GUATEMALA 1962 to 1980s
 A less publicized "final solution"
     Indians tell harrowing stories of village raids in which
 their homes have been burned, men tortured hideously and
 killed, women raped, and scarce crops destroyed. It is
 Guatemala's final solution to insurgency: only mass
 slaughter of the Indians will prevent them joining a mass
 uprising.{1}
This newspaper item appeared in 1983. Very similar stories have
appeared many times in the world press since 1966, for
Guatemala's "final solution" has been going on rather longer than
the more publicized one of the Nazis.
 It would be difficult to exaggerate the misery of the
mainly-Indian peasants and urban poor of Guatemala who make up
three-quarters of the population of this beautiful land so
favored by American tourists. The particulars of their existence
derived from the literature of this period sketch a caricature of
human life. In a climate where everything grows, very few escape
the daily ache of hunger or the progressive malnutrition ...
almost half the children die before the age of five ... the
leading cause of death in the country is gastro-enteritis. 
Highly toxic pesticides sprayed indiscriminately by airplanes, at
times directly onto the heads of peasants, leave a trail of
poisoning and death ... public health services in rural areas are
virtually non-existent ... the same for public education ...
near-total illiteracy. A few hundred families possess almost all
the arable land ... thousands of families without land, without
work, jammed together in communities of cardboard and tin houses,
with no running water or electricity, a sea of mud during the
rainy season, sharing their bathing and toilet with the animal
kingdom. Men on coffee plantations earning 20 cents or 50 cents
a day, living in circumstances closely resembling concentration
camps ... looked upon by other Guatemalans more as beasts of
burden than humans. A large plantation to sell, reads the
advertisement, "with 200 hectares and 300 Indians" ... this, then
was what remained of the ancient Mayas, whom the American
archeologist Sylvanus Morely had called the most splendid
indigenous people on the planet.{2}
 The worst was yet to come.
 We have seen how, in 1954, Guatemala's last reform
government, the legally-elected regime of Jacobo Arbenz, was
overthrown by the United States. And how, in 1960, nationalist
elements of the Guatemalan military who were committed to
slightly opening the door to change were summarily crushed by the
CIA. Before long, the ever-accumulating discontent again issued
forth in a desperate lunge for alleviation -- this time in the
form of a guerrilla movement -- only to be thrown back by a
Guatemalan-American operation reminiscent of the Spanish
conquistadores in its barbarity.
 In the early years of the 1960s, the guerilla movement, with
several military officers of the abortive 1960 uprising prominent
amongst the leadership, was slowly finding its way: organizing
peasant support in the countryside, attacking an army outpost to
gather arms, staging a kidnapping or bank robbery to raise money,
trying to avoid direct armed clashes with the Guatemalan
military.
 Recruitment amongst the peasants was painfully slow and
difficult; people so drained by the daily struggle to remain
alive have little left from which to draw courage; people so
downtrodden scarcely believe they have the right to resist, much
less can they entertain thoughts of success; as fervent
Catholics, they tend to believe that their misery is a punishment
from God for sinning.
 Some of the guerrilla leaders flirted with Communist Party
and Trotskyist ideas and groups, falling prey to the usual
factional splits and arguments. Eventually, no ideology or
sentiment dominated the movement more than a commitment to the
desperately needed program of land reform aborted by the 1954
coup, a simple desire for a more equitable society, and
nationalist pride vis-ˆ-vis the United States. New
York Times, correspondent Alan Howard, after interviewing
guerrilla leader Luis Turcios, wrote:     

 Though he has suddenly found himself in a position of
 political leadership, Turcios is essentially a soldier
 fighting for a new code of honor. If he has an alter
 ego, it would not be Lenin or Mao or even Castro, whose
 works he has read and admires, but Augusto Sandino, the
 Nicaraguan general who fought the U.S. Marines sent to
 Nicaragua during the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations.{3} 

In March 1962, thousands of demonstrators took to the
streets in protest against the economic policies, the deep-rooted
corruption, and the electoral fraud of the government of General
Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes. Initiated by students, the
demonstrations soon picked up support from worker and peasant
groups. Police and military forces eventually broke the back of
the protests, but not before a series of violent confrontations
and a general strike had taken place.
 The American military mission in Guatemala, permanently
stationed there, saw and heard in this, as in the burgeoning
guerrilla movement, only the omnipresent "communist threat". As
US military equipment flowed in, American advisers began to prod
a less-alarmed and less-than-aggressive Guatemalan army to take
appropriate measures. In May the United States established a
base designed specifically for counter-insurgency training. (The
Pentagon prefers the term "counter-insurgency" to 
"counter-revolutionary" because of the latter's awkward
implications.) Set up in the northeast province of Izabal,
which, together with adjacent Zacapa province, constituted the area of
heaviest guerrilla support, the installation was directed by a
team of US Special Forces (Green Berets) of Puerto Rican and Mexican
descent to make the North American presence less conspicuous. 
The staff of the base was augmented by 15 Guatemalan officers trained
in counter-insurgency at the US School of the Americas at Fort
Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone.{4}
 American counter-insurgency strategy is typically based on a
carrot-and-stick philosophy. Accordingly, while the Guatemalan
military were being taught techniques of ambush, booby-traps,
jungle survival and search-and-destroy warfare, and provided with
aircraft and pilot training, a program of "civil action" was
begun in the northeast area: some wells were built, medicines
distributed, school lunches provided etc., as well as promises of
other benefits made, all aimed at stealing a bit of the
guerrillas' thunder and reducing the peasants' motivation for
furnishing support to them; and with the added bonus of allowing
American personnel to reconnoitre guerrilla territory under a
non-military cover. Land reform, overwhelmingly the most
pressing need in rural Guatemala, was not on the agenda.
 As matters were to materialize, the attempt at "winning the
hearts and minds" of the peasants proved to be as futile in
Guatemala as it was in southeast Asia. When all the academic
papers on "social systems engineering" were in, and all the
counter-insurgency studies of the RAND Corporation and the other
think-tanks were said and done, the recourse was to terror:
unadulterated, dependable terror. Guerrillas, peasants,
students, labor leaders, and professional people were jailed or
killed by the hundreds to put a halt, albeit temporarily, to the
demands for reform.{5}
 The worst was yet to come.

