December
22, 2023
It
was on the streets of Guatemala City in 1987 when I began awakening to Israel’s
partnership with the USA in facilitating genocide.
Today
we are “seeing genocide”–a decades-long cumulative “genocidal condition”–being
played out, as Israeli Modern Culture and Media Professor, Ariella Aisha
Azoulay argues. We see it in the US/Israeli onslaught against Gaza. My memories
and knowledge return to reflect on Israel’s connection to genocidal practice,
not only in Gaza but also in Guatemala.
In
Guatemala of the 1980s, a counterinsurgency by U.S.-backed military governments
slaughtered Maya indigenous and tens of thousands of other dissidents and
suspects. There was no social media to cover it. Most American citizens knew
nothing of it. The killing of this period in Guatemala has been recognized as
“genocide” by official analysts and by a thorough 12-volume investigative
report (CEH, 1999). This latter study made clear the appropriateness of the
phrase “acts of genocide” to name the crimes of Guatemala’s military against
the Maya, in spite of the military’s claim that they lacked “intent” to commit
genocide, that it was only motivated by economic, political or military
concerns (CEH, 1999, ch. 2, vol.3). As with Israel in Gaza of Palestine, so with
Guatemalan elites relative to the indigenous Maya, it is the historical record
of decades of accumulative killing, occupation, forced removal and
dehumanization, which establish the acts and conditions as those of genocide.
The
studies of Guatemala’s genocide, as I will show, reveal also the special role
of Israel in that slaughter under the aegis of US imperial interests.
I
was first in Guatemala in 1987 to interview educators and activists who were
important for my research about the role of religious beliefs among Maya
indigenous peoples as they waged resistance to their ongoing repression. 1987
was a date when Guatemala’s latest series of military governments had just
passed the worst of mass violence against Maya communities, the worst occurring
between 1981 and 1983 (see historian Grandin and anthropologist Schirmer). The
period is often called a “hidden/silent holocaust,” the “Guatemala holocaust”
or the “Maya holocaust.” And this is only one site of Israel’s involvement with
massive state violence and terrorism throughout Latin America. I had been
working with Guatemalans and others in the US to seek an end to U.S. military
aid to Guatemala.
Simultaneous
to my research, I was also in Guatemala to set up a program for students, one
that I ran at Princeton Theological Seminary for almost 15 years. It placed our
students in Central America, usually in Guatemala, for 8-weeks of summer
learning programs–not for missions, building projects, but primarily for
accompaniment, listening, and mutual understanding. Setting up this program
through consultations with many Guatemalans, and then guiding students through
this program remains one of the most valuable of my experiences over 40-plus
years of teaching at Princeton.
One
day in 1987, as the dust and smog of a Guatemala City street swirled about me,
I walked in conversation with an activist friend and mentor. We were
interrupted, startled by a loud order given by an authoritative command,
projected by a deep vibrating loudspeaker. Call it a Darth Vader like
sound-only sharper, slightly higher pitched, more threatening at high volume.
“What?”
I gasped with irritation.
“Oh
yeah,” clarified my colleague, “Witness our new police vehicles, courtesy of
the Israeli Government.”
“Israel
in Guatemala?” This disturbed me and started a line of thinking that persisted
in my research and writing for decades. The Israeli state’s destruction of over
400-500 villages in Palestine of 1947/1948 would for subsequent decades be
linked in my mind with the destruction of a similar number of villages
destroyed in Guatemala in the early 1980s. My thinking on this part of the
tangled web of world genocidal outcomes became a life-long concern in my
research and publications (and here).
I
knew something of Israel’s history of war and repression in Palestine, but I
did not know then, in 1987, of its connections to supplying police and military
equipment as well as advisors in technology and surveillance to Guatemala. The
nation’s police institutions were networked with military and surveillance
agencies. These armed agents of state became fearsome threats to its citizens
and brutal actors, especially after the 1954 CIA orchestrated coup against
Guatemala’s last democratically-elected government.
The
worst of the massacres in Maya villages were part of large military “sweeps”
through Guatemala’s northern and western highlands. U.S. Colonel George Maynes
told journalist Allan Nairn that he had worked with Guatemalan General
Benedicto Lucas Garcia to develop this sweep tactic. During the presidency of
Pentecostal general Efraín Ríos Montt, this sweep tactic was developed in March
1982 into a systematic strategy against the Maya who were seen as the major
“internal enemy” to the Guatemalan state. Nairn also reports that U.S. Green
Beret, Captain Jesse Garcia was even more specific about how he “was training
Guatemalan troops in the technique of how to ‘destroy towns’.” Maya indigenous
suffered over 625 massacres and also, by the government’s own admission, the
near total destruction of more than 600 villages in Guatemala’s rural
highlands. 100,000 fled to Mexico, over a million displaced within Guatemala.
