Guatemala apologizes to people displaced for dam

Guatemala's president has apologized to 33 communities of indigenous Achi people who were forced to abandon their homes to make way for construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam in the north of the Central American country (with funding from the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank).

President Otto Perez Molina (accused of human rights abuses himself) says he asks forgiveness for atrocities and other human rights violations suffered by those communities over the project, which occurred during Guatemala's civil war. Some people were assassinated and others had their land expropriated.

The apology was delivered Saturday to a gathering of Achi as officials provided details of an agreement to provide $153.8 million in compensation for the damage inflicted on them. The money will be distributed among the 33 communities over the next 15 years. (Yahoo News)

Chixoy Dam massacres

In 1978, in the face of civil war, the Guatemalan government proceeded with its economic development program, including the construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. Financed in large part by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, the Chixoy Dam was built in Rabinal, a region of the department of Baja Verapaz historically populated by the Maya Achi. To complete construction, the government completed voluntary and forcible relocations of dam-affected communities from the fertile agricultural valleys to the much harsher surrounding highlands. When hundreds of residents refused to relocate, or returned after finding the conditions of resettlement villages were not what the government had promised, these men, women, and children were kidnapped, raped, and massacred by paramilitary and military officials. More than 440 Maya Achi were killed in the village of Río Negro alone, and the string of extrajudicial killings that claimed up to 5,000 lives between 1980 and 1982 became known as the Río Negro Massacres. The government officially declared the acts to be counterinsurgency activities - although local church workers, journalists and the survivors of Rio Negro deny that the town ever saw any organized guerrilla activity. (Wikipedia)

How the Media Got Guatemala's Dos Erres Massacre Wrong

NPR received a Peabody award for their piece on the 1982 massacre, but they omit one important fact; the US directly sponsored the Guatemalan special forces that brutally killed thousands of civilians

The Real News

Israel’s Hand in Guatemala’s Genocide

The Guatemalan genocide of the 1980s does not just implicate President Ronald Reagan and his senior aides but the Israeli government which secretly supplied helicopters, guns and computers that were used to hunt down and exterminate Ixil Indians and other perceived enemies of the state, reports Robert Parry.

At the height of Guatemala’s mass slaughters in the 1980s, including genocide against the Ixil Indians, the Reagan administration worked with Israeli officials to provide helicopters that the Guatemalan army used to hunt down fleeing villagers, according to documentary and eyewitness evidence. During testimony at the recent genocide trial of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, one surprise was how often massacre survivors cited the Army’s use of helicopters in the scorched-earth offensives. Journalist Allan Nairn, who covered the war in Guatemala and attended the Rios Montt trial, said in an interview, “one interesting thing that came out in the trial, as witness after witness testified, was a very substantial number of them talked about fleeing into the mountains and being bombed, attacked and machine gunned from U.S. planes and helicopters.

On Aug. 1, 1983, NSC aides Oliver North and Alfonso Sapia-Bosch reported to National Security Advisor William P. Clark that his deputy Robert “Bud” McFarlane was planning to exploit his Israeli channels to secure the helicopters for Guatemala, according to a document that I discovered at Reagan’s presidential library. McFarlane’s approach to Israel for the helicopters was successful, according to former Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe, who described some of the history behind Israel’s activities in Guatemala in his 1992 memoir, Profits of War.

Ben-Menashe traced the Israeli arms sales to Guatemala back to a private network established in the 1970s by Gen. Ariel Sharon during a gap when he was out of the government. Sharon’s key representative in Guatemala was a businessman named Pesach Ben-Or, and through that channel, Israel supplied military gear to Guatemala’s security services in the 1980s, Ben-Menashe wrote.

By Robert Parry on Consortiumnews

Guatemala leader apologises for 1954 coup

The Guatemalan president, Alvaro Colom, has issued an official apology to the family of the former president Jacobo Arbenz, 57 years after a US-backed coup violently removed him from power. Colom, who apologised under a settlement worked out with Arbenz's family by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, said on Thursday the coup was a "crime [against] the Guatemalan society committed by the CIA and Guatemalans with bad intentions".

Speaking during a ceremony at the former government headquarters, in the presence of Jacobo Arbenz Vilanova, the only surviving son of the former president, Colom said: "As head of state, as constitutional president of the republic and as the military's commander in chief, I hereby wish to request the forgiveness of the Arbenz Vilanova family for this great crime. "It was above all a crime against him, his wife, his family, but also a historic crime for Guatemala. This day changed Guatemala and we still haven't recovered."

More on Al Jazeera English

Guatemala victims of US syphilis study still haunted by the 'devil's experiment'

In 1946 orphans in Guatemala City, along with prisoners, military conscripts and prostitutes, had been selected for a medical experiment which would torment many, and remain secret, for more than six decades.

The US, worried about GIs returning home with sexual diseases, infected an estimated 1,500 Guatemalans with syphilis, gonorrhoea and cancroid to test an early antibiotic, penicillin.

The US government admitted to the experiment in October when the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the health secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, issued a joint statement apologising for "such reprehensible research" under the guise of public health. Barack Obama phoned his Guatemalan counterpart, Alvaro Colom, to say sorry too.

Susan Reverby, a professor at Wellesley College in the US, uncovered the experiment while researching the Tuskegee syphilis study in which hundreds of African American men were left untreated for 40 years from the 1930s.

The Guatemalan study went further by deliberately infecting its subjects. Not only did it violate the Hippocratic oath to do no harm but it echoed Nazi crimes exposed around the same time at the Nuremberg trials.

More on The Guardian