In March 1963, General Ydigoras, who had been elected in 1958 for
a six-year term, was overthrown in a coup by Col. Enrique Peralta
Azurdia. Veteran Latin American correspondent Georgie Anne Geyer
later reported that "Top sources within the Kennedy
administration have revealed the U.S. instigated and supported
the 1963 coup." Already in disfavor with Washington due to
several incidents, Ydigoras apparently sealed his fate by
allowing the return to Guatemala of Juan José
Arévalo who had led a reform government before Arbenz and still had a
strong following. Ydigoras was planning to step down in 1964,
thus leaving the door open to an election and, like the Guatemalan
army, Washington, including President Kennedy personally,
believed that a free election would reinstate Arévalo to
power in a government bent upon the same kind of reforms and
independent foreign policy that had led the United States to
overthrow Arbenz.{6} Arévalo was the author of a book
called The Shark and the Sardines in which he pictured the US as
trying to dominate Latin America. But he had also publicly
denounced Castro as "a danger to the continent, a menace".{7}
 The tone of the Peralta administration was characterized by
one of its first acts: the murder of eight political and trade
union leaders, accomplished by driving over them with rock-laden
trucks.{8} Repressive and brutal as Peralta was, during his
three years in power US military advisers felt that the
government and the Guatemalan army still did not appreciate
sufficiently the threat posed by the guerrillas, still were
strangers to the world of unconventional warfare and the
systematic methods needed to wipe out the guerrillas once and for
all; despite American urging, the army rarely made forays into
the hills.
 Peralta, moreover, turned out to be somewhat of a
nationalist who resented the excessive influence of the United
States in Guatemala, particularly in his own sphere, the
military. He refused insistent American offers of Green Beret
troops trained in guerrilla warfare to fight the rebels,
preferring to rely on his own men, and he restricted the number
of Guatemalan officers permitted to participate in American
training programs abroad.
 Thus it was that the United States gave its clear and firm
backing to a civilian, one Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro, in the
election held in March 1966. Mendez won what passes for an
election in Guatemala and granted the Americans the free hand
they had been chafing at the bit for. He served another
important function for the United States: as a civilian, and one
with genuine liberal credentials, Mendez could be pointed to by
the Johnson administration as a response to human rights critics
at home.
 However, whatever social conscience Julio Cesar Mendez may
have harbored deep within, he was largely a captive of the
Guatemalan army, and his administration far exceeded Peralta's in
its cruelty. Yet the army did not trust this former law school
professor -- in the rarefied atmosphere of Guatemala, some
military men regarded him as a communist -- and on at least two
occasions, the United States had to intervene to stifle a coup
attempt against him.
 Within days after Mendez took office in July, US Col. John
D. Webber, Jr. arrived in Guatemala to take command of the
American military mission. Time magazine later described
his role:    

	 Webber immediately expanded counterinsurgency training
 within Guatemala's 5,000-man army, brought in U.S. Jeeps,
 trucks, communications equipment and helicopters to give
 the army more firepower and mobility, and breathed new
 life into the army's civic-action program. Towards the
 end of 1966 the army was able to launch a major drive
 against the guerrilla strongholds ... To aid in the drive,
 the army also hired and armed local bands of "civilian
 collaborators" licensed to kill peasants whom they
 considered guerrillas or "potential" guerrillas. There
 were those who doubted the wisdom of encouraging such
 measures in violence-prone Guatemala, but Webber was not
 among them. "That's the way this country is," he said.
 "The communists are using everything they have including
 terror. And it must be met."{9} 

The last was for home consumption. There was never any
comparison between the two sides as to the quantity and cruelty
of their terror, as well as in the choice of targets; with rare
exceptions, the left attacked only legitimate political and
military enemies, clear and culpable symbols of their foe; and
they did not torture, nor take vengeance against the families of
their enemies.
 Two of the left's victims were John Webber himself and the
US naval attaché, assassinated in January 1968. A bulletin
later issued by a guerrilla group stated that the assassinations
had "brought to justice the Yanqui officers who were teaching
tactics to the Guatemalan army for its war against the
people".{10}
 In the period October 1966 to March 1968, Amnesty
International estimated, somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000
Guatemalans were killed by the police, the military, right-wing
"death squads" (often the police or military in civilian clothes,
carrying out atrocities too bloody for the government to claim
credit for), and assorted groups of civilian anti-communist
vigilantes. By 1972, the number of their victims was estimated
at 13,000. Four years later the count exceeded 20,000, murdered
or disappeared without a trace.
 Anyone attempting to organize a union or other undertaking
to improve the lot of the peasants, or simply suspected of being
in support of the guerrillas, was subject ... unknown armed men
broke into their homes and dragged them away to unknown places
... their tortured or mutilated or burned bodies found buried in
a mass grave, or floating in plastic bags in a lake or river, or
lying beside the road, hands tied behind the back ... bodies
dropped into the Pacific from airplanes. In the Gual n
area, it was said, no one fished any more; too many corpses were
caught in the nets ... decapitated corpses, or castrated, or
pins stuck in the eyes ... a village rounded up, suspected of
supplying the guerrillas with men or food or information, all
adult males takenaway in front of their families, never to be
seen again ... or everyone massacred, the village bulldozed
over to cover the traces ... seldom were the victims actual
members of a guerrilla band.
 One method of torture consisted of putting a hood filled
with insecticide over the head of the victim; there was also
electric shock -- to the genital area is the most effective; in
those days it was administered by using military field telephones
hooked up to small generators; the United States supplied the
equipment and the instructions for use to several countries,
including South Vietnam where the large-scale counter-insurgency
operation was producing new methods and devices for extracting
information from uncooperative prisoners; some of these
techniques were finding their way to Latin America.{11}
 The Green Berets taught their Guatemalan trainees various
methods of "interrogation", but they were not solely classroom
warriors. Their presence in the countryside was reported
frequently, accompanying Guatemalan soldiers into battle areas;
the line separating the advisory role from the combat role is
often a matter of public relations.
 Thomas and Marjorie Melville, American Catholic missionaries
in Guatemala from the mid-1950s until the end of 1967, have
written that Col. Webber "made no secret of the fact that it was
his idea and at his instigation that the technique of
counter-terror had been implemented by the Guatemalan Army in the
Zacapa and Izabal areas."{12} The Melvilles wrote also of Major
Bernard Westfall of Iowa City who:     

 perished in September 1967 in the crash of a Guatemalan
 Air Force jet that he was piloting alone. The official
 notices stated that the US airman was "testing" the
 aeroplane. That statement may have been true, but it is
 also true that it was a common and public topic of
 conversation at Guatemala's La Aurora air base that the
 Major often "tested" Guatemalan aircraft in strafing and
 bombing runs against guerrilla encampments in the
 Northeastern territory.{13} 

