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July
29, 2003
Ray
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July
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Qusay Deaths Bad for Bush; Gen. Hitchens at the Front
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Stan
Goff
Bring 'Em On Home, Now!
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Robert
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Alam
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Lula
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Edward
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July
24, 2003
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Tom Turnipseed
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Stew Albert
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July
23, 2003
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Georgie Porgie
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July
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Christian
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Allan J.
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John Dean: Taking Apart Bush's State of the Union Speech, Claim
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July
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We Shall be Heard
Cynthia
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Bush's Racial Politics at Home and Abroad
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Impeachment as the Message
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Mano Singham
Cheney's Oil Maps
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July
29, 2003
"Journalist Spotted;
Journalist Dead!"
Guatemala
Bleeds; US Press Shrugs
By
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
All hell is breaking loose in Guatemala and few
outside that tragic nation seem to care or even notice.
In recent days, followers of General
Efrain Rios Montt, stirred into action by the rightwing Republican
Front Party (FRG) which he controls, have charged into the streets
of Guatemala City armed with machetes, clubs and guns. Led by
FRG militants, the crowds, including many members of the Guatemalan
army, have marched on the nation's courts, opposition parties
and newspapers, torching buildings, shooting out windows and
bullying opponents of the Bible-spouting dictator.
The riots were orchestrated by Rios Montt's
cohorts after the Guatemalan Supreme Court (the nation's second
highest court) suspended his campaign for the presidency and
agreed to hear a complaint brought by two right-center parties
that the general, the butcher of thousands during the 1980s,
is constitutionally barred from running for president of the
country he once ruled with an iron fist.
The 77-year old Rios Montt, now white-haired
and grizzled, denounced the ruling as "judicial manipulation"
and, in a radio address, implored his followers to take to the
streets to protest the decision. Within an hour of his speech,
thousands of the general's backers had flooded the capital city,
blocking traffic, chanting threatening slogans and waving machetes.
Hooded men ransacked buildings, fired
machine guns from SUVs, smashed windows and set fire to cars
and piles of tires. The situation in Guatemala City became so
chaotic over the weekend of July 26th that the both the UN mission
and the US embassy were closed.
It all seemed like a bloody flashback
to the 1980s, when Rios Montt's goons roamed the streets at night
threatening nuns and priests, kidnapping reporters, torturing
dissidents and killing at will, especially those of Mayan descent.
Journalists appear to have been a main
target of the attackers. In the first wave of street violence,
Hector Ramirez, a reporter for a Left-center television station,
was hounded and chased by a mob until he collapsed in the street
and died of heart failure. As Ramirez was carried away, the rioters
chanted, "Journalist Spotted, Journalist Dead."
Edgar Valle, a reporter for the Noticias
television news show, was briefly detained and roughed up by
Rios Montt's mob. ''They attacked everybody without differentiating,''
said Valle, after being released. ''It was strange to me because
my channel has always been identified with the government. These
people didn't want the press to cover what was happening.''
The rioters seemed to target cameramen
in particular. Hector Estrada was filming the riots for Guatevision
when he was attacked by a gang of masked men swinging machetes.
They seized his video camera, drenched him with gasoline and
tried to light him on fire as he fled down the street.
"I was praying for God to save me,"
said Estrada. "I thought they were going to hack me to pieces."
Two political reporters in Guatemala
told CounterPunch that they have received multiple death threats
in the past week. One of the reporters told us that he had gotten
two telephone calls threatening him and his wife and children.
Another reporter said that she had arrived home to find a death
threat nailed to the door of her home.
''The press is the only functioning institution
in this country," says Mario Antonio Sandoval, vice president
of the excellent daily paper Prensa Libre. "That is why
they either have to control it or scare it into silence."
The strategy appears to have worked.
Even though much of the violence has been aimed at journalists,
the US press has largely ignored the riots and the political
re-emergence of Rios Montt and his rightwing thugs. In the US,
only the Miami Herald printed detailed accounts of the riots.
Not only has the Guatemalan government
taken no action to quell the rioters, members of the Army and
police have actually joined the frenzy of violence. One account
of the riots by Prensa Libre tallied 46 criminal acts of violence
and vandalism, 12 of those the paper said were committed by government
troops and police.
Fearing the impending return of the regime
that slaughtered nearly 200,000 people, Mayan peasants in the
highlands began steaming across the border into Mexico last week.
But they were blocked by hostile border patrols with orders from
the Mexican government, under its cruel Plan Salvamento, to either
send them back into Guatemala or lock them up in immigrant concentration
camps, where they are routinely starved and abused by guards.
The reaction of the Bush administration
to Rios Montt's antics has been restrained, given the circumstances.
Even though the US Embassy was taunted by rioters, there have
been no statements of condemnation directly from Colin Powell.
