Who is Rios Montt and why does it matter?
If you follow international news, you may have heard that a man by the name of Efraín Ríos Montt is set to appear in court in Guatemala this week. It's important to understand why.
Montt is a former army general and televangelist who gained control of Guatemala in the early 1980s through a coup d'état. He has long been tied to charges of genocide that took place during his short-lived rule as military dictator in 1982-3. During that time he had the full support of Washington, and in the midst of Cold War fears, Ronald Reagan famously asserted that Montt was “totally dedicated to democracy.”
As a sitting member of Congress until last week, Montt has enjoyed immunity from prosecution -- until now. Importantly, while military leaders in Guatemala have always denied that genocide occurred (a claim that former general and newly inaugurated president Otto Pérez Molina continues to hold), Montt's strategy has simply been to deny that he had anything to do with it -- not to deny that the 626 massacres and 200,000 deaths over the course of 36 years actually happened. Military documents, for their part, seem to show a fairly direct chain of command from top to bottom during that time, so we'll see how that argument holds up.
It's impossible to understand Guatemala today without understanding its past, and Montt was at the center of one of its darkest hours. Here's how I summarized the country's recent history in a magazine piece I did on what's currently happening in the town where I grew up:
Dietrich Bonhoeffer described history as the story of what people do with power. History has not been kind to Guatemala’s indigenous people. The country’s Mayan descendants, though comprising well over half the population, have time and again been dealt a losing hand by those in power.
After Columbus “discovered” the New World, Europeans began settling in the region, usually exercising force as a means of gaining control in matters of politics, economics, and even religion. This wealthy and powerful Old World elite established large-scale coffee and banana plantations, or fincas, on Guatemala’s fertile lowlands. Many of the indigenous people, meanwhile, were pushed to resettle on small tracts of land in the more topographically challenging, and often less fertile, highlands, while some were forcibly conscripted into harvesting the fincas. The Guatemalan Catholic Church, which had by this time become a well-established social and political force, gave its silent assent to the new arrangement.
In the 20th century, with colonialism-as-usual waning, US interests at times assumed a less overt, but no less insidious, role in Guatemala. When, after years of dictatorial tyranny, a delicate democratic process resulted in the election in 1951 of a president committed to land reform, a major US fruit company with much to lose persuaded the Eisenhower administration that recent developments in Guatemala represented a turn towards communism. According to the domino logic of the Cold War, this was seen as an intolerable threat, and the CIA swiftly engineered a coup to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala’s head of state.
Within several years Guatemala had spiraled into a civil war over the struggle for land that would last 36 years, waged between left-wing guerrillas and the military forces representing right-wing dictators. Wanting nothing more than peace, the majority of Guatemalans — and especially the rural-dwelling indigenous poor — were caught in the middle.
After the signing of peace accords brought fighting to an end in 1996, reports by the United Nations and the Guatemalan Catholic Church (which had since “converted” to the side of the poor) revealed that the vast majority of “disappearances,” deaths, and human rights abuses during the war occurred at the hands of the federal government and military forces. Among the most notorious offenders of human rights during the civil war was Efraín Ríos Montt, an army general and evangelical televangelist with strong US support, during whose short-lived presidency in 1982-83 the country saw an alarming escalation of rape, torture, and gruesome massacres of indigenous people. The United Nations accused him of genocide.
This was the world into which I was born at a small hospital in Guatemala City in 1982.
When I heard the news this week that Montt would finally be heading to court, I picked up a book by Victor Montejo, who as a school teacher witnessed one of the massacres that took place in rural Guatemala in 1982, and though he was tortured, he managed to escape with his life. The book is called Testimony: Death of a Guatemalan Village, and while it is terrible to read, I believe it testifies to the reality of what life was like for indigenous Guatemalans at that time. I hesitate to recommend it because it is vulgar and graphic, but it's part of the legacy of the war, and one way or another, part of the legacy of Ríos Montt.
For those concerned with justice and peace, I'd encourage you to follow what happens with Montt and others connected to genocide and human rights abuses in Guatemala. God forbid that we'd ignore it, or that we'd lose this chance to learn from the tragedies of the recent past. And please, pray for the perpetrators, pray for the families of victims, and pray that some semblance of peace and justice would prevail in Guatemala at last.
