Publish to Newswire
Add an EventFrom the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature
Doing the US's Dirty Work: The Colombian Paramilitaries and Israel
''I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis.''
-Carlos Castano, Mi Confesion, 2002
-Carlos Castano, Mi Confesion, 2002
Please go to link for full report.
Doing the US's Dirty Work
The Colombian Paramilitaries and Israel
By Jeremy Bigwood
Special to the Narco News Bulletin
April 8, 2003
"I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis."
-Carlos Castaño, Mi Confesión, 2002
According to his recently published autobiography, Carlos Castaño was only 18 years old when he arrived in Israel in 1983 to take a year-long course called "562." Castaño, a Colombian, had come to the Holy Land as a pilgrim of sorts, but not to find peace. Course 562 was about war, and how to wage it, and it was something Carlos Castaño would eventually excel at, becoming the most adept and ruthless paramilitary leader in Latin America’s history.
Castaño was propelled down this path a few years earlier, after the killing of his father, a cattle rancher who was being held for a "tax" ransom by the FARC - Colombia’s strongest left-wing guerrilla army. As a 1994 DEA document put it, "Colombian guerrilla groups traditionally have supported their activities through extortion and kidnapping, with ranchers and other wealthy individuals being the primary victims."
Bitter over their father’s death, the result of a botched rescue attempt by the Colombian army, Carlos and his older brother, Fidel, vowed revenge, a vengeance that would dovetail with both the interests of the Colombian landholding classes, and, to a large extent, U.S. foreign policy. It is a vengeance that continues unabated to this day.
The Castaño brothers first offered their services as scouts for the Colombian Army’s Bombona Battalion - fingering FARC sympathizers, providing intelligence and even participating in military operations. But Fidel - some 14 years older than Carlos - concluded that by merely working for the army, they were going to get nowhere. One of the battalion’s majors introduced them to a local paramilitary death squad called "Caruso," with whom they started a killing spree. When local police started to investigate them, they found it necessary to operate even more clandestinely. Unlike in many other third-world countries under the U.S.’s shadow, Colombia’s police and judiciary have sometimes played a role independent from the Army.
Later, according to press reports, Fidel started his own paramilitary death squad called "Los Tangueros," named after his ranch, "Las Tangas." Los Tangueros was responsible for more than 150 murders during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In his book, Castaño talks openly about murders he has committed or ordered during this period, making his habit of killing what he calls "guerrillas in towns" routine. In one massacre alone, the Tangueros captured dozens of campesinos from a neighboring town. Back at the ranch, "they tortured them all night with crude instruments before shooting some and burying others alive." Los Tangueros, along with other death squads dispersed throughout the country, would evolve into the present 9,000-strong paramilitary force in Colombia, which is now killing an average of up to thirteen civilians per day.
During the time Castaño’s father was been captured by the FARC, rural Colombia was rife with small diverse paramilitary units working for the army and the landholding upper classes. Many of these groups were merely the enforcers and protectors of the local wealthy, while others worked protecting the "new rich" of the cocaine trade from the "taxation" of the left-wing insurgencies. Some of these groups bore the names of petty criminal gangs or the names of their leaders. They called themselves "self-defense" or "auto defense" groups, but because of their propensity to operate in coordination with the Colombian Army, the term ‘paramilitaries" more accurately describes them and will be used here.
In the 1980s, these paramilitary groups were disparate and poorly trained, sometimes involving themselves in bloody internecine turf battles. In order to take the offensive against the steady advances of the leftist guerrillas, the paramilitaries needed both unification and political/military training. While these paramilitaries essentially worked towards the same goals as US foreign policy, the US government could not directly support them because of their death squad tactics. But others could.
Exactly how Carlos Castaño got to Israel is still a mystery, as is precisely which entity trained him there. But whoever set it up, the Israeli course "562" definitely had a strong effect on Castaño. "Something clicked in me, and I began to behave differently...My perception of this war changed radically after my trip to Israel," he said in his best-selling autobiography, which is a series of interviews edited by Spanish journalist Mauricio Aranguren Molina.
In Israel, Carlos Castaño was clearly a good and highly motivated student. Of his studies there, he reminisces:
"Unlike what one might think, we studied in the classroom more enthusiastically than in the military training. The classes emphasized the regular and irregular ways in which the world operates... It was there that I rounded out my education... [The teachers] insisted on us carrying ourselves well, in both the way we dressed and in the way we spoke in public. I also received a class on how to enter and register in a hotel and we analyzed how to behave around immigration police in airports. We read in libraries and spent long sessions on both the self-esteem and the security that an individual should have. This was an invaluable process which taught me to respect and have confidence in myself, to triumph during tough intimidating moments."
Most importantly for the eager student, he "received lectures on how the world arms business operates, and how to buy arms."
And of course, there was also a military component:
"I received instruction in urban strategies, how to protect oneself, how to kill someone or what to do when someone is trying to kill you... We learned how to stop an armored car and use fragmentation grenades to enter a target. We practiced with multiple grenade launchers, and learned how to make accurate shots with RPG-7s, or shoot a cannon shell through a window."
"We also took complementary courses on terrorism and counter-terrorism, night vision equipment, and parachuting. We also learned how to make homemade bombs. In short, we learned what the Israelis know, but, in all sincerity, very little of all of this has been applied to the war in Colombia. I got a very good basic education, and there I learned how to do the most important thing – I learned how to control fear..."
Castaño also describes training that could not have taken place without the express permission of the highest authorities of the Israeli Defense Forces, such as when he performed "airborne maneuvers and [we] parachuted at night over islands of the Mediterranean. I had to carry weights as ballast to adjust my free-fall speed." However, sources in Israeli daily Ha'aretz doubted the veracity of this story, when this author asked them about it.
According to his book, not all was study for Castaño in Israel, and he used his free time to meet with Colombian soldiers undergoing regular military training there – soldiers of the worst human rights violators in the western hemisphere were being trained by some of the worst human rights violators in the Middle East. But these were precisely the connections that would prove so useful in the future.
"In the Sinai desert, I also had the opportunity of meeting military men from our country, the men of the Colombia battalion [of the Colombian Army]. I did not meet the battalion as a whole, but on my R & R days, we went to the same places, and I spent time in the company of sergeants and officers."
Castaño summarizes his epiphany in Israel in the following terms: "Upon returning to Colombia, I had become another person... I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements, although I repeat, in Israel I didn’t only learn about things related to military training. There I became convinced that it was possible to destroy the guerrillas in Colombia. I started to understand how a people could defend itself against the whole world. I understood how to bring into the "cause" a person who had something to lose in the war, with the aim of converting him into the enemy of my enemies."
By 1985, shortly after Castaño returned to Colombia, some of the paramilitary groups that were springing up had become completely dependant on the monies from drug trafficking. Indeed, some paramilitary units had merely evolved as such from drug protection rackets. In fairness it is true that some of the paramilitary groups were not involved in illicit drug protection or other aspects of the business: some were formerly the guards of rich landowners, cattle ranchers and the like. A secret 1989 Colombian Police (DAS) Intelligence document includes a section on the "Contamination of the Paramilitaries by Drug Trafficking," even places a time and a place on this event, although there is other evidence (below) that this took place earlier. "The economic crisis facing the paramilitary forces in 1985 was resolved by an alliance with drug trafficking... This alliance came about in mid-1985 when the Paramilitary intercepted a camper full of cocaine... After conversations with the drug traffickers through the initiative of HENRY PEREZ, the Paramilitary forces returned the camper and the drugs to their owners, receiving in exchange for it a four-door Toyota pickup..." It should be noted that Henry Perez was part of the Caruso paramilitary gang, at the time also known as the Autodefensas del Magdalena Medio (Paramilitary Militia of Magdalena Medio)- as were the Castaños. In fact, Castaño calls Henry Pérez one of the "fathers" of the paramilitaries, along with his brother Fidel (who is mentioned in the DAS document), and the previously mentioned Bombona battalion Major Alejandro Álvarez Henao, who had introduced the brothers to their first death squad.
From this point onwards, these paramilitaries expanded, protecting operations of the Medellín cartel and others, including that cartel’s competition in Cali.
The DEA was also watching: Its agents had noticed a paramilitary/drug trafficking connection at least as early as1993: "Intelligence indicates that some of Colombia's private paramilitary groups have been co-opted by cocaine trafficking organizations. Throughout the 1980s, the Autodefensas del Magdalena Medio (Self-Defense Militia of Magdalena Medio), one of the most important of these groups, had close ties with the Medellín Cartel's organization."
A year later, in another report, the DEA looked at the relationship between the left-wing insurgencies and the drug trade, accurately stating: "Despite Colombian security forces’ frequently claim that FARC units are involved directly in drug trafficking operations, the independent involvement of insurgents in Colombia’s domestic drug production, transportation, and distribution is limited...No credible evidence indicates that the national leadership of either the FARC or the ELN has directed, as a matter of policy, that their respective organizations directly engage in independent drug production or distribution. Furthermore, neither the FARC nor the ELN are known to have been involved in the transportation, distribution, or marketing of illicit drugs in the United States or Europe." In other words, the left-wing insurgencies taxed the production of coca or its products’ transportation through insurgent-controlled areas, but were not involved in its processing to cocaine, shipping or marketing – as opposed to the paramilitaries who ran and still run processing factories and were and still are actively involved in shipping it out of the country. There are some, yet unproven indications of greater insurgent involvement in the trade since the time of that report.
Paramilitary leaders also set upclandestine training schools in Colombia, or "schools for assassins" as they were called by the previously mentioned secret 1989 Colombian Police (DAS) Intelligence report. The first such school that was discovered was called "El Tecal," and it trained the first of the paramilitary forces, and as these extended themselves deeper into the countryside and received greater funding form the drug trade, they formed other schools in other areas. For instance, "Cero Uno [Zero One] located at kilometer 9 of the Puerto Boyocá-Zambito road," and "El Cincuenta" Number 50" - called "La 50" in Castaño's book] located on the road between El Delirio and Arizá (Santander)." There were also "satellite schools" with names like "Galaxias" reminiscent of bars and brothels. According to the DAS report, "Personnel graduated from these schools to incorporate into the ‘paramilitary-narcotrafficking’ structure with an aim to undertaking four specific jobs:
Protect the community and the properties of narcotrafickers from the guerrillas and rival groups...
Be responsible for the personal protection of the heads of the cartels and those of the paramilitary forces, functioning as bodyguards.
Produce cocaine in the laboratories of that organization...
Attack members of the Unión Patriótica [a leftist legal political party affiliated with the FARC that was the only party on the continent to have been decimated by political murder] and members of the government or political parties that opine against the drug trade."