Indeed, we've only heard from state department spokesman Richard
Boucher, who continues to say the administration would prefer
that Rios Montt not run for office. This weekend Boucher was
again rolled out to remark on the rampages in the streets of
Guatemala City. "They are a dangerous mockery of protest,"
Boucher said. But he stopped short of pointing the finger at
the General, whose infamous career is every bit as bloody as
that of Saddam Hussein.
A Rios Montt victory in November could
complicate matters for a Bush administration that is crusading
against political corruption in Latin America. Of course, the
preacher in this crusade is none other than the unappetizing
Otto Reich, who enjoys deep and warm ties to Rios Montt and his
gang of gruesome generals.
Still, Rios Montt is an unreconstructed
monster of an older vintage, trained in the art of the military
strongman at the School of the Americas in the 1950s. Powell
no doubt feels that the general, if elected, might become as
problematic as Manuel Noriega was for the current president's
father. That said, the Bush administration may calculate that
it can't afford to be too harsh in its condemnations of Rios
Montt, who no doubt has many stories to tell about the CIA's
affirmative role in the Guatemala bloodbaths of the 1980s.
Guatemala's court system is a maze of
conflicting and overlapping jurisdictions. Already this year,
Rios Montt's election bid has been ruled on by three different
courts, the electoral court, the Supreme Court and the constitutional
court.
Last week's decision to suspend Rios
Montt's campaign by the Supreme Court came only day's after the
nation's highest court, the so-called Constitutional Court, approved
the general's candidacy in a sharply divided 4-3 decision. The
majority on the constitutional court agreed with Rios Montt's
claim that the constitutional amendment that bans those who seized
power in military coups from running for president doesn't apply
to him since the amendment was passed after he had left office.
The General took power in a bloody coup
in 1982, which was backed by the Reagan administration. Over
the next 18 months Rios Montt supervised a vicious crackdown
on political opponents and Mayan peasants that left more than
19,000 dead, thousands more in jail and more than 100,000 displaced
from their homes. He has been called the Pinochet of Guatemala
and several war crimes complaints are pending against him in
different courts in Guatemala and in Spain.
The constitutional court is slated to
hear Rios Montt's appeal later this week. However, the three
members of the court who voted against the General in the previous
case announced that they will not attend the hearing unless their
safety can be guaranteed by the current government, headed by
Rios Montt's protégé Alfonso Portillo.
Rios Montt has boasted that he owns the
votes of four justices on the court. And indeed that's precisely
how many votes he got in the July 15th ruling that initially
put him on the ballot.
Rigoberta Menchu, the Mayan activist
who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982 and brought genocide charges
against Rios Montt in Spain, bitterly concedes that the general
is probably right about having the top court rigged in his favor.
She says Rios Montt and his FRG party, its accounts plump with
funds derived from a fruitful association with Colombian drug
cartels, have corrupted the judicial system through bribes and
intimidation in an attempt to grease the old dictator's return
to power.
"The court has supported a coup
d'etat by the Rios Montt's Republican Front," says Menchu.
"And they have hidden its hand. The FRG usurped a court
that was meant to protect the legal and moral welfare of the
Guatemalan state."
Menchu also says that the Rios Montt
knows he doesn't have the votes to win the election in November
unless he intimidates enough people into staying away from the
polls. He certainly is off to a brisk start. But she suggests
that the general's campaign and the riots that have accompanied
it may in fact be a kind of calculated rouse designed to create
a chaotic and unstable political situation that would lead the
military to seize control of the government in another coup.
"It looks a lot like 1982,"
she said.
That was a very bloody year.
Jeffrey St. Clair is author of Been
Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature
(Common Courage Press) and coeditor, with Alexander Cockburn,
of The
Politics of Anti-Semitism (AK Press). Both books will be
published in October.
Weekend Edition Features for July 26 / 28, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
NYT's Screws Up Again; Uday and
Qusay Deaths Bad for Bush; Gen. Hitchens at the Front
Gary
Leupp
Faith-Based Intelligence
Saul Landau
A Report from Syria
Stan
Goff
Bring 'Em On Home, Now!
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Book Cooking at Boeing
Andrew
Cockburn
The Sons Are Dead; Now the Blood Feud
Begins
Jason Leopold
CIA Points the Finger at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans
Robert
Fisk
The Power of Death
Joanne
Mariner
Monsieur Moussaoui
Standard
Schaefer
Joblessness and the Invisible Hand
M. Shahid
Alam
The Global Economy Since 1800: a Short History
Harry
Browne
Northern Ireland: the Other Faltering Peace Process
Fidel Castro
Moncada, 50 Years Later
Lula
Democracy Requires Social Justice
Edward
S. Herman
Refuting Brad DeLong's Smear Job on Noam Chomsky
Ron Jacobs
Guided by a Great Feeling of Love: a Review of Gordon's The Company
You Keep
Julie
Hilden
A Photographer, an Offer and Cameron Diaz's Topless Photos
Adam Engel
Man Talk
Poets'
Basement
Keeney, Witherup, Short, Nimba, Guthrie and Albert
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