F-51(D) fighter planes modified by the United States for use
against guerrillas in Guatemala ... after modification, the
planes are capable of patrolling for five hours over a limited
area ... equipped with six .50-calibre machine guns and wing
mountings for bombs, napalm and 5-inch air-to-ground rockets.{14} 
The napalm falls on villages, on precious crops, on people ...
American pilots take off from Panama, deliver loads of napalm on
targets suspected of being guerrilla refuges, and return to
Panama{15} ... the napalm explodes like fireworks and a mass of
brilliant red foam spreads over the land, incinerating all that
falls in its way, cedars and pines are burned down to the roots,
animals grilled, the earth scorched ... the guerrillas will not
have this place for a sanctuary any longer, nor will they or
anyone else derive food from it ... halfway around the world in
Vietnam, there is an instant replay.
 In Vietnam they were called "free-fire zones"; in
Guatemala, "zonas libres": "Large areas of the country have been
declared off limits and then subjected to heavy bombing. 
Reconnaissance planes using advanced photographic techniques fly
over suspected guerrilla country and jet planes, assigned to
specific areas, can be called in within minutes to kill anything
that moves on the ground."{16}
"The military guys who do this are like serial killers. If
Jeffrey Dahmer had been in Guatemala, he would be a general by
now." ... In Guatemala City, right-wing terrorists machine-gunned
people and houses in full light of day ... journalists, lawyers,
students, teachers, trade unionists, members of opposition
parties, anyone who helped or expressed sympathy for the rebel
cause, anyone with a vaguely-leftist political association or a
moderate criticism of government policy ... relatives of the
victims, guilty of kinship ... common criminals, eliminated to
purify the society, taken from jails and shot. "See a Communist,
kill a Communist", the slogan of the New Anticommunist
Organization ... an informer with hooded face accompanies the
police along a city street or into the countryside, pointing
people out: who shall live and who shall die ... "this one's a
son of a bitch" ... "that one ... " Men found dead with their
eyes gouged out, their testicles in their mouth, without hands or
tongues, women with breasts cut off ... there is rarely a witness
to a killing, even when people are dragged from their homes at
high noon and executed in the street ... a relative will choose
exile rather than take the matter to the authorities ... the
government joins the family in mourning the victim ...{17}
 One of the death squads, Mano Blanca (White Hand), sent a
death warning to a student leader. Former American Maryknoll
priest Blase Bonpane has written:
 
     I went alone to visit the head of the Mano Blanca and asked
 him why he was going to kill this lad. At first he denied
 sending the letter, but after a bit of discussion with him
 and his first assistant, the assistant said, "Well, I know
 he's a Communist and so we're going to kill him."
 "How do you know?" I asked.
 He said, "I know he's a Communist because I heard him say
 he would give his life for the poor."{18} 

Mano Blanca distributed leaflets in residential areas
suggesting that doors of left-wingers be marked with a black
cross.{19}
In November 1967, when the American ambassador, John Gordon Mein,
presented the Guatemalan armed forces with new armored vehicles,
grenade launchers, training and radio equipment, and several
HU-1B jet powered helicopters, he publicly stated:
 
     These articles, especially the helicopters, are not easy
 to obtain at this time since they are being utilized by
 our forces in defense of the cause of liberty in other
 parts of the world [i.e., southeast Asia]. But liberty
 must be defended wherever it is threatened and that
 liberty is now being threatened in Guatemala.{20}

In August 1968, a young French woman, Michele Kirk, shot herself
in Guatemala City as the police came to her room to make
"inquiries". In her notebook Michele had written:
 
     It is hard to find the words to express the state of
 putrefaction that exists in Guatemala, and the permanent
 terror in which the inhabitants live. Every day bodies
 are pulled out of the Motagua River, riddled with bullets
 and partially eaten by fish. Every day men are kidnapped
 right in the street by unidentified people in cars, armed
 to the teeth, with no intervention by the police patrols.{21}

The US Agency for International Development (AID), its Office of
Public Safety (OPS), and the Alliance for Progress were all there
to lend a helping hand. These organizations with their
reassuring names all contributed to a program to greatly expand
the size of Guatemala's national police force and develop it into
a professionalized body skilled at counteracting urban disorder. 
Senior police officers and technicians were sent for training at
the Inter-American Police Academy in Panama, replaced in 1964 by 
the International Police Academy in Washington, at a Federal
School in Los Fresnos, Texas (where they were taught how to
construct and use a variety of explosive devices - see Uruguay
chapter), and other educational establishments, their instructors
often being CIA officers operating under OPS cover. This was
also the case with OPS officers stationed in Guatemala to advise
local police commands and provide in-country training for
rank-and-file policemen. At times, these American officers
participated directly in interrogating political prisoners, took
part in polygraph operations, and accompanied the police on
anti-drug patrols.
 Additionally, the Guatemala City police force was completely
supplied with radio patrol cars and a radio communications
network, and funds were provided to build a national police
academy and pay for salaries, uniforms, weapons, and riot-control
equipment.
 The glue which held this package together was the standard
OPS classroom tutelage, similar to that given the military, which
imparted the insight that "communists", primarily of the Cuban
variety, were behind all the unrest in Guatemala; the students
were further advised to "stay out of politics"; that is, support
whatever pro-US regime happens to be in power.
 Also standard was the advice to use "minimum force" and to
cultivate good community relations. But the behavior of the
police and military students in practice was so far removed from
this that continued American involvement with these forces over a
period of decades makes this advice appear to be little more than
a self-serving statement for the record, the familiar
bureaucratic maxim: Cover your ass.{22}
 According to AID, by 1970, over 30,000 Guatemalan police
personnel had received OPS training in Guatemala alone, one of
the largest OPS programs in Latin America.{23}
 "At one time, many AID field offices were infiltrated from
top to bottom with CIA people," disclosed John Gilligan, Director
of AID during the Carter administration. "The idea was to plant
operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas, government,
volunteer, religious, every kind."{24}
By the end of 1968, the counter-insurgency campaign had all but
wiped out the guerrilla movement by thwarting the rebels' ability
to operate openly and casually in rural areas as they had been
accustomed to, and, through sheer terrorization of villagers,
isolating the guerrillas from their bases of support in the
countryside.
 It had been an unequal match. By Pentagon standards it had
been a "limited" war, due to the absence of a large and overt US
combat force. At the same time, this had provided the American
media and public with the illusion of their country's 
non-involvement. However, as one observer has noted: "In the
lexicon of counterrevolutionaries, these wars are "limited" only
in their consequences for the intervening power. For the people and
country under assault, they are total."{25}
 Not until 1976 did another serious guerrilla movement arise,
the Guatemalan Army of the Poor (EGP) by name. Meanwhile, others
vented their frustration through urban warfare in the face of
government violence, which reached a new high during 1970 and
1971 under a "state of siege" imposed by the president, Col.
Carlos Arana Osorio. Arana, who had been close to the US
military since serving as Guatemalan military attachç in
Washington, and then as commander of the counter-insurgency
operation in Zacapa (where his commitment to his work earned him
the title of "the butcher of Zacapa"), decreed to himself
virtually unlimited power to curb opposition of any stripe.{26}
 Amnesty International later stated that Guatemalan sources,
including the Committee of the Relatives of Disappeared Persons,
claimed that over 7,000 persons disappeared or were found dead in
these two years. "Foreign diplomats in Guatemala City," reported
Le Monde in 1971, "believe that for every political
assassination by left-wing revolutionaries fifteen murders are
committed by right-wing fanatics."{27}
 During a curfew so draconian that even ambulances, doctors
and fire engines reportedly were forbidden outside ... as
American police cars and paddy wagons patrolled the streets day
and night ... and American helicopters buzzed overhead ... the
United States saw fit to provide further technical assistance and
equipment to initiate a reorganization of Arana's police forces
to make them yet more efficient.{28}
"In response to a question [from a congressional investigator in
1971] as to what he conceived his job to be, a member of the US
Military Group (MILGP) in Guatemala replied instantly that it was
to make the Guatemalan Armed Forces as efficient as possible. 
The next question as to why this was in the interest of the
United States was followed by a long silence while he reflected
on a point which had apparently never occurred to him."{29}
As for the wretched of Guatemala's earth ... in 1976 a major
earthquake shook the land, taking over 20,000 lives, largely of
the poor whose houses were the first to crumble ... the story was
reported of the American church relief worker who arrived to help
the victims; he was shocked at their appearance and their living
conditions; then he was informed that he was not in the
earthquake area, that what he was seeing was normal.{30}
 "The level of pesticide spraying is the highest in the
world," reported the New York Times in 1977, "and little
concern is shown for the people who live near the cotton fields"
... 30 or 40 people a day are treated for pesticide poisoning in
season, death can come within hours, or a longer lasting liver 
malfunction ... the amounts of DDT in mothers' milk in Guatemala
are the highest in the Western world. "It's very simple," 
explained a cotton planter, "more insecticide means more cotton,
fewer insects mean higher profits." In an attack, guerrillas
destroyed 22 crop-duster planes; the planes were quickly replaced
thanks to the genius of American industry{31} ... and all the
pesticide you could ever want, from Monsanto Chemical Company of
St. Louis and Guatemala City.
 During the Carter presidency, in response to human-rights
abuses in Guatemala and other countries, several pieces of
congressional legislation were passed which attempted to curtail
military and economic aid to those nations. In the years
preceding, similar prohibitions regarding aid to Guatemala had
been enacted into law. The efficacy of these laws can be
measured by their number. In any event, the embargoes were never
meant to be more than partial, and Guatemala also received
weapons and military equipment from Israel, at least part of
which was covertly underwritten by Washington.{32}
 As further camouflage, some of the training of Guatemala's
security forces was reportedly maintained by transferring it to
clandestine sites in Chile and Argentina.{33}

