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‘Journalist spotted; journalist
dead!’
Guatemala bleeds; US press shrugs
By Jeffrey St. Clair
July 29— All hell is breaking loose in Guatemala
and few outside that tragic nation seem to care or even notice.
In recent days, followers of General Efrain Rios Montt, stirred into
action by the rightwing Republican Front Party (FRG) which he controls,
have charged into the streets of Guatemala City armed with machetes,
clubs and guns. Led by FRG militants, the crowds, including many members
of the Guatemalan army, have marched on the nation’s courts, opposition
parties and newspapers, torching buildings, shooting out windows and
bullying opponents of the Bible-spouting dictator.
The riots were orchestrated by Rios Montt’s cohorts after the Guatemalan
Supreme Court (the nation’s second highest court) suspended his
campaign for the presidency and agreed to hear a complaint brought by
two right-center parties that the general, the butcher of thousands
during the 1980s, is constitutionally barred from running for president
of the country he once ruled with an iron fist.
The 77-year old Rios Montt, now white-haired and grizzled, denounced
the ruling as “judicial manipulation” and, in a radio address,
implored his followers to take to the streets to protest the decision.
Within an hour of his speech, thousands of the general’s backers
had flooded the capital city, blocking traffic, chanting threatening
slogans and waving machetes.
Hooded men ransacked buildings, fired machine guns from SUVs, smashed
windows and set fire to cars and piles of tires. The situation in Guatemala
City became so chaotic over the weekend of July 26th that the both the
UN mission and the US embassy were closed.
It all seemed like a bloody flashback to the 1980s, when Rios Montt’s
goons roamed the streets at night threatening nuns and priests, kidnapping
reporters, torturing dissidents and killing at will, especially those
of Mayan descent.
Journalists appear to have been a main target of the recent attackers.
In the first wave of street violence, Hector Ramirez, a reporter for
a Left-center television station, was hounded and chased by a mob until
he collapsed in the street and died of heart failure. As Ramirez was
carried away, the rioters chanted, “Journalist spotted, journalist
dead.”
Edgar Valle, a reporter for the Noticias television news show, was briefly
detained and roughed up by Rios Montt’s mob. “They attacked
everybody without differentiating,” said Valle, after being released.
“It was strange to me because my channel has always been identified
with the government. These people didn’t want the press to cover
what was happening.”
The rioters seemed to target cameramen in particular. Hector Estrada
was filming the riots for Guatevision when he was attacked by a gang
of masked men swinging machetes. They seized his video camera, drenched
him with gasoline and tried to light him on fire as he fled down the
street.
“I was praying for God to save me,” said Estrada. “I
thought they were going to hack me to pieces.”
Two political reporters in Guatemala told CounterPunch that they have
received multiple death threats in the past week. One of the journalists
reported that he had gotten two telephone calls threatening him and
his wife and children. Another reporter said that she had arrived home
to find a death threat nailed to the door of her home.
“The press is the only functioning institution in this country,”
says Mario Antonio Sandoval, vice president of the excellent daily paper
Prensa Libre. “That is why they either have to control it or scare
it into silence.”
The strategy appears to have worked. Even though much of the violence
has been aimed at journalists, the US press has largely ignored the
riots and the political re-emergence of Rios Montt and his rightwing
thugs. In the US, only the Miami Herald printed detailed accounts of
the riots.
Not only has the Guatemalan government taken no action to quell the
rioters, members of the Army and police have actually joined the frenzy
of violence. One account of the riots by Prensa Libre tallied 46 criminal
acts of violence and vandalism, 12 of those the paper said were committed
by government troops and police.
Fearing the impending return of the regime that slaughtered nearly 200,000
people, Mayan peasants in the highlands began streaming across the border
into Mexico last week. But they were blocked by hostile border patrols
with orders from the Mexican government, under its cruel Plan Salvamento,
to either send them back into Guatemala or lock them up in immigrant
concentration camps, where they are routinely starved and abused by
guards.
The reaction of the Bush administration to Rios Montt’s antics
has been restrained, given the circumstances. Even though the US Embassy
was taunted by rioters, there have been no statements of condemnation
directly from Colin Powell. Indeed, we’ve only heard from state
department spokesman Richard Boucher, who continues to say the administration
would prefer that Rios Montt not run for office. This weekend Boucher
was again rolled out to remark on the rampages in the streets of Guatemala
City. “They are a dangerous mockery of protest,” Boucher said.
But he stopped short of pointing the finger at the General, whose infamous
career is every bit as bloody as that of Saddam Hussein.
