THE GUATEMALA CONNECTION
Nairn, Allan
The Guatemala Connection While Congress slept, U.S. arms merchants delivered the goods BY ALLAN NAIRN In the spring of 1982, as Washington debated whether to restore military aid to Guatemala,...
...It's a no-miss situation...
...If Israel started to make a sale the U.S...
...officials...
...The Guatemalan military has devastated its own country with a thoroughness usually reserved for invasions of a foreign land...
...According to U.S...
...Ambassador Frederic Chapin and CIA station chief Robert Hultslander, Cerezo had come to believe that the U.S...
...Benny put together the first civil patrols, we worked together on it," Maynes said...
...aid to the contras in Nicaragua, this ongoing, surreptitious, at-times-illegal effort to bolster Guatemala's repressive capabilities goes unnoticed...
...above-ground military sales to Guatemala in the prior thirty-two years...
...military aid after 1977...
...The incident first became known outside the Executive Branch when State Department documents referring to the tanks were discovered by auditors from the General Accounting Office...
...Now, with the coming to office of a civilian president, U.S...
...Government denied involvement in the deal...
...In an off-the-record press briefing, Chapin argued that the election was legitimate...
...Southern Command, told Congress in August 1984, "Guatemala has an effective army, which is successfully coping with its long-enduring insurgency...
...In a speech this February, he noted sixty-nine reports of extrajudicial executions during his first three weeks in office...
...the deal is still pending...
...Another report from the electoral registry noted that 235,000 phantom voters had been added to the rolls three weeks after the registration deadline...
...The Administration was requesting only a modest appropriation to buy spare parts for three army helicopters, yet the matter would occupy Congress for two years of protracted debate until the parts were finally delivered in 1984...
...military sales to El Salvador, which had emerged in Washington as the most hotly debated foreign-policy issue of the time...
...Currently, Congress is considering resumption of an open military relationship with Guatemala, which has the worst human-rights record in the Western hemisphere...
...According to individuals close to the U.S...
...On April 10, 1982, dressed in combat fatigues and accompanied by two young U.S...
...The remaining ten tanks continued on to Guatemala, where they were unloaded by the navy and taken to the Puerto Barrios base...
...Unfortunately, his brother [President Romeo Lucas] just didn't take the trouble to take Benny's strategy and put it on the ground nationwide...
...officials, the Pentagon and the CIA had arranged for the tanks to arrive from Belgium by way of the Dominican Republic...
...Helicopters...
...firm for a $5,750,000 purchase of 10,000 M-16s, sufficient to rearm a third of the Guatemalan force...
...He had, he told me, secured their backing for clean elections and, by implication, for the Christian-Democratic candidacy of Alejandro Maldonado Aguirre, an ally of Cerezo, who at thirty-nine was still too young to qualify as a candidate...
...Bill Brokhousen of Tactel, a Laguna, California, laser-sight maker, says the U.S...
...At the time, the State Department denied a license but encouraged the exporter to reapply...
...Construction of the route has come to a virtual standstill, hampered by guerrilla attacks and parts shortages...
...As all eyes are turned on the issue of U.S...
...The tank sale was a byzantine underground transaction approved by Washington but carried out through allied countries...
...The violence against civilians occurred under all of them—Lucas, Rios Montt, Mejia," says one Western observer...
...The transaction amounted to more than triple the 1981 U.S...
...The count will resume...
...Since the 1977 curtailment of U.S...
...has done contract arms shipments for the CIA...
...Beautiful, absolutely incredible...
...Research for his current article was supported by a grant from the Funding Exchange...
...Cerezo eoncedes that his power to restrain the army is limited...
...After a year of meetings with U.S...
...But as in 1982, other—more deadly—transactions are occurring...
...Subsequent Israeli sales resulted in a complete rearmament of the Guatemalan military...
...The Mass Transit deals are part of a pattern of off-stage transactions, carried on behind the back of Congress, that funnel military hardware to Guatemala...
...Congress had curtailed military aid to Guatemala in 1977 on human-rights grounds, but the Reagan Administration argued that the new government of General Efrain Rios Montt was improving conditions dramatically...
...There's a strong degree of cooperation between the two countries," says Evan Whirthlin of Action Arms, a Philadelphia distributor of the Galil rifle and the Uzi submachine gun and an agent of Israel Military Industries...
...The Reagan Administration has downplayed or denied the ongoing carnage waged by the regimes of generals Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt, and Mejia Victores...
...Weapons experts say the sight is used primarily for night fighting and close-in, house-to-house operations...
...policy precludes approval of such lethal equipment deals...
...The factory, which is licensed to produce Galil parts and ammunition, is believed to be the only arms-making facility in Central America...
...intelligence community, Mass Transit Allan Nairn, a free-lance writer in New York City, wrote "Confessions of a Death Squad Officer" in the March issue of The Progressive...
