Guatemala: a new form of totalitarianism?
Bowen, Roger L.
_9 I . . . . . . . . . . STATE TERRORISM & CYCLES OF "DISAPPEARANCES" Guatemala: a new form of totalitarianism? GORDON L. BOWEN Everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual...
...ability to persevere toward these ends depends upon our leaders' ability to convey to our adversaries the perception that the U.S...
...In 1983, Guatemalan authorities were confronted with these facts by the OAS's InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights...
...Organizations deprived of their natural leaders suffer further from subsequent officially-targeted "disappearances" of the leaders' replacements...
...What a terrible situation for these poor people, i think the main 'crime' of those who have died is that they managed to get an education...
...The time may soon come to confront what the true costs are of standing shoulder to shoulder into the indefinite future with the regime, as the Reagan administration now asks us to do...
...Cycles of "disappearances" thus have proven to be functional to the internal and external objectives of the rulers of the Guatemalan state...
...Commonweal: 78...
...The U.S...
...Moreover, in mid 1983, thirty-four professors were missing and presumed dead...
...Oxfam America reported in 1982 that one development worker contided to them that all graduates of his training courses were in exile after the 1979-82 targeted violence, or were, like eightytwo of his graduates, killed in the violence...
...It is to fill this need, and in this light, that the apparently irrational, apparently secondary, repression of other social leaders -- those well beyond anything approaching an organized political opposition- can be understood...
...Amnesty International documented fifty-three cases of official assassination of schoolteachers in 1980 . - many conducted in front of the students...
...It was largely with the Central American context in mind that Jeane Kirkpatrick made the distinction between totalitarian governments and traditional autocratic, or authoritarian, ones...
...However, their plight has been no worse than that of the personnel of the nation's major public university, the University of San Carlos (U.S.C...
...Social "learning" has occurred...
...Indeed, Guatemalan violence once gave birth to the term which most exactly shows the method of total social control: "the disappearance...
...Targeted in this manner, unions, church cooperatives, and opposition political parties are deprived of their "brains...
...The Guatemala City daily La Prensa Libre detailed seventy-five others in the first five months of 1981...
...Since the primary function of opposition figures "disappearing" always aims at better control over others' behavior, this chilling dynamic must therefore be reestablished even if it is necessary to find some other human flotsam...
...How else can American officials spurn our own "disappearing" employees...
...Once buttressed by aid and arms, there is little incentive to discontinue this cycle of state terrorism...
...Weeks later, in March 1983, the Defense Ministry admitted that Ortiz and friends in fact had been detained by its forces...
...Grade school educators in great numbers may one day be needed for Guatemala to develop its human resources...
...Rather than become unarmed targets for future "disappearance," potential leaders quite reasonably come to view clandestine opposition activity as a more reasonable personal response...
...The "disappearance" has become as central to the continuing primacy of the leading institution (the Guatemalan Armed Forces) as the ever available labor camp "Gulag Archipelago" is to the Soviet Communist Party in its "mature" form of totalitarianism...
...professors and students regularly have been served up as toys to be torn apart by the latter-day Torquemadas of the Guatemalan military...
...They were not political but they must have been seen as possible threats for the future...
...to teach illiterate Indians...
...has long-term interests in the region which require the continuing support of the U.S...
...The growth of less visible, clandestine opposition organizations -- a byproduct of the ruling tactics of the governing state terrorists -- then lends an air of plausibility to additional, but more random, repression...
...and allied oil supplies...
...This oil- and mineral-rich nation desperately needs to develop its human resources through education, yet educators keep getting assassinated...
...Its shadow is not unique to the flawed character of a particular state leader, or leaders...
...Such consorting may require that we pay a far higher cost than present billing suggests...
...Internally, respites serve the interests of state officials by enabling them to identify the next generation of bona fide social and political leaders...
...T HAT CHILL still hangs over the "Land of Eternal Spring," as the tourist brochures would have us see the nation, "Disappearing" politicians, then unionists and priests, then teachers, all appear essential to a military regime bent on complete immobilization of society...
...Organized, legal opposition activity wanes as thesocial will to engage in it atrophies...
...At first, Mejia denied any official responsibility, but later in the interview he sought to justify the crime by stating that she was the spouse of a "known subversive...
...Some of the Indian parents have asked what sense does it make to have their boys and girls receive an education if it only marks them for assassination...
...Amnesty International found 1980 to be even more shocking: twenty-seven professors and seventy-one students "disappeared" or were assassinated that year...
...The preceding day, she, her two teenaged daughters and her son had' been abducted by "unknown" gunmen...