To qualify as a candidate for training in these "schools for assassins" one had to be interviewed by narco Henry Perez and his cohorts, all friends of the Castaño brothers. Students were selected by "the express recommendation of a rancher, farmer or narcotraficker from the region." with questions like "What is your ideology? Are you capable of killing your father, mother or brother if it can be confirmed that they are guerrillas?" The candidates were told that the war may go on forever and that the only enemy was communism. And "upon the evaluation and verification of all of the information supplied by the candidate, the candidate is given a medical exam and placed in a basic training course. During the first stage of training, recruits are selected to work in the financial apparatus (drug production) or security (bodyguards, patrolmen). The training course includes: a.) Camouflage techniques, b.) Handling small arms and parading, c.) Explosives, d.) Personal defense, e.) Identity preservation, f.) Body guarding, g.) Intelligence, h.) Counterintelligence, i.) Communications, j.) First Aid."
But apparently this training by fellow Colombians was not enough, and in 1987 the Israelis were called in to help, probably through Colombian Army intermediaries.
In the mainstream media the 16 Israeli and some British trainers were presented as "mercenaries," perhaps because of the bias of the Colombian DAS agents who wrote a report on them. These foreign military trainers were far too well connected to be ordinary "mercenaries"—they clearly acted with some government approval, most definitely that of Israel, and probably of some US entity also – as we shall see below. Castaño, who attended these courses, said that members of the Colombian Army had actually arranged the courses, which featured the training by a famous Israeli officer, Yair Klein.
Again, it was Castaño ally Henry Perez who picked the candidates - along with drug kingpin Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha. According to his book, Carlos Castaño took part in the courses, and their organization occupied five of the 50 scholarships. According to the DAS document:
A group of five Israelis taught the course called "PABLO EMILIO GUARIN VERA" in the "El Cincuenta" school of Puerto Boyocá.
The instructors were in the area for a period of 45 days after having entered the country through Cartegena (Bolivar). Initially, they stayed in the "El Rosario" residence of Puerto Boyocá and later in a rustic house on the Isla de la Fantasía (Fantasy Island)...
Another thirty scholarships were awarded so that the best students could undergo further training in Israel, just as Castaño had done: "According to what these instructors said, they were going to send the best 30 students for further schooling in a special course that would be taught in Israel." Thirty paramilitaries being sent to Israel would have clearly required the permission of the Israeli Defense Forces - the Israeli government. It is hard to imagine anything else for a country continually at war.
And there was also a Nicaraguan Contra connection: "TEDDY, the Israeli interpreter told our source that they should shorten and speed up the course because they had promised to train the Nicaraguan Contras in Honduras and Costa Rica." Anyone who thinks that these were simple "for hire" mercenaries would do well to analyze this quote. At the time, only with express US government approval – particularly that of the State Department and CIA – could one get into the contra camps located in Honduras or Costa Rica, let alone a group of men bearing arms. These Israelis were clearly trusted at the highest levels of both the Israeli and US governments.
During this time, and even up until the present, the Colombian state has not shown itself to be a monolith. Even today, in spite of all of the US influence, one still finds government ministries, such as that of the Environment and the Human Rights Ombudsman's office that refuse to go along with the official line crafted by the US State Department and filtered through the presidency or some other ministry. This explains why part of the Colombian state -justice and police – were so clearly disturbed by the paramilitaries’ advances that in 1990 police units raided a Castaño property and exhumed 24 decomposed corpses, some showing signs of torture.
And there were other troubles too: competition was growing between the Medellín and Cali drug cartels. According to a DEA Intelligence Report from 1993, "By 1990, for reasons that are still unclear, the Autodefensas del Magdalena Medio and the Medellín Cartel emerged as bitter foes." Former ally, Medellín cartel drug-kingpin Pablo Escobar was now being hunted by the Colombian state, aided by US intelligence agencies and the DEA. The Castaño brothers, under a new organizational name "MAS" helped the Colombians and the U.S. in the hunt for Escobar, which resulted in Escobar’s death. Carlos even had lines of communication to the police squad that killed Escobar, as he had known "the brother of the famous police colonel, Hugo Martínez Poveda, commander of the Search Team that killed Pablo Escobar" from time both of them had spent in Israel.
After Escobar was out of the picture, the Castaño brothers consolidated and unified the paramilitaries under the name "Auto-Defensas Unidas de Colombia" (Unified Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), known by its Spanish acronym AUC. As the Washington Post's Scott Wilson reported:
"From these death squads grew the Peasant Paramilitary Force of Cordoba and Urabá (ACCU), the oldest and largest of the AUC's confederation of privately funded armies across the country. This was a result of Carlos Castaño's new leadership: He transformed a regional protection force into a national political movement."
The effect was dramatic. The paramilitaries grew in size from a few thousand to nine thousand or more, and as Time magazine reported in 2000: "Fear of AUC vengeance is one reason at least 1 million peasants fled their homes during the past decade." Like the Nicaraguan Contras, the Salvadoran and Guatemalan death squads, the paramilitaries were known for using excessive violence to terrorize the population, and on at least one occasion paramilitary units used chainsaws to torture and kill their victims.
But there were also losses for the paramilitaries. In 1994, Carlos’s elder brother Fidel or "Rambo" as he was known – then the paramilitaries’ leader – was – according to Carlos -- killed in a chance combat with FARC guerrillas in northern Colombia. However there exists some doubt as to whether he is really dead. There are those in the State Department who apparently believe that he may still be alive - and a recent article rumours him to be living in Israel.Whatever the truth may be, Carlos took over the top paramilitary position at that point, and the movement grew even more, even acquiring a rudimentary air force, something that CIA black propaganda was always trying to pin on the guerrillas, so it could induce the mainstream press to argue for more military aid to bolster the Colombian government.
Galil: The Israeli Presence in Latin America
In Colombia you see the black assault rifles everywhere. Both the US-backed Army and the National Police use them. These are not, as you might imagine, US M16s, but they are the famous Israeli Galil assault rifle, an imitation of the Russian Kalashnikov series but marketed in Latin America using the smaller, but faster (and messier) .223 round - the same as the M16. The Galil has been manufactured by the Israeli Military Industries since 1972 and has been a considerable success. But the Israelis themselves do not use many Galils in their own operations inside (and outside) Israel, because they get M16s free from the US.
But in Latin America, the Galil is the main weapon of both the Guatemalan and Colombian governments. In the Guatemalan case, the US did not wish to be seen overtly supplying the Guatemalan military as it conducted countless massacres in the countryside during the 1980s. So Israel stepped in and not only supplied the weapons, but also built a munitions factory in Coban, a mountainous, but relatively unconflicted region of the country. While the Israelis made out well on the deal, it was not so sweet for the Guatemalans: the factory was most of the time immersed in humid clouds, and the resulting ammunition was often damp, producing misfires.
But in Colombia, Israeli Military Industries didn’t merely set up a munitions factory to make bullets; they set up an entire Galil assault rifle factory in Bogotá. Of the Colombian version of the weapon, only the barrel is imported from Israel. Who pays for this? Colombia? Think again. The Isreali assault rifles are paid for through US military aid to both Israel and Colombia. As such, it is yet another way the unwitting US taxpayer is underwriting the Colombian bloodletting.
-JB
In reality, the insurgents didn’t have an air force, but the paramilitaries did and still do. By the late 1990’s, the paramilitaries had acquired several helicopters, along with maintenance mechanics and pilot training. Helicopters are extremely costly to purchase and maintain, but are very useful in this type of war, as Carlos was soon to find out. According to his autobiography, his life was saved during the Christmas holidays of 1998 when a large FARC contingent attacked his base-camp in a surprise assault. It was the Sicilian-born Israeli-trained pilot and paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso who rescued him in a paramilitary helicopter.
According to his own autobiography and dozens of press reports, Castaño has often met in secret with government officials. By 2000 the meetings were being openly reported. On November 6, 2000, he met with Colombia’s Interior Minister Humberto de la Calle of then-President Andrés Pastrana’s Government. As a result of the meeting, Castaño released two of seven legislators that his paramilitaries were holding captive. Indeed, at the time of this writing, as we shall see later, Castaño and Mancuso are in negotiations with the new Colombian government.
As the paramilitaries expanded, continuing to absorb other paramilitary organizations, it needed arms, and probably had several sources for them, one of which came to light last May. It should come as no surprise to the reader that the major suppliers were Israelis. Israeli arms dealers have long had a presence in next-door Panama and especially in Guatemala. While some of the details of this particular deal have been contested and are still sketchy, one thing is clear: by a series of misrepresentations, GIRSA, an Israeli company associated with the IDF and based in Guatemala was able to buy 3,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 2.5 million rounds of ammunition that were then handed over to the paramilitaries in Colombia through a Colombian port controlled by a US banana company.
This may remind us of what Carlos Castaño said about his course in Israel – when he received "lectures on how the world arms business operates, and how to buy arms." Was Israel where he also made the connections to do so?
This arms deal, like most, featured many layers of deniability and smokescreens. Although Colombian police uncovered the deal, no one has been indicted over it. The only players who appear to have known what was going on were the Israelis and the paramilitaries. The Nicaraguan police who sold the arms thought they were trading them for Israeli mini-Uzis and Jericho pistols, although the OAS, led by former Colombian president César Gaviria blamed the Nicaraguans in its report. The US State Department, which had recently placed the Colombian paramilitaries on its "terrorist" list claims though spokesperson Wes Carrington that the department was under the impression that the fully automatic assault rifles were going to collectors in the US!
The President Uribe – Castaño Connection
Colombia’s President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, like Castaño, also lost his narcotrafficking father to the FARC, but in the case of Uribe, the father died fighting on his ranch that was attacked by the insurgents. And there are other similarities, too: like Castaño, the Uribe family has had close ties to the cocaine trade, even renting out a helicopter to the business. In fact, Uribe’s father was once indicted for his role in the notorious Tranquilandia cocaine-processing lab, after it was taken out by a combined DEA-Colombian police operation. From 1980 to 1982, Uribe was head of Civil Aviation (Aerocivil) in Colombia and controlled all of the aviation licensing throughout the country at a time when small planes did most of the drug running.When Uribe was governor of Antioquía department in the mid-1990s, he helped set up a paramilitary force called Convivir, in which paramilitary boss Salvatore Mancuso is rumored to have served.
