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GENOCIDE TRIAL IN GUATEMALA BRINGS MEMORIES OF ISRAEL’S ROLE IN THE
KILLINGS  
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Mary Jo McConahay
May 10, 2024
The Progressive Magazine
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_ Along with the United States, Israel provided weapons and training
to Guatemala’s military and their campaign against Indigenous Maya
civilians from 1974-1996. Israel was a war machine on its own,
searching for arms markets and anxious for allies. _

Observers from the Ixil Triangle sit in the front row at the trial of
Guatemalan General Benedicto Lucas Garcia at the Tribunals Tower in
Guatemala City., Photo: Mary Jo McConahay / The Progressive Magazine

 

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.

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
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them at the hands of the state according
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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.
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.  (Photo: Mary Jo McConahay / The Progressive Magazine)
From the time of the 1954 CIA-orchestrated
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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
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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.  

Indigenous Maya witnesses—some in strained voices or reduced to
tears—describe the killing methods used by soldiers.

Unsuccessful, the insurgents fled to the eastern Zacapa region and
began a guerrilla movement aiming to overthrow the government.
Washington sent in Green Berets to advise, and by some reports
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alongside Guatemalan troops. They pursued the rebels mercilessly, used
napalm, and slaughtered civilians suspected of being guerrilla
supporters. In 1972 a handful of surviving insurgents regrouped as the
Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and entered the Quiche region by way
of Mexico. The EGP gathered thousands of supporters, including in the
Ixil Triangle. Meanwhile in Guatemala City, U.S. advisors, many fresh
from Vietnam, reshaped Guatemalan police and intelligence procedures.
Death squads killed opposition student, church, and union leaders. In
1977 the human rights situation in Guatemala was so bleak that U.S.
President Jimmy Carter stopped
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aid. 

But there was another source of weapons and advisors: Israel, “the
only country that gave us support in our battle against the
guerrillas,” Benedicto Lucas said, as foreign correspondent Yoav
Karni reported
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1986 in the Israeli newspaper _Ha’aretz_. 

 
Two members of the prosecution team listen to a witness during the
genocide trial of former Guatemalan General Benedicto Lucas Garcia,
architect of the counterinsurgency program in which witnesses say
their entire villages were burned to the ground after families were
killed. The trial took place at the Tribunals Tower in Guatemala City,
2024.  (Photo: Mary Jo McConahay / The Progressive Magazine)
Yet Israel should not be considered a mere proxy for the United States
during Lucas’s genocidal sweeps through the Ixil. Israel was a war
machine on its own, searching
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arms markets and anxious for allies. Tel Aviv supported the brutal
Guatemalan army in Lucas’s day and beyond. 

Israel began selling weapons
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Guatemala in 1974: armored personnel carriers, military communications
equipment, light cannons, machine guns, Uzis, and thousands of Galil
assault rifles, which became the Guatemalan troops’ standard weapon.
In the 1980s Israel built a factory inside Guatemala to produce the
Galils and bullets to go with them. Tel Aviv made deliveries of its
signature short take-off and landing aircraft, the Arava, several of
which were later equipped with gun pods.

“The planes came over us,” testified Caterina Rodriguez, now
seventy-one, recounting the year she spent sheltering in the mountains
with her husband and a brother, watching others die of starvation,
eating grass after Guatemalan soldiers wiped out residents of their
village and burned its houses to cinders. “The planes dropped bombs
. . . we were like animals looking for places to hide,” she said in
the courtroom.

Various news media reported
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Lucas said Israeli advisors were teaching locals how to use the
Israeli equipment the army had purchased. But they did much more. By
1983, when the regime of Lucas’s brother had given way to another
autocrat, General Efraín Ríos Montt
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the EGP said there were 300 Israeli advisors in the country, “in the
security structures and in the army.” 

“Israeli advisers—some official, others private—helped
Guatemalan internal security agents hunt underground rebel groups,”
reported correspondent Ed Cody for _The_ _Washington Post_ that
year. 

An Israeli company, then called Tadiran, designed and financed the
Guatemalan army’s school of transmission and electronics. At the
school’s opening celebration, Lucas thanked the Israeli ambassador
for “the advice and transfer of electronic technology” which
brought the country up to date, and the ambassador called Guatemala
“one of our best friends.” A computer supplied by Israel and
housed in a former military academy became “the nerve center of the
armed forces, which deals with the movements of units in the field and
so on,” Lucas said. Once the army’s presence was secure in an
area, Maya were concentrated into controlled settlements.
Israelis advised
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those as well.

Dr. Milton Jamail, a scholar who has examined the Israel-Guatemala
connection and traveled in the country during the war, wrote in the
1986 book _It’s No Secret_, _Israel’s Military involvement in
Central America_
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the Guatemalan government, “in facing a broad based popular
movement, has come to resemble the Israelis on the West Bank and Gaza:
They are an occupying army.” To stop dissent, “they must use
force, but also need to plan for the more long-range effort of social
control. Thus the Israeli plans at home provide a prototype for
solving Guatemalan problems.”
 
Psychologists from the Public Ministry accompany Maya massacre
survivors during the trial of retired General Benedicto Lucas Garcia
at the Tribunals Tower in Guatemala City, 2024.  (Photo: Mary Jo
McConahay / The Progressive Magazine)
At the end of their testimonies, witnesses in the genocide trial are
asked what they want from the tribunal by lawyers of the Public
Ministry, which is prosecuting the criminal case for the government,
or by lawyers from the plaintiffs, the Human Rights Office of the
Archdiocese of Guatemala and the Association for Justice and
Reconciliation, a victims’ group.

The witnesses usually answer with some version of the words of Juana
Avilés, who was fifteen when she ran at the appearance of soldiers
and later returned to find her parents dead and her house destroyed.
“What obligates me is the pain I carry,” Avilés said. “I do not
want my children to suffer like this.”

_[MARY JO MCCONAHAY's latest book is "Playing God: American Catholic
Bishops and the Far Right
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(Melville House).]_

* Guatemala
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* Israel
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* Genocide
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* CIA
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* Indigenous peoples
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* Indigenous Rights
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* weapons
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* Central America
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