No Accountability
Despite the tens of thousands of civilian deaths and now-corroborated accounts of massacres and genocide, not a single senior military officer in Central America was given any significant punishment for the bloodshed, nor did any U.S. officials pay even a political price.
The U.S. officials who sponsored and encouraged these war crimes not only escaped legal judgment, but many remained respected figures in Washington, with some, like former U.S. Ambassador to Honduras John Negroponte, returning to senior government posts under President George W. Bush.
Reagan has been honored as few recent presidents have with major public facilities named after him, including National Airport in Washington. A major celebration of his 100th birthday is planned for 2011.
The concept of perception management also emerged from the Reagan years as a tested method for manipulating the American people through propaganda and fear. The same tactics were used in 2002-03 to herd the public behind George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.
The broader success of perception management and its impact on an intimidated U.S. press corps was revealed, too, in the general disinterest shown by most of the major news media when the historical record about Guatemala's atrocities was released in the late 1990s.
On Feb. 25, 1999, relying heavily on documents made available by the Clinton administration, a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that U.S. governments from Eisenhower through Reagan had aided, abetted and concealed.
The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the Guatemalan conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s.
Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.
The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages " are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's history," the commission concluded.
A Genocide
The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the northern highlands, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide."
Besides carrying out murder and "disappearances," the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found.
The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.
"Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals," said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.
"Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people," Tomuschat said.
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