Legitimizing the paramilitaries
During the last Colombian presidential elections, a "cleansed" Uribe was voted into power and applauded by the US State Department. Many of the plans for his government are based upon a US-generated Rand Corporation study. A major part of both the Rand study and Uribe’s plan involve the creation of a large civil defense/government informer force that will be beholden to the Colombian state. The Rand report, like all things "Plan Colombia," was first written in the United States. It bases a new Colombian Civil Defense counterinsurgency structure on the Peruvian "Ronda" system or the old Guatemalan "PAC" system – in which "civilians" must serve as local counterinsurgency fighters under Army supervision. In both Peru and Guatemala these were greatly responsible for reducing the size of the guerrillas but at an extreme cost: committing a multitude of human rights abuses. When this idea was first floated during the unveiling of the Rand Report on June 13th, 2001 by authors Angel Rabasa and Peter Chalk, Rabasa indicated that the present paramilitary structures could be dissolved and re-enrolled in the new "civil" defense forces, but now under direct Army control.
Castaño/Mancuso indictment
To make sure of the AUC leadership’s compliance in this restructuring plan, and to keep US liberal Congressmen on board with Plan Colombia by feigning to initiate the prosecution of the paramilitaries, US Attorney General John Ashcroft announced on September 24, 2002 that Carlos Castaño, Salvatore Mancuso and Juan Carlos Sierra were under indictment by the US government for arranging the transport of some 17 tons of cocaine into the U.S. and Europe since 1997. Not that the smuggling of cocaine by the paramilitaries was actually news to the US – since US documents as early as 1993 confirmed this allegation. But did the Colombians arrest the AUC leadership? After all, the Colombian government is receiving millions in US AID and in most cases works hand-in-glove with the US. Instead of arresting Castaño and company, by November 24, 2002, the news from Colombia revealed that the US-backed Colombian government was now involved in direct full-scale negotiations with them!
Castaño and Mancuso also came through for the Colombian government: they announced a "ceasefire" with the army – a farce as the paramilitaries have always fought alongside the army and have only come to blows when there has been a local dispute between the two over control over some kind of criminal enterprise. But this "ceasefire" had good propaganda value in both Colombia’s cities, and more importantly in the US Congress.
As it stands now at the time of this writing, if Uribe and the US Embassy have their way, the AUC paramilitaries will now be demobilized as the AUC per sé and then transformed into legal entities of the Colombian state as "peasant soldiers;" trained by the army, but living in villages and not at military bases. Thus Castaño’s men will become retrained and legitimized and continue the counterinsurgent war under the aegis of the Colombian Army with the direct assistance of the United States, their bloody hands washed in State Department PR.
At that point, the Israelis will no longer be needed in Colombia, although the will keep their Galil rifle business alive there (see sidebar). And indeed, they would prefer their presence to be forgotten, as there can be no doubt that Israeli interests share some blame for the many years of ongoing bloodbath in Colombia, which kills as many as 20 people a day – some 70% or more of which is attributed to the paramilitaries, totaling tens of thousands over the last decade- most of whom are killed for merely being suspected of sympathies to the insurgency, not for being actual combatants. Unfortunately, in other new places around the world, we can expect the training of right-wing paramilitary groups to continue, as the Israeli state and its agents gleefully continue to undertake operations that are deemed too distasteful for its US counterparts.
Jeremy Bigwood is a Washington DC-based journalist with extensive experience reporting from Latin America, and the United States' leading expert on utilizing the Freedom-of-Information Act to liberate censored government documents. A veteran war photographer, he is a professor of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism and during last February's session served as photo editor of Narco News.
Doing the US's Dirty Work
The Colombian Paramilitaries and Israel
By Jeremy Bigwood
Special to the Narco News Bulletin
April 8, 2003
"I copied the concept of paramilitary forces from the Israelis."
-Carlos Castaño, Mi Confesión, 2002
According to his recently published autobiography, Carlos Castaño was only 18 years old when he arrived in Israel in 1983 to take a year-long course called "562." Castaño, a Colombian, had come to the Holy Land as a pilgrim of sorts, but not to find peace. Course 562 was about war, and how to wage it, and it was something Carlos Castaño would eventually excel at, becoming the most adept and ruthless paramilitary leader in Latin America’s history.
Castaño was propelled down this path a few years earlier, after the killing of his father, a cattle rancher who was being held for a "tax" ransom by the FARC - Colombia’s strongest left-wing guerrilla army. As a 1994 DEA document put it, "Colombian guerrilla groups traditionally have supported their activities through extortion and kidnapping, with ranchers and other wealthy individuals being the primary victims."
Bitter over their father’s death, the result of a botched rescue attempt by the Colombian army, Carlos and his older brother, Fidel, vowed revenge, a vengeance that would dovetail with both the interests of the Colombian landholding classes, and, to a large extent, U.S. foreign policy. It is a vengeance that continues unabated to this day.
The Castaño brothers first offered their services as scouts for the Colombian Army’s Bombona Battalion - fingering FARC sympathizers, providing intelligence and even participating in military operations. But Fidel - some 14 years older than Carlos - concluded that by merely working for the army, they were going to get nowhere. One of the battalion’s majors introduced them to a local paramilitary death squad called "Caruso," with whom they started a killing spree. When local police started to investigate them, they found it necessary to operate even more clandestinely. Unlike in many other third-world countries under the U.S.’s shadow, Colombia’s police and judiciary have sometimes played a role independent from the Army.
Later, according to press reports, Fidel started his own paramilitary death squad called "Los Tangueros," named after his ranch, "Las Tangas." Los Tangueros was responsible for more than 150 murders during the late 1980s and early 1990s. In his book, Castaño talks openly about murders he has committed or ordered during this period, making his habit of killing what he calls "guerrillas in towns" routine. In one massacre alone, the Tangueros captured dozens of campesinos from a neighboring town. Back at the ranch, "they tortured them all night with crude instruments before shooting some and burying others alive." Los Tangueros, along with other death squads dispersed throughout the country, would evolve into the present 9,000-strong paramilitary force in Colombia, which is now killing an average of up to thirteen civilians per day.
During the time Castaño’s father was been captured by the FARC, rural Colombia was rife with small diverse paramilitary units working for the army and the landholding upper classes. Many of these groups were merely the enforcers and protectors of the local wealthy, while others worked protecting the "new rich" of the cocaine trade from the "taxation" of the left-wing insurgencies. Some of these groups bore the names of petty criminal gangs or the names of their leaders. They called themselves "self-defense" or "auto defense" groups, but because of their propensity to operate in coordination with the Colombian Army, the term ‘paramilitaries" more accurately describes them and will be used here.
In the 1980s, these paramilitary groups were disparate and poorly trained, sometimes involving themselves in bloody internecine turf battles. In order to take the offensive against the steady advances of the leftist guerrillas, the paramilitaries needed both unification and political/military training. While these paramilitaries essentially worked towards the same goals as US foreign policy, the US government could not directly support them because of their death squad tactics. But others could.
Exactly how Carlos Castaño got to Israel is still a mystery, as is precisely which entity trained him there. But whoever set it up, the Israeli course "562" definitely had a strong effect on Castaño. "Something clicked in me, and I began to behave differently...My perception of this war changed radically after my trip to Israel," he said in his best-selling autobiography, which is a series of interviews edited by Spanish journalist Mauricio Aranguren Molina.
In Israel, Carlos Castaño was clearly a good and highly motivated student. Of his studies there, he reminisces:
"Unlike what one might think, we studied in the classroom more enthusiastically than in the military training. The classes emphasized the regular and irregular ways in which the world operates... It was there that I rounded out my education... [The teachers] insisted on us carrying ourselves well, in both the way we dressed and in the way we spoke in public. I also received a class on how to enter and register in a hotel and we analyzed how to behave around immigration police in airports. We read in libraries and spent long sessions on both the self-esteem and the security that an individual should have. This was an invaluable process which taught me to respect and have confidence in myself, to triumph during tough intimidating moments."
Most importantly for the eager student, he "received lectures on how the world arms business operates, and how to buy arms."
And of course, there was also a military component:
"I received instruction in urban strategies, how to protect oneself, how to kill someone or what to do when someone is trying to kill you... We learned how to stop an armored car and use fragmentation grenades to enter a target. We practiced with multiple grenade launchers, and learned how to make accurate shots with RPG-7s, or shoot a cannon shell through a window."
"We also took complementary courses on terrorism and counter-terrorism, night vision equipment, and parachuting. We also learned how to make homemade bombs. In short, we learned what the Israelis know, but, in all sincerity, very little of all of this has been applied to the war in Colombia. I got a very good basic education, and there I learned how to do the most important thing – I learned how to control fear..."
Castaño also describes training that could not have taken place without the express permission of the highest authorities of the Israeli Defense Forces, such as when he performed "airborne maneuvers and [we] parachuted at night over islands of the Mediterranean. I had to carry weights as ballast to adjust my free-fall speed." However, sources in Israeli daily Ha'aretz doubted the veracity of this story, when this author asked them about it.
According to his book, not all was study for Castaño in Israel, and he used his free time to meet with Colombian soldiers undergoing regular military training there – soldiers of the worst human rights violators in the western hemisphere were being trained by some of the worst human rights violators in the Middle East. But these were precisely the connections that would prove so useful in the future.
"In the Sinai desert, I also had the opportunity of meeting military men from our country, the men of the Colombia battalion [of the Colombian Army]. I did not meet the battalion as a whole, but on my R & R days, we went to the same places, and I spent time in the company of sergeants and officers."
Castaño summarizes his epiphany in Israel in the following terms: "Upon returning to Colombia, I had become another person... I learned an infinite amount of things in Israel and to that country I owe part of my essence, my human and military achievements, although I repeat, in Israel I didn’t only learn about things related to military training. There I became convinced that it was possible to destroy the guerrillas in Colombia. I started to understand how a people could defend itself against the whole world. I understood how to bring into the "cause" a person who had something to lose in the war, with the aim of converting him into the enemy of my enemies."
By 1985, shortly after Castaño returned to Colombia, some of the paramilitary groups that were springing up had become completely dependant on the monies from drug trafficking. Indeed, some paramilitary units had merely evolved as such from drug protection rackets. In fairness it is true that some of the paramilitary groups were not involved in illicit drug protection or other aspects of the business: some were formerly the guards of rich landowners, cattle ranchers and the like. A secret 1989 Colombian Police (DAS) Intelligence document includes a section on the "Contamination of the Paramilitaries by Drug Trafficking," even places a time and a place on this event, although there is other evidence (below) that this took place earlier. "The economic crisis facing the paramilitary forces in 1985 was resolved by an alliance with drug trafficking... This alliance came about in mid-1985 when the Paramilitary intercepted a camper full of cocaine... After conversations with the drug traffickers through the initiative of HENRY PEREZ, the Paramilitary forces returned the camper and the drugs to their owners, receiving in exchange for it a four-door Toyota pickup..." It should be noted that Henry Perez was part of the Caruso paramilitary gang, at the time also known as the Autodefensas del Magdalena Medio (Paramilitary Militia of Magdalena Medio)- as were the Castaños. In fact, Castaño calls Henry Pérez one of the "fathers" of the paramilitaries, along with his brother Fidel (who is mentioned in the DAS document), and the previously mentioned Bombona battalion Major Alejandro Álvarez Henao, who had introduced the brothers to their first death squad.