Testimony of an Indian woman:
 
My name is Rigoberta Menchú Tum. I am a representative of the
"Vincente Menchú" [her father] Revolutionary Christians ... On
9 December 1979, my 16-year-old brother Patrocino was captured
and tortured for several days and then taken with twenty other
young men to the square in Chajul ... An officer of [President]
Lucas Garcia's army of murderers ordered the prisoners to be
paraded in a line. Then he started to insult and threaten the
inhabitants of the village, who were forced to come out of
their houses to witness the event. I was with my mother, and
we saw Patrocino; he had had his tongue cut out and his toes
cut off. The officer jackal made a speech. Every time he
paused the soldiers beat the Indian prisoners.
When he finished his ranting, the bodies of my brother and the
other prisoners were swollen, bloody, unrecognizable. It was
monstrous, but they were still alive.
They were thrown on the ground and drenched with gasoline.
The soldiers set fire to the wretched bodies with torches
and the captain laughed like a hyena and forced the inhabitants
of Chajul to watch. This was his objective -- that they should
be terrified and witness the punishment given to the
"guerrillas".{34}


 In 1992, Rigoberta Menchú Tum was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize.

Testimony of Fred Sherwood (CIA pilot during the overthrow of the
Arbenz government in 1954 who settled in Guatemala and became
president of the American Chamber of Commerce), speaking in
Guatemala, September 1980:

Why should we be worried about the death squads? They're
bumping off the commies, our enemies. I'd give them more
power. Hell, I'd get some cartridges if I could, and
everyone else would too ... Why should we criticize them? 
The death squad -- I'm for it ... Shit! There's no
question, we can't wait 'til Reagan gets in. We hope
Carter falls in the ocean real quick ... We all feel that
he [Reagan] is our saviour.{35}

The Movement for National Liberation (MLN) was a prominent
political party. It was the principal party in the Arana regime. 
An excerpt from a radio broadcast in 1980 by the head of the
party, Mario Sandoval Alarcon ...
 
I admit that the MLN is the party of organized violence.
Organized violence is vigor, just as organized color is
scenery and organized sound is harmony. There is nothing
wrong with organized violence; it is vigor, and the
MLN is a vigorous movement.{36}