It
was not just the Maya indigenous who suffered such atrocity. Urban,
non-indigenous dissidents or suspects were also rounded up and often
interrogated, tortured, disappeared. Over a million pages of reports from
Guatemalan police archives–yes, over a million pages now retrieved–confirm
this. Overall, more than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared in this war
in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996.
In
a later visit with seminary students in 1988 and accompanied by my family and
my two young children, I visited the forensics unit of Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo
(Mutual Support Group) in a small building in Guatemala City run by the
country’s las madres de los desaparecidos (“mothers of the disappeared”). The
next morning, we saw in the newspapers that the building had been firebombed by
police forces. Families looking for their disappeared loved ones (and doing so
with the support of international delegations of which I was a part), all
seeking forensic information that might expose those culpable for the
disappeared–this was a crime in Guatemala in these years. The pervasiveness of
violence in Guatemala, and the U.S. role in sustaining it, was dramatically marked
for me by this encounter.
Israel’s
connection to all this has been extensively researched.
Israel
became heavily involved with Guatemala’s military government, especially when
US President Jimmy Carter in 1977 cut off most of US military aid to Guatemala
due to its notorious record of human rights abuses. Investigative journalist
George Black, writing for NACLA, reported that Israel eagerly stepped in for
the US, becoming “Guatemala’s principal supplier. In 1980, the Army was fully
re-equipped with Galil rifles [Israeli manufactured] at a cost of $6 million.”
In later years, Guatemalan military elites were proud that they had quelled the
insurgency largely without US aid. Israel had played a much-valued proxy role
for US military suppliers.
In
an infamous massacre, one of many, the Israeli connection was clearly present.
At the village of Dos Erres on December 6, 1982. Israeli-trained commandos left
the village completely burned down, after shooting, torturing and/or raping
over 200 villagers. A UN investigative team reported: “All the ballistic
evidence recovered corresponded to bullet fragments from firearms and pods of
Galil rifles made in Israel” (Trans. of Spanish report, volume 6, appendix 1,
p. 410). This was just in the one village of Dos Erres. The same 12-volume
investigation reports that Israeli made Galil rifles were used throughout the
highlands, while US-made helicopters ferried troops into the highlands for what
the report argues were “acts of genocide” (report, volume 2, 314-423).
Alas,
it took me too long to learn how many were the other ways that Israel had been
involved in Guatemala’s massive state violence. Harvard-trained political
scientist Bishara Bahbah in his book, Israel, and Latin America: The Military
Connection (1986) termed Israeli military aid to Guatemala “A Special Case”
within a larger set of Israel’s armament sales to Latin America over the
decades. Other works make similar points, such as the study by Milton Jamail
and Margo Gutierrez, It’s No Secret: Israel’s Military Involvement in Central
America.
Scholars
continue to study Israel’s military contribution to militarizing today’s global
order. Israel is adept at marketing itself as provider of technology for the
“pacification” of the global order’s trouble spots. Israeli anthropologist,
Jeff Halper, documents this at length in his book, War Against the People:
Israel, The Palestinians, and Gl0bal Pacification (2015). Halper notes that in
Guatemala, Israel’s military aid and training were instrumental in setting up
forced-settlement, “re-adjustment” communities, or “model villages” designed to
monitor massacre survivors. This was even referred to by Guatemalan military
officers as a “Palestinization” of Guatemala’s post-massacre Maya lands, where
shock and awe and scorched earth campaigns left a devastated people (Halper,
154-155). Guatemala-born journalist, Victor Perera described the result “a
distorted replica of rural Israel.” Ian Almond, who recounted Perera’s
description stated that Israeli trained, Guatemalan Colonel Eduardo Wohlers, in
charge of the Plan of Assistance to Conflict Areas admitted “The model of the
kibbutz and moshav is planted firmly in our minds” (Bahbah, 164).
Here
are just a few further notes on Israel’s Guatemala connection:
As
early as 1978, joint discussions taking place in Israel, between Israeli and
Guatemalan defense ministers, focused on “the supply of weapons, munitions,
military communications equipment (including a computer system, tanks and
armored cars, field kitchens, other security items and even the possible supply
of the advanced fighter aircraft, the Kfir. They also talked about sending
Israeli personnel . . . to train and advise the Guatemalan army and the
internal security police (known as G-2) in counterinsurgency tactics”
(Rubenberg, n.33).
As
the Guatemalan sweeps against the Maya were beginning, in November of 1981, the
United States and Israel signed the Memorandum of Understanding Concerning
Strategic Cooperation. It focused on their joint efforts “outside the east
Mediterranean zone.”
Israel
started delivering its Arava STOL utility planes in 1977, purportedly only for
transporting non-military supplies, but as advertised by Israelis the planes
are “quickly convertible” to other purposes, even into being “a substitute for
the helicopter.” They were used for counterinsurgency activity in the Guatemala
highlands (Bahbah, 71,96, 100, 145-7).