...The sight is placed on the barrel of a Galil rifle or M-16, projecting a small red dot onto the target's body...
...Maynes was a confidant of Lucas's brother, General Benedicto Lucas Garcia, who served as army chief of staff...
...on April 23, 1982, the State Department's Bureau of Political and Military Affairs issued a telegram to the U.S...
...Scorched earth...
...Kopyt says Mass Transit obtains the sights overseas—at a location he declines to disclose—and therefore does not need a State Department license...
...distributors, and other private deals are pending...
...We've been talking about it for months...
...The Pentagon again is requesting relatively modest amounts of aid, this time $10 million for army engineers, medical evacuation teams, and a military bomb squad...
...Last July, according to Western intelligence sources, a CIA-approved shipment of forty assault rifles with telescopic night sights—together with 1,000 grenade launchers—arrived in Guatemala on a KLM flight from Israel...
...The Rios Montt coup had caught the Embassy by surprise...
...We're already dealing...
...The destination on the manifest read Santo Domingo...
...President Reagan wired congratulations...
...The sight is an advanced, still-developing technology employed mostly by elite army and police units...
...were] used in those massacres...
...Ten days later, the election—and the U.S...
...Earlier that day, two more Christian Democrats had been assassinated in El Quiche, and the army had frozen the count with less than 20 per cent of precincts reporting...
...You'll see," he said...
...Last November, when fourteen bodies turned up on the roads of Es-cuintla in the course of a ten-day period, the morgue was flooded with inquiries from families wondering whether the mutilated remains might be those of their missing loved ones...
...military sales, Israel has stepped in to fill the gap...
...They were going in and taking out their own people...
...Outfitted with TOW missiles, which are aimed by optically tracked wire-guide eyesights, the choppers are capable of destroying tanks (which the Guatemalan guerrillas do not have) and small buildings...
...A Guatemalan general involved with the project says, however, that the route has been designed to speed troops and hardware to previously remote areas of Indian unrest...
...The proposed $ 15 million deal for thirty Hughes 500 M-D light-combat helicopters is potentially the most lethal transaction of all...
...Defense Intelligence Agency attache, arrived at the CIA Central American headquarters in Washington...
...Though the sale was licensed by the Commerce Department as an ostensibly nonmilitary transaction, in early 1982 twenty pilots from Lucas's air force received training at Bell's headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, where they learned how to mount .30-caliber machine guns on the helicopters...
...But everybody knows what was happening...
...Unknown to Congress, however, the entire debate was a sham...
...As armored personnel carriers rolled up Sixth Avenue and troops commanded by Captain Rodolfo Munoz Pi-lona converged on the National Plaza, the U.S...
...Army's Delta Force and various Israeli commando units use the sights...
...Mass Transit, incorporated in Delaware in 1978 for the "promotion and sale of transportation equipment and related parts and supplies," operates out of a small office above Philadelphia's Suburban Station...
...These shipments appear to have exceeded in value those received from abroad by any Central American nation-El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua included...
...Government viewed him differently...
...But Mass Transit Systems has been shipping the sights right along...
...officers who identified themselves as being on a study tour, Maynes attended the kick-off rally of Rios Montt's 900,000-man civil patrol...
...It said," notes former CIA analyst David MacMichael, who recalls reading the cable at the time, "that after extensive meetings with officers, the DIA had concluded that Lucas had strong support and that coup rumors were unfounded...
...Some of these deliveries were illegal...
...diplomat in Guatemala provided the details: "We knew perfectly well," he told me, "that they were raiding villages and taking out all males from fourteen up, tying their hands behind their backs, torturing and killing them...
...We already have a connection in Guatemala," says Kopyt...
...In the spring of 1982, even as Thomas Enders, then Assistant Secretary of State, boasted that "in Guatemala, we carefully refrained from backing a regime with a record of serious human-rights violations," troops at Guatemala's Puerto Barrios army base were polishing up their latest acquisition: ten U.S...
...And what will the Embassy do, he was asked...
...I'm going to the Embassy," Cerezo explained as he jogged to his Cherokee...
...The army's Committee of National Reconstruction says 440 Indian villages have been destroyed...
...To say that the army never committed that repression," he says, "is a lie against history...
...Guatemala continues to receive a steady flow of underground shipments from U.S...
...disapproved of, it would be quashed...
...According to company sales materials circulating in Guatemala, Mass Transit also has supplied grenade launchers to plantation owners and the Guatemalan army...
...Israel depends too much on U.S...
...decision to ratify the fraud—backfired...
...The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency monitored the shipment in the Dominican Republic and Guatemala, according to U.S...
...With help, they could do it better...
...In December 1981, Israel's Taidiran Electronics and DEGEM Systems helped open the Military School of Electronics and Transmissions...