 Mario Sandoval Alarcon and former president Arana ("the
butcher of Zacapa") "spent inaugural week mingling with the stars
of the Reagan inner circle", reported syndicated columnist Jack
Anderson. Sandoval, who had worked closely with the CIA in the
overthrow of Arbenz, announced that he had met with Reagan
defense and foreign-policy advisers even before the election. 
Right-wing Guatemalan leaders were elated by Reagan's victory. 
They looked forward to a resumption of the hand-in-glove
relationship between American and Guatemalan security teams and
businessmen which had existed before Carter took office.{37}
 Before that could take place, however, the Reagan
administration first had to soften the attitude of Congress about
this thing called human rights. In March 1981, two months after
Reagan's inaugural, Secretary of State Alexander Haig told a
congressional committee that there was a Soviet "hit list ... for
the ultimate takeover of Central America". It was a "four phased
operation" of which the first part had been the "seizure of
Nicaragua". "Next," warned Haig, "is El Salvador, to be followed
by Honduras and Guatemala."{38}
 This was the kind of intelligence information which one
would expect to derive from a captured secret document or KGB
defector. But neither one of these was produced or mentioned,
nor did any of the assembled congressmen presume to raise the
matter.
 Two months later, General Vernon Walters, former Deputy
Director of the CIA, on a visit to Guatemala as Haig's special
emissary, was moved to proclaim that the United States hoped to
help the Guatemalan government defend "peace and liberty".{39}
 During this period, Guatemalan security forces, official and
unofficial, massacred at least 2,000 peasants (accompanied by the
usual syndrome of torture, mutilation and decapitation),
destroyed several villages, assassinated 76 officials of the
opposition Christian Democratic Party, scores of trade unionists,
and at least six catholic priests.{40}
 19 August 1981 ... unidentified gunmen occupy the town of
San Miguel Acatan, force the Mayor to give them a list of all
those who had contributed funds for the building of a school,
pick out 15 from the list (including three of the Mayor's
children), make them dig their own graves and shoot them.{41}
 In December, Ronald Reagan finally spoke out against
government repression. He denounced Poland for crushing by
"brute force, the stirrings of liberty ... Our Government and
those of our allies, have expressed moral revulsion at the
police-state tactics of Poland's oppressors."{42}
 Using the loopholes in the congressional legislation, both
real and loosely interpreted, the Reagan administration, in its
first two years, chipped away at the spirit of the embargo: $3.1
million of jeeps and trucks, $4 million of helicopter spare
parts, $6.3 million of other military supplies.{43} These were
amongst the publicly announced aid shipments; what was
transpiring covertly can only be guessed at in light of certain
disclosures: Jack Anderson revealed in August 1981 that the
United States was using Cuban exiles to train security forces in
Guatemala; in this operation, Anderson wrote, the CIA had
arranged "for secret training in the finer points of
assassination".{44} The following year, it was reported that the
Green Berets had been instructing Guatemalan Army officers for
over two years in the finer points of warfare.{45} And in 1983,
we learned that in the previous two years Guatemala's Air Force
helicopter fleet had somehow increased from eight to 27, all of
them American made, and that Guatemalan officers were once again
being trained at the US School of the Americas in Panama.{46}
 In March 1982, a coup put General Efrain Rios Montt,
a "born-again Christian" in power. A month later, the Reagan
administration announced that it perceived signs of an
improvement in the state of human rights in the country and took
the occasion to justify a shipment of military aid.{47} On the
first of July, Rios Montt announced a state of siege. It
was to last more than eight months. In his first six months in
power, 2,600 Indians and peasants were massacred, while during his 
17-month reign, more than 400 villages were brutally wiped off
the map.{48} In December 1982, Ronald Reagan, also a Christian, went
to see for himself. After meeting with RÁos Montt, Reagan,
referring to the allegations of extensive human-rights abuses,
declared that the Guatemalan leader was receiving "a bad
deal."{49}
Statement by the Guatemalan Army of the Poor, made in 1981 (by
which time the toll of people murdered by the government since
1954 had reached at least the 60,000 mark, and the sons of
one-time death-squad members were now killing the sons of the
Indians killed by their fathers):
 
The Guatemalan revolution is entering its third decade.
Ever since the government of Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown
in 1954, the majority of the Guatemalan people have been
seeking a way to move the country towards solving the 
same problems which were present then and have only
worsened over time.

The counterrevolution, put in motion by the U.S. Government
and those domestic sectors committed to retaining every
single one of their privileges, dispersed and disorganized
the popular and democratic forces. However, it did not
resolve any of the problems which had first given rise to
demands for economic, social and political change. These
demands have been raised again and again in the last quarter
century, by any means that seemed appropriate at the time,
and have received each time the same repressive response as in
1954.{50}

Statement by Father Thomas Melville, 1968:
 
     Having come to the conclusion that the actual state of violence,
composed of the malnutrition, ignorance, sickness and hunger of the
vast majority of the Guatemalan population, is the direct result of a
capitalist system that makes the defenseless Indian compete against
the powerful and well-armed landowner, my brother [Father Arthur
Melville] and I decided not to be silent accomplices of the mass
murder that this system generates.
 We began teaching the Indians that no one will defend their
rights, if they do not defend themselves. If the government and
oligarchy are using arms to maintain them in their position of
misery, then they have the obligation to take up arms and defend
their God-given right to be men.  We were accused of being
communists along with the people who listened to us, and were
asked to leave the country by our religious superiors and the
U.S. ambassador [John Gordon Mein]. We did so.
  But I say here that I am a communist only if Christ was a
communist. I did  what I did and will continue to do so because
of the teachings of Christ and  not because of Marx or Lenin.
And I say here too, that we are many more than the hierarchy
and the U.S. government think. When the fight breaks out more
in the open, let the world know that we do it  not for Russia,
not for China, nor any other country, but for Guatemala. Our
response to the present situation is not because we have read
either Marx or Lenin, but because we have read the New
Testament.{51}

Postscript, a small sample:

 1988: Guatemala continues to suffer the worst record of
human-rights abuses in Latin America, stated the Council on
Hemispheric Affairs in its annual report on human rights in the
Western Hemisphere.{52}
 1990: Guatemalan soldiers at the army base in Santiago
Atitl n opened fire on unarmed townspeople carrying white
flags, killing 14 and wounding 24. The people had come with
their mayor to speak to the military commander about repeated
harassment from the soldiers.{53}
 1990: "The United States, said to be disillusioned because
of persistent corruption in the government of President Vinicio
Cerezo Arevalo, is reportedly turning to Guatemala's military to
promote economic and political stability ... even though the
military is blamed for human rights abuses and is believed to be
involved in drug trafficking."{54}
 This was reported in May. In June, a prominent American
businessman living in Guatemala, Michael DeVine, was kidnapped
and nearly beheaded by the Guatemalan military after he
apparently stumbled upon the military's drug trafficking and/or
other contraband activities. The Bush administration, in a show
of public anger over the killing, cut off military aid to
Guatemala, but, we later learned, secretly allowed the CIA to
provide millions of dollars to the military government to make up
for the loss. The annual payments of $5 to $7 million apparently
continued into the Clinton administration.
 1992: In March, Guatemalan guerrilla leader, Efrain Bamaca
Velasquez, was captured and disappeared. For the next three
years, his American wife, attorney Jennifer Harbury, waged an
impassioned international campaign -- including public fasts in
Guatemala City (nearly to death) and in Washington -- to pressure
the Guatemalan and American governments for information about her
husband's fate. Both governments insisted that they knew
nothing. Finally, in March 1995, Rep. Robert Torricelli of the
House Intelligence Committee revealed that Bamaca had been
tortured and executed the same year of his capture, and that he,
as well as DeVine, had been murdered on the orders of Col. Julio
Roberto Alpírez, who had been on the CIA payroll for
several years. (Alpírez thus becoming another illustrious
graduate of Fort Benning's School of the Americas). The facts
surrounding these cases were known early on by the CIA, and by
officials at the State Department and National Security Council
at least a few months before the disclosure. Toricelli's
announcement prompted several other Americans to come forward
with tales of murder, rape or torture of themselves or a relation
at the hands of the Guatemalan military. Sister Dianna Ortiz,
a nun, related how, in 1989, she was kidnapped, burned with
cigarettes, raped repeatedly, and lowered into a pit full of
corpses and rats. A fair-skinned man who spoke with an American
accent seemed to be in charge, she said.{55}

