"Thank you God, for you have put me here," prayed Brigadier General Jose Efrain Rios Montt on June 9 of this year as he became president of Guatemala. Earlier that day hundreds of troops with armored vehicles had surrounded the Interior and Communications Ministries, forcing the resignations of the other two members of the triumvirate who had ruled the country since taking power in a March 23 coup. The putsch quickly consolidated the position of Rios Montt as the new military strongman. In addition to taking the presidency, Rios Montt became the nation's sole legislator and commander of the armed forces.
Rios Montt is a self-avowed born-again Christian who has declared his intention to run the country on Christian principles. The New York Times reported that on the evening of the coup, Rios Montt addressed the people of Guatemala shouting, "I have confidence in my God, my master and my king, that he will guide me. Only he can grant and take away power." Rios Montt's invocation of God's enlightenment, however is drowned out by the cries of the victims of increased violence directed at the country's rural Indian peasants.
In June the Association of Guatemalan Newspaper Writers reported 4,000 deaths due to political violence in the first two months following the coup. International human rights organizations attempting to monitor the situation have attributed most of the deaths to the policies of the Guatemalan army.
Rios Montt is at best a bundle of contradictions. In dealing with members of the Committee for Peasant Unity who seized the Brazilian Embassy in May, Rios Montt held back the army with the biblical admonition that "a soft answer turneth away wrath." This averted a catastrophe like that created in the takeover of the Spanish Embassy in 1980, when the Guatemalan army killed 39 people.
Why, then, does Montt apparently have no qualms about the thousands of men, women, and children being killed in army massacres? In what has become perhaps the most often quoted statement by Rios Montt, the New York Times reported that he responded to questions about women and children being massacred by saying, "It is a war. It is a permanent war." It is clear that to Guatemala's new leader a state of war covers a multitude of sins.
In 1974 Rios Montt was the Christian Democrat candidate for president, winning with 56 per cent of the vote. However, the army did not allow him to take office, and he was instead sent as military attache to Spain. As he left the country his parting shot was, "He who laughs last laughs loudest." In 1976 he returned to Guatemala and apparently stayed away .from political activity. Soon after his return, Rios Montt left the Roman Catholic Church and became an active convert to the Christian Church of the Word (El Verbo) connected to Gospel Outreach, a charismatic Christian group centered in Eureka, California. Gospel Outreach first came to Guatemala in 1976 with a group of about 25 missionaries to assist in reconstruction following the devastating earthquake earlier that year and now has about 800 adherents in the country.
The most popular account of the coup carried by the media was that Rios Montt, an elder in El Verbo, was teaching classes in the church's elementary school when he received word that the young officers responsible for the coup were summoning him to join them at the national palace. Rios Montt, his family, and church leaders prayed about what he should do and concluded that God was granting him the leadership of Guatemala. When he met with the young officers, he was made head of the new junta. Recent reports by National Public Radio question this account, carrying allegations by high government officials in Guatemala that Rios Montt knew of the coup in advance and met with the young officers 10 days earlier to finalize the details of the coup.
When the junta took power, its first action was to dissolve Congress, nullify the Constitution, and outlaw all political activity. All legal power was consolidated in the hands of the military even more than under the previous Lucas Garcia regime. On the day of the coup, Montt mentioned elections but has since stated that it would be at least 30 months before elections would be held for a constituent assembly, and his tenure in office could be "six months or six years."
The current U.S. administration has done an effective job of confusing public opinion on Central America. In spite of its bumbling efforts to uncover alleged Cuban-Soviet involvement in Central America, the State Department has succeeded in raising fears in many people about what is going on in "our back yard." But the allegations are often a cruel hoax which have sought to hide the struggle of the Central American people to meet their basic human needs. By couching its interpretation of the Central American conflict in terms of an East-West confrontation, the administration is overlooking the historical development of the situation with a shortsightedness that can only lead to further disasters in U.S. foreign policy. No doubt both Moscow and Washington are anxious to gain what they can from the situation, but that in no way goes to the root of the problem or the actual dynamics of what is taking place in Guatemala today.
Anyone traveling in rural Guatemala can readily see the problem. Hunger, poverty, and illness are a way of life in the highlands. The Indian families no longer have sufficient land to feed their children nor to pass on to their sons' families, as tradition would have it. This, combined with the daily tortures and disappearances of their people at the hands of the army has caused them to slowly take up the struggle against their government. The decision to oppose the government is an anguishing one for a people who, more than anything else, want to be left in peace to work their small farms in their local communities. It is only in dealing with these problems that the government can hope to turn back the rising tide of violence that has cost 30,000 Guatemalan lives in the past four years.
Unfortunately, Rios Montt shows no understanding of the peasants' urgent desire for needed social reforms and has opted instead for a military solution. While announcing a 30-day state of seige that began July 1 and that he has since threatened to extend through December, Rios Montt declared that now is the time to do what God requires and that "today we are going to begin a merciless struggle" against "subversives." The new interior minister, Coronel Mendez Ruiz, echoed Rios Montt's perspective by declaring that Guatemala's situation is one of civil war, which the nation must wake up to. (Before Rios Montt appointed him to that post in June, Mendez was military commander at Coban, where under his authority many of the army's recent massacres have reportedly taken place.) Now Rios Montt is determined to do what none of his military predecessors have been able to: issue the final blow to all opposition forces. His chances of succeeding are even dimmer than under previous leaders because of mounting popular opposition and growing outrage at the new pattern of total destruction of Indian communities.