[Photo credit: AP via Sulekha.com]
Repaso: CEO integrity, Brazilian culture wars, rethinking nuclear weapons, Guatemalan war documentary, Derek Webb on free music, Christianity and culture, good economic news, top global thinkers, and justice for all
1. What does a CEO with integrity look like?
Michael Lindsay, president of Gordon College, had an op-ed yesterday in the New York Times about Gerard Arpey, the American Airlines CEO who just walked away after 30 years out of a belief that filing for bankruptcy -- a procedure that’s become standard in the airline industry -- is wrong. That he is a man of integrity is worth celebrating; that he is a rare exception among CEOs, though, is lamentable. Lindsay writes:
Over the last eight years, I have interviewed hundreds of senior executives for a major academic study on leadership, including six airline C.E.O.’s. Mr. Arpey stood out among the 550 people I talked with not because he believed that business had a moral dimension, but because of his firm conviction that the C.E.O. must carefully attend to those considerations, even if doing so blunts financial success or negates organizational expediency. For him, it is an obligation that goes with the corner office.
2. Culture wars and Pentecostalism in Brazil
The days of the Religious Right might be mostly behind us here in the US, but in Brazil, it seems to really be catching on. The New York Times has a profile of Silas Malafaia, a televangelist with a massive following who is known for his polarizing views, and takes a look at the rise of Pentecostals and other Protestant groups in Brazil:
About one in four Brazilians are now thought to belong to evangelical Protestant congregations, and Pentecostals like Mr. Malafaia are at the forefront of this growth. In a remarkable religious transformation, scholars say that while Brazil still has the largest number of Roman Catholics in the world, it now also rivals the United States in having one of the largest Pentecostal populations. Not everyone in Brazil is enthusiastic about this shift.
3. Evangelicals rethink nuclear weapons
Members of the National Association of Evangelicals board of directors have written a piece for Washington Post’s “On Faith” column that’s worth prayerful consideration:
Christians hold that all people bear God’s image (Genesis 1:27).Therefore, human life and freedom are precious and should be defended from injustice and tyranny. Nuclear weapons, with their capacity for terror as well as for destruction of human life, raise profound spiritual, moral and ethical concerns. We question the acceptability of nuclear weapons as part of a just national defense. The just war tradition admonishes against indiscriminate violence and requires proportionality and limited collateral damage. New scientific studies reveal that even a limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would have profound global consequences, harming billions of innocents. The very weapons meant to restrain evil could potentially destroy all that they were intended to protect.
4. “Our voice, our memory”
Mike at the Central American Politics blog shared this 30-minute documentary about the 36-year civil war in Guatemala, which, according to the makers of the film, meets the international criteria to be considered genocide. Needless to say, it’s not for the faint of heart, but is important for the understanding of history, as well as what you might call “the roots of the present illness.” It’s in Spanish, too, by the way.
5. How free music makes more than sense
Derek Webb, one of my favorite artists who started NoiseTrade (a great place to get free music legally!), has a new reflection on the state of the music industry and what it means for those who make and listen to music (hint: he’s not a fan of Spotify):
There has never been a better moment to be a middle-class or an independently thinking artist making and performing music than right now. The costs and complications of creating, recording, manufacturing, and distributing music are at an all-time low, enabling more music to be made and more artists to make a living than ever before. If your ego can bear not being rich and famous, you can make a respectable and sustainable living as a blue-collar musician. The problem used to be access; now it’s obscurity. And this brings with it a completely new set of problems and opportunities.
6. Andy Crouch on Christianity and culture
If you haven’t read Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling, you really should. But if you don’t want to do that, here’s a 50-minute podcast about Christianity and culture, the big themes of that book. If even that is too much to ask, at least take a listen to the four and a half minute snippet about how cultural change can -- and often must -- start small.
7. Good economic news from Latin America
The BBC reports:
Poverty in Latin America is at its lowest level for 20 years, the UN's regional economic body, Eclac, says. From 1990 to 2010, the rate fell from 48.4% to 31.4%, which means 177 million people currently live in poverty... "Poverty and inequality continue to decline in the region, which is good news, particularly in the midst of an international economic crisis," said Alicia Barcena, Eclac's executive secretary. "However, this progress is threatened by the yawning gaps in the productive structure in the region and by the labour markets which generate employment in low-productivity sectors."
8. Top 100 global thinkers
Foreign Policy has released its latest list of top global thinkers for the past year. A number of the leaders of the Egyptian revolution are atop the list. I was especially interested to see that Yoani Sánchez, Cuban dissident blogger, and Dr. Paul Farmer, medical anthropologist with a long history in Haiti, made the cut as well.
9. And justice for all [infograhic]
GOOD and Column Five Media have produced an interesting infographic on how the US is doing in terms of income equality and providing all citizens with access to the market economy (click on the image below to view the full-size infographic).
Repaso is intended as a thought-provoking compilation of news and commentary from the past week related to the intersections of faith, development, justice and peace. As always, I welcome your thoughts on any of the links and ideas in this roundup!
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