...sometimes your country just sucks!
What your government has done to Guatemala is hard to believe, but visible in the eyes of the rural people, hearable in the voices talking about suffer and loss and perceptible in any Guatemalteco fighting for truth, reconciliation and human rights.
From Wiki:
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état (18–27 June 1954) was the CIA covert operation that deposed President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, with Operation PBSUCCESS — paramilitary invasion by an anti-Communist "army of liberation". In the early 1950s, the politically liberal, democratically elected Árbenz government had effected the socio-economics of Decree 900 (27 June 1952), such as the exproperation, for peasant use and ownership, of unused prime-farmlands that national and multinational corporations had earlier set aside, as reserved business assets. The land-reform of Decree 900 especially threatened the agricultural monopoly of the United Fruit Company, the multinational cooperation that owned 42 per cent of the arable land of Guatemala; which landholdings either had been bought by, or been ceded to, the UFC by the military dictatorship who preceded the Árbenz Government of Guatemala. In response to the expropriation of prime-farmland assets, the United Fruit Company asked the U.S. governments of presidents Harry Truman (1945–53) and Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61) to act diplomatically, economically, and militarily against Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.The thirty-six-year Guatemalan Civil War, which began on 13 November 1960, resulted in the deaths of 140,000 to 250,000 Guatemalans.
From Amnesty International:
In this context, Amnesty International documented widespread human rights violations, amounting to crimes against humanity – including extra-judicial executions, disappearances and torture – carried out by Guatemala’s armed forces and their supporters in armed “civil patrols”.
Massacres of whole villages of indigenous non-combatants were commonplace, with troops often torturing the inhabitants – including by raping women and girls –
before systematically killing them.
Among the worst massacres took place in the village of Plan de Sánchez, near the central Guatemala town of Rabinal, in July 1982, leaving 268 rural and indigenous people dead.
Early in the morning of 18 July 1982, two mortar grenades were dropped on Plan de Sánchez as rural peasants were making their way to trade at the market in Rabinal. That afternoon, some 60 people in military uniforms and brandishing assault rifles descended on the village and began rounding up its Maya-Achí indigenous inhabitants.
Around 20 girls between the ages of 12 and 20 were taken to a house where they were abused, raped and murdered. Other children were beaten to death, while some adults were imprisoned in a house before troops fired on them indiscriminately and attacked them with hand-grenades.
Nine months into General Ríos Montt’s rule in December 1982, a Guatemalan elite army unit entered Dos Erres in the northern Petén region, where they tortured and killed some 250 men, women and children over the course of three days before razing the village. Again, many of the women and girls were raped, and numerous villagers, including children, were thrown into the village well.
When I listened to the cruel and bloody detailed story of the "Operation Scorched Earth", taking place here in Guatemala in the 1980, as one of the aftermaths of the interference from the US Government, I had tears in my eyes!
Of course your could argue: "It was not me" or state "I cannot be responsible for the things happened in the past"...
...But let me tell you: from my own cultural experience as a German and my experience about dealing with my cultural history: You have a responsibility!
- Firstly to remember and to remind everyone about what has happened in the past and secondly to support the victims of your own cultural heritage in any way.
Rarely before I have been so touched by the courage Guatemaltecos have by revealing the truth, by the beauty of their culture and the nightmares entire communities have had to go through.
Until today communities face problems caused by the greed and ignorance of Western governments and multinational companies. The peace agreement from 1996 is in many eyes just a piece of paper, legitimizing further discrimination and human rights abuses. The health care system as well as the education system are close to break down while international companies granting free access to natural resources while the corrupt national and local governments as well as regional stakeholder receive all the money and adventages. Those extraction sites are highly criticized worldwide, see for example the Grasberg Mine in West Papua, BP in the Niger Delta, the timber conflict in Cambodia or Columbias issues with the extraction of coca, poppy and oil.
However, just the other day the government passed a law allowing to install a new secret police: just like one of those responsible for massacres and killing fields.
Support the cause of the Gualtematecos, learn for yourself about the hurtful history
Saschi, wahr gesprochen!
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