From this point onwards, these paramilitaries expanded, protecting operations of the Medellín cartel and others, including that cartel’s competition in Cali.
The DEA was also watching: Its agents had noticed a paramilitary/drug trafficking connection at least as early as1993: "Intelligence indicates that some of Colombia's private paramilitary groups have been co-opted by cocaine trafficking organizations. Throughout the 1980s, the Autodefensas del Magdalena Medio (Self-Defense Militia of Magdalena Medio), one of the most important of these groups, had close ties with the Medellín Cartel's organization."
A year later, in another report, the DEA looked at the relationship between the left-wing insurgencies and the drug trade, accurately stating: "Despite Colombian security forces’ frequently claim that FARC units are involved directly in drug trafficking operations, the independent involvement of insurgents in Colombia’s domestic drug production, transportation, and distribution is limited...No credible evidence indicates that the national leadership of either the FARC or the ELN has directed, as a matter of policy, that their respective organizations directly engage in independent drug production or distribution. Furthermore, neither the FARC nor the ELN are known to have been involved in the transportation, distribution, or marketing of illicit drugs in the United States or Europe." In other words, the left-wing insurgencies taxed the production of coca or its products’ transportation through insurgent-controlled areas, but were not involved in its processing to cocaine, shipping or marketing – as opposed to the paramilitaries who ran and still run processing factories and were and still are actively involved in shipping it out of the country. There are some, yet unproven indications of greater insurgent involvement in the trade since the time of that report.
Paramilitary leaders also set upclandestine training schools in Colombia, or "schools for assassins" as they were called by the previously mentioned secret 1989 Colombian Police (DAS) Intelligence report. The first such school that was discovered was called "El Tecal," and it trained the first of the paramilitary forces, and as these extended themselves deeper into the countryside and received greater funding form the drug trade, they formed other schools in other areas. For instance, "Cero Uno [Zero One] located at kilometer 9 of the Puerto Boyocá-Zambito road," and "El Cincuenta" Number 50" - called "La 50" in Castaño's book] located on the road between El Delirio and Arizá (Santander)." There were also "satellite schools" with names like "Galaxias" reminiscent of bars and brothels. According to the DAS report, "Personnel graduated from these schools to incorporate into the ‘paramilitary-narcotrafficking’ structure with an aim to undertaking four specific jobs:
Protect the community and the properties of narcotrafickers from the guerrillas and rival groups...
Be responsible for the personal protection of the heads of the cartels and those of the paramilitary forces, functioning as bodyguards.
Produce cocaine in the laboratories of that organization...
Attack members of the Unión Patriótica [a leftist legal political party affiliated with the FARC that was the only party on the continent to have been decimated by political murder] and members of the government or political parties that opine against the drug trade."
To qualify as a candidate for training in these "schools for assassins" one had to be interviewed by narco Henry Perez and his cohorts, all friends of the Castaño brothers. Students were selected by "the express recommendation of a rancher, farmer or narcotraficker from the region." with questions like "What is your ideology? Are you capable of killing your father, mother or brother if it can be confirmed that they are guerrillas?" The candidates were told that the war may go on forever and that the only enemy was communism. And "upon the evaluation and verification of all of the information supplied by the candidate, the candidate is given a medical exam and placed in a basic training course. During the first stage of training, recruits are selected to work in the financial apparatus (drug production) or security (bodyguards, patrolmen). The training course includes: a.) Camouflage techniques, b.) Handling small arms and parading, c.) Explosives, d.) Personal defense, e.) Identity preservation, f.) Body guarding, g.) Intelligence, h.) Counterintelligence, i.) Communications, j.) First Aid."
But apparently this training by fellow Colombians was not enough, and in 1987 the Israelis were called in to help, probably through Colombian Army intermediaries.
In the mainstream media the 16 Israeli and some British trainers were presented as "mercenaries," perhaps because of the bias of the Colombian DAS agents who wrote a report on them. These foreign military trainers were far too well connected to be ordinary "mercenaries"—they clearly acted with some government approval, most definitely that of Israel, and probably of some US entity also – as we shall see below. Castaño, who attended these courses, said that members of the Colombian Army had actually arranged the courses, which featured the training by a famous Israeli officer, Yair Klein.
Again, it was Castaño ally Henry Perez who picked the candidates - along with drug kingpin Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha. According to his book, Carlos Castaño took part in the courses, and their organization occupied five of the 50 scholarships. According to the DAS document:
A group of five Israelis taught the course called "PABLO EMILIO GUARIN VERA" in the "El Cincuenta" school of Puerto Boyocá.
The instructors were in the area for a period of 45 days after having entered the country through Cartegena (Bolivar). Initially, they stayed in the "El Rosario" residence of Puerto Boyocá and later in a rustic house on the Isla de la Fantasía (Fantasy Island)...
Another thirty scholarships were awarded so that the best students could undergo further training in Israel, just as Castaño had done: "According to what these instructors said, they were going to send the best 30 students for further schooling in a special course that would be taught in Israel." Thirty paramilitaries being sent to Israel would have clearly required the permission of the Israeli Defense Forces - the Israeli government. It is hard to imagine anything else for a country continually at war.
And there was also a Nicaraguan Contra connection: "TEDDY, the Israeli interpreter told our source that they should shorten and speed up the course because they had promised to train the Nicaraguan Contras in Honduras and Costa Rica." Anyone who thinks that these were simple "for hire" mercenaries would do well to analyze this quote. At the time, only with express US government approval – particularly that of the State Department and CIA – could one get into the contra camps located in Honduras or Costa Rica, let alone a group of men bearing arms. These Israelis were clearly trusted at the highest levels of both the Israeli and US governments.
During this time, and even up until the present, the Colombian state has not shown itself to be a monolith. Even today, in spite of all of the US influence, one still finds government ministries, such as that of the Environment and the Human Rights Ombudsman's office that refuse to go along with the official line crafted by the US State Department and filtered through the presidency or some other ministry. This explains why part of the Colombian state -justice and police – were so clearly disturbed by the paramilitaries’ advances that in 1990 police units raided a Castaño property and exhumed 24 decomposed corpses, some showing signs of torture.
And there were other troubles too: competition was growing between the Medellín and Cali drug cartels. According to a DEA Intelligence Report from 1993, "By 1990, for reasons that are still unclear, the Autodefensas del Magdalena Medio and the Medellín Cartel emerged as bitter foes." Former ally, Medellín cartel drug-kingpin Pablo Escobar was now being hunted by the Colombian state, aided by US intelligence agencies and the DEA. The Castaño brothers, under a new organizational name "MAS" helped the Colombians and the U.S. in the hunt for Escobar, which resulted in Escobar’s death. Carlos even had lines of communication to the police squad that killed Escobar, as he had known "the brother of the famous police colonel, Hugo Martínez Poveda, commander of the Search Team that killed Pablo Escobar" from time both of them had spent in Israel.
After Escobar was out of the picture, the Castaño brothers consolidated and unified the paramilitaries under the name "Auto-Defensas Unidas de Colombia" (Unified Self-Defense Forces of Colombia), known by its Spanish acronym AUC. As the Washington Post's Scott Wilson reported:
"From these death squads grew the Peasant Paramilitary Force of Cordoba and Urabá (ACCU), the oldest and largest of the AUC's confederation of privately funded armies across the country. This was a result of Carlos Castaño's new leadership: He transformed a regional protection force into a national political movement."
The effect was dramatic. The paramilitaries grew in size from a few thousand to nine thousand or more, and as Time magazine reported in 2000: "Fear of AUC vengeance is one reason at least 1 million peasants fled their homes during the past decade." Like the Nicaraguan Contras, the Salvadoran and Guatemalan death squads, the paramilitaries were known for using excessive violence to terrorize the population, and on at least one occasion paramilitary units used chainsaws to torture and kill their victims.
But there were also losses for the paramilitaries. In 1994, Carlos’s elder brother Fidel or "Rambo" as he was known – then the paramilitaries’ leader – was – according to Carlos -- killed in a chance combat with FARC guerrillas in northern Colombia. However there exists some doubt as to whether he is really dead. There are those in the State Department who apparently believe that he may still be alive - and a recent article rumours him to be living in Israel.Whatever the truth may be, Carlos took over the top paramilitary position at that point, and the movement grew even more, even acquiring a rudimentary air force, something that CIA black propaganda was always trying to pin on the guerrillas, so it could induce the mainstream press to argue for more military aid to bolster the Colombian government.
Galil: The Israeli Presence in Latin America
In Colombia you see the black assault rifles everywhere. Both the US-backed Army and the National Police use them. These are not, as you might imagine, US M16s, but they are the famous Israeli Galil assault rifle, an imitation of the Russian Kalashnikov series but marketed in Latin America using the smaller, but faster (and messier) .223 round - the same as the M16. The Galil has been manufactured by the Israeli Military Industries since 1972 and has been a considerable success. But the Israelis themselves do not use many Galils in their own operations inside (and outside) Israel, because they get M16s free from the US.
But in Latin America, the Galil is the main weapon of both the Guatemalan and Colombian governments. In the Guatemalan case, the US did not wish to be seen overtly supplying the Guatemalan military as it conducted countless massacres in the countryside during the 1980s. So Israel stepped in and not only supplied the weapons, but also built a munitions factory in Coban, a mountainous, but relatively unconflicted region of the country. While the Israelis made out well on the deal, it was not so sweet for the Guatemalans: the factory was most of the time immersed in humid clouds, and the resulting ammunition was often damp, producing misfires.
But in Colombia, Israeli Military Industries didn’t merely set up a munitions factory to make bullets; they set up an entire Galil assault rifle factory in Bogotá. Of the Colombian version of the weapon, only the barrel is imported from Israel. Who pays for this? Colombia? Think again. The Isreali assault rifles are paid for through US military aid to both Israel and Colombia. As such, it is yet another way the unwitting US taxpayer is underwriting the Colombian bloodletting.
-JB
In reality, the insurgents didn’t have an air force, but the paramilitaries did and still do. By the late 1990’s, the paramilitaries had acquired several helicopters, along with maintenance mechanics and pilot training. Helicopters are extremely costly to purchase and maintain, but are very useful in this type of war, as Carlos was soon to find out. According to his autobiography, his life was saved during the Christmas holidays of 1998 when a large FARC contingent attacked his base-camp in a surprise assault. It was the Sicilian-born Israeli-trained pilot and paramilitary commander Salvatore Mancuso who rescued him in a paramilitary helicopter.
