Three decades after José Efraín Ríos Montt finished his coursework at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA)—where tens of thousands of Latin American soldiers have been trained in the art of violent repression; it was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001—he seized power in Guatemala, and then ripped its social fabric to shreds. “During the 14 months of Ríos Montt’s rule, an estimated 70,000 unarmed civilians were killed or ‘disappeared;’ hundreds of thousands were internally displaced,” according to Amnesty International. In the summer of 1982, he launched “Operation Sofia,” which destroyed 600 Mayan villages.
Had Ríos Montt lived centuries ago, he might be remembered as a hero today. We can compare him, for example, to the Admiral who, as scholar David Stannard recounts, on one campaign “set forth across the countryside, tearing into assembled masses of sick and unarmed native people, slaughtering them by the thousands.” That was Columbus on Hispaniola, back in March 1495. Or perhaps Ríos Montt is a worthy successor to the man the Iroquois dubbed “Town Destroyer” in the 1770s. Historian Robert A. Ferguson relates the words of Seneca Chief Cornplanter: “When that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.” The Indians were referring to George Washington.
But killers of this caliber today face challenges their predecessors never confronted. For the past several decades, groups of activists in the U.S. and especially Latin America have brought attention to Washington-backed terror campaigns in countries like Guatemala, winning a major victory this past January 26, when “Judge Carol Patricia Flores Blanco ruled…that there was sufficient evidence linking Ríos Montt” to human rights violations for him to “face trial on genocide and crimes against humanity,” Rory Carroll reported in the Guardian.
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