July 16, 2014
“Is today a patriotic holiday of some
kind?” My inquiry had been provoked by the abundance of armed soldiers
being ferried through the streets of Guatemala City. My friend, a native Guatemalteco, shook his head, a puzzled
frown creasing his features. “Then why are there so many troops on the
streets?” I persisted, directing his attention to the grim-faced, uniformed
figures visible beyond the windows of our “Chicken Bus.” It was Monday morning,
August 8, 1983, and the two of us were taking a break from our missionary
labors to shop for necessities downtown. The concentration of military
personnel – and the visible agitation of my native-born friend — increased as
we approached the City Center.About an hour later, we were intercepted by
another missionary while returning to the bus stop.
“The government was overthrown in a
coup this morning,” he informed us in a voice drawn taut with urgency. “We’re
supposed to go back to our apartments, lock the doors, and wait until we’re
told it’s safe to come out.” Shocked but not entirely surprised, I turned
to a third missionary who had joined us in our shopping excursion, a young man
from Blackfoot, Idaho, whose reaction to the news was more surprising that the
coup itself.
“Cool!” he
yelped, pumping a fist in the air.
Like any other 20-year-old male, I was
a shameless adrenaline junkie, but my response was rather more
subdued. After returning to our apartment in the suburbs, we turned on the
radio and television, both of which were playing a continuous program of music
interrupted each hour by a brief speech from Gen. Oscar Humberto Mejia
Victores, the figurehead of the officers’ putsch that ousted President Efrain
Rios-Montt, an erratic general who had been in power for about a year
and a half following a previous coup.
Several weeks earlier, Rios-Montt had declared a
state of emergency, accusing the military and the media of plotting against
him.
“They are using methods of manipulation
to provoke the public against me,” he raved in a televised speech that was
broadcast repeatedly in the weeks leading up to the coup, “but I’m still here.”
Rios-Montt had a mock-Evangelical
speaking style that was long on dramatic poses and pauses, longer still on
frantic verbal effusions, and all but devoid of substance. Some Guatemalans
took to calling him “El Pajaro Loco” — “Crazy Bird,” the local name for the
cartoon character Woody Woodpecker. In retrospect he more closely
resembled a well-groomed version of El Guapo, the Bandit Chieftain from Three Amigos.
Rios-Montt’s abhorrence for Communism
was genuine, and nearly as passionate as his contempt for individual liberty.
His message to Guatemala’s rural peasantry was simple: “If you are with us,
we’ll feed you; if you’re not, we’ll kill you.”
By all accounts, Rios-Montt displayed
Caligulan capriciousness in defining who was “with” or “against” him, and his
zeal to kill those perceived as enemies of the state was limitless. He presided
over the most sanguinary years of Guatemala’s decades-long civil war, a
period in which the army routinely slaughtered entire villages of Maya Indians.
The CIA giveth, and the CIA taketh
away, so when Rios-Montt became a liability to his patron he was quietly
removed from office. The military faction that collaborated in the coup did so
because they were fixated on efficiency, not freedom. The military seized
control over the country out of concern that Rios-Montt had mishandled the
counter-insurgency campaign.
For two days following the August 1983
coup, we were confined to our apartments with little more to do than read and
listen to military helicopters churning overhead. Eventually we were given the
all-clear, but like everybody else in the country we went about our business
with a greatly enhanced sense of wariness.
Once the generals were in undisguised
control the violence abated somewhat – although Guatemaltecos found it
disconcerting to see dead bodies occasionally materialize on the streets without
warning.
A few weeks after the coup, I was
transferred to a small town called La Democracia, which was
soon selected to host a counter-insurgency command post. Without notice or
explanation the army descended on the town, setting up checkpoints and
appropriating a large building as its operations center. Within a few weeks the
army had extended its operations into the nearby town of Siquinala, where I would
eventually have the stimulating experience of being threatened by a soldier who
pointed a U.S.-purchased M16 at my chest.
Memories of my time living under
undisguised martial law were summoned by the recent spectacle in Livingston,
Illinois, where a
military raid was conducted to arrest a solitary man suspected of possessing
child pornography. Agents from the Department of Homeland Security, backed
by SWAT teams, a Blackhawk helicopter, and officers from several local
jurisdictions converged on the home of 34-year-old Robert Godsey, who offered
no resistance as he was arrested and his computers were seized.
Without permission or explanation, the
raiders set up a “staging area” on the grounds of the A.R. Graiff Elementary
School, displaying the same arrogant indifference to the locals that had
radiated from the Guatemalan Army as it seized control of streets and buildings
in La Democracia and Siquinala.
“It’s better to be over-prepared,”
smirked Jim Porter of the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of
Illinois in response to questions about wildly disproportionate use of force.
Dutifully regurgitating pre-digested soundbites Porter insisted that the most
important consideration for the raiders is to be prepared for what they
“reasonably expect might happen.” And since their indoctrination describes the public
as an undifferentiated mass of menace, and their role as subduing any potential
resistance, rather than protecting property rights, their default setting is
“overkill.”
This obsession with “force protection”
– or, as it is commonly called, “officer safety” – is the primary driver
behind the
124 SWAT raids that occur, on average, every day in the United States.
These are not “paramilitary” raids; they are fully realized military operations
carried out with financial support from Washington and material assistance from
the Pentagon. The only significant difference between counter-insurgency
operations overseas and the ones conducted domestically is the fact that
military personnel operate under more restrictive rules of engagement than
police officers.
The SWAT concept itself could be
considered a
domestic variant of the “Counter-terror teams” assembled by the CIA as
part of the murderous “Phoenix Program” in Vietnam. Amid mounting – and
overdue, but welcome — public antipathy toward police militarization, the
Homeland Security apparatus has ramped up its longstanding campaign to collect
information on activists and commentators who promote “anti-police” attitudes –
another homefront adaptation of counter-insurgency methods.
In
2008, total
government spending on “police protection” was $76 billion – nearly
half of all “criminal justice”-related expenditures. In the following
year the
Obama administration poured additional billions of dollars into the
Justice Department’s Byrne Memorial Grant program. That program is one of the
chief federal funding arteries for “local” police departments – and perhaps the
most significant tool the Feds have employed to mobilize police departments and
sheriff’s offices in the “war on drugs.”
The foregoing happened before the most recent push to
provide every police agency with surplus war-fighting vehicles – even
if their officers patrol tiny rural villages in which crime is all but
nonexistent. Of course, the same was true of La Democracia and Siquinala
before the Guatemala army showed up to “pacify” them.
Unlike Guatemala, the United States has
not witnessed an overt military coup, yet our society is more pervasively
militarized than that country was when I lived there decades ago, at the nadir
of a long and brutal civil war. The welcome news is that our rulers haven’t
rolled up a comparable body count. The ominous news is that they’re just
getting started.
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