According to his own autobiography and dozens of press reports, Castaño has often met in secret with government officials. By 2000 the meetings were being openly reported. On November 6, 2000, he met with Colombia’s Interior Minister Humberto de la Calle of then-President Andrés Pastrana’s Government. As a result of the meeting, Castaño released two of seven legislators that his paramilitaries were holding captive. Indeed, at the time of this writing, as we shall see later, Castaño and Mancuso are in negotiations with the new Colombian government.
As the paramilitaries expanded, continuing to absorb other paramilitary organizations, it needed arms, and probably had several sources for them, one of which came to light last May. It should come as no surprise to the reader that the major suppliers were Israelis. Israeli arms dealers have long had a presence in next-door Panama and especially in Guatemala. While some of the details of this particular deal have been contested and are still sketchy, one thing is clear: by a series of misrepresentations, GIRSA, an Israeli company associated with the IDF and based in Guatemala was able to buy 3,000 Kalashnikov assault rifles and 2.5 million rounds of ammunition that were then handed over to the paramilitaries in Colombia through a Colombian port controlled by a US banana company.
This may remind us of what Carlos Castaño said about his course in Israel – when he received "lectures on how the world arms business operates, and how to buy arms." Was Israel where he also made the connections to do so?
This arms deal, like most, featured many layers of deniability and smokescreens. Although Colombian police uncovered the deal, no one has been indicted over it. The only players who appear to have known what was going on were the Israelis and the paramilitaries. The Nicaraguan police who sold the arms thought they were trading them for Israeli mini-Uzis and Jericho pistols, although the OAS, led by former Colombian president César Gaviria blamed the Nicaraguans in its report. The US State Department, which had recently placed the Colombian paramilitaries on its "terrorist" list claims though spokesperson Wes Carrington that the department was under the impression that the fully automatic assault rifles were going to collectors in the US!
The President Uribe – Castaño Connection
Colombia’s President Álvaro Uribe Vélez, like Castaño, also lost his narcotrafficking father to the FARC, but in the case of Uribe, the father died fighting on his ranch that was attacked by the insurgents. And there are other similarities, too: like Castaño, the Uribe family has had close ties to the cocaine trade, even renting out a helicopter to the business. In fact, Uribe’s father was once indicted for his role in the notorious Tranquilandia cocaine-processing lab, after it was taken out by a combined DEA-Colombian police operation. From 1980 to 1982, Uribe was head of Civil Aviation (Aerocivil) in Colombia and controlled all of the aviation licensing throughout the country at a time when small planes did most of the drug running.When Uribe was governor of Antioquía department in the mid-1990s, he helped set up a paramilitary force called Convivir, in which paramilitary boss Salvatore Mancuso is rumored to have served.
Legitimizing the paramilitaries
During the last Colombian presidential elections, a "cleansed" Uribe was voted into power and applauded by the US State Department. Many of the plans for his government are based upon a US-generated Rand Corporation study. A major part of both the Rand study and Uribe’s plan involve the creation of a large civil defense/government informer force that will be beholden to the Colombian state. The Rand report, like all things "Plan Colombia," was first written in the United States. It bases a new Colombian Civil Defense counterinsurgency structure on the Peruvian "Ronda" system or the old Guatemalan "PAC" system – in which "civilians" must serve as local counterinsurgency fighters under Army supervision. In both Peru and Guatemala these were greatly responsible for reducing the size of the guerrillas but at an extreme cost: committing a multitude of human rights abuses. When this idea was first floated during the unveiling of the Rand Report on June 13th, 2001 by authors Angel Rabasa and Peter Chalk, Rabasa indicated that the present paramilitary structures could be dissolved and re-enrolled in the new "civil" defense forces, but now under direct Army control.
Castaño/Mancuso indictment
To make sure of the AUC leadership’s compliance in this restructuring plan, and to keep US liberal Congressmen on board with Plan Colombia by feigning to initiate the prosecution of the paramilitaries, US Attorney General John Ashcroft announced on September 24, 2002 that Carlos Castaño, Salvatore Mancuso and Juan Carlos Sierra were under indictment by the US government for arranging the transport of some 17 tons of cocaine into the U.S. and Europe since 1997. Not that the smuggling of cocaine by the paramilitaries was actually news to the US – since US documents as early as 1993 confirmed this allegation. But did the Colombians arrest the AUC leadership? After all, the Colombian government is receiving millions in US AID and in most cases works hand-in-glove with the US. Instead of arresting Castaño and company, by November 24, 2002, the news from Colombia revealed that the US-backed Colombian government was now involved in direct full-scale negotiations with them!
Castaño and Mancuso also came through for the Colombian government: they announced a "ceasefire" with the army – a farce as the paramilitaries have always fought alongside the army and have only come to blows when there has been a local dispute between the two over control over some kind of criminal enterprise. But this "ceasefire" had good propaganda value in both Colombia’s cities, and more importantly in the US Congress.
As it stands now at the time of this writing, if Uribe and the US Embassy have their way, the AUC paramilitaries will now be demobilized as the AUC per sé and then transformed into legal entities of the Colombian state as "peasant soldiers;" trained by the army, but living in villages and not at military bases. Thus Castaño’s men will become retrained and legitimized and continue the counterinsurgent war under the aegis of the Colombian Army with the direct assistance of the United States, their bloody hands washed in State Department PR.
At that point, the Israelis will no longer be needed in Colombia, although the will keep their Galil rifle business alive there (see sidebar). And indeed, they would prefer their presence to be forgotten, as there can be no doubt that Israeli interests share some blame for the many years of ongoing bloodbath in Colombia, which kills as many as 20 people a day – some 70% or more of which is attributed to the paramilitaries, totaling tens of thousands over the last decade- most of whom are killed for merely being suspected of sympathies to the insurgency, not for being actual combatants. Unfortunately, in other new places around the world, we can expect the training of right-wing paramilitary groups to continue, as the Israeli state and its agents gleefully continue to undertake operations that are deemed too distasteful for its US counterparts.
Jeremy Bigwood is a Washington DC-based journalist with extensive experience reporting from Latin America, and the United States' leading expert on utilizing the Freedom-of-Information Act to liberate censored government documents. A veteran war photographer, he is a professor of the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism and during last February's session served as photo editor of Narco News.
For more information:
http://www.narconews.com
Add Your Comments
Comments
(Hide Comments)
I don't know where you found out that Castaño's father was killed as a result of "a botched rescue attempt by the Colombian army." This piece of your article is unknown in Colombia, where we have read and heard that his father was simply murdered by the Farc after the family had paid the ransom (another despicable crime, this kidnapping, that you wrap with the seemingly more favorable concept of 'tax ransom'). It's not very subtle, but it's very damning that you try to pin the responsibility of the Castaño's father death, the origin of their fight, on the Army, when the direct and total guilty party were the FARC, as everyone knows in Colombia.
Castaño and his brothers have sown more than their share of blood and mayhem in my country, but the responsibility for their birth falls squarely on the FARC and their criminal methods of fighting what otherwise might have been a just political struggle.
Castaño and his brothers have sown more than their share of blood and mayhem in my country, but the responsibility for their birth falls squarely on the FARC and their criminal methods of fighting what otherwise might have been a just political struggle.
More on mass-murderer Carlos Castaño | More
From the Washington Post (November 24, 2002):
From the Washington Post (November 24, 2002):
Carlos was just 14 in 1979 when Marxist guerrillas from the country's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, kidnapped his father, Jesus, from a cattle farm his father and Fidel owned together in the province of Antioquia. Fidel paid two ransoms. The guerrillas demanded more. But Fidel, believing his father was already dead, balked.
"Even if I had the money," he wrote back, "I would use it to fight you." Jesus Castano's body was never found. In his book, Carlos said the guerrillas shot his father between the shoulder blades because they thought the army was closing in on them.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Middle_East/Israel_Guatemala.html
Israel and Guatemala
... The history of Israel's relations with Guatemala roughly parallels that of its ties with El Salvador except the Guatemalan military was so unswervingly bloody that Congress never permitted the ... Reagan Administration to undo the military aid cutoff implemented during the Carter years.
Weaponry for the Guatemalan military is the very least of what Israel has delivered. Israel not only provided the technology necessary for a reign of terror, it helped in the organization and commission of the horrors perpetrated by the Guatemalan military and police. And even beyond that: to ensure that the profitable relationship would continue, Israel and its agents worked actively to maintain Israeli influence in Guatemala.
Throughout the years of untrammeled slaughter that left at least 45,000 dead, and, by early 1983, one million in internal exile - mostly indigenous Mayan Indians, who comprise a majority of Guatemala's eight million people - and thousands more in exile abroad, Israel stood by the Guatemalan military. Three successive military governments and three brutal and sweeping campaigns against the Mayan population, described by a U.S. diplomat as Guatemala's "genocide against the Indians," had the benefit of Israeli techniques and experience, as well as hardware.
***
Israel began selling Guatemala weapons in 1974 and since then is known to have delivered 17 Arava aircraft. In 1977 at the annual industrial fair, Interfer, Israel's main attraction was the Arava. "An operative Arava is to be parked outside the IAI pavilion for public inspection, although its silhouette in flight is a common sight over the capital and countryside."'
Referring to the Aravas, Benedicto Lucas Garcia, chief of staff during the rule of his brother Romeo Lucas Garcia (1978-1982) said, "Israel helped us in regard to planes and transportation-which we desperately needed because we've had problems in transferring ground forces from one place to another. By 1982, at least nine of the Aravas had been mounted with gun pods.
Among the other weapons sold by Israel were 10 RBY armored personnel carriers, three Dabur class patrol boats armed with Gabriel missiles, light cannons, machine guns and at least 15,000 Galil assault rifles. The Galil became Guatemala's standard rifle and Uzis were widely seen as well.
According to Victor Perera, "Uzis and the larger Galil assault rifles used by Guatemala's special counterinsurgency forces accounted for at least half of the estimated 45,000 Guatemalan Indians killed by the military since 1978"
***
When the Reagan Administration took office it was determined to do everything it could for Guatemala. It had promised as much during the election campaign. Never had Ronald Reagan seen a rightist dictatorship he didn't like; during his 1980 campaign he met with a representative of the right-wing business lobby Los Amigos del Pais, and, referring to the Carter Administration's aid cutoff, told him, "Don't give up. Stay there and fight. I'll help you as soon as I get in."
