How Israel Facilitated the Guatemalan Genocide

[Judi Lynn]

BY
MARK LEWIS TAYLOR

tered thousands of indigenous Maya.



Ixil indigenous people protest in front of a banner describing the crimes of former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt on May 24, 2013, in Guatemala city. (Johan Ordonez / AFP via Getty Images)


It was on the streets of Guatemala City in 1987 that I began awakening to Israel’s partnership with the United States in facilitating genocide.
Today we are “seeing genocide” — a decades-long cumulative “genocidal condition” — being played out, as Israeli modern culture and media professor Ariella Aisha Azoulay argues. We see it in the US/Israeli onslaught against Gaza. My memories and knowledge return to reflect on Israel’s connection to genocidal practice, not only in Gaza but also in Guatemala.

In the Guatemala of the 1980s, a counterinsurgency by US-backed military governments slaughtered indigenous Maya and tens of thousands of other dissidents and suspects. There was no social media to cover it. Most American citizens knew nothing of it. The killing of this period in Guatemala has been recognized as “genocide” by official analysts and by a thorough twelve-volume investigative report. This latter study made clear the appropriateness of the phrase “acts of genocide” to name the crimes of Guatemala’s military against the Maya, in spite of the military’s claim that it lacked “intent” to commit genocide, that it was only motivated by economic, political or military concerns. As with Israel in Gaza to Palestine, so with Guatemalan elites relative to the indigenous Maya, it is the historical record of decades of accumulative killing, occupation, forced removal, and dehumanization that establishes the acts and conditions as those of genocide.

The studies of Guatemala’s genocide, as I will show, also reveal the special role of Israel in that slaughter under the aegis of US imperial interests.

I was first in Guatemala in 1987 to interview educators and activists who were important for my research about the role of religious beliefs among Maya indigenous peoples as they waged resistance to their ongoing repression. 1987 was a year when Guatemala’s latest series of military governments had just passed the worst mass violence against Maya communities, the worst occurring between 1981 and 1983. The period is often called a “hidden/silent holocaust,” the “Guatemala holocaust,” or the “Maya holocaust.” And this is only one site of Israel’s involvement with massive state violence and terrorism throughout Latin America. I had been working with Guatemalans and others in the United States to seek an end to US military aid to Guatemala.

One day in 1987, as the dust and smog of a Guatemala City street swirled about me, I walked in conversation with an activist friend and mentor. We were interrupted, startled by a loud order given by an authoritative command, projected by a deep vibrating loudspeaker. Call it a Darth Vader–like sound — only sharper, slightly higher pitched, and more threatening at high volume.

More:
https://jacobin.com/2024/04/israel-guatemala-genocide-gaza-imperialism/