NOTES 

The details of the events and issues touched upon in this chapter
through 1968 were derived primarily from the following sources:
a) Thomas and Marjorie Melville, Guatemala -- Another Vietnam?
(Great Britain, 1971) Chapters 9 to 16; particularly for the
conditions of the poor, and US activities in Guatemala. Published
in the United States the same year in a slightly different form
as Guatemala: The Politics of Land Ownership.
b) Eduardo Galeano, Guatemala, Occupied Country (Mexico, 1967;
English translation: New York, 1969) passim; for the politics of
the guerrillas and the nature of the right-wing terror; Galeano
was a Uruguayan journalist who spent some time with the guerrillas.
c) Susanne Jonas and David Tobis, editors, Guatemala (Berkeley,
California, 1974) passim; particularly "The Vietnamization of
Guatemala: U.S. Counter-insurgency Programs" pp. 193-203, by
Howard Sharckman; published by the North American Congress on Latin
America (NACLA, New York and Berkeley).
d) Amnesty International, Guatemala (London, 1976) passim; for
statistics about the victims of the terror. Other AI reports
issued in the 1970s about Guatemala contain comparable
information.
e) Richard Gott, Rural Guerrillas in Latin America (Great
Britain, 1973, revised edition) Chapters 2 to 8; for the
politics of the guerrillas.


1. The Guardian (London), 22 December 1983, p. 5.
2. The plight of the poor: a montage compiled from the sources
cited herein.
3. New York Times Magazine, 26 June 1966, p. 8.
4. US counter-insurgency base: El Imparcial (Guatemala City
conservative newspaper) 17 May 1962 and 4 January 1963, cited in
Melville, pp. 163-4.
5. Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The
Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (New York, 1982),
p. 242.
6. Georgie Anne Geyer: Miami Herald, 24 December 1966. Also see:
New York Herald Tribune, 7 April 1963, article by Bert Quint,
section 2, p. 1; Schlesinger and Kinzer, pp. 236-44.
7. Galeano, p. 55.
8. Ibid., pp. 55-6.
9. Time, 26 January 1968, p. 23.
10. Ibid.
11. Atrocities and torture: compiled from the sources cited
herein; also see A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors (New York, 1978)
pp. 139, 193 for US involvement with the use of the field
telephones for torture in Brazil.
12. Melville, p. 292.
13. Ibid., p. 291.

14. Washington Post, 27 January 1968, p. A4, testimony of Rev.
Blase Bonpane, an American Maryknoll priest in Guatemala at the
time.
15. Panama: revealed in September 1967 by Guatemalan
Vice-President Clemente Marroquin Rojas in an interview with the
international news agency Interpress Service (IPS), reported in
Latin America, 15 September 1967, p. 159, a weekly published in
London. Eduardo Galeano, p. 70, reports a personal conversation
he had with Marroquin Rojas in which the vice-president related
the same story. Marroquin Rojas was strongly anti-communist, but
he apparently resented the casual way in which the American planes
violated Guatemalan sovereignty.
16. Norman Diamond, "Why They Shoot Americans", The Nation (New
York), 5 February 1968. The title of the article refers to the
shooting of John Webber.
17. Opening quotation: Clyde Snow, forensic anthropologist, cited
in Covert Action Quarterly, spring 1994, No. 48, p. 32. 
Right-wing terrorism: compiled from the sources cited herein.
18. Washington Post, 4 February 1968, p. B1. The historic
dialogue in Latin America between Christianity and Marxism, begun
in the 1970s, can be traced in large measure to priests and nuns
like Bonpane and the Melvilles and their experiences in Guatemala
in the 1950s and 60s.
19. Galeano, p. 63.
20. El Imparcial (Guatemala City), 10 November 1967, cited in
Melville, p. 289.

21. Richard Gott, in the Foreword to the Melvilles' book, p. 8.

22. AID, OPS, Alliance for Progress:

a) "Guatemala and the Dominican Republic", a Staff Memorandum
prepared for the US Senate Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere
Affairs, Committee on Foreign Relations, 30 December 1971, p. 6;
b) Jonas and Tobis, pp. 199-200;
c) Galeano, pp. 72-3;
d) Michael Klare, War Without End (Random House, New York, 1972)
pp. 241-69, for discussion of the OPS curriculum and philosophy;
e) Langguth, pp. 242-3 and elsewhere, for discussion of OPS
practices, including its involvement with torture; the author
confines his study primarily to Brazil and Uruguay, but it
applies to Guatemala as well;
f) CounterSpy magazine (Washington), November 1980-January 1981,
pp. 54-5, lists the names of almost 300 Guatemalan police
officers who received training in the United States from 1963 to 1974;
g) Michael Klare and Nancy Stein, "Police Terrorism in Latin
America", NACLA's Latin America and Empire Report (North American
Congress on Latin America, New York), January 1974, pp. 19-23,
based on State Department documents obtained by Senator James
Abourezk in 1973;
h) Jack Anderson, Washington Post, 8 October 1973, p. C33.

23. AID figure cited in Jenny Pearce, Under the Eagle: U.S.
Intervention in Central America and the Caribbean (Latin American
Bureau, London, updated edition 1982) p. 67.
24. George Cotter, "Spies, strings and missionaries", The
Christian Century (Chicago), 25 March 1981, p. 321.

25. Eqbal Ahmad, "The Theory and Fallacies of Counter-insurgency",
The Nation (New York), 2 August 1972, p. 73.
26. Relationship of Arana to US military: Joseph Goulden, "A Real
Good Relationship", The Nation (New York), 1 June 1970, p. 646;
Norman Gall, "Guatemalan Slaughter", N.Y. Review of Books, 20 May
1971, pp. 13-17. 27. Le Monde Weekly (English edition), 17 February 1971, p. 3. 28. New York Times, 27 December 1970, p. 2; New York Times
Magazine, 13 June 1971, p. 72. 29. US Senate Staff Memorandum, op. cit. 30. New York Times, 18 February 1976.