The Guatemalan far-right apparently helped Reagan get in.
Guatemalan business leaders reportedly pumped large illegal contributions into the Reagan campaign coffers. Their tentacles reached right into the core of the new administration through the lobbying activities of the Hannaford-Deaver law firm of White House troika member Michael Deaver. Within three days of the Republican victory on 7 November 1980, Hannaford-Deaver were busy arranging a Capitol Hill briefing for Amigos del Pais.
Congress, however, did not change its attitude about Guatemala, and as late as 1985 remained adamant about denying it military aid. In 1981, Reagan's Secretary of State Alexander Haig "urged Israel to help Guatemala." In July 1985 Israel helped the administration move a shipment of 40 assault rifles with advanced night sights and 1,000 grenade launchers from Israel to Guatemala on a KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) flight.
In late 1983, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) issued a communiqué saying that the previous May a munitions factory producing bullets for Galil rifles and Uzi submachine guns had begun operation in Alta Verapaz. Subsequently the director of Army Public Relations confirmed that the military was producing Galil rifle parts, had begun armor plating its vehicles at the factory, and that the facility would soon be capable of building grenade launchers. The following year the factory began manufacturing entire Galil rifles under license from Israel.
Israeli advisers set up the factory and then trained the Guatemalans to run it, said Gen. Benedicto Lucas Garcia, who had headed the army at the time. "The factory is now being run by Guatemalans," he added. There are hopes in Guatemala that 30 percent of the plant's output can be sold to Honduras and El Salvador.
The EGP said in 1983 that there were 300 Israeli advisers in Guatemala, working "in the security structures and in the army." Other reports were less specific as to numbers, but suggested that these Israeli advisers, "some official, others private," performed a variety of functions. Israelis "helped Guatemalan internal security agents hunt underground rebel groups."
Gen. Lucas said Israeli advisers had come to teach the use of Israeli equipment purchased by Guatemala. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the Guatemalan police agencies had had extensive U.S. training in "riot control training and related phases of coping with civil disturbances in a humane and effective manner," a euphemism for the terror campaigns in which these forces participated that in 1967-1968 took 7,000 lives while ostensibly fighting a guerrilla force that never numbered more than 450. When Congress forbade U.S. forces to train the internal police forces of other countries-passed in 1974, this law was supplanted in 1985 by legislation that put the U.S. back in the police-guidance business - the Israelis stepped in and "set up their intelligence network, tried and tested on the West Bank and Gaza."
Israeli noncommissioned officers were also said to have been hired by big landowners to train their private security details. (Under Marcos, Israel did the same in the Philippines. These private squads, together with "off-duty military officers formed the fearsome 'death squads' which later spread to neighboring El Salvador, where they have been responsible for an estimated 20,000-30,000 murders of left-wing dissidents."
Not only did the Israelis share their experiences and their tactics, they bestowed upon Guatemala the technology needed by a modern police state. During the period Guatemala was under U.S. tutelage, the insurgency spread from the urban bourgeoisie to the indigenous population in the rural highlands; with Israeli guidance the military succeeded in suppressing ... the drive for land and political liberation. The Guatemalan military is very conscious of that achievement, even proud of it. Some officers argue that with the help of the U.S. they could not have quelled the insurgency, as Congress would not have tolerated their ruthless tactics.
In 1979, the Guatemalan interior minister paid a "secret and confidential" visit to Israel, where he met with the manufacturers of "sophisticated police equipment." In March of the following year Interior Minister Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz was in Israel to conclude an agreement for police training. Following the overthrow of Lucas Garcia, the home of Interior Minister Alvarez was raided, "uncovering underground jail cells, stolen vehicles...[and] scores of gold graduation rings, wrenched from the fingers of police torture victims."
Israeli advisers have worked with the feared G-2 police intelligence unit. overseen by the army general staff, the G-2 is the intelligence agency - sections charged with "the elimination of individuals" are stationed at every army base - which has been largely responsible for the death squad killings over the last decade. The present civilian government has dissolved the DIT, a civilian organization subordinate to G-2, but not G-2 itself.
In 1981, the Army's School of Transmissions and Electronics, a school designed and financed by the Israeli company Tadiran to teach such subjects as encoding, radio jamming and monitoring, and the use of Israeli equipment was opened in Guatemala City. According to the colonel directing the school, everything in it came from Israel: the "teaching methods, the teaching teams, the technical instruments, books, and even the custom furniture...designed and built by the Israeli company DEGEM Systems."
At the opening ceremony the Israeli ambassador was thanked by Chief of Staff Gen. Benedicto Lucas Garcia for "the advice and transfer of electronic technology" which, Lucas said, had brought Guatemala up to date. Calling Guatemala "one of our best friends" the ambassador promised that further technology transfers were in the works.
Perhaps the most sinister of all the equipment supplied by Israel to Guatemala were two computers. One was in an old military academy and became, as Benedicto Lucas called it, "the nerve center of the armed forces, which deals with the movements of units in the field and so on." The other computer was located in an annex of the National Palace. The G-2 have a control center there, and, since the days of Romeo Lucas Garcia, meetings have been held in that annex to select assassination victims. According to a senior Guatemalan army official, the complex contains "an archive and computer file on journalists, students, leaders, people of the left, politicians, and so on. " This material is combined with current intelligence reports and mulled over during weekly sessions that have included, in their respective times, both Romeo Lucas and Oscar Mejia Victores.
The bureaucratic procedures for approving the killing of a dissident are well-established. "A local military commander has someone they think is a problem," the officer explains. "So they speak with G-2, and G-2 consults its own archives and information from its agents and the police and, if all coincide, it passes along a direct proposition to the minister of defense. They say, 'We have analyzed the case of such and such a person in depth and this person is responsible for the following acts and we recommend that we execute them."
***
Control of the Rural Population
The aspect of Israeli cooperation with Guatemala with the most serious implications is the role played by Israeli personnel in the universally condemned rural "pacification" program. Extreme maldistribution of land-exacerbated by encroachment on indigenous land-was a major cause of the present rebellion. After trying several different approaches, the military, under Rios Montt, embarked on a resolution of the problem, substituting forced relocation and suppression for equitable land distribution.
In 1982 Israeli military advisers helped develop and carry out 'Plan Victoria' the devastating scorched earth campaign which Rios Montt .unleashed on the highland population. In June 1983, the Guatemalan embassy in Washington confirmed that "personnel sent by the Israeli government were participating in the repopulation and readjustment programs for those displaced." Rios Montt himself told the Washington Times that the Israeli government was giving his administration help with the counterinsurgency plan called "Techo, tortilla y trabajo" (shelter, food and work). The "three T's" followed an earlier Rios program called Fusiles y Fridoles, or beans and bullets, where wholesale slaughter was combined with the provision of life's necessities to those willing to cooperate with the military.
The success of the government's initially savage but sophisticated campaign against the rebels has come without significant U.S. military assistance, and top field commanders say that none is necessary now to finish the guerrillas.
"We declared a state of siege so we could kill legally," Rios Montt told a group of politicians. The Roman Catholic Conference of Bishops called what Rios was doing "genocide." Following Rios' overthrow, his successor Mejia Victores continued the program, proclaiming that model villages would be extended throughout the country.
As the army bombed, strafed and burned village after village, an estimated 100,000 peasants escaped across the border to Mexico or to the mountainous territory controlled by the guerrillas. Others were captured by the military. Many of those who went to the guerrillas were later forced by hunger to surrender themselves to the military. Their fate was confinement in model villages, what were called strategic hamlets during the U.S. assault on Vietnam.
***
One of the most oppressive features of Guatemala's pacification program is the "civilian self-defense patrols" whose ranks are filled by coercion, with most joining out of fear of being called subversive, and thus marked for torture or execution.
Those who do serve in the patrols must "turn in their quota of 'subversives."' Otherwise, "they will be forced to denounce their own neighbors and to execute them with clubs and fists in the village plaza."'
The patrols are believed by most analysts to have been suggested by Israelis. They have had a profound effect on Mayan society, both psychologically, "a permanent violation of our values or a new negative vision," as the country's Catholic bishops charged, and practically, as long shifts on patrol prevent fulfillment of family and economic obligations
In 1983 the Guatemalan government estimated that 850 villages in the highlands had "self defense" units. The following year the U.S. embassy in Guatemala estimated that 700,000 men had been enrolled in the units, armed with Israeli assistance. Currently 900,000 men are organized into the civil patrols.
***
It is no accident that the Guatemalans looked to the Israelis for assistance in organizing their campaign against the Indians, and having followed their mentors' advice, wound up with something that looks quite a bit like the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza strip. As the Israelis wrecked the local economy and turned the occupied territories into a captive market and a cheap labor pool, the Guatemalan military has made economic activity in the occupied highlands all but impossible.
As it is openly acknowledged in the Israeli media that the Palestinian population must not be allowed to exceed the Jewish population, it is common knowledge that the Guatemalan military would like to reduce the Mayan population to a minority.
But most of all there is the unyielding violence of the suppression. The occupation regime Israel has maintained since 1967 over the Palestinians (and its occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai and Southern Lebanon) has trained "an entire generation of Israelis...to impose Israeli rule over subject peoples." "The Israeli soldier is a model and an example to us," Gen. Benedicto Lucas said in 1981.
It was in the coercive resettlement program that Israel's activities in Guatemala intersected most directly with those of the Christian right surrounding the Reagan Administration. This was particularly true during the reign of Rios Montt. Montt was a so-called "born-again Christian," a member ("elder") of the Arcata, California based Church of the Word, a branch of Evangelical Gospel Outreach.
In Guatemala, the Christian right was interested in converts by the end of 1982 reactionary Protestants had succeeded in recruiting 22 percent of the population to their theology of blind obedience and anti-communism. They were particularly hostile to Catholicism, especially "Liberation Theology," which many of the Guatemalan military deemed responsible for the insurgency.
Right-wing Christian organizations seemed to be especially drawn to the harsh social control being exerted on the highland Mayans. During the Rios Montt period, foreign fundamentalists were permitted access to military operational zones, while Catholics were turned away-or attacked. During this period "many Catholic rectories and churches in Quiche [a highland province] [were] turned into Army barracks. In late 1983, the Vatican itself protested the murder of a Franciscan priest in Guatemala and the (exiled) Guatemalan Human Rights Commission (CDHG) charged that in the space of several months 500 catechists had been disappeared. In October the police caught and tortured some religious workers.
