operation sofia guatemalashinedown attention attention

Despite the civil war, church leaders helped peasants to reclaim unwanted marshland, build co-operative villages and sustain both their traditional culture and new left-wing politics. There were certainly too few to be a real threat to the State, whose massive and brutal campaign was largely driven by long-term racist prejudice against the Mayan majority. The records make clear that "Operation Sofía" was executed as part of the military strategy of Guatemala’s In 1999, the UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission concluded that the Guatemalan Army had committed “massacres, human rights violations, and other atrocities” against Mayan communities that “illustrated a government policy of genocide.” Due to military stonewalling, which included refusing to turn over internal records, the Commission based its findings almost exclusively on testimony from witnesses and perpetrators, human rights reports, and data from exhumations. We would try and bury them, but we didn’t have enough time, and still the dogs would come, dig them up, and eat at them.Guatemala is a mainly mountainous country in Central America, just south of Mexico and less than half the size of the UK. rights reserved. All More than 80 percent of the victims of human rights abuses during the war were Indians, the Commission for Historical Clarification concluded.”The massacres, scorched-earth operations, forced disappearances and executions of Maya authorities, leaders and spiritual guides were not only an attempt to destroy the social base of the guerrillas,” the report said, ”but above all, to destroy the cultural values that ensured cohesion and collective action in Maya communities.”Although the report was couched in relatively moderate language when it came to assigning blame to non-Guatemalan participants, Commission Chairman Christian Tomuschat accused the United States of being responsible for much of the bloodshed.As seething U.S. diplomats looked on, Tomuschat said the Guatemalan army carried out hundreds of massacres of civilians at a time when ”the United States government and U.S. private companies exercised pressure to maintain the country’s archaic and unjust socioeconomic structure.”Tomuschat said the CIA and other U.S. agencies ”lent direct and indirect support to some illegal state operations.” This encouraged a Guatemalan military government that was committing genocide against the country’s Indian population, he added.Tomuschat spoke at the unveiling of the commission’s 3,600-page report on human rights abuses during the civil war that ended in 1996. Operation Irini is the successor operation. It does single out a handful of senior officials for blame — like former military strongman Efrain Rios Montt — who already have been excoriated in numerous other human rights reports.The last time a highly publicized human rights report was unveiled in Guatemala, it was followed 48 hours later by the murder of its principal author. The 359-page operational plan for Operation Sofia says it is aimed at “exterminating subversive elements in the area” of Ixil, in northwestern Quiché. When Spanish explorers conquered this region in the 16th century, the Mayans became slaves in their own ancient home. Finally they sprayed petrol around and set fire to the house… [The next day, Buenaventura Manuel Jeronimo] emerged from his hiding place to see the destruction they had caused. Labourers could now set up workers’ unions, and this gave them political strength as well.However, attempts at land reform brought Guatemala’s ‘Ten Years of Spring’ to an end. Ms. Doyle testified today before Judge Pedraz on the authenticity of the documents, which were obtained from military intelligence sources in Guatemala. By 1981 three guerrilla groups had merged to create Guatemala’s United Front, Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG). These were supported initially by ethnic Maya indigenous peoples and Ladino peasants, who together make up the rural poor. “The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike.”— “Counterinsurgency Operations in El Quiché“, February 1982, Central Intelligence Agency, secret cable, in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! The Roman Catholic church was deprived of its lands for the purpose, and within 30 years Americans were the major investors. Indians in both town and country were given consideration, social security, and education. Though the Spanish ambassador urged the government to respond peacefully, his embassy was deliberately burned down, killing all the protesters together with all the Embassy staff (the ambassador survived).The Guatemalan government, using the Guatemalan Army and its counter-insurgency force (whose members defined themselves as ‘killing machines’), began a systematic campaign of repressions and suppression against the Mayan Indians, whom they claimed were working towards an communist coup.In the words of the 1999 UN-sponsored report on the civil war: ‘The Army’s perception of Mayan communities as natural allies of the guerrillas contributed to increasing and aggravating the human rights violations perpetrated against them, demonstrating an aggressive racist component of extreme cruelty that led to extermination en masse of defenceless Mayan communities, including children, women and the elderly, through methods whose cruelty has outraged the moral conscience of the civilised world.’Working methodically across the Mayan region, the army and its paramilitary teams, including ‘civil patrols’ of forcibly conscripted local men, attacked 626 villages.
Afterward, a clearly furious Planty said the attack was unfair.”Everyone knows the historical context in which the conflict took place,” Planty said.
Ms. Doyle testified today before Judge Pedraz on the authenticity of the documents, which were obtained from military intelligence sources in Guatemala.

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