 My name is Josema Roquín. I am a Guatemalan. I was the publisher of La Hora for some years. Then I began a battle for transparency and for stronger institutions in my country. And most of you know Guatemala, so you might not be surprised to know that now I live in the US because I can't do my job back there. I will be moderating this period of time. And I just wanted, before I started with my first question to Mr. Nair, try to answer what Daniel asked about why people don't know about Guatemala. With a very brief answer, my answer will be because obtaining silence has been the method of success for the status quo in Guatemala. Talking and doing is a way of dying. Being silent is a way of living. And I will give you two very small examples. One, Carlos Castrezana. The day Carlos Castrezana started talking too much about the Guatemalan situation and the institutional situation of the country, he was not good enough anymore. And in a positive way, I want to talk now about Mr. Benjamin. Mr. Benjamin, like most of you have been also helping, has been bringing the word of the truth of what happened. And look at what the trial has been getting to. So talking is what really can be a big threat for the status quo. And the silence has been the key that they have been using to success. That's my point of view. In this part, we're going to be talking about the role of the US in the genocide years. And the first question will be to Mr. Nair. If you can do an analysis on what was going on in the last part of the 1970s when Nicaragua was already Sandinistas were in power. In El Salvador, the Frente Fajardo-Martí was taking possession of very important pieces of the territory. And in Guatemala, the urban battle was almost finished by the army and all the guerrilla members were moving to the highlands. Was the US able to support the risk of losing also Guatemala like they did in Nicaragua? Well, the US, particularly when the Reagan administration came in in 1981, made Central America a priority. That is, it wanted to reverse the results of the Sandinista revolution. It wanted to reverse the human rights restrictions that the Carter administration had placed on some of the assistance to the Salvadoran military. As far as Guatemala was concerned, Guatemala had rejected US assistance after the first country reports on human rights were published in 1977. And the Reagan administration wanted to overcome the relative disengagement from Guatemala that was going on. So this was a priority for the Reagan administration to make sure that Central America was not lost to those who were seen to be, let's say, agents of the Cuban revolution or leftists associated with world communism. And based also on that time and what I was just talking about a little bit from the silence, both of you were involved in the first kind of effort to go to the areas where the war was present, talk to the victims, do some work with the anthropology teams and everything. What was the effect of all the information that we were collecting when you were bringing it back to the US, coming back from Guatemala and a known country in the media and everything? I think it's a really good question. I think the first effect actually in the exclamation in Don Ben Hamin's community in Flan de Sanchez in 1994 is the very visible opening of political space. Because when you open up the graves and you show that there are skeletons of women and children who were massacred, you break the lie of the army that they're guerrillas. You break the lie that their civilians caught in crossfire. You see that their hands are tied behind their backs and that they were murdered with their babies on their backs. And so it's a very visible opening of political space and then bringing those stories back to Guatemala City and then to, I think, the greater international community. I think it breaks that silence that you're speaking of. And it also presents a challenge to the army. And the army over the years had different tactics in the way that they addressed this type of human rights work. First, they wanted to stop the exclamation. So there were threats. The people in Flan de Sanchez received threats. The forensic teams received threats. And they would deny that there were massacres and they would say that it hadn't happened. Later, they decided to allow the excemations to continue, but they stopped the processes in the Ministerio Publico and the prosecutor's office. So there are every exclamation that the forensic team has done somewhere in Guatemala in one of the courts is a case. And so those cases would sit there and a prosecutor would come along and decide to open up and move on the case. And that prosecutor would be threatened. Family members would be threatened. They'd be transferred or they would be injured or sometimes they would be killed. And that would end the movement on the prosecution. And as the prosecution grew because of shifts and reforms in the legal system and the presence of more international manugua later sesig, and that opened up, then what they did is they kind of left a little bit of space in the Ministerio Publico with the prosecutors and took over in Asif, which is the forensic part, so that they can maintain impunity and contemporary Guatemala. And I think somehow in the discussion it's really important to connect the violence and impunity of the past with the violence and impunity of the present because right now in Guatemala, the homicide rate is as high as it was at the height of the genocide. And that's what maintains the impunity and the clandestine structures of military officials and former military officials and drug traffickers who have ties to those officials and allows the cycle of impunity to