Meanwhile, Rios Montt surrounded himself with advisers, both North American and Guatemalan, from his Verbo church, and what appeared to be a loose coalition of right-wing fundamentalist organizations, most notably Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, began an extensive fundraising drive and also started sending volunteers to Ixil Triangle villages under military control. Rios Montt chose Love Lift International, the "relief arm" of Gospel Outreach, Verbo's parent church, to carry the food and supplies purchased with the money raised. Verbo representatives, along with an older evangelical outfit, the Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT/SIL, the latter initials for the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an organization whose CIA connections are long and impeccable and which has often been charged with involvement in massacres of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas), arranged with the government "to take charge of all medical work in the Ixil Triangle, and for all education in Indian areas up to the third grade to be taught in Indian languages with WBT/SIL assistance," through the Behrhorst Clinic. WBT/SIL and the Clinic's parent, the Behrhorst Foundation, incorporated with Verbo Church into the Foundation for Aid to the Indian People (FUNDAPI), whose stated purpose was to channel international Christian donations to refugees and which coordinated volunteers from U.S. right-wing religious organizations.
Although nothing has yet emerged which definitively ties Israeli activities in Guatemala to those of the religious right, it is reasonable to assume there is contact. Since the late 1970s the government of Israel has devoted considerable energy to befriending such political luminaries of rightist evangelism as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, having turned to these groups after the National Council of Churches passed some mildly reproving resolutions about the Middle East. The Christian extremists tell Israel what it wants to hear. Jerry Falwell found justification in the Bible for an Israel encompassing parts of "lraq, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan and all of Lebanon, Jordan, and Kuwait. Pat Robertson praised the Reagan Administration's veto of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel's invasion of Lebanon with some gobbledygook tying the invasion to the fundamentalist superstition that Israel will be the site of the last battle, Armageddon: "Israel has lit the fuse, and it is a fast burning fuse, and I don't think that the fuse is going to be quenched until that region explodes in flames. That is my personal feeling from the Bible." Robertson urged his viewers to call the White House and voice their support for the Israeli invasion.
Untroubled by the scene in Armageddon when all the Jews will be converted (or damned), Israel welcomed the "Christian Voice of Hope" radio station and its companion "Star of Hope" television to Southern Lebanon, and, even though proselytizing is illegal in Israel, provided the stations with Israeli government newscasts. Supported by donations from U.S. right-wing evangelicals, and in particular by Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, the stations were "used as a military tool" by the Israeli proxy South Lebanon Army.
Aside from the religious right and their secular allies, the Guatemalan model villages have been universally condemned. Until 1985 a bipartisan majority opposed the granting of any U.S. aid that would strengthen the development poles. This, of course, stopped short of undercutting support for the "pacification" program, as funds received from U.S. AID and other foreign sources freed up government funds for use on the model villages. In 1984, U.S. AID granted Guatemala $1 million which was used for constructing infrastructure for the model villages. Americas Watch Vice Chairman Aryeh Neier pointed out that humanitarian assistance from the U.S. has "played an essential role in the Guatemalan Army's counterinsurgency programs," enabling the army to distribute (or withhold) food to exact compliance with its resettlement program.
***
Abdication of Responsibility
... When the U.S. intervened in Guatemala and overthrew its liberal, democratically elected government in 1954, it effectively transferred rule to the country's military, which has held power ever since. Even the civilian presidency of Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro was (with U.S. acquiescence) immediately subjugated by the military. To cite only one example of the continuity that makes the last three tragic decades of Guatemala a U.S. responsibility: the dossiers that formed the basis of the intelligence unit G-2's death squad selection process also date back to 1954. After the fall of the government of Jacobo Arbenz, the army confiscated the membership lists of the many organizations which had blossomed during the all-too-short hiatus between repressive regimes- Guatemala was ruled by the oppressive dictator Jorge Ubico until 1945, when he was bloodlessly replaced by a popular government under Dr. Juan Jose Arevalo-and from these lists culled 70,000 "communists." These files were updated during the 1960s and used for assassinations during a U.S.-supported counterinsurgency. In the 1970s Israel stepped in and helped with the computerization of the whole bloody system.
It does not take convoluted reasoning to conclude that "both the U.S. and Israel bear rather serious moral responsibility" for Guatemala.
Israel and Guatemala
... The history of Israel's relations with Guatemala roughly parallels that of its ties with El Salvador except the Guatemalan military was so unswervingly bloody that Congress never permitted the ... Reagan Administration to undo the military aid cutoff implemented during the Carter years.
Weaponry for the Guatemalan military is the very least of what Israel has delivered. Israel not only provided the technology necessary for a reign of terror, it helped in the organization and commission of the horrors perpetrated by the Guatemalan military and police. And even beyond that: to ensure that the profitable relationship would continue, Israel and its agents worked actively to maintain Israeli influence in Guatemala.
Throughout the years of untrammeled slaughter that left at least 45,000 dead, and, by early 1983, one million in internal exile - mostly indigenous Mayan Indians, who comprise a majority of Guatemala's eight million people - and thousands more in exile abroad, Israel stood by the Guatemalan military. Three successive military governments and three brutal and sweeping campaigns against the Mayan population, described by a U.S. diplomat as Guatemala's "genocide against the Indians," had the benefit of Israeli techniques and experience, as well as hardware.
***
Israel began selling Guatemala weapons in 1974 and since then is known to have delivered 17 Arava aircraft. In 1977 at the annual industrial fair, Interfer, Israel's main attraction was the Arava. "An operative Arava is to be parked outside the IAI pavilion for public inspection, although its silhouette in flight is a common sight over the capital and countryside."'
Referring to the Aravas, Benedicto Lucas Garcia, chief of staff during the rule of his brother Romeo Lucas Garcia (1978-1982) said, "Israel helped us in regard to planes and transportation-which we desperately needed because we've had problems in transferring ground forces from one place to another. By 1982, at least nine of the Aravas had been mounted with gun pods.
Among the other weapons sold by Israel were 10 RBY armored personnel carriers, three Dabur class patrol boats armed with Gabriel missiles, light cannons, machine guns and at least 15,000 Galil assault rifles. The Galil became Guatemala's standard rifle and Uzis were widely seen as well.
According to Victor Perera, "Uzis and the larger Galil assault rifles used by Guatemala's special counterinsurgency forces accounted for at least half of the estimated 45,000 Guatemalan Indians killed by the military since 1978"
***
When the Reagan Administration took office it was determined to do everything it could for Guatemala. It had promised as much during the election campaign. Never had Ronald Reagan seen a rightist dictatorship he didn't like; during his 1980 campaign he met with a representative of the right-wing business lobby Los Amigos del Pais, and, referring to the Carter Administration's aid cutoff, told him, "Don't give up. Stay there and fight. I'll help you as soon as I get in."
The Guatemalan far-right apparently helped Reagan get in.
Guatemalan business leaders reportedly pumped large illegal contributions into the Reagan campaign coffers. Their tentacles reached right into the core of the new administration through the lobbying activities of the Hannaford-Deaver law firm of White House troika member Michael Deaver. Within three days of the Republican victory on 7 November 1980, Hannaford-Deaver were busy arranging a Capitol Hill briefing for Amigos del Pais.
Congress, however, did not change its attitude about Guatemala, and as late as 1985 remained adamant about denying it military aid. In 1981, Reagan's Secretary of State Alexander Haig "urged Israel to help Guatemala." In July 1985 Israel helped the administration move a shipment of 40 assault rifles with advanced night sights and 1,000 grenade launchers from Israel to Guatemala on a KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) flight.
In late 1983, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) issued a communiqué saying that the previous May a munitions factory producing bullets for Galil rifles and Uzi submachine guns had begun operation in Alta Verapaz. Subsequently the director of Army Public Relations confirmed that the military was producing Galil rifle parts, had begun armor plating its vehicles at the factory, and that the facility would soon be capable of building grenade launchers. The following year the factory began manufacturing entire Galil rifles under license from Israel.
Israeli advisers set up the factory and then trained the Guatemalans to run it, said Gen. Benedicto Lucas Garcia, who had headed the army at the time. "The factory is now being run by Guatemalans," he added. There are hopes in Guatemala that 30 percent of the plant's output can be sold to Honduras and El Salvador.
The EGP said in 1983 that there were 300 Israeli advisers in Guatemala, working "in the security structures and in the army." Other reports were less specific as to numbers, but suggested that these Israeli advisers, "some official, others private," performed a variety of functions. Israelis "helped Guatemalan internal security agents hunt underground rebel groups."
Gen. Lucas said Israeli advisers had come to teach the use of Israeli equipment purchased by Guatemala. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the Guatemalan police agencies had had extensive U.S. training in "riot control training and related phases of coping with civil disturbances in a humane and effective manner," a euphemism for the terror campaigns in which these forces participated that in 1967-1968 took 7,000 lives while ostensibly fighting a guerrilla force that never numbered more than 450. When Congress forbade U.S. forces to train the internal police forces of other countries-passed in 1974, this law was supplanted in 1985 by legislation that put the U.S. back in the police-guidance business - the Israelis stepped in and "set up their intelligence network, tried and tested on the West Bank and Gaza."
Israeli noncommissioned officers were also said to have been hired by big landowners to train their private security details. (Under Marcos, Israel did the same in the Philippines. These private squads, together with "off-duty military officers formed the fearsome 'death squads' which later spread to neighboring El Salvador, where they have been responsible for an estimated 20,000-30,000 murders of left-wing dissidents."
Not only did the Israelis share their experiences and their tactics, they bestowed upon Guatemala the technology needed by a modern police state. During the period Guatemala was under U.S. tutelage, the insurgency spread from the urban bourgeoisie to the indigenous population in the rural highlands; with Israeli guidance the military succeeded in suppressing ... the drive for land and political liberation. The Guatemalan military is very conscious of that achievement, even proud of it. Some officers argue that with the help of the U.S. they could not have quelled the insurgency, as Congress would not have tolerated their ruthless tactics.
In 1979, the Guatemalan interior minister paid a "secret and confidential" visit to Israel, where he met with the manufacturers of "sophisticated police equipment." In March of the following year Interior Minister Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz was in Israel to conclude an agreement for police training. Following the overthrow of Lucas Garcia, the home of Interior Minister Alvarez was raided, "uncovering underground jail cells, stolen vehicles...[and] scores of gold graduation rings, wrenched from the fingers of police torture victims."
Israeli advisers have worked with the feared G-2 police intelligence unit. overseen by the army general staff, the G-2 is the intelligence agency - sections charged with "the elimination of individuals" are stationed at every army base - which has been largely responsible for the death squad killings over the last decade. The present civilian government has dissolved the DIT, a civilian organization subordinate to G-2, but not G-2 itself.