A Rios Montt victory in November could complicate matters for a Bush
administration that is crusading against political corruption in Latin
America. Of course, the preacher in this crusade is none other than
the unappetizing Otto Reich, who enjoys deep and warm ties to Rios Montt
and his gang of gruesome generals.
Still, Rios Montt is an unreconstructed monster of an older vintage,
trained in the art of the military strongman at the School of the Americas
in the 1950s. Powell no doubt feels that the general, if elected, might
become as problematic as Manuel Noriega was for the current president’s
father. That said, the Bush administration may calculate that it can’t
afford to be too harsh in its condemnations of Rios Montt, who no doubt
has many stories to tell about the CIA’s affirmative role in the
Guatemala bloodbaths of the 1980s.
Guatemala’s court system is a maze of conflicting and overlapping
jurisdictions. Already this year, Rios Montt’s election bid has
been ruled on by three different courts, the electoral court, the Supreme
Court and the constitutional court.
Last week’s decision to suspend Rios Montt’s campaign by the
Supreme Court came only day’s after the nation’s highest court,
the so-called Constitutional Court, approved the general’s candidacy
in a sharply divided 4-3 decision. The majority on the constitutional
court agreed with Rios Montt’s claim that the constitutional amendment
that bans those who seized power in military coups from running for
president doesn’t apply to him since the amendment was passed after
he had left office.
The General took power in a bloody coup in 1982, which was backed by
the Reagan administration. Over the next 18 months Rios Montt supervised
a vicious crackdown on political opponents and Mayan peasants that left
more than 19,000 dead, thousands more in jail and more than 100,000
displaced . He has been called the Pinochet of Guatemala and several
war crimes complaints are pending against him in different courts in
Guatemala and in Spain.
The constitutional court is slated to hear Rios Montt’s appeal
later this week. However, the three members of the court who voted against
the General in the previous case announced that they will not attend
the hearing unless their safety can be guaranteed by the current government,
headed by Rios Montt’s protégé Alfonso Portillo.
Rios Montt has boasted that he owns the votes of four justices on the
court. And indeed that’s precisely how many votes he got in the
July 15th ruling that initially put him on the ballot.
Rigoberta Menchu, the Mayan activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in
1982 and brought genocide charges against Rios Montt in Spain, bitterly
concedes that the general is probably right about having the top court
rigged in his favor. She says Rios Montt and his FRG party, its accounts
plump with funds derived from a fruitful association with Colombian
drug cartels, have corrupted the judicial system through bribes and
intimidation in an attempt to grease the old dictator’s return
to power.
“The court has supported a coup d’etat by Rios Montt’s
Republican Front,” says Menchu. “And they have hidden its
hand. The FRG usurped a court that was meant to protect the legal and
moral welfare of the Guatemalan state.”
Menchu also says that Rios Montt knows he doesn’t have the votes
to win the election in November unless he intimidates enough people
into staying away from the polls. He certainly is off to a brisk start.
But she suggests that the general’s campaign and the riots that
have accompanied it may in fact be a kind of calculated rouse designed
to create a chaotic and unstable political situation that would lead
the military to seize control of the government in another coup.
“It looks a lot like 1982,” she said.
That was a very bloody year.
Source: Counterpunch
New plans made for downtown Asheville
parks
By Eric Lynch
Aug. 5— This Tuesday, August 12, the Asheville
City Council will hold a public hearing to help determine the future
of Pack Square and the City/County Plaza. The City has proposed
to sell-off Asheville historic greenspace in order to allow the Grove
Park Inn to build two luxury highrises. Local citizens claim that
the City Council’s proposal has failed to take into account aesthetics,
traffic planning or affordable office/residential space.
The attempt to sell-off the downtown parks is being sponsored by the
Pack Square Conservancy, whose executive director is Asheville Mayor
Charles Worley’s campaign manager and the spouse of the commercial
real estate agent who stands to make a large profit on this mega-million
dollar transaction.
In May 2000, the City of Asheville hosted the regional Pack Square Renaissance
Forum, wherein people from Western North Carolina were invited to participate
in the land use planning process. One of the proposed highrises
was secretly inserted into the Forum’s draft report several months
later and was quietly removed upon the vocal protest of a number of
activists. The proposal then appeared again in the report when
the Grove Park Inn made public its latest plans to privatize lands that
were legally bequeathed to the community at large. The legality
of this land sale is also being called into question due to the fact
that at least part of the commons in question may belong to the government
of Buncombe County.
