David Stoll on US involvement in Guatemala's civil war

In David Stoll's book review that I mentioned yesterday, I also wanted to draw attention to something else that David wrote about US involvement in Guatemala during that country's civil war (yes because it echoes my understanding of the situation).

Guatemala’s internal armed conflict began in the early 1960s, reached its crescendo in the early 1980s and dragged on until a formal peace agreement was signed in 1996. Like many ordinary Latin Americans across those decades, Guatemalans could choose between two unappealing alternatives: U.S.-supported dictatorships or admirers of the Cuban Revolution. In Guatemala the guerrillas justified their struggle by pointing to the US government’s overthrow of a democratically elected government in 1954. The first guerrilla organizers were dissident army officers, appalled by their country’s subservience to U.S. interests, and then university intellectuals, shut out of electoral politics by state repression of the left. These mainly urban revolutionaries had little success communicating with Guatemala’s indigenous peasants until the late 1970s, when entire villages suddenly began to join them.

Ironically, by the time Guatemala’s guerrilla organizations were approaching their apogee, the U.S. government had cut off public military assistance to the Guatemalan army. With the Carter administration embracing human rights, U.S. diplomats could not help but acknowledge the army’s barbaric behavior against opponents. The Central Intelligence Agency continued to work with army officers, and Israeli and Argentine advisers may have served as proxies, but the U.S. role in the Guatemalan bloodshed of the 1980s was small compared to its role in El Salvador and Nicaragua.

Unfortunately for indigenous peasants living in contested areas, the army’s minimal reliance on U.S. military aid also freed it from the conditions attached to that aid. And so the Guatemalan army carried out what may have been the most brutal counterinsurgency campaign in Latin America. Hundreds of villages were destroyed, tens of thousands of noncombatants were killed, and hundreds of thousands more were driven off their land. This was accompanied by a ferocious campaign of disappearances and repression in the capital.

As I've argued before, US military / economic support for the Guatemalan government and military is often overstated. The US House of Representatives and Jimmy Carter fought to promote human rights in Guatemala and elsewhere in the 1970s. The Guatemalan government fought back against those conditions. President Reagan tried to resume all sorts of aid to Guatemala without any noticeable improvement in how the Guatemalan military was carrying out the war. Fortunately, the US Congress fought back against Reagan's efforts. They weren't totally successful but Reagan got less than he wanted.

US involvement in Guatemala's civil war is pretty ugly, just not as ugly as some people seem to misremember.