31. Ibid., 9 November 1977, p. 2. 32. Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, Jane Hunter, The 
Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in 
the Reagan Era (South End Press, Boston, 1987), chapter V,
passim; The Guardian (London), 9 December 1983; CounterSpy, op. cit., 
p. 53, citing Elias Barahona y Barahona, former press secretary 
at the Guatemalan Ministry of the Interior who had infiltrated
the government for the EGP. 33. CounterSpy, op. cit. (Barahona) p. 53. 34. Pearce, p. 278; a book was published later which transcribed
Mench£'s own account of her life, in which she recounts many
more atrocities of the Guatemalan military: Elisabeth Burgos-Debray,
ed., I ... Rigoberta Mench£: An Indian Woman in Guatemala (London,
1984, English translation). 35. Pearce, p. 176; Sherwood's role in 1954: Schlesinger and
Kinzer, pp. 116, 122, 128. His statement is partially quoted in
Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Doubleday, New York, 1984), p.
238, citing CBS News Special, 20 March 1982: "Update: Central
America in Revolt". 36. Washington Post, 22 February 1981, p. C7, column by Jack
Anderson; Anderson refers only to an "official spokesman" of the
MLN; the identity of the speaker as Sandoval comes from other
places -- see, e.g., The Guardian (London), 2 March 1984. 37. Washington Post, ibid. For a discussion of the many ties
between American conservatives and the Guatemalan power
structure, see the report of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs
(Washington), by Allan Nairn in 1981. 38. New York Times, 19 March 1981, p. 10. 39. Washington Post, 14 May 1981, p. A16. 40. Ibid.; New York Times, 18 May 1981, p. 18; Report issued by
the Washington Office on Latin America (a respected human-rights
lobby which has worked in liaison with the State Department's
human-rights section), 4 September 1981. 41. Washington Office on Latin America report, op. cit. 
Presumably it was the traditional right-wing fear of the poor
being educated which lay behind this incident. 42. New York Times, 28 December 1981. 43. Ibid., 21 June 1981; 25 April 1982; The Guardian (London), 10
January 1983.  44. San Francisco Chronicle, 27 August 1981, p. 57. 45. Washington Post, 21 October 1982, p. A1. 46. The Guardian (London), 10 January 1983; 17 May 1983. 47. New York Times, 25 April 1982. p. 1. 48. Ibid., 12 October 1982, p. 3 (deaths, citing Amnesty
International); Los Angeles Times, 20 July 1994, p. 11 (villages,
citing "human rights organizations"). For the gruesome details
of death squads, disappearances, and torture in Guatemala during the
early 1980s, see Guatemala: A Government Program of Political
Murder (Amnesty International, London, 1981) and Massive
Extrajudicial Executions in Rural Areas Under the Government of
General EfraÁn RÁos Montt (AI, July 1982). 49. New York Times, 6 December 1982, p. 14. 50. Contemporary Marxism (San Francisco), No. 3, Summer 1981. 51. The National Catholic Reporter (Kansas City, Missouri
weekly), 31 January 1968. 52. Los Angeles Times, 25 December 1988. 53. Occurred on 2 December 1990; Report, Summer 1991, from
Witness for Peace, Washington, a religious-oriented human-rights
organization concerned with Central America. 54. Los Angeles Times, 7 May 1990. 55. DeVine and Bamaca cases: New York Times, 23 March 1995, p.
1; 24 March, p. 3; 30 March, p. 1; Los Angeles Times, 23 March 1995,
p. 7; 24 March, p. 4; 31 March, p. 4; 2 April, p. M2; Time

ANGOLA  1975 to 1980s

The Great Powers Poker Game

It is spring 1975. Saigon has just fallen. The last of the Americans are fleeing for their lives. Fallout from Watergate hangs heavy in the air in the United States. The Pike Committee of the House of Representatives is investigating CIA foreign covert activities. On the Senate side, the Church Committee is doing the same. And the Rockefeller Commission has set about investigating the Agency’s domestic activities. The morning papers bring fresh revelations about CIA and FBI misdeeds.
The CIA and its influential supporters warn that the crescendo of disclosures will inhibit the Agency from carrying out the functions necessary for national security.
At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they are busy preparing for their next secret adventure: Angola.
To undertake a military operation at such a moment, the reasons, one would imagine, must have been both compelling and urgent. Yet, in the long history of American interventions it would be difficult to find one more pointless or with less to gain for the United States or the foreign people involved.

The origin of our story dates back to the beginning of the 1960s when two political movements in Angola began to oppose by force the Portuguese colonialågovernment: the MPLA, led by Agostinho Neto, and the FNLA, led by Holden Roberto. (The latter group was known by other names in its early years, but for simplicity will be referred to here only as FNLA.)
The United States, not normally in the business of supporting “liberation” movements, decided that inasmuch as Portugal would probably be unable to hold on to its colony forever, establishing contact with a possible successor regime might prove beneficial. For reasons lost in the mists of history, the United States, or at least someone in the CIA, decided that Roberto was their man and around 1961 or ’62 onto the Agency payroll he went.{1}
At the same time, and during the ensuing years, Washington provided their NATO ally, the Salazar dictatorship in Lisbon, with the military aid and counter-insurgency training needed to suppress the rebellion. John Marcum, an American scholar who walked 800 miles through Angola into the FNLA guerrilla camps in the early 1960s, has written:

By January 1962 outside observers could watch Portuguese planes bomb and strafe African villages, visit the charred remains of towns like Mbanza M’Pangu and M’Pangala, and copy the data from 750-point napalm bomb casings from which the Portuguese had not removed the labels marked “Property U.S. Air Force”.{2}

The Soviet Union, which had also given some support to Roberto, embraced Neto instead in 1964, arguing that Roberto had helped the discredited Moise Tshombe in the Congo and curtailed his own guerrilla operations in Angola under pressure from Washington.{3} Before long, another movement, UNITA by name, entered the picture and China dealt itself into The Great Powers Poker Game, lending support to UNITA and FNLA.
Although MPLA may have been somewhat more genuine in its leftist convictions than FNLA or UNITA, there was little to distinguish any of the three groups from each other ideologically. When the press made any distinction amongst them it was usually to refer to MPLA as “Marxist”, but this was ill-defined, if defined at all, and simply took on a media life of its own. Each of the groups spoke of socialism and employed Marxist rhetoric when the occasion called for it, and genuflected to other gods when it did not. In the 1960s, each of them was perfectly willing to accept support from any country willing to give it without excessive strings attached. Neto, for example, went to Washington in December 1962 to put his case before the American government and press and to emphasize the fallacy of categorizing the MPLA as communist. During the following two years, Roberto appealed for aid to the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Algeria, and Nasser’s Egypt. Later, Jonas Savimbi, the leader of UNITA, approached the same countries (with the exception perhaps of the Soviet Union) as well as North Vietnam, and accepted military training for his men from North Korea.
Each group was composed predominantly of members of a particular tribe; each tried to discourage aid or recognition being given to the others; they each suffered from serious internal splits and spent as much time fighting each other as they did the Portuguese army. The Vietcong they were not.{4}
Author Jonathan Kwitny has observed that the three tribal nations had a long history of fighting each other …

It was not until the latter part of the twentieth century, however, that Dr. Henry Kissinger and other political scientists discovered that the real reason the Mbundu, the Ovimbundu, and the Kongo had been fighting off and on for the past 500 years was that the Mbundu were “Marxist” and the Ovimbundu and Kongo were “pro-Western”.{5}

That the CIA’s choosing of its ally was largely an arbitrary process is further underlined by a State Department cable to its African Embassies in 1963 which stated: “U.S. policy is not, repeat not, to discourage [an] MPLA … move toward West and not to choose between these two movements.”{6}
Even in 1975, when the head of the CIA, William Colby, was asked by a congressional committee what the differences were between the three contesting factions, he responded:

They are all independents. They are all for black Africa. They are all for some fuzzy kind of social system, you know, without really much articulation, but some sort of let’s not be exploited by the capitalist nations.