continue on and on making it very difficult for people to speak publicly. Ms. Zoyal, in 82, when there was a change of power, the urban fight was kind of done because most of the leaders in the urban area were already hunted. When the plan Sophia, for instance, and all the other documents this classified from the CIA with the time showed that the US knew or had information about what was going on. After your analysis of all those documents, what do you think was the role of the US into it? I was involved in that moment. I had started going to Guatemala in 1981 and in that first visit in 1981, I had met with General Benedicto Lucas Garcia and talked to him at some length about the counterinsurgency effort that he was launching at that time. And he had told me that he had studied at Military Academy in France that his teachers had been French military men who had learned their trade in Algeria and he was bringing back to Guatemala the counterinsurgency methods that were used by the French in Algeria. So those counterinsurgency methods sort of started under his brother Romeo Lucas Garcia before Rios Mont came in and then Rios Mont sort of doubled down on those counterinsurgency methods. The US was very enthusiastic at that moment about the initial reduction in violence in Guatemala city. There was an initial reduction in death squad killings and disappearances when Rios Mont came in but there was the great intensification of the counterinsurgency effort in the Highlands areas and the US knew what was going on and we were reporting what was going on. That is, there was no Guatemalan human rights group at that moment. It was too dangerous. Bishop Juan Gerardi had fled the country. He was living in Costa Rica. I saw him there, not in Guatemala during that period. So he was the driving force in the Catholic church but the church was essentially out of the business of being able to report on human rights abuses. And so we were reporting on the basis of refugee testimony that we collected at the Mexican border and a limited amount of on the spot reporting from areas like the Ishel Triangle. Essentially two women were reporting for us. A photographer named Jean-Marie Simon was going around taking photographs and interviewing people in the Ishel Triangle and getting a certain amount of information. She was also interviewing soldiers and then the anthropologist Beatrice Mons had collected testimony in Mexico and then went to the Ishel Triangle in March 1983 to add to what she got. But it was very fragmentary information. We didn't have a complete picture. Amnesty was trying to collect information. They didn't have a complete picture. We were able to report on a certain number of massacres. We didn't use the word genocide. We didn't know the extent of the killing that was taking place. But we did think that the U.S. knew and the U.S. was saying publicly that we were getting our information from the guerrilla sympathizers. They said that with respect to amnesty. They said that with respect to us and in the process they conveyed the impression that they were supporting everything that was going on. And of course Reagan himself journeyed to Honduras to meet with Rial Smont and to say that these human rights reports were a bum rap against Rial Smont. Mr. Ayala, if you can comment on that and also in the impact that you had with the process with George Pedras when you brought your analysis of the documents from the CIA too. Sure. I want to reflect a little bit on what the declassified record of U.S. documents says about 1982 to 1983. Because if you read every single one, and I have read every single one of the cables and memos and reports that came up out of the U.S. embassy and flowed into the State Department, Langley or the Pentagon about what was happening on the ground in Guatemala. Every single one until the very end of 1982 blamed either the guerrillas dressed in army uniforms for the killings or blamed reports of massacres as guerrilla propaganda whether it came from a U.S. human rights organization like America's Watch or from some of the organizations on the ground, the church and other Guatemalan organizations. So the United States in its eagerness I would say to embrace Rial Smont as a new ally, especially in the wake of a disastrous butcher like Lucas Garcia, which even the Reagan administration could, you know, had to kind of throw their hands up about and could not work with, despite repeated attempts to send emissaries like Vernon Walters from the CIA and others down to Guatemala to negotiate with Lucas Garcia. When Rial Smont came into office, the U.S. was so eager to embrace him as an ally as Arya said previously, within the strategic U.S. vision in Central America that the U.S. basically accepted hook, line and sinker what the army was saying about what was happening in the highlands. And Arya's right, there were so few visits, onsite visits by the U.S. and when there were onsite visits and all of this is documented in the secret, formerly secret cables, they were onsite visits in the presence of or accompanied by the base commander or the task force, Guamarka commander. And they would have villagers who had been saved from guerrilla massacres weeping and gnashing their teeth and tearing their hair out. These are quotes from some of the cables in front of the U.S. embassy officials and the army base commander talking about how the guerrillas had destroyed their villages and murdered their families. So there is this kind of very moving and terrible to read sort of cover up at the moment of these things unfolding within not simply Elliot Abrams talking before Congress and trying to convince Congress that everything's fine and Rios Maude is a human rights reformer