Genocide Trial in Guatemala Brings Memories of Israel's Role in the Killings
Genocide Trial in Guatemala Brings Memories of Israel’s Role in the Killings
Along with the United States, Israel provided weapons and training to Guatemala’s military and their campaign against Indigenous Maya civilians from 1974-1996.
BY MARY JO MCCONAHAY MAY 10, 2024 10:46 AM
As the genocide trial of retired Guatemalan General Benedicto Lucas Garcia unfolds in a courtroom in Guatemala City, Indigenous Maya witnesses—some in strained voices or reduced to tears—describe the killing methods used by soldiers. A woman in a woven huipil blouse grabs her chest and inclines forward to show how her mother was shot point blank. A man who was fourteen when troops came upon his family cleaning their cornfield points to his forehead and a spot above his right ear where a soldier shot his father “in front of me.” Another woman closes her fingers like the head of an ax and brings it down on the crown of her head to show how a neighbor was killed.
As testimonies unroll, it is germane to point out that Benedicto Lucas Garcia did not commit mass murder by himself, but rather with help from the United States and Israel.
Retired General Benedicto Lucas Garcia, accused of genocide, signifies his presence during roll call by the president of the tribunal at the beginning of a trial session at the Tribunals Tower in Guatemala City, 2024. Lucas attends virtually from a nearby military medical center due to health issues, with one of his three attorneys at his side, while his image is projected on the wall behind the judges.
Lucas, now ninety-one, Armed Forces Chief of Staff for his brother, President General Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, was the architect of the counterinsurgency in a war from 1960 to 1996 in which 200,000 died or disappeared, 93 percent of them at the hands of the state according to a United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission report. Genocide trials are rare, partly because of the difficulty of proving that the accused intended to destroy a particular group as such. Lucas is charged with deliberately seeking to eliminate Indigenous Maya in the Ixil Triangle, located in the remote mountainous region of Quiche, among the hardest hit during the war.
From the time of the 1954 CIA-orchestrated coup against the progressive, democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz, Guatemala was led by military autocrats supported by the United States, or civilians answerable to the military. (Only in January, 2024 did another progressive, independent thinking president, Bernardo Arévalo, take office, although he continues to fight the old military guard and rightists in the business and legal sectors.) After the CIA coup, young officers rebelled in 1960 when the Guatemalan president at the time, a general, allowed Washington to train fighters for the Bay of Pigs invasion on a local plantation. Fidel Castro was a hero to many Latin Americans for throwing off the U.S. yoke; permitting the U.S. military to instruct the Cuban invaders inside Guatemala was an affront to national sovereignty.
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