And when asked why the Chinese were backing the FNLA or UNITA, he stated: “Because the Soviets are backing the MPLA is the simplest answer.”
“It sounds,” said Congressman Aspin, “like that is why we are doing it.”
“It is,” replied Colby.{7}
Nonetheless, the committee, in its later report, asserted that in view of Colby’s statement, “The U.S.’s expressed opposition to the MPLA is puzzling”.{8}
Finally, it is instructive to note that all three groups were denounced by the Portuguese as communists and terrorists.
Before April 1974, when a coup in Portugal ousted the dictatorship, the aid given to the Angolan resistance movements by theiråvarious foreign patrons was sporadic and insignificant, essentially a matter of the patrons keeping their hands in the game. The coup, however, raised the stakes, for the new Portuguese government soon declared its willingness to grant independence to its African colonies.
In an agreement announced on 15 January 1975, the three movements formed a transitional government with elections to be held in October and formal independence to take place the following month.
Since 1969, Roberto had been on a $10,000-a-year retainer from the CIA.{9} On 22 January, the Forty Committee of the National Security Council in Washington authorized the CIA to pass $300,000 to Roberto and the FNLA for “various political action activities, restricted to non-military objectives.”{10} Such funds of course can always free up other funds for military uses.
In March, the FNLA, historically the most warlike of the groups, attacked MPLA headquarters and later gunned down 51 unarmed, young MPLA recruits.{11} These incidents served to spark what was to be a full-scale civil war, with UNITA aligning itself with FNLA against MPLA. The scheduled elections would never take place.
Also in March, the first large shipment of arms reportedly arrived from the Soviet Union for the MPLA.{12} The House investigating committee subsequently stated that “Later events have suggested that this infusion of US aid [the $300,000], unprecedented and massive in the underdeveloped colony, may have panicked the Soviets into arming their MPLA clients”.{13}
The Soviets may have been as much influenced by the fact that China had sent a huge arms package to the FNLA the previous September and had dispatched over one hundred military advisers to neighboring Zaire to train Roberto’s soldiers only a month after the coup inPortugal.{14}
The CIA made its first major weapons shipment to the FNLA in July 1975. Thus, like the Russians and the Chinese, the United States was giving aid to one side of the Angolan civil war on a level far greater than it had ever provided during the struggle against Portuguese colonialism.
The United States was directly involved in the civil war to a marked degree. In addition to training Angolan combat units, US personnel did considerable flying between Zaire and Angola carrying out reconnaissance and supply missions,{15} and the CIA spent over a million dollars on an ambitious mercenary program.{16}  Several reports appeared in the US press stating that many American mercenaries were fighting in Angola against the MPLA — from “scores” to “300″ — and that many others were being recruited and trained in the United States to join them. But John Stockwell, the head of the CIA’s Angola task force, puts the number of American mercenaries who actually made it to Angola at only 24.{17}  However, Holden Roberto was using CIA money, with the Agency’s tacit approval, to recruit many other mercenaries — over 100 British plus a scattering of French and Portuguese.{18} The CIA was also directly financing the arming of British mercenaries.{19}  (The mercenaries included amongst their number the well-known Englishman and psychopath George Cullen who lined up 14 of his fellow soldiers-of-fortune and shot them all dead because they had mistakenly attacked the wrong side.){20}
Subsequently, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger informed the Senate that “the CIA is not involved” in the recruitment of mercenaries for Angola.{21}
There were also well over a hundred CIAofficers and American military advisers scurrying about Angola, Zaire, Zambia and South Africa helping to direct the military operations and practicing their propaganda skills.{22} Through recruited journalists representing major news services, the Agency was able to generate international coverage for false reports of Soviet advisers in Angola. One CIA story, announced to the press by UNITA, was that 20 Russians and 35 Cubans had been captured. Another fabrication concerned alleged rapes committed by Cuban soldiers in Angola; this was elaborated to include their capture, trial, and execution, complete with photos of the young women killing the Cubans who had raped them.{23}
Both stories were reported widely in the American and British press and elsewhere. Some of the major newspapers, such as the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian of London, were careful to point out that the only source of the information was UNITA and their articles did not attempt to ascribe any special credence to the reports.{24} But this could not of course prevent the placing of seeds of belief in the minds of readers already conditioned to believe the worst about communists.
The disinformation campaign took place within the United States as well. FNLA delegates came to New York in September to lobby for support at the UN and with the New York press, distributing as they went copies of a “white paper” on the Angolan conflict prepared at CIA headquarters but made to look like it was produced in Zaire, French and all.{25}  John Stockwell described the paper as sometimes “false to the point of being ludicrous” and other times “simply inaccurate”.{26}
Afterward, representatives of UNITA went to Washington and presented to members of Congress, the State Department, theWhite House and the media, verbal reports about the situation in Angola which were the product of briefings given them by their CIA case officers.{27}
In January 1976, William Colby sat before the Senate investigating committee and solemnly assured the Senators:

We have taken particular caution to ensure that our operations are focused abroad and not at the United States to influence the opinion of the American people about things from the CIA point of view.{28}

     There was virtually no important aspect of the Angolan intervention which Colby, Kissinger, and other high officials did not misrepresent to Congress and the media.

The odds never favored a military victory for the US-backed forces in Angola, particularly in the absence of a relatively large-scale American commitment which, given the political atmosphere, was not in the cards. The MPLA was the most organized and best led of the three factions and early on controlled the capital city of Luanda, which housed almost the entire governmental machinery. Yet, for no reason, apparently, other than anti-Soviet spite, the United States was unwilling to allow a negotiated settlement. When Savimbi of UNITA sent out feelers to the MPLA in September 1975 to discuss a peaceful solution he was admonished by the CIA. Similarly, the following month when an MPLA delegation went to