Newspaper of Record, as an establishment institution and consistent defender of U.S.

imperial prerogatives, and it is interesting and amusing to see how it coped.

One problem for the paper was to explain and

justify U.S. complicity in light of this country’s definitionally good and benevolent

qualities. Sometimes this problem has been eased by discrediting the source, and in fact

the Times did that just a few weeks previously in giving uncritical front page attention

to Stoll’s effort to discredit Rigoberto Menchu’s testimony. But the authorship and

character of the Historical Clarification Commission’s report made it difficult to treat

the document in this manner, at least on short notice. The Times was forced to bite the

bullet, acknowledging on its front page that the army had done most of the killing and

that the United States was complicit (Feb. 26, 1999). The news report did play a little

dumb, citing one "anonymous aide" who confided that the Commission "found

evidence that the United States had knowledge of genocide and still supported the

Guatemalan military." As the article admitted that U.S. training of the army was a

key factor "with significant bearing on human rights violations," that the U.S.

"knew" what was going on is more than obvious. The article also failed to

mention that the state terror increased in severity in direct relation to U.S. aid and

training.

The news article traced the origin of the war to

1960, when "a rightist military-controlled Government [was pitted] against a classic

Latin American left-wing insurgency." This is Times history, not real history: the

war is traceable to the U.S. overthrow of an elected government in 1954 and installation

of the "rightist military-controlled government" that responded to mass demands

exclusively by force. (In one of those marvelous Orwellisms that so enrich U.S. imperial

history, Richard Nixon stated that "This is the first instance in history where a

Communist government has been replaced by a free one.") Furthermore, the insurgency

began from within the military establishment, not among the peasants, although the

conditions created under the regime of terror made peasant recruitment easy. Many officers

resented the U.S. use of Guatemalan territory to train the Bay of Pigs invaders, and they

staged an uprising in 1960 that was crushed with U.S. help. Some of the officers fled to

the hills and began organizing an insurgency. A top rebel, Luis Turcios Lima, who had been

trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, claimed to be motivated by the puppet character of the

Guatemalan government and with the aim "to clean up the government, not to destroy

capitalism." In short, this was not a "classic Latin-American left-wing

insurgency" and the U.S. role in creating it was fundamental.

The Times editorial on "Guatemala’s Nightmare

Past" (February 28, 1999), while acknowledging the terror and U.S. involvement,

eventually featured the fact that the United States "has helped uncover its

complicity" and has "given important files to Guatemala." The sole Op Ed

column dealing with this issue also featured "Helping Guatemala Find the Truth"

(Kate Doyle, March 1, 1999), and concluded that in helping the truth commission "the

administration has made an "important gesture of atonement." By this apologetic

route, the paper evades key questions: Why was the United States complicit with a system

of outlandish terror for decades? Where was the Times’s and media’s reporting and

indignation at this genocide in our backyard, the absence of which made its long murderous

duration possible? If the United States can actively support such a regime for decades,

does it not disqualify itself as a judge capable of unbiased decision-making on global

human rights abuses?

These questions cannot even be raised in the

Times–this writer’s letter putting them forward was, as expected, unpublishable. But in a

sense they were answered by the single editorial and Op Ed column–the United States has

changed course, and is now more sensitive to these matters, as evidenced by its

cooperation with the truth commission and its readiness to bomb Serbia (if not Turkey and

Saudi Arabia)!

————–

Edward Herman is a Professor Emeritus of Finance,

Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of Triumph of the Market (South

End, 1995) and The Global Media (with Robert McChesney, Cassell, 1997), among other

books._