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History > Cold War > Guatemala > 1950s-1990s
Sister Ortiz 1958-2021
Sister Dianna Ortiz in 1996.
After being raped and tortured in Guatemala, she helped focus attention on the 200,000 people who were killed or disappeared during that country’s 36-year civil war.
Photograph: Stephen Crowley The New York Times
Dianna Ortiz, American Nun Tortured in Guatemala, Dies at 62 She became a champion of survivors of torture and helped compel the release of documents showing U.S. complicity in decades of human rights abuses in Guatemala. NYT Feb. 20, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/
Sister Ortiz 1958-2021
American Roman Catholic nun whose rape and torture in Guatemala in 1989 helped lead to the release of documents showing American involvement in human rights abuses in that country
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and teaching Indigenous children in the western highlands of Guatemala, Sister Ortiz was abducted, gang-raped and tortured by a Guatemalan security force.
Her story became even more explosive when she said that someone she believed to be an American had acted in concert with her abductors.
Only after years of extensive therapy at the Marjorie Kovler Center in Chicago for survivors of torture did Sister Ortiz start to recover, at which point she began to hunt down information about her case.
She went on to become a global champion for people subjected to torture, and her case would help compel the release of classified documents showing decades of U.S. complicity in human rights abuses in Guatemala during its 36-year civil war, in which 200,000 civilians were killed.
It was never clear why she and many other Americans were targeted.
She was told at one point that hers was a case of mistaken identity, an assertion she didn’t believe.
Her attack came during a particularly lawless period; ravaged by war, Guatemala was being run by a series of right-wing military dictatorships, some of them violent toward Indigenous people nd suspicious of anyone helping them.
Sister Ortiz’s 24-hour ordeal, initially labeled a hoax by American and Guatemalan officials, included multiple gang rapes.
Her back was pockmarked with more than 100 cigarette burns.
At one point she was suspended by her wrists over an open pit packed with the bodies of men, women and children, some of them decapitated, some of them still alive.
At another point she was forced to stab to death a woman who was also being held captive.
Her abductors took pictures and videotaped the act to use against her.
The torture stopped, she said, only after a man who appeared to be an American — and appeared to be in charge — saw what was happening and ordered her release, saying her abduction had become news in the outside world.
He took her to his car and said he would give her safe haven at the American Embassy.
He also advised her to forgive her torturers.
Fearing he was going to kill her, she jumped out.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/
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Guatemala coup June 1954
More than a half-century after Guatemala’s elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was overthrown in a coup planned by the C.I.A. and forced into a wandering exile, President Alvaro Colom apologized on Thursday for what he called a “great crime.”
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The overthrow in 1954 of Mr. Arbenz, a former army colonel whose policies attempted to narrow the chasm betwen the country’s tiny elite and its impoverished peasants, squashed a 10-year effort to build a democratic state.
Under a succession of military rulers who took power after the coup, Guatemala descended into three decades of a brutal civil war in which as many as 200,000 people died, many of them peasants killed by security forces.
The Eisenhower Administration painted the coup as an uprising that rid the hemisphere of a Communist government backed by Moscow.
But Mr. Arbenz’s real offense was to confiscate unused land owned by the United Fruit Company to redistribute under a land reform plan and to pay compensation for the vastly understated value the company had claimed for its tax payments.
Mr. Arbenz “was not a dictator, he was was not a crypto-communist,” said Stephen Schlesinger, an adjunct fellow at the Century Foundation and co-author of “Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala.”
“He was simply trying to create a middle class in a country riven by extremes of wealth and poverty and racism,” Mr. Schlesinger said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/
Washington feared Arbenz because he tried to institute agrarian reforms that would hand over fallow land to dispossessed peasants, thereby creating a middle class in a country where 2 percent of the population owned 72 percent of the land.
Unfortunately for him, most of that territory belonged to the largest landowner and most powerful body in the state: the American-owned United Fruit Company.
Though Arbenz was willing to compensate United Fruit for its losses, it tried to persuade Washington that Arbenz was a crypto-communist who must be ousted.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, along with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, the C.I.A.’s director, were a receptive audience. In the cold war fervor of the times, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers believed a strike against Arbenz would roll back communism.
And the Dulleses had their own personal sympathies for United Fruit: they had done legal work for the company, and counted executives there among their close friends.
It is true that Arbenz’s supporters in the Guatemalan Legislature did include the Communist Party, but it was the smallest part of his coalition.
Arbenz had also appointed a few communists to lower-level jobs in his administration.
But there was no evidence that Arbenz himself was anything more than a European-style democratic socialist.
And Arbenz’s land reform program was less generous to peasants than a similar venture pushed by the Reagan administration in El Salvador several decades later.
Eisenhower’s attack on Guatemala was brilliantly executed.
A faux invasion force consisting of a handful of right-wing Guatemalans used fake radio broadcasts and a few bombing runs flown by American pilots to terrorize the fledgling democracy into surrender.
Arbenz stepped down from the presidency and left the country.
Soon afterward, a Guatemalan colonel named Carlos Castillo Armas took power and handed back United Fruit’s lands.
For three decades, military strongmen ruled Guatemala.
The covert American assault destroyed any possibility that Guatemala’s fragile political and civic institutions might grow.
It permanently stunted political life.
And the destruction of Guatemala’s democracy also set back the cause of free elections in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras — all of which drew the lesson that Washington was more interested in unquestioning allies than democratic ones.
It was only after the cold war and a United Nations-negotiated peace deal with leftist guerrillas in 1996 that genuine democracy began to take hold in Guatemala.
And even since then, the cycle of violence and lawlessness unleashed by the 1954 coup has continued.
In 1998, an assassin bludgeoned to death the Catholic bishop Juan Gerardi shortly after he issued a damning report blaming the army for widespread massacres.
In 2007, Guatemala had the world’s third-highest homicide rate, according to a United Nations-World Bank study.
In 2009, more civilians were murdered in Guatemala than were killed in the war zones of Iraq.
Washington took the first step toward making amends when President Bill Clinton visited Guatemala in 1999 and offered a vague apology for America’s support of violent and repressive forces there.
This year is an opportunity for Washington to fully own up to its shameful role in destabilizing Guatemala and honor Arbenz for having the courage to lead one of Central America’s first democracies — and send a signal that America has learned to stop placing its ideological concerns and business interests ahead of its ideals.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/
En 1954, au Guatemala, un coup d’État orchestré par les États-Unis et la CIA renverse le gouvernement de Jacobo Arbenz, dont les projets de réforme menaçaient les intérêts de la United Fruit Company et de l’oligarchie nationale.
250 000 civils seront massacrés, pour la plupart des indigènes mayas et des citadins progressistes.
https://www.mediapart.fr/studio/portfolios/
https://www.mediapart.fr/studio/portfolios/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/23/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/02/
https://www.npr.org/2013/10/16/
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/mar/12/
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/07/
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/28/
1940s
US medical experiments in Guatemala
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The Guatemala experiments are already considered one of the darker episodes of medical research in US history, but panel members say the new information indicates that researchers were unusually unethical, even when placed into the historical context of a different era.
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From 1946-48, the US Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with several Guatemalan government agencies on medical research paid for by the US government that involved deliberately exposing people to sexually transmitted diseases.
The researchers apparently were trying to see if penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent infections in the 1,300 people exposed to syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid.
Those infected included soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis.
The commission revealed on Monday that only about 700 of those infected received some sort of treatment.
Eighty-three people died, although it's not clear if the deaths were directly due to the experiments.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/30/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/31/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/30/
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