but within their own secret communications between each other. This reached such an extreme point in the contrast between what the State Department, for example, was getting through secret cables coming up from the embassy were saying and what America's Watch was saying in congressional hearings that the State Department assigned someone to do a kind of internal investigation. And that person in November 1982 read every single cable, most of which are now available publicly and concluded in a long internal secret memo that the U.S. embassy had not reported a single instance in which the army was responsible for violence against civilians in the Highlands, underlined in the original document. Essentially, the investigation concluded by saying what is wrong here and the embassy has to revise its reporting methods. So there was a very clear will not to see, I think, what was happening. It was reinforced through the United Nations because the U.S. lobbied to get a man named Lord Colville appointed as the UN rapporteur on Guatemala and he was a Thatcher loyalist and the Reagan administration was very happy with him and he traveled in the area with the Guatemalan military and he got the same kind of information that the State Department officials were getting. I mean, I can remember meeting with him and bringing our researcher, Jean-Marie Simon, to meet with him and she would ask him about what he had seen in particular places and ask him particular questions and it was apparent that he had been completely he had completely swallowed the story of the Guatemalan military. Can I add something? I think all of that is true but what also makes Guatemala so complicated is that it wasn't hidden that much because if you do a search through all the press that reported on 1982 to 83, Elizabeth Farnsworth for public television, Alan writing, Marley Simon for the New York Times, John Lee Anderson for Jack Anderson's indicated program, Alan Niren for the Progressive, Mary Jo McConaughey, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Jose Mercury, San Francisco Chronicle, Papers in Texas. There were reporters who were going up to the Eichel area and they reported on massacres happening there. They reported on what they were witnessing and I can't remember which article but there is one where someone actually says there's a genocide here and I can't remember which reporter it is that had reported it but it's in 1982 and also among those declassified documents is a 1982 October declassified CIA document where the CIA operative is reporting that the archivo de la Estado Mayor Presidencia which sounds like the filing cabinet of the office of the president, it's actually the name of a clandestine structure which is a death squad and what they're reporting is and they have received instructions that they are allowed to detain, interrogate and dispose of suspected subversives as they see fit and that at the same time, coincidentally, they're seeing the same telltale signs of right wing hit squads as they had seen under the time of Lucas because they're trying to maintain this fiction that somehow these clandestine death squads were separate from the government but then the stunning thing about this particular document is at the end of it, Ambassador Chapin says that he disagrees that these are not right wing death squads that in fact, this is government supported violence and that it comes from the very highest of office, it comes out of the office of the president of Guatemala Rios March. So I think there, I mean, there was knowledge that was pretty clear. But just one question. Is it possible that at that time that information coming here was coming also to a polarized society based on the Cold War and that made it like more permissible for the local government and more permissible into a society to be happening down there? That's one. And the other one is, isn't it maybe one of the biggest problems in Guatemala also that we have been polarized since 54 intervention? And most of the countries, most of the societies have developed over it but Guatemala, we haven't. And you can see it in today's newspapers. You can see it in today's discussions. So isn't it possible that maybe that polarization since the 54 intervention has been part of what we are living? Yes, definitely. Yeah, I wanted to, well, first of all, that document, which is an amazing document, is talking specifically about urban operations, not about the shill massacres, but of course they knew. Of course they knew. That's not the issue. I guess what I'm trying to say is, even when they knew, it was important to maintain that understanding between them, that you really couldn't pin this down. That if the army was telling us that there are guerrillas out there wearing army uniforms, slaughtering Indian civilians, that's a real tragedy and that's why this guerrilla war has to be fought. So there was this very powerful urge to maintain that fiction, even at the most secret levels, which is astonishing. I did want to address briefly, though, your reference to the past. Because if you look for US collusion in 1982, RIA knows this well because of the aid cutoff, yes, the CIA was sending millions of dollars covertly, it's true. But the fact is military assistance, the kind of, not millions, but billions of dollars that were flowing to El Salvador at the same time, that was not going to Guatemala. When that was happening, was in 1954, the 1960s and into the early 1970s and you actually had a precursor to the massacres that took place in the Ischial region in 1967 and 1968. At that time, without the kind of human rights policy that the Carter administration and US Congress began to embrace in the late 1970s, at that time