Hypocritical U.S. policy ignored in the “Land of the Free”

By Dennis Meredith

In November of 1989, the Berlin Wall — which had stood as the seemingly indestructible wall to the world’s biggest prison — ceased to exist. People surged through it from both sides, greeting each other with cheers, embraces and champagne. People in the United States exulted that “our” values had won some monumental competition as we comfortably watched from our living rooms. 

Soon after the media blitz died away, however, those very same values were inscribed in the bodies of a household of Salvadoran Jesuits, their housekeeper and her daughter — killed by men trained in Georgia and paid from Washington, D. C. Yet these events, as too often is the case, went unnoticed, unheralded in newspapers or on television.

Perhaps the new world was not so new after all.

Now, once again, an atrocity has dared Americans to look at a darker side of our history — a side they don’t teach in U.S. history classes.

On April 24, Bishop Juan Jose Geradi issued a report — the result of a three-year investigation — that exposed the atrocities and genocide of the Guatemalan government during that country’s civil war. On April 26, Geradi was beaten to death with a cinder block outside his home.  None of his personal effects were taken — not a wallet, or a ring.  This was not a random act of violence.

The most sickening part of the United States policy toward Latin America is not the number of atrocities that have been committed, but the shocking complacency with which they’ve been dealt. 

Eight people are killed or tortured in Guatemala at the hands of the government every week. More than 200,000 have been killed or disappeared to date.

A huge majority of students still think that “Banana Republic” is just a place to buy cute shorts. The name actually started when the CIA organized and financed a coup during the Eisenhower Administration to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected president, in order to protect the interests of the United Fruit Co. and its massive banana plantations. Guatemala’s current constitution was essentially written by United Fruit Co. lawyers.

The School of the Americas is the heart of all this evil. Located in Georgia, it has been the training ground for death squads and military dictators for decades, all financed by our taxes. We are paying these men to kill and torture.

This most recent murder in Guatemala is part of a pattern of U. S. involvement in the most unspeakable horrors around the globe. The U.S. government has set up death squads in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Haiti. It has worked right alongside the torturers in Chile and Argentina.

There’s any easy solution to this problem. When people come together and tell the government that “the land of the free and the home of the brave” shouldn’t be financing the oppression of innocent people behind a cloak of secrecy, things will begin to change — but only if people know and only if people care enough to change them.

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