General
Benedicto Lucas Garcia, Chief of Staff of the Guatemalan military and who
implemented the genocidal sweeps, expressed appreciation for ” ‘the advice and
transfer of electronic technology’ from Israel: when he was speaking at a
special ceremony for opening the Guatemalan Army School of Transmission and
Electronics (Bahbah, 163, citing Lucas Garcia as quoted in the Manchester
Guardian, January 1982).
According
to one comprehensive summary of Israel’s role in “Guatemala’s Dirty War,”
journalist Gabriel Schivone wrote in The Electronic Intifada about how Israel
pursued this proxy role for the U.S. One Israeli minister of economy, Yaakov
Meridor stated: “We will say to the Americans: Don’t compete with us in Taiwan;
don’t compete with us in South Africa; don’t compete with us in the Caribbean
or in other places where you cannot sell arms directly. Let us do it . . .
Israel will be your intermediary.”
Consider
Israeli General Mattityalu Peled, who was a trained fighter for Israel with the
early elite Zionist paramilitary Haganah, a military administrator over
occupied Gaza in the late 1950s, and also a general during the 1967 war. Peled
gave an honest explanation of Israel’s role in the global arms market: “Israel
has given its soldiers practical training in the art of oppression and in
methods of collective punishment. It is no wonder, then, that after their
release from the army, some of those officers choose to make use of their
knowledge in the service of dictators and that those dictators are pleased to
take in the Israeli experts” (Rubenberg n.6).
President
Ríos Montt’s 1982 coup, as he himself explained to ABC News, carried the day
because “many of our soldiers were trained by the Israelis.” Israeli trainers
and advisors for both military and police actions were reported to be at
150-200 in number, some reports stating 300 (Bahbah, 161). As the killing in
the highlands was at its height, Ríos Montt’s chief of staff, General Hector
Lopez Fuentes admitted, “Israel is our principal supplier of arms and the
number one friend of Guatemala in the world” (Rubenberg, n.61).
One
Israeli advisor who worked extensively in Guatemala, Lieutenant Colonel Amatzia
Shuali, had clearly taken the Israeli government’s message to heart. Shuali
mentioned to a fellow Israeli, “I don’t care what the Gentiles do with the
arms. The main thing is that the Jews profit.” The interviewer added, “Shuali
was too polite to make such a remark to a non-Israeli.” (Shuali quoted from
interview by the Cockburns in Dangerous Liaison, p. 221, 381.n10). Shuali’s
attitude was similar to that coming from the lips of a former head of the
Knesset foreign relations committee. About Israel’s relationship to Guatemala,
the Knesset member explained: “Israel is a pariah state, we cannot afford to
ask questions about ideology. The only type of regime that Israel would not aid
would be one that is anti-American” (Rubenberg, n.1).
Another
key Israeli strategist, Pesakh Ben Or, “perhaps the most prominent Israeli in
Guatemala” in the 1980s, was an agent for Israel Military Industries and for
Tadiran (an Israeli telecom group that serviced the military and surveillance
offices at the Guatemalan National Palace). He managed also to maintain “a
villa near Ramlah in Israel, complete with Guatemalan servants, pool and
stabling for seven racehorses” (Dangerous Liaison, 221 from interviews Oct 31,
1988 and from Aluf Ben, writing in Ha’ir, Sept 1987).
Much
of Israel’s military aid is part of an assistance mesh that includes
agricultural aid. A NACLA report by investigative journalist George Black
summarized from Guatemala: “. . . there is an interlocking mosaic of assistance
programs–weapons to help the Guatemalan Army crush the opposition and lay waste
to the countryside, security and intelligence advice to control the local
population, and agrarian development models to construct on the ashes of the
highlands.”
According
to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, as Bahbah summarizes,
“With Israeli help, Guatemala even built a munitions plant to manufacture
bullets for M-16, and Galil assault rifles.” This plant was opened in the
Guatemala town of Coban, a place in which I and my students had visited to
interview activists and church leaders. (Bahbah, 162).
Fifteen
years of research and consultation with scholars more expert than me on
Guatemala have kept me attuned to the US/Israel/Guatemala military connections.
There is more research on the connections during the years of genocide in
Guatemala than I can summarize here. I have found the similar patterns of
Israeli/US partnership when making visits to other sites of US military
interventions, overt and covert (in Peru, Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador,
Nicaragua and Chiapas, Mexico). These countries, too–but especially and always
Guatemala–gave me a first window out onto the US and Israel as partners in
genocide. Now, especially within the U.S. I as a citizen have to reckon with my
share of responsibility in all this, given the $3.8 billion dollars per year in
military aid that the US sends to Israel to preserve these ways of violence
against Palestinians and Guatemalans.
Our
pro-Palestinian movements must rise to challenge, once and for all, this
US/Israel partnership in the genocidal condition.
Mark
Lewis Taylor is Maxwell Upson Professor of Theology and Culture, Princeton
Theological Seminary.
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