In 1981, the Army's School of Transmissions and Electronics, a school designed and financed by the Israeli company Tadiran to teach such subjects as encoding, radio jamming and monitoring, and the use of Israeli equipment was opened in Guatemala City. According to the colonel directing the school, everything in it came from Israel: the "teaching methods, the teaching teams, the technical instruments, books, and even the custom furniture...designed and built by the Israeli company DEGEM Systems."
At the opening ceremony the Israeli ambassador was thanked by Chief of Staff Gen. Benedicto Lucas Garcia for "the advice and transfer of electronic technology" which, Lucas said, had brought Guatemala up to date. Calling Guatemala "one of our best friends" the ambassador promised that further technology transfers were in the works.
Perhaps the most sinister of all the equipment supplied by Israel to Guatemala were two computers. One was in an old military academy and became, as Benedicto Lucas called it, "the nerve center of the armed forces, which deals with the movements of units in the field and so on." The other computer was located in an annex of the National Palace. The G-2 have a control center there, and, since the days of Romeo Lucas Garcia, meetings have been held in that annex to select assassination victims. According to a senior Guatemalan army official, the complex contains "an archive and computer file on journalists, students, leaders, people of the left, politicians, and so on. " This material is combined with current intelligence reports and mulled over during weekly sessions that have included, in their respective times, both Romeo Lucas and Oscar Mejia Victores.
The bureaucratic procedures for approving the killing of a dissident are well-established. "A local military commander has someone they think is a problem," the officer explains. "So they speak with G-2, and G-2 consults its own archives and information from its agents and the police and, if all coincide, it passes along a direct proposition to the minister of defense. They say, 'We have analyzed the case of such and such a person in depth and this person is responsible for the following acts and we recommend that we execute them."
***
Control of the Rural Population
The aspect of Israeli cooperation with Guatemala with the most serious implications is the role played by Israeli personnel in the universally condemned rural "pacification" program. Extreme maldistribution of land-exacerbated by encroachment on indigenous land-was a major cause of the present rebellion. After trying several different approaches, the military, under Rios Montt, embarked on a resolution of the problem, substituting forced relocation and suppression for equitable land distribution.
In 1982 Israeli military advisers helped develop and carry out 'Plan Victoria' the devastating scorched earth campaign which Rios Montt .unleashed on the highland population. In June 1983, the Guatemalan embassy in Washington confirmed that "personnel sent by the Israeli government were participating in the repopulation and readjustment programs for those displaced." Rios Montt himself told the Washington Times that the Israeli government was giving his administration help with the counterinsurgency plan called "Techo, tortilla y trabajo" (shelter, food and work). The "three T's" followed an earlier Rios program called Fusiles y Fridoles, or beans and bullets, where wholesale slaughter was combined with the provision of life's necessities to those willing to cooperate with the military.
The success of the government's initially savage but sophisticated campaign against the rebels has come without significant U.S. military assistance, and top field commanders say that none is necessary now to finish the guerrillas.
"We declared a state of siege so we could kill legally," Rios Montt told a group of politicians. The Roman Catholic Conference of Bishops called what Rios was doing "genocide." Following Rios' overthrow, his successor Mejia Victores continued the program, proclaiming that model villages would be extended throughout the country.
As the army bombed, strafed and burned village after village, an estimated 100,000 peasants escaped across the border to Mexico or to the mountainous territory controlled by the guerrillas. Others were captured by the military. Many of those who went to the guerrillas were later forced by hunger to surrender themselves to the military. Their fate was confinement in model villages, what were called strategic hamlets during the U.S. assault on Vietnam.
***
One of the most oppressive features of Guatemala's pacification program is the "civilian self-defense patrols" whose ranks are filled by coercion, with most joining out of fear of being called subversive, and thus marked for torture or execution.
Those who do serve in the patrols must "turn in their quota of 'subversives."' Otherwise, "they will be forced to denounce their own neighbors and to execute them with clubs and fists in the village plaza."'
The patrols are believed by most analysts to have been suggested by Israelis. They have had a profound effect on Mayan society, both psychologically, "a permanent violation of our values or a new negative vision," as the country's Catholic bishops charged, and practically, as long shifts on patrol prevent fulfillment of family and economic obligations
In 1983 the Guatemalan government estimated that 850 villages in the highlands had "self defense" units. The following year the U.S. embassy in Guatemala estimated that 700,000 men had been enrolled in the units, armed with Israeli assistance. Currently 900,000 men are organized into the civil patrols.
***
It is no accident that the Guatemalans looked to the Israelis for assistance in organizing their campaign against the Indians, and having followed their mentors' advice, wound up with something that looks quite a bit like the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza strip. As the Israelis wrecked the local economy and turned the occupied territories into a captive market and a cheap labor pool, the Guatemalan military has made economic activity in the occupied highlands all but impossible.
As it is openly acknowledged in the Israeli media that the Palestinian population must not be allowed to exceed the Jewish population, it is common knowledge that the Guatemalan military would like to reduce the Mayan population to a minority.
But most of all there is the unyielding violence of the suppression. The occupation regime Israel has maintained since 1967 over the Palestinians (and its occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai and Southern Lebanon) has trained "an entire generation of Israelis...to impose Israeli rule over subject peoples." "The Israeli soldier is a model and an example to us," Gen. Benedicto Lucas said in 1981.
It was in the coercive resettlement program that Israel's activities in Guatemala intersected most directly with those of the Christian right surrounding the Reagan Administration. This was particularly true during the reign of Rios Montt. Montt was a so-called "born-again Christian," a member ("elder") of the Arcata, California based Church of the Word, a branch of Evangelical Gospel Outreach.
In Guatemala, the Christian right was interested in converts by the end of 1982 reactionary Protestants had succeeded in recruiting 22 percent of the population to their theology of blind obedience and anti-communism. They were particularly hostile to Catholicism, especially "Liberation Theology," which many of the Guatemalan military deemed responsible for the insurgency.
Right-wing Christian organizations seemed to be especially drawn to the harsh social control being exerted on the highland Mayans. During the Rios Montt period, foreign fundamentalists were permitted access to military operational zones, while Catholics were turned away-or attacked. During this period "many Catholic rectories and churches in Quiche [a highland province] [were] turned into Army barracks. In late 1983, the Vatican itself protested the murder of a Franciscan priest in Guatemala and the (exiled) Guatemalan Human Rights Commission (CDHG) charged that in the space of several months 500 catechists had been disappeared. In October the police caught and tortured some religious workers.
Meanwhile, Rios Montt surrounded himself with advisers, both North American and Guatemalan, from his Verbo church, and what appeared to be a loose coalition of right-wing fundamentalist organizations, most notably Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, began an extensive fundraising drive and also started sending volunteers to Ixil Triangle villages under military control. Rios Montt chose Love Lift International, the "relief arm" of Gospel Outreach, Verbo's parent church, to carry the food and supplies purchased with the money raised. Verbo representatives, along with an older evangelical outfit, the Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT/SIL, the latter initials for the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an organization whose CIA connections are long and impeccable and which has often been charged with involvement in massacres of indigenous peoples throughout the Americas), arranged with the government "to take charge of all medical work in the Ixil Triangle, and for all education in Indian areas up to the third grade to be taught in Indian languages with WBT/SIL assistance," through the Behrhorst Clinic. WBT/SIL and the Clinic's parent, the Behrhorst Foundation, incorporated with Verbo Church into the Foundation for Aid to the Indian People (FUNDAPI), whose stated purpose was to channel international Christian donations to refugees and which coordinated volunteers from U.S. right-wing religious organizations.
Although nothing has yet emerged which definitively ties Israeli activities in Guatemala to those of the religious right, it is reasonable to assume there is contact. Since the late 1970s the government of Israel has devoted considerable energy to befriending such political luminaries of rightist evangelism as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, having turned to these groups after the National Council of Churches passed some mildly reproving resolutions about the Middle East. The Christian extremists tell Israel what it wants to hear. Jerry Falwell found justification in the Bible for an Israel encompassing parts of "lraq, Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan and all of Lebanon, Jordan, and Kuwait. Pat Robertson praised the Reagan Administration's veto of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel's invasion of Lebanon with some gobbledygook tying the invasion to the fundamentalist superstition that Israel will be the site of the last battle, Armageddon: "Israel has lit the fuse, and it is a fast burning fuse, and I don't think that the fuse is going to be quenched until that region explodes in flames. That is my personal feeling from the Bible." Robertson urged his viewers to call the White House and voice their support for the Israeli invasion.
Untroubled by the scene in Armageddon when all the Jews will be converted (or damned), Israel welcomed the "Christian Voice of Hope" radio station and its companion "Star of Hope" television to Southern Lebanon, and, even though proselytizing is illegal in Israel, provided the stations with Israeli government newscasts. Supported by donations from U.S. right-wing evangelicals, and in particular by Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, the stations were "used as a military tool" by the Israeli proxy South Lebanon Army.
Aside from the religious right and their secular allies, the Guatemalan model villages have been universally condemned. Until 1985 a bipartisan majority opposed the granting of any U.S. aid that would strengthen the development poles. This, of course, stopped short of undercutting support for the "pacification" program, as funds received from U.S. AID and other foreign sources freed up government funds for use on the model villages. In 1984, U.S. AID granted Guatemala $1 million which was used for constructing infrastructure for the model villages. Americas Watch Vice Chairman Aryeh Neier pointed out that humanitarian assistance from the U.S. has "played an essential role in the Guatemalan Army's counterinsurgency programs," enabling the army to distribute (or withhold) food to exact compliance with its resettlement program.
***
Abdication of Responsibility
... When the U.S. intervened in Guatemala and overthrew its liberal, democratically elected government in 1954, it effectively transferred rule to the country's military, which has held power ever since. Even the civilian presidency of Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro was (with U.S. acquiescence) immediately subjugated by the military. To cite only one example of the continuity that makes the last three tragic decades of Guatemala a U.S. responsibility: the dossiers that formed the basis of the intelligence unit G-2's death squad selection process also date back to 1954. After the fall of the government of Jacobo Arbenz, the army confiscated the membership lists of the many organizations which had blossomed during the all-too-short hiatus between repressive regimes- Guatemala was ruled by the oppressive dictator Jorge Ubico until 1945, when he was bloodlessly replaced by a popular government under Dr. Juan Jose Arevalo-and from these lists culled 70,000 "communists." These files were updated during the 1960s and used for assassinations during a U.S.-supported counterinsurgency. In the 1970s Israel stepped in and helped with the computerization of the whole bloody system.
It does not take convoluted reasoning to conclude that "both the U.S. and Israel bear rather serious moral responsibility" for Guatemala.
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!
Donate
$230.00 donated
in the past month
Get Involved
If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.
Publish
Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.
Topics
More
Search Indybay's Archives
Advanced Search
►
▼
IMC Network