the United States was absolutely openly not only sending millions of dollars, not only building units within the Guatemalan army that had not before existed, such as the famous Mariscal Zavala Battalion, not only building up the Guatemalan intelligence services and creating what would then become the Archivo, the Klandestine Death Squad unit, but actually having men on the ground, both in Saqapa and in Guatemala City, advising, just as we did in El Salvador years later, advising the Minister of Defense and the soldiers in the field who killed according to even the most conservative estimates that show up in CIA documents from that era, up to 4,000 Guatemalan civilians in Saqapa during that first round of massacres. There's an amazing CIA report that was written in 1983 about the 50s and 60s that although, at that time the CIA could not write in this way about what was happening under Rios Mont. It was able with the passage of time to reflect in a way about what had happened in the past. And the report says that following the coup against Jacobo Arbenz, the coup ended a decade of economic and social reform, said the report, and left a nation, and this is the coup that the United States itself engineered and pushed, supported, and left a nation ruled by elites who share a tacit understanding that unpredictable and unmanageable political processes, such as free elections and greater popular participation, are inimical to their interests. In pursuit of a policy of political exclusion, the document continues, the Guatemalan elites, and this is a quote, killed the leaders of many independent or opposition organizations that could not be co-opted, silenced, or frightened into exile. Manipulated procedural techniques in electoral and labor laws to deny or delay legal recognition of opposition political parties and independent unions. Subverted the integrity of the judicial system by government and right-wing sponsored use of death squads to murder and intimidate judges, witnesses, and defense lawyers. This is the CIA talking about our coup in the United States. So when we think about what responsibility is the US bear for a massacre or a series of massacres or genocide that unfolded decades later, I think we only need to sort of look back to the origins of that sort of creation moment in 1954 of our most intensive engagement to see. Yes, and I'm sorry I know the time, it's all right, I just have one more question for Eastern Ireland. How important can it be, Eastern Ireland, that these genocide trial and all the other topics about impunity that goes under individual human rights violations in Guatemala need to be addressed so that maybe one day in Guatemala we can start wondering about the economic and social human rights. Develop a little bit into the individual, the right of life, living, it's already taking care of. We are respecting it. Now we can look into a more dignifying way of living. How important are these trials to make that happen? I think they're very important. I think that there have been many places in the world where terrible crimes took place. And unless there is some kind of sense of closure, with respect to the abuses of the past, and unless one can create a sense in a country that broadly speaking justice will prevail, I think it's very difficult for a society to deal with its different problems. There are so many examples, one can cite, in different parts of the world of countries that have or have not come to grips with their past. But I think it's always a crucial question, are they able to do it? And once it's done, I think it has a kind of liberating effect upon the society. I just wanted to ask the distinguished panel. Now that the trial has really brought out a lot of conversation about the role of the United States in the past, especially in the United States, what do you think can be done to take advantage of this opportunity and move this conversation forward? What else can be investigated? What is still to be learned about the US role? Go ahead. Start? So many things. No. Well, first of all, this is a soft part of the answer, but I want to say this, what we're constantly saying in Guatemala, oh, the schools don't teach the real history, the brutality of the regimes during the conflict. And it's one of the leading issues that the Truth Commission mentioned, that Remy mentioned that many different efforts, social movements talk about as being a real lack in terms of how does society come to grips with what happened? But the same is true, I would say in our own school system. So like I said, this is the soft part of my answer, but I do think if you look through as I have my own child's high school texts about Guatemala, there is an understanding that the United States was involved in this coup. There is not an understanding in that story. And so many stories about what that really wreaked, the havoc it wreaked on that society for decades to come, the way that sparked the spiral of violence and how we bear a responsibility for that. So I will say that in terms of what we, how do we address even knowing what we know now? I think, many people have said in different forums, should we have a Truth Commission? Should there be trials? Of course, sure, there should be. There will never be. You know, we can do that ourselves. I think that's meaningless, frankly. I think a Truth Commission has power and weight and meaning in a society when the government is part of, you know, is sitting at the table with regard to trials. Obviously that's never going to happen in the United States. Canada, Belgium, Spain, feel free. But there are people like Elliot Abrams, like Stephen Bosworth, who are sitting on the council in farm relations, who are I think