...Rather, violence in Guatemala wanes because it is functional to the totalitarian order which creates the violence...
...Commonweal: 76 Behind the apparently extraordinary excesses implicit in government use of the tactic of "disappearances" lies a continuing strategy, one that sustains the continuous influence of the extant beneficiaries within the system...
...Graciela Morales Herrera...
...In another recent case, in January 1983, Amnesty international presented detailed evidence of the complicity of official security forces in the abduction of History Professor Rolando Enrique Medina, including the automobile license numbers of the vehicles used to kidnap him...
...Perceiving the reality of Guatemala need not be a foggy blur of Orwellian doublespeak...
...As with all "disappearances," the current government of Gen...
...In October 1983, two employees of U.S.-sponsored projects (Felipe Ralac Xioloj, a linguist, and Julieta Esperanza Sanchez Castillo, an administrato0 vanished...
...and denying to the SoViet Union regional, and ultimately global, supremacy...
...strategy is said to be aiming to prevent this in Central America...
...As Hannah Arendt saw thirty years ago, arbitrary terror is a structural pillar of these regimes...
...In scale, it has been dwarfed by its larger cousins (i.e., Brazil) with their larger numbers of zealots, but never has it been exceeded in cruel ferocity...
...Congress tends to favor continuation of the arms embargo that was imposed, 1977-198 l, as a result of Congressional findings that the Guatemalan military ruled through a pattern of gross human fights violations...
...Taken from the name of a mid- 1960s human GORDON L. BOWEN is assistant professor of political science at Mary BaMwin College in Staunton, Virginia...
...Their leaders, again, became targets in the next cycle of "disappearances," 1978-1981...
...Yet, in each cycle the growing social awareness of the lethal cycle diminishes the number of clear, opposition-linked, political targets...
...Confronted by the discovery of their corpses, the Defense Ministry finally admitted that the army, in fact, had killed all four...
...Oxfam America, as well as other reputable international human fights groups, reported the brazen broad daylight methods involved in these officially-directed killings...
...Benito Mussolini, 1932 A TOTAL GOVERNMENT is one in which all social relations are controlled and politicized...
...These claims lack credibility: in February 1983, as Defense Minister (prior to seizing power in August 1983), Gen Mej~a himself heatedly denied any army involvement in the "disappearance" of anthropologist-linguist Patricio Ortiz Maldonado and three companions...
...No arrests have occurred in any of these cases...
...Periodic lulls, momentary respites in the violence also appear to be a necessary part of the cycle...
...In the short run it may be argued with some plausibility, as the Kissinger Commission recently has, that an alliance with these state terrorists can yield some advantage to the U.S...
...GORDON L. BOWEN Everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value outside of the State . . . Outside the State there can be neither individuals nor groups...
...The combined effect of several years of targeted "disappearances," then generalized repression, is to induce periodic respites in social and political mobilization of the opposition...
...Without a single Nicaraguan or Cuban military unit becoming involved, without subjection to an all-encompassing Marxist-Leninist doctrine, Guatemala is nonetheless a land where the state, through terrorism, looms over all that is "human or spiritual...
...M ANY HAVE FALLEN in the current cycle of violence: labor leaders, attorneys, missionaries, priests, and more...
...Founded in 1676 and accorded legal autonomy under several now-suspended Constitutions, U.S.C...
...Violence in Guatemala wanes not due to periodic "strategic retreats" by guerrillas who disrupt an otherwise stable social order...
...is aiding an improving situation, the balance of forces in the U.S...
...According to the O.A.S., in the late 1970s, among the population aged ten years and older half are illiterate...
...rather, all military personnel have been pardoned in advance for any crimes committed...
...The 1983 killings of employees of U.S.A.I.D...
...The specter of the "disappearance" is not episodic, nor transient, nor optional...
...They then become targets for the future...
...During these calm moments, the up side of this grisly cycle, an opportunity is provided for the principal power of the region, the U.S., to extend military and economic assistance...
...Although Kirkpatrick's dichotomy, an important intellectual prop of administration foreign policy, has been subjected to many criticisms, none could be more concrete than the example of Guatemala, where tactics of repression have brought into existence what qualifies as a new form of totalitarian government...
...An educated society such as ours may itself be torn asunder at its most basic moral foundations if it is asked to accept the necessity of perpetual cycles of murder of teachers and priests by such "friends...
...free presses, churches, and educational institutions wither and die...
...As the totalitarian state matures, cycles of terror must periodically recur...
...The practical purpose of the distinction was to steel American citizens and elites to supporting otherwise unpalatable regimes against overthrow by revolutionaries...