Rios Montt declared June an amnesty month, when all "subversives" were called upon to lay down their arms and be reunited with society. Of the estimated 6,000 guerrilla forces, the government claims that more than 1,500 responded by the June 30 deadline. That figure is doubtful given the opposition's strong public denunciations of the amnesty program as a farce and the continued lack of confidence in entrusting oneself to the care of the government. Human rights advocates have been particularly concerned about the amnesty provision, which granted pardon to right-wing security forces who had abused their power by torturing and killing thousands under the Lucas regime. In response to this concern, the Christian Democrat party leadership challenged Rios Montt to prove that the amnesty program was not just a smokescreen to pardon his military colleagues whom he had earlier said he would prosecute.
As the amnesty ended and the state of seige began, Rios Montt ordered all citizens between the ages of 18 and 30 who had completed obligatory military duty to present themselves for special duty. Those failing to comply, he said, would be charged with the "crime of resistance." The veteran recall is in addition to the newly established rural civilian militias comprised of peasants conscripted by the army to provide a grassroots network of informants and opposition to the guerrillas. One North American eyewitness to these militias said the Indians were armed with simple hunting rifles and one or two bullets, then sent ahead of the regular forces to meet the guerrillas, pitting peasant against peasant. The same eyewitness was told the guerrillas are aware of this and hold fire on the militias. Other reports indicate that many Indians in the civil patrols have in fact been killed at the vanguard of battle.
All subversives caught are immediately tried before special tribunals, and those found guilty executed before public firing squads. No appeals are allowed to the decisions by the special courts, that right having been suspended along with the right of habeas corpus and the right to be represented by an attorney. Among the crimes warranting the death sentence is the catch-all category of "acting against the integrity of the state."
Censorship of the press and the banning of all political activity round out Rios Montt's program of absolute military control over every major area of Guatemalan life. The only news related to the civil war allowed to be published is that released by the Public Relations Secretariat of the Presidency. The state-of-seige decree also states that political parties are suspended and all political activity prohibited, including pronouncements, speeches, proclamations, declarations, or publications either of a personal nature or in the name of political parties. In spite of the decree, the four political parties comprising the anti-fraud front attempted to hold a press conference on the afternoon of July 6 to declare their position on recent government actions, but they were prevented from doing so. Individual civil liberties of movement, association, speech, and inviolability of residence have also been suspended.
By failing to deal with the underlying social and economic causes of the conflict, favoring instead the military approach of force, Rios Montt is only exacerbating these very problems. Anti-government sentiment is growing in the countryside. Under the army's scorched-earth campaign, entire villages are being riddled with machine-gun fire and then burned to the ground, along with all crops and stored provisions. Literally thousands of Indians are being massacred.
Allan Nairn recently reported in the New York Times that "General Rios Montt's Vietnam-style strategy has only increased the killing. Under cover of what the security plan calls 'psychological action at all levels,' the army has devastated the countryside. A rightist newspaper recently listed 584 victims of 30 massacres; an editorial blamed the army. 'The problem is not human rights,' one colonel says. 'The problem is leftist humans.'"
Now, according to the Guatemalan Bishops Conference, more than one million displaced persons move about Guatemala trying to survive the ravages of war. An estimated 250,000 refugees live in Mexico, Honduras, and the United States. One North American in Guatemala said this national catastrophe is far worse than the 1976 earthquake which attracted a global relief effort. Many of the peasant farmers who have not yet fled their land are afraid to plant.
The Committee for Peasant Unity, the largest grassroots peasant organization in Guatemala, sees the military policy as a program of genocide against the Indian people by the Guatemalan army. Oxfam America is predicting the result of the rural military campaigns will be famine in Guatemala by late 1982 on a scale comparable to that in Cambodia several years ago.
Guatemalan relations with the United States have been strained since 1978, when the Carter administration cut off aid due to the country's massive violations of human rights. Since then the United States government has not been able to find a leader whom it could openly support. Even the Reagan administration publicly steered clear of the brutality of the Lucas Garcia regime, though it was ready to back Garcia's hand-picked successor, General Anibal Guevera. Now the State Department is actively lobbying for congressional approval of $300,000 in IMET (military training) funds for Guatemala, as well as grant licenses for the sale of $3.7 million worth of helicopter spare parts.
On July 15, the House Foreign Affairs Committee approved $11 million in economic support funds for Guatemala as part of the Caribbean-Central American Initiative Bill. There is the possibility of an amendment being introduced to have the $11 million removed when the bill reaches the floor of the House. Also, hearings took place in August on the rural telecommunications systems loan to Guatemala. At those hearings, the State Department publicly declared its position that not only economic, but also military aid was needed for Guatemala.
As for Rios Montt's views on U.S. aid, the signals are contradictory. His statements reject the idea of U. S. aid one day only to welcome it the next. First of all he speaks as a nationalist who calls for a nation "without a capital in Washington or Moscow, but in Guatemala." But he is also a leader waging civil war in a country with $700 million balance of payments deficit and almost no foreign currency reserves.
There is no doubt that the army power structure is aware of Montt's more acceptable image abroad than that of his predecessors. Rios Montt's press secretary, Francisco Bianchi, has already been to Washington to plead Guatemala's case.
In Rios Montt's view, opposition to his rule equals subversion. Subversion equals communism. Communism equals the anti-Christ. Therefore, in the name of God an all-out war is being mounted against the "communist" opposition. Several great leaps over gaping chasms of reason were necessary to complete Montt's equation. Unfortunately, it is an equation that the current U.S. administration appears anxious to buy.
Peter Browning was a special assistant on Guatemala with the Washington Office on Latin America when this article appeared.
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