Guatemala is not a country of eternal spring — it is a country of eternal tyranny. We are a people oppressed and compelled to silence. A people closed in upon themselves, who neither speak nor sing: our silence is made up of songs we were never allowed to sing. On our sad land, a cheerful song would sound like a gunshot.

Luis Cardoza y Aragon, Guatemala — las lineas de su mano

I am aware that this reportage contains shocking passages, and I therefore consider it necessary to state that every sentence is based on documents, and my personal impressions constitute only a marginal part of the whole.

This is a reportage about the kidnapping and death of Count Karl von Spreti, the West German ambassador in Guatemala. But not only about that. It is also a reportage about crime as an instrument of domination — and about the mechanisms of intensifying terror in a country where other methods of rule and colonial dominance are no longer possible.

1.

Tuesday, 31 March, shortly after noon. Along an avenue called Avenida de las Americas, a black Mercedes is moving. Behind the wheel — driver Eduardo Hernandez. In the back — an elderly, grey-haired man in glasses: Count Karl von Spreti, the West German ambassador. They are driving slowly; a week ago the city speed limit was reduced to 30 kilometres per hour. At a certain point two Volkswagens emerge from a side street and block the Mercedes. The ambassador’s car stops. Six armed young men get out of the Volkswagens. They approach the Mercedes, open the door, and ask the Count to get in with them. Von Spreti complies. A moment later the two cars drive away.

What is the significance of this scene? The Avenida de las Americas is a busy street — many cars, many people. The kidnapping must have taken some time. In theory one might expect someone to stop, stare, say something, shout, run to the police. One might expect a crowd to form. But — nothing of the sort. Traffic flows normally, only faster. Drivers accelerate; pedestrians quicken their step. For the people who pass the two Volkswagens blocking the Mercedes, the most important thing at that moment is not to see. Those people know they are witnessing some violation — and in Guatemala the street person’s tactic of self-defence is not to be a witness to anything. Because if there was a violation, someone’s head must roll. But it is rarely the perpetrator’s head. The real perpetrator acts beyond the reach of the police. And the police must demonstrate efficiency.

2.

Six young guerrilleros spirited Karl von Spreti away into the unknown, and for a few hours silence fell over the city.

People who write history devote too much attention to the so-called loud moments, and too little to studying periods of silence. This is a lack of the intuition that every mother possesses when she hears her child’s room go suddenly quiet. The mother knows that this silence means something bad. That it is a silence concealing something. She runs to intervene, because she senses that evil is in the air. Silence plays the same role in history and politics. Silence is a signal of misfortune — and often of crime. It is as much a political instrument as the clash of arms or a speech at a rally. Silence is needed by tyrants and occupiers, who take care that their work is accompanied by quiet.

Notice how carefully every colonialism cultivated silence. With what discretion the Holy Inquisition worked. How carefully Leonidas Trujillo avoided publicity.

What silence emanates from countries with overflowing prisons! About Somoza’s state — silence. About Duvalier’s state — silence. How much effort each of these dictators expends to maintain the ideal state of silence, which someone is always trying to break! How many victims for this reason, and what costs! Silence has its laws and its demands. Silence requires that concentration camps be built in remote places. Silence needs a vast apparatus of police — an army of informers. Silence demands that the enemies of silence disappear suddenly and without trace. Silence would like no voice of complaint, protest, or outrage to disturb its peace. Wherever such a voice is raised, silence strikes with all its force and restores the previous state — that is, the state of silence.

3. — A Century of Dictators

The Republic of Guatemala was born in a moment of great misfortune: Central America was then in the grip of a cholera epidemic. The governor of the province of Guatemala — part of the Central American Federation at the time — was a liberal and reformist, Mariano Galvez. Galvez organised teams of gravediggers to bury the dead. The head of one such team was a young mestizo named Rafael Carrera — a swineherd turned pig-trader who had seen death everywhere and had been told by priests that the epidemic was the work of liberals who were poisoning the wells to exterminate the Indians and mestizos.

Carrera decided to wage a holy war. His army began with 14 gravediggers — barefoot, half-naked Indians armed with old muskets. As they marched on the capital, new brigades joined them. Three friars at the head of the column carried wooden crosses. Singing devotional songs and pillaging along the way, they reached the city and took it after a short fight. Carrera found the governor’s general’s uniform and put it on immediately. Though still barefoot, he proclaimed himself President of Guatemala. He was 23 years old. He ruled for 27 years, until his death. He never learned to read or write.

This was the beginning of a pattern. Every successor — Cerna, Barrios, Estrada Cabrera, Ubico — added new pages to the same chronicle of tyranny, forced labour, and silence. United Fruit arrived in 1901 and gradually took possession of the best lands. By 1950 the company owned 92% of fallow land while 57% of peasants owned no land at all, and 67% of the population did not live to the age of twenty.

4. — Arbenz and the American Intervention

In 1951 Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman became president. He proposed simple reforms: if United Fruit left 92% of its land fallow while one and a half million Guatemalan peasants had no land, let United Fruit give up some of those idle acres and they would be distributed among the landless. In the autumn of 1953 Arbenz confiscated nearly half of United Fruit’s fallow land — 83,000 hectares — and paid $1.2 million compensation for land the company had originally received for nothing.

The legal architect of the original United Fruit concessions was John Foster Dulles, who was now Secretary of State. His brother Allan headed the CIA. On 17 June 1954 the invasion of Guatemala began, led by Colonel Castillo Armas — a traitor who had escaped his death sentence four years earlier. The Americans gave him six million dollars to build an army, American aircraft, pilots, weapons, and radio stations.

Arbenz surrendered. Before he could board the plane to exile, soldiers from Armas’s column ordered him to strip naked. He refused to remove his shorts. And so he boarded the plane. He has wandered the world ever since, silent, giving no interviews, refusing to be photographed.

Castillo Armas immediately issued 574 decrees reversing the revolution, returning United Fruit’s lands, and granting 45 foreign oil companies concessions over 4.6 million hectares — nearly half the country’s territory. In the spring of 1957 Columbia University awarded him an honorary doctorate for services to American democracy. Shortly thereafter, on 26 July 1957, he was shot dead on orders from the CIA by a member of his own Presidential Guard.

5. — The System of Lists

After the counter-revolution, Colonel Peralta created the National Security Archive (Archivo Nacional de Seguridad — ANS) and issued a law on the registration of persons “whom the military government considers communists.” According to American sociologist John Durston, in 1966 one comisionado militar (a reserve officer serving in local administration) was assigned to every 50 adults. The comisionado was the terror of his locality: anyone who fell afoul of him could end up on the list. And to be on the list — estar en la lista — was equivalent to a death sentence.

Access to the lists was extremely restricted. Beyond the American embassy, only a tiny circle could read them — a circle so small that it did not include the President of the Republic.

Count von Spreti fell victim to this system — caught in the intersection of German and American capital, of a century of dictatorships, and of an armed movement that had no other means of saving its imprisoned comrades.

source: kapuscinski.info