...It is vital that there appear to be periodic improvements in state protection of human fights...
...When opposition leaders vanish, their colleagues and followers are prodded to cower, to take flight, lest they, too, "disappear...
...Ortiz Maldonado was an employee of Interamerica, Inc., a firm under contract with U.S.A.I.D...
...Exceptional individuals, group leaders, through Argentina's "dirty war," to El Salvador's "death squads," Guatemala's brand of state-run terrorism has inspired others to excess...
...In that brief hiatus of apparent social-political order, independent organizations began to appear...
...With the green light given, waves of anti-academic violence then began...
...When did killing teachers become part of the defense of the Free World...
...An oral reply was given by the (then) Defense Minister, Gen...
...Without the persuasive pretext that the U.S...
...In October 1978, shortly after the publication of a "death list" naming (among others) twenty-three academics as targets, the military's Education Minister declared that the country could "do without" teachers who "agitate...
...Recruitment stalls...
...Repression of educators in Guatemala has been profession,wide, a plague that has menaced all educators, not just leftists, with the shadow of the "disappearance...
...On November 26, 1983 U.S.C...
...for four days they equally vehemently maintained that the four had "escaped...
...Subsequent ferocious and sweeping counterinsurgency operations, 1981-1983, appear to have brought the cycle near completion once more...
...Oscar Humberto Mej~a Victores has denied anyinvolvement...
...people behind the tactics used to secure our interests...
...in our efforts to retard the growth of anti-U.S...
...Rector Raul Leonel Carrillo Reeves was shot as he disembarked from his automobile on campus...
...What is the cost to America for forsaking our national ethos...
...Unless my estimation of the American people is quite confused, the Guatemalan reality cannot willingly be accommodated as a necessary evil...
...But one pointed review of the kindred travails of educators in Guatemala will help us both to know this larger process and to measure one barrier to furore educational progress there...
...They become, in effect, lobotomized...
...Accordingly, a period of multifaceted carnage (1966-71) in Guatemala, gave rise to a short period in which the number of casualties from state terrorism fell somewhat, 1972-1977...
...guerrilla movements in Guatemala and in neighboring El Salvador...
...The social impact of this targeted repression mirrors the social impact of the violence, 1966-71...
...Twelve professors and thirty-eight students were dead by May 1979...
...Must we who are educated as to the nature of this situation now commit some sort of autolobotomy...
...Unendingly intense state terrorism would not allow this identification to take place as efficiently...
...Moreover, unending violence would poorly serve the foreign policy objectives of this totalitarian state...
...Those interests flow from the long-run objectives of the U.S.: securing U.S...
...Many former teachers now are refugees...
...University rectors and deans vanished just as ignominiously...
...rights group, the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared, the tactic of government-directed "disappearances" has become a chillingly effective tool...
...people will bear willingly the costs involved...
...Being a democracy, the U.S...
...In Guatemala, "the disappeared" quite often reappear -- as corpses bearing the marks of mutilation and torture...
...The process of social control behind a government strategy of "disappearances" is disarmingly simple...
...in Guatemala City...
...The editor of U.S.C.'s student newspaper, for example, was dragged from the campus cafeteria and shot in front of dozens of eyewitnesses...
...How else can American educators let this grim cycle disappear from consciousness...
...Why are Guatemalans blowing their brains out...
...Slackening rates of "disappearances," then, are an important part of the way that the whole cycle of violence serves the foreign policy objectives of the state...
...It is not even a chosen alternative among other approaches...
...It is of the essence, a feature which at first assists in the creation of the modem totalitarian state and later sustains evolution toward an ever more totally controlled society...
...projects, however, illustrate that there are some limits to the coincidence of our objectives...
...among the Indian 10 February 1984:77 minorities, more than three-fourths cannot read and write...
...Clearly, even U.S.-connected educators have been far from immune from recent, targeted repression...
...The circumstances surrounding two of these more recent outrages underline the well-documented claim of Amnesty International, Americas Watch and others that these "disappearances" at the universities form part of a "government program of political murder" and are not part of some feud among warring civilians, in September 1982, uniformed officials, presumably in the employ of the armed forces, carted off (i.e., looted) the household belongings Of the Treasurer of the Economics Department (Sra...
...A comprehensive catalog in each profession must remain beyond our scope here...
...Mejia, who now is Chief of State...
...The day on which those sorry statistics are improved becomes ever more distant with each "disappearance...
...A 1981 letter from one missionary teacher captures a sense of the draconian chill these cycles of violence create: "My arrival in Huehuetenango coincided with the 'disappearance' of two young Indian teachers...
Vol. 111 • February 1984 • No. 3
