Talk:Efraín Ríos Montt/Archive 4

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Page protection

If some sort of agreement can't be reached in the talk page, with these reverts this looks like a candidate to be protected again. -- Infrogmation 19:20, 18 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Disputed information

• "in which then US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles was personally invested."

• "According to more recent estimates, within 18 months, tens of thousands were killed by regime death squads."

• "Clinton declared: "For the United States, it is important I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong and the United States must not repeat that mistake.""

Lets see some verification for these and other additions, and some context for the statement by Clinton. Was he referring specifically to Efraín Ríos Montt? If not it’s irrelevant.

Sam [Spade] 04:20, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

For the third one, here's something from the Washington Post:

GUATEMALA CITY, March 10 – President Clinton expressed regret today for the U.S. role in Guatemala's 36-year civil war, saying that Washington "was wrong" to have supported Guatemalan security forces in a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that slaughtered thousands of civilians.

Clinton's statements marked the first substantive comment from the administration since an independent commission concluded last month that U.S.-backed security forces committed the vast majority of human rights abuses during the war, including torture, kidnapping and the murder of thousands of rural Mayans.

"It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong," Clinton said, reading carefully from handwritten notes. "And the United States must not repeat that mistake. We must, and we will, instead continue to support the peace and reconciliation process in Guatemala."

(...)

The record of the Guatemalan security forces was laid bare in a report released Feb. 25 by the Historical Clarification Commission, which grew out of the U.N.-sponsored peace process that ended the war in 1996. The commission said the Guatemalan military had committed "acts of genocide" during the conflict, in which 200,000 people died. [1] Neutrality 04:50, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Cool, thanx. Thats one down. Sam [Spade] 04:54, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

For the first one, here's something. The connection may be dubious, but it probably deserves a mention:

"The CIA director at this time, Allen Dulles, was formerly the president of the United Fruit Fruit Company (UFCO) and the previous CIA director and under-secretary of state, General Walter Bedell Smith, is on the company's board of directors. Smith will become UFCO's president following the overthrow. [Smith, n.d.; Blum, 1995; LaFeber, 1993; Hertz, 2001] Allen Dulles' brother, John Dulles, who was Secretary of State at the time, had worked as a lawyer defending the United Fruit Company. [2] Neutrality 04:57, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

That’s too thin to deserve mention in the article. My friend’s brother works for Tyson chicken, and yet he (my friend) is in no way complicit in the chicken waste Clinton allowed them to pour into the Arkansas rivers ;) Sam [Spade] 05:01, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

This statement demonstrates a complete ignorance of the role of the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. Do some research as opposed to citing your friend's brother up as evidence. I recommend that you read LaFeber's Inevitable Revolutions, which I managed to list as a reference before you reverted my work and triggered the page protection.

Moving on to the Reagan quotation, see Schirmer, Jennifer (1998) The Guatemalan Military Project: A Violence Called Democracy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 33. It took me a while to respond because I was trying to search for an online reference to go along with it and my Internet connection is running unbearably slow tonight. These briefly paraphrase his comments: ([3], [4]) 172 05:33, 19 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hash out your differences on a sub-page

Sniping at each other isn't helping anything. Go create a sub-page and put it up for a straw poll. Neutrality 04:43, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Calling all reactionaries...

Guys, we'd better stop. We're just ignorant right-wing hacks standing in the presence of a professional historian. We have no right to edit his deeply researched and perfectly objective work. Trey Stone 11:24, 23 Aug 2004 (UTC)

hmm... 172 wants the page unprotected, what say you? Sam [Spade] 02:04, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I think we gotta work stuff out before we unprotect it. About the United Fruit thing, I don't really think that needs to be featured that much in this article. It's true that Dulles had ties with the company but it's covered in the article about Arbenz -- and despite being factual, the way it's phrased just gives off the impression that the CIA support was just about protecting the UFC, which is POV. Trey Stone 04:21, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Of course the U.S. government and U.S. corporations had been using their economic, diplomatic, and military power to influence politics in Central America for more than half a century. Dulles was merely one in a long line of corporate lawyers at the helm of the State Department committed to using his position to promote U.S. interests in Central America and to keeping this region within a tight sphere of U.S. influence. For more than half a century the United Fruit Company had employed as many as 40,000 Guatemalans; monopolized shipping, communications, and railroads; and helped shaped the country's politics. Thus, the major players with a stake in U.S.-Guatemalan relations (State Department officials, investors, creditors, military personnel, etc.) understandably reacted with alarm as they watched Arbenz confiscate 178,000 acres of company land in 1953; and Dulles was one of these players with a familiarity with Guatemala. The United Fruit Company was a major player in Guatemalan politics, with a substantial degree of political and economic leverage over the country, so your insistence on removing that particular reference is utterly baffling to me. BTW, see Immerman, R. H., The CIA in Guatemala: The Foreign Policy of Intervention, University of Texas Press: Austin, 1982, which is the seminal work on the 1954 coup. 172 18:41, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I wouldn't know. If you guys can be peacable I suggest you and 172 discuss it and try to build a concensus. This is really not my area, I have a friend who travels to guatamala fairly often and was originally reading this article to have something to talk w him about. He told me Montt was mean, but I figured that was too POV to put in the article ;) Sam [Spade] 05:20, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Severe bias and dubious factual accuracy

which educated cadets loyal to Washington in coup-plotting, political repression, torture, assassination, and strong anticommunist propaganda.

This kind of rhetoric has no place in an encyclopdia. Please review NPOV. Sam [Spade] 23:00, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Straightforward factual content belongs in encyclopedias, and the factual basis of the above is indisputable. If you look up at least one of the references provided in the article, you'll be on your way to realizing that this is a general description of the activities of the School of the Americas. 172 00:27, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I question your sources, and point out that they are not in agreement with the US govt. Presenting one side as fact and the other as fraud is POV and unencyclopdic. Sam [Spade] 00:49, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

What sources? Like the quotation of the Washington Post article quoting Clinton? He had some sort of role in the U.S. government, if I'm not mistaken. If you don't have the knowledge on Guatemala, I suggest that you find another article on which to work. 172 01:54, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)