...Israel stepped in to fill the gap, and the Reagan Administration opened a pipeline of underground assistance...
...In late 1982, it quietly approved a pair of transactions worth $40 million to supply the Guatemalan air force with two transport jets and eight T-37 trainers...
...embassies in Belgium and Guatemala stating that it was a private shipment never authorized by the United States...
...The Embassy knew the tally was a fraud but chose to say otherwise, according to U.S...
...Embassy's political section overheard a secretary's radio announcing a coup...
...During the regime of General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, who ruled from August 1983 to January 1986, applications were filed for delivery to Guatemala of 10,000 M-16 assault rifles, 3,350 M-16 laser-aimed sights, and thirty Hughes 500 M-D combat helicopters...
...We knew this was going.to happen...
...Both the Pentagon and CO-COM, a NATO coordinating committee that reviews technology exports, had licensed the transaction...
...Campaign headquarters was in an uproar...
...Holding their Uzis above their shoulders, Cerezo's security guards ran for the jeeps as their colleagues took up positions along the sandbagged perimeter...
...According to U.S...
...A government survey found more than 200,000 children orphaned by violence since 1978...
...I'd follow that son-of-a-bitch into combat any time," Maynes told me in 1982...
...He's the only one who understands what it takes to win this war...
...Three years later, Israeli advisers helped design the army's new munitions plant in Alta Verapaz...
...In 1984, an application was filed with the State Department Office of Munitions Control to sell Guatemala 3,350 laser-aimed sights for M-16s at a price of $7,705,000...
...I can't imagine either marketing goods without tacit approval of the other...
...officials in Guatemala, reviving the project is a priority second only to refurbishing the helicopter fleet...
...In 1984, the Guatemalan Ministry of Defense concluded negotiations with a U.S...
...Just wait and see what happens when I get back...
...On the morning of March 23, young officers surrounded the National Palace, ousting Lucas and Guevara and installing a junta led by the charismatic evangelical, General Efrain Rios Montt...
...The Guatemalans have yet to receive the planes because they lack the money to purchase them...
...A senior U.S...
...With a high-powered rifle, you could pretty much do what you want...
...Israeli shipments included eleven Ar-ava transport planes, ten RE-MK tanks, 120,000 tons of ammunition, three Tair navy patrol boats, a new tactical radio system, and major consignments of eighty-one-millimeter mortars, bazookas, grenade launchers, and Uzi submachine guns—manufactured by PA'AF, the largest Israeli military contractor—for the Guatemalan army's secret police...
...Five days before the coup, a cable from Colonel George Maynes, U.S...
...M-41 tanks, worth $36 million...
...These back-door arms deals represent only a fraction of the supplies in the pipeline, awaiting approval from the State Department...
...Together with more pedestrian transactions pending—including 500 machine guns, 200 M-2 heavy-barrel guns, and diverse quantities of ammunition—the deals would amount to $72.5 million in lethal weaponry for Guatemala's rulers...
...One report from Guevara headquarters detailed the cartons of forged identity cards and bogus tally sheets the army had shipped to the provinces...
...Manufactured by Hughes Aircraft, a McDonnell-Douglas subsidiary, the helicopters can be outfitted with Hughes Chain Guns—7.62-millimeter machine guns said by the company to be effective for "crew protection and area suppression"—or with 7.62-millimeter Vulcan miniguns capable of spraying an area with 6,000 rounds per minute...
...M A Fraud, a Fumble, and Brute Force Minutes after a spokesman for the military government came on television to announce that the presidential vote count had been interrupted, the bodyguards of Vinicio Cerezo were sprinting for their ammunition clips...
...That same year, Marcus Katz, a Mexico City-based representative of a group of Israeli arms companies, struck a $6 million deal with the Guatemalan president, General Kjell Laugerrud, for 15,000 Galil rifles...
...all were contrary to Congress's express intent to withhold lethal aid from Guatemala...
...According to Maryland Democrat Michael Barnes, who heads the House Western Hemisphere subcommittee, "the Guatemalan army was systematically massacring the Indian population...
...Quietly, behind the scenes, the Reagan Administration had been presiding over the delivery to General Lucas's army of a large quantity of military goods...
...I've seen them at night out to 500 yards...
...As General Paul Gorman, then chief of the U.S...
...Cerezo did indeed return with a victory for his Christian Democrats, but not until four years later...
...Though the State Department's decision was ostensibly a matter of public record, Congress was not informed at the time by the State Department, says a spokesman for Barnes...
...For this was 1982 and in the eyes of the Guatemalan army, Cerezo and his party were still the enemy...
...A 1984 application for a $40 million surveillance satellite was denied, but is still eligible for resubmission...
...the United States would be well on the way to resuming its role as principal military supplier to Guatemala...