The Grove Park Inn is certainly no stranger to controversy. In
recent years, the historic hotel has received vocal citizen protests
because of its several expansion plans. When the Inn built its
Sports Complex, Spa, and two adjacent wings, residents were forced to
endure massive deforestation, increased traffic and pollution. In
addition to the plans for downtown Asheville, the Grove Park Inn is
attempting to expand into adjoining residential areas.
According to Gerald Green, the inn’s spokesperson, a parking deck
will be built near the current sports facility and approximately 62
to 68 two-story bungalow/cottages will be constructed in four clusters
uphill from the hotel entrance and in two areas adjacent to the Bynum
and Battle Houses. The construction will take approximately seven years
to complete.
Local citizens are planning to protest both expansion plans. Community
members are asking Asheville residents to attend the upcoming Asheville
City Council meeting at 5pm on Tuesday, Aug. 12 in the second floor
city council chamber of Asheville City Hall. Activists are encouraging
concerned residents to bombard the council and local newspapers with
communications voicing their objections. A date has not yet been
set for a public hearing regarding the Grove Park Inn’s cottage
and parking expansion.
The unreported cost of war:
At least 827 US wounded
By Julian Borger
Aug. 4— US military casualties from the occupation of Iraq
have been more than twice the number most Americans have been led to
believe because of an extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides
and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported
in the media.
Since May 1, when President George Bush declared the end of major combat
operations, 52 American soldiers have been killed by hostile fire, according
to Pentagon figures quoted in almost all the war coverage. But the total
number of US deaths from all causes is much higher: 112.
The other unreported cost of the war for the US is the number of American
wounded, 827 since Operation Iraqi Freedom began.
Unofficial figures are in the thousands. About half have been injured
since the president’s triumphant appearance on board the aircraft
carrier USS Lincoln at the beginning of May. Many of the wounded have
lost limbs.
The figures are politically sensitive. The number of American combat
deaths since the start of the war is 166 — 19 more than the death
toll in the first Gulf war.
The passing of that benchmark last month erased the perception, popular
at the time Baghdad fell, that the US had scored an easy victory.
According to a Gallup poll, 63 percent of Americans still think Iraq
was worth going to war over, but a quarter want the troops out now,
and another third want a withdrawal if the casualty figures continue
to mount.
In fact, the total death toll this time is 248 — including accidents
and suicides — and as the number of non-combat deaths and serious
injuries becomes more widely known, the erosion of public confidence
is likely to continue, posing a threat to Bush’s prospects of re-election,
which at the beginning of May had seemed a foregone conclusion.
Military observers say it is unusual, even in a “low-intensity”
guerrilla war such as the situation seen in Iraq, for non-combat deaths
to outnumber combat casualties.
The Pentagon does not tabulate the cause of those deaths, but according
to an American website that has been tracking official reports, Iraq
Coalition Casualty Count, 23 American soldiers have died in car or helicopter
accidents since May 1, while 12 have been killed in accidents with weapons
or explosives.
Three deaths have been categorized as “possible suicides,”
three have died from illness, and three from drowning. The rest are
unexplained.
Wounded American soldiers continue to be flown back to the US at a relentless
rate, in twice-weekly transport flights to Andrews air force base near
Washington.
Hospital staff are working 70- or 80-hour weeks, and the Walter Reed
army hospital in Washington is so full that it has taken over beds normally
reserved for cancer patients to handle the influx, according to a report
on CBS television.
Meanwhile, at the nearby national naval medical center in Bethesda,
new Marine injuries are delivered almost daily by a medical plane known
as the Nightingale.
The Pentagon figure for “wounded in action” in Iraq is 827,
but here again the total number of injuries appears to be much higher.
The estimate given by central command in Qatar is 926, but according
to Lieutenant-Colonel Allen DeLane, who is in charge of the airlift
of the wounded into Andrews air base, that too is understated.
“Since the war has started, I can’t give you an exact number
because that’s classified information, but I can say to you over
4,000 have stayed here at Andrews, and that number doubles when you
count the people that come here to Andrews and then we send them to
other places like Walter Reed and Bethesda, which are in this area also,”
Lt. Col. DeLane told National Public Radio.
He said 90 percent of injuries were directly war-related.
Some of that number may involve double-counting — if a soldier
stays at the Andrews clinic on the way to Washington and then again
on the way back to the war or back home, for example. But the actual
number of wounded still appears to be much higher than the official
figures.
“When the facility where I’m at started absorbing the people
coming back from theatre [in April], those numbers went up significantly
— I’d say over 1,200,” Lt. Col. DeLane said.
“That number even went up higher in the month of May, to about
1,500, and continues to increase.”
Source: Guardian (UK)
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