Küchenkabinett

Guatemala

Wo wir gerade über Lateinamerika sprechen, schauen wir auch mal nach Guatemala. Dort fand - mit Unterbrechungen - zwischen 1962 und 1996 ein blutiger Bürgerkrieg statt, dessen Opferzahlen den viel besser bekannten Konflikt im nahen Nicaragua deutlich in den Schatten stellten. Ähnlich wie in Nicaragua erhielt die guatemaltekische Militärdiktatur über die Jahre konstante Unterstützung durch die USA, die in der Guerilla die Gehilfen des Ostblocks in ihrem Hinterhof sah. Dies bedeutete jedoch auch die Unterstützung eines Regimes, das grausamster Menschenrechtsverletzungen bis hin zum Genozid an den indianischen Ureinwohnern schuldig war.

Es wäre leicht, dies in anti-amerikanischem Gestus zu präsentieren, dies ist jedoch nicht meine Intention. Die US-Regierung handelte damals nach der Logik der Blockkonfrontation, darin standen ihnen die sowjetische (und chinesische und kubanische) Regierung in nichts nach (fragt mal in Angola). Ich rede deshalb von Guatemala, weil man dort inmitten dieser Katastrophe noch Spuren von Menschlichkeit findet, eines Charakterzugs, den wir im “Krieg gegen den Terror” heute wieder zu verlieren drohen.

Viron Vaky, im Jahre 1968 der zweithöchste Repräsentant der Vereinigten Staaten im Land, schrieb damals in einem internen Memo an das State Department über die schweren Menschenrechtsverletzungen staatlicher Sicherheitskräfte:

“Interrogations are brutal, torture is used and bodies are mutilated. Many believe that the very brutal way the ex-beauty queen was killed, obviously tortured and mutilated, provoked the FAR to murder Colonel Webber in retaliation. If true, how tragic that the tactics of 'our side' would in any way be responsible for that event!

But the point is that this is a serious practical political problem as well as a moral one: Because of the evidence of this brutality, the government is, in the eyes of many Guatemalans, a cruel government, and therefore righteous outrage, emotion and viciousness have been sucked into the whole political situation. […] In the minds of many Latin Americans, and, tragically, especially in the sensitve, articulate youth, we are believed to have condoned these tactics, if not actually to have encouraged them. […]

This leads to an aspect I personally find the most disturbing of all - that we have not been honest with ourselves. We have condoned counter-terror; we may even in effect have encouraged or blessed it. We have been so obsessed with the fear of insurgency that we have rationalized away our qualms and uneasiness. This is not only because we have concluded we cannot do anything about it, for we never really tried. Rather we suspected that maybe it is a good tactic, and that as long as Communists are being killed it is all right. Murder, torture and mutilation are all right if our side is doing it and the victims are Communists. After all hasn't man been a savage from the beginning of time so let us not be too queasy about terror. I have literally heard these arguments from our people.

Have our values been so twisted by our adversary concept of politics in the hemisphere? Is it conceivable that we are so obsessed with insurgency that we are prepared to rationalize murder as an acceptable counter-insurgency weapon? Is it possible that a nation which so reveres the principle of due process of law has so easily acquiesced in this sort of terror tactic?”

Zitiert nach Daniel Wilkinson, Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala, Duke University Press, 2004, S. 324-325.