...At about the same time, Guatemala received twenty-three Jet-Ranger helicopters, manufactured by Bell, a subsidiary of the Textron corporation...
...officials serving in Guatemala at the time...
...Cathy Hill says her firm has supplied them to the army of Colombia...
...Jim Casen, the State Department's Guatemala desk officer, says U.S...
...The choppers were rushed into the field, where they ferried troops and raided villages as part of the army counterinsur-gency...
...Unlike the fraudulent election, which had been conceived and carried out by the Embassy's closest associates in the army high command, the coup had been staged by dissident officers with whom the Embassy had only limited contact...
...CIA records indicate that the relationship has existed since 1981, says one source...
...During the Rios Montt period, as the Reagan Administration repeatedly tried and failed to win Congressional approval for sale of the $2 million worth of helicopter parts, the State Department was giving the nod to a separate, costlier deal...
...Pentagon spokesmen say the road's purpose is "to help the villagers get their products to market...
...Formally, the U.S...
...officials have once again been freed to speak on background about the army governments they once defended...
...The tanks have seen only limited rural action because of the lack of even rudimentary roads in the Mayan highlands...
...manufacturer...
...The new president, Vinicio Cerezo, has kept the army leadership intact and says there will not be prosecutions of officers implicated in past killings and disappearances...
...The tanks had originally been supplied by the United States to Belgium through customary country-to-country military sales...
...Stephen Bosworth, then Assistant Secretary of State, called the counter-insurgency tactics "as abhorrent as they were counterproductive...
...Since the Lucas administration, however, Guatemalan army engineers have been at work on a packed-gravel, all-weather road from Nenton to Playa Grande, a mountainous expanse that is the heartland of guerrilla support and the focus of army massacres...
...Only with the arrival of a new government would the truth about its predecessor be admittted in retrospect...
...Where the laser beam shines, that's where the bullet goes," says Cathy Hill of Laser Products in Fountain Valley, California, the weapon's principal U.S...
...The projects now await the $10 million in foreign military sales credits proposed by the Reagan Administration for Guatemala for fiscal 1987...
...But Cerezo was mistaken, as he learned that night...
...The application was Returned Without Action...
...Sitting in their secure third-floor Embassy offices, Hultslander and his staff knew precisely what was going on at the National Palace and at the campaign headquarters of General Angel Anibal Guevara, who was the hand-picked successor of General Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia...
...Five minutes later, he came downstairs and acknowledged what thousands of downtown Guatemalans were already seeing for themselves...
...Tens of thousands more have disappeared...
...It was done under the guise of making the world safe for democracy, getting rid of communism...
...Once in the Dominican Republic, however, only twelve went ashore...
...The Guatemalan army has suffered little more than political embarrassment from the curtailment of open U.S...
...Running upstairs tothe CIA station, a diplomat brought the news to a skeptical chief Hultslander...
...A.N...
...Despite his initial distance from Rios Montt's junta, Maynes says he was still consulted on the new regime's rural strategy...
...Elliot Abrams, then head of the State Department's human-rights division, charged the Lucas government with waging "a war against the populace...
...After arrangements had been made with the Lucas defense ministry, twenty-two M-41s were shipped out of Antwerp by ASCO, a Belgian arms trader...
...arms merchants delivered the goods BY ALLAN NAIRN In the spring of 1982, as Washington debated whether to restore military aid to Guatemala, a succession of Administration spokesmen came before Congress to heap scorn on the recently toppled regime of General Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia...
...According to Maynes, Benedicto Lucas was the architect of the counterinsurgency campaign, later adopted by Rios Montt, that included civil patrols, model villages, and army sweeps...
...Estimates of the total civilian death toll run as high as 100,000— more than 1 per cent of the Guatemalan population...
...The tank transaction wasn't the only back-door arms deal the United States made with the Lucas army...
...Though the Executive Branch is required by the Arms Export Control Act to report all such transactions to Congress, no report was filed...
...With a civilian in the National Palace, the Administration hopes to achieve its longstanding objective of restoring open U.S...
...The single shipment to General Lucas of the M-41 tanks in late 1981 or early 1982 exceeded in dollar value the sum of all U.S...
...Mass Transit Systems Corporation of Philadelphia has been supplying the Guatemalan government with laser-aimed rifle sights "for several years," according to company president Leon Kopyt...
...General Guevara was set to become Guatemala's ninth military head of state since the 1954 CIA coup...
...aid to be very independent...
...Upcoming decisions in Washington will determine whether Israel is still needed...
...Completion of any one of them would fundamentally alter the nature of the Guatemalan arsenal and represent a quantum leap in American hardware supply...
...All were returned without action, but according to Administration officials, the companies were told to reapply later...
Vol. 50 • May 1986 • No. 5
