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“FOREIGN OPERATIONS EXPORT FINANCING, AND RELATED PROGRAMS APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 1998” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E1678-E1679 on Sept. 5, 1997.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
FOREIGN OPERATIONS EXPORT FINANCING, AND RELATED PROGRAMS
APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 1998
______
speech of
HON. ESTEBAN EDWARD TORRES
of california
in the house of representatives
Thursday, September 4, 1997
The House in Committee of the Whole House on the State of the Union had under consideration the bill (H.R. 2159) making appropriations for foreign operations, export financing, and related programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 1998, and for other purposes:
Mr. TORRES. Mr. Chairman, the recent release by the CIA of roughly 5 percent of the documents in its possession which pertain to its 40-
year-old controversial role in Guatemala provides extraordinary insights into the lengths to which the U.S. Government was prepared to go in order to achieve its cold war antisubversion goals. The documents provide a good argument for the need to close institution like the School of the Americas [SOA], a product of an era in which a growing consensus of critics say Washington's paranoia was enshrined as its official Guatemalan policy. The following research memorandum, authored by Gretchen Oelsner, research associate for the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, demonstrates the need for the United States to end its support for the School of the Americas.
Torres Amendment
The School of the Americas was instrumental in providing the venue for covert liaisons with key Guatemalan army personnel, often resulting in longstanding relationships. By training their young officials, and subsequently recruiting some of them for the CIA's payroll, Washington was able to ensure cooperation with its anti-Communist policy, even at the eventual cost of a friendly country's sovereignty and democratic institutions. On Wednesday, July 9, Representative Esteban Torres introduced an amendment to the Foreign Aid appropriations bill which would have limited funding for the School of the Americas, but it was defeated by a narrow margin (23-21). The tight vote suggests that there is hope that the School of the Americas eventually will be closed down. It is imperative that the amendment on the floor today succeed because its approval would be an important step in ending a legacy of human rights violations by U.S.-trained members of the Guatemalan armed forces.
CIA involvement in Guatemala began when the country's popularly elected president Jacobo Arbenz threatened in the early 1950's to nationalize mainly underutilized land holdings controlled by the United Fruit Co. and offered to remunerate the U.S. Goliath at the artificially low rate of assessment that the company itself had placed on its land for tax purposes. With strong personnel connections to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, the company was able to arrange for the CIA to inaugurate an effective scenario in response to fast-
breaking developments in the country. By backing Lt. Col. Castillo Armas, one of its contracts in the Guatemalan Army, the State Department, along with the CIA, orchestrated a successful coup against Arbenz in 1954. Forty years of terror, torture, and death squad activity followed, often in part funded and directed by Washington, which resulted in the deaths of more than 150,000 civilians.
Mysterious Deaths
The most recent instance of CIA activity in the country involved the suspicious deaths of Michael DeVine in 1990 and Efrain Bamaca Velasquez in 1992. DeVine, a U.S. citizen, was an innkeeper residing in the Peten, a heavily forested region of the country known for its Mayan antiquities and valuable hardwood. Later, it was established that he had been assassinated and beheaded by a Guatemalan military unit in June 1990, perhaps after he happened upon a smuggling operation being run out of the zone's military compound. In response to this grisly incident, and to the Guatemalan military's failure to comply with a promised vigorous investigation into the circumstances behind DeVine's death, Congress ceased aid shipments to the Central American country. However, the CIA was quick to replenish the funding gap. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations admit that $5 to $7 million were secretly funneled annually to the Guatemalan Armed Forces, though Bush officials insist the funds were used to pay CIA sources and placate the armed forces, not for the purchase of weapons.
Another victim of the violence was Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a leftist guerrilla leader married to Washington, DC lawyer Jennifer Harbury. Contrary to information provided at first by Guatemalan military reports as well as United States diplomats, a United States Defense Intelligence Agency document stated that ``Bamaca was not killed during a firefight with army troops, but was captured, interrogated, and killed.''