running the Tufts Foreign Affairs School, who are in comfortable, powerful positions, who at least I think need to answer in some way today. Now that we've had this genocide conviction for what happened and what was their role. And apparently, I mean, this is off the record. Where's the TV camera? There's the camera. There was a debate, there was a room for debate sequence on the New York Times blog that looked at U.S. responsibility in Guatemala. And the guy that is the editor for that called around to all of those people I've mentioned and others to try to get one of them to make a public statement. Now that the genocide conviction had come in about how they saw it, how they reflected on it, vis-a-vis their own role, and none of them would, as you wrote in the email. I guess they weren't proud of the work they did or something, you know. So I think that's, you know, students at Tufts. I mean, ask the dean of your school why his role in the 1980s was to cover up. He was the guy who went out to Capitol Hill to trash amnesty and to complain that amnesty was basing its reports on guerrillas. And, you know, he's now dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts. Anyway, could I just add one thing? You know, after World War II, there was great fear that knowledge of what took place during the war would disappear and that it was particularly not known in Germany. And then, you know, a couple of things took place. The Eichmann trial took place. The television series on the Holocaust. And starting maybe 16, 17 years after the war, there got to be a consciousness in Germany about everything that had taken place during World War II. And it has only grown since that period. There are probably more than any other country in the world. Germany has sort of taken responsibility for its own past. And there were thousands of trials of Nazi war criminals in German courts. By contrast in Japan, there was never a trial in a Japanese court of a Japanese war criminal, even though the Japanese in China and Korea and the Philippines probably killed 10 million people. And even today, you have stories in the newspaper of the mayor of Osaka justifying the comfort women who were forced to serve the Japanese troops during World War II. Perhaps 300,000 women were made into coerced sex slaves of the Japanese military. In Japan, I think it was because the Japanese saw themselves as victims of the war. The firebombing of Japanese cities, the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki made the Japanese feel like victims. Therefore, they weren't responsible for what had taken place. But in Germany, things worked very differently. It's very difficult to foretell how this works. A country that completely smothered the past was Spain after Franco died. Today, there is very great discussion in Spain of the crimes that took place. Today, Spaniards know, which they didn't know until relatively recently, the thousands of babies were stolen from poor women and left-wing women stolen by the military and by the church and given to right-wing families that were supporters of Franco. That had never been known previously. It's only in the last few years that it has become public knowledge in Spain. These things have a habit in various places of coming back at some later point. It's usually some unexpected event that makes it happen. I don't know whether the Rios Montt trial will have that effect in Guatemala, but I do think that it is such a watershed event that it could have a very significant impact. I think one lesson is that the United States shouldn't wait 30 years to investigate and support prosecution of contemporary correction and violence in Guatemala today that's linked to former and current military officers and their clandestine structures and others who hold places of authority within the government. On those ends, we should be supporting the work of Suseg and making sure that it continues and we should be in some way tying our assistance to that country on the willingness of the actual government to cooperate with Suseg because that's a huge issue there. And I think on the home front, I think every time you see Elliott Abrams talking about Benghazi or some other foreign policy issue, you should write a letter to the editor and say, so interesting that he has all these opinions in contemporary foreign policy when he's unwilling to be held accountable for his previous positions. I think that we should all write letters to the editor all the time. I was just going to say that I have a huge respect for the genocide trial, but I don't think that genocide was the goal that they were looking for. Genocide was a tool to protect the benefits that the elites are having. I think when you ask what is next, I think this has to teach us that our homework is still up there. We are still living in a country that is very sinking to poverty, racism, discrimination, and it's always the same people who are suffering it. So it's not going to just finish the trial and let's imagine that what most of us are looking or maybe all of us are looking as a result of the trial is what we get. That's not going to solve the situation in the country. So I think right now it's also a moment when we have to think where do we want to get the state? Is it really going to serve the people? Is it, for instance, I admire Claudia Pazipaz and what she has been doing. I think she's brave and amazing. I want the Ministerio Público to develop into do persecution on corruption. I want to be everybody accountable of money that they are taking and that is not letting our people get a better future. So I think the main goal to make a small end is we have to make the state work for the people and look for a sentence.