians.
About 200 000 people were killed in Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, which pitted Marxist guerrillas against a series of right-wing governments and ended with peace accords in 1996. Most of the victims were Mayan Indian peasants, many killed in massacres during army or paramilitary sweeps through rural areas.
Berger, a conservative businessman, pledged $9-million to compensate civilians who lost relatives and property in the conflict. He said the amount was “important but insufficient” and promised more funds when state finances were more stable.
The new government’s head of security and defence, Otto Perez Molina, himself a retired general, denied genocide had taken place in Guatemala. “There was no genocide because there was no attempt to exterminate a race. This was a battleground for the United States and Russia, and communism against capitalism. We provided the dead and they provided the ideology,” he said.
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