Putative murderer remains a free man
Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a senior intelligence officer and SOA alumnus, implicated in the murders of both Bamaca and DeVine, acknowledges that he `routinely exchanged information with CIA officials.'' White House officials also have conceded that Alpirez received at least $60,000 from the CIA during 1990-92. In July 1992, shortly after embarrassing details of Alpirez's complicity in Bamaca's execution had surfaced, the agency terminated his contract, awarding him $44,000 in severance pay. While a later report by the CIA's Intelligence Oversight Board found that its agents neither had ordered nor had prior knowledge of DeVine's death, and that there was no way to definitively determine responsibility for Bamaca's killing, Justice Department officials did admit Alpirez was involved in DeVine's murder. Even though further evidence had indicated that the colonel ordered DeVine's death and supervised the torture and execution of Bamaca, he was later exonerated by Guatemalan officials. Outside observers maintain that it is astonishing that the agency claims to have had no knowledge of the murder of the U.S. citizen, even though one of its paid informers was involved in his death. This is especially so in the case of the guerrilla fighter Bamaca, whose cause the agency was spending millions of dollars annually to eliminate. Critics speculate that the CIA station chief felt it important that Bamaca be neutralized, so the agency sanctioned local Guatemalan authorities led by Alpirez, to have him tortured and killed.
School of the Americas
Colonel Alpirez received important training at the ill-reputed School of the Americas, located at Fort Benning, GA, but then based in Panama. In fact, he attended the school twice, once in the Combat, Arms and Support Services in 1970, and later at the Command and General Staff College in 1989, just before he was involved in the high-profile murders. This institution has earned the nicknames ``School of Coups'' and ``School of Assassins'' because of the activities of many of its alumni--some of whom later gained renown as the worst human rights abusers in Latin America. Former Panamanian President, Jorge Illueca, had no trouble terming the school the ``biggest base for destabilization in Latin America.''
The institution teaches combat skills, counterinsurgency operations, sniper fire, military intelligence, commando tactics and psychological warfare. When the Pentagon finally released the controversial training manuals used at the facility after their contents already had begun to leak, pages were found in them advocating such interrogation techniques as blackmail, detaining the innocent relatives of those being questioned, torture and murder.
The clandestine tactics promoted by the CIA coincided with some of the training being offered at the institution. Subsequently, many SOA graduates, after having been signed on by the CIA, almost routinely were responsible for the torture and disappearance of ``subversives'' during the region's civil wars. According to the advocacy group, School of the Americas Watch, the school's alumni have been responsible for choosing targets for assassination, fashioning genocidal strategies which essentially legalized military atrocities throughout the eighties, helped plan and implement ex-President Sermon's 1993 auto-
coup and were the architects behind numerous extrajudicial executions. In addition, General Edgar Godoy Gaitan, Gen. Luis Francisco Ortega Menaldo, and Col. Otto Perez Molina were some of the SOA Guatemalan alumni who were on the CIA payroll as well as implicated in right-wing death squad killings.
The Nation magazine, April 17, 1997, reported that U.S. undercover agents on the CIA payroll for decades had worked inside the Guatemalan G-2 army unit, one of the two brains behind the terror state, and which was known to have been responsible for the torture and murders of thousands of civilians. According to former military strongman Oscar Huberto Mejia Victores, Guatemala's death squads were initiated in the 1960's by the CIA. Ortega Menaldo and Perez Molina both served as leaders of the G-2 forces during the eighties and nineties, at a time when its death squad activities and drug trafficking roles already were established.
In the same way the U.S. Government denied knowledge of Bamaca's death, they did not admit some of the subject matter taught at the SOA. Only after then-Representative Torrecelli revealed the details of the rebel's death was the White House forced to confess its connections to the Guatemalan operations and its knowledge of the circumstances of Bamaca's death. It was not until a dirty tricks training manual was discovered and made public that Washington was forced to confess that it teaches terror tactics.
Final closure to Guatemala's endless civil war cannot occur until the School of the Americas is shut down and culpable military and political figures are held accountable for their actions in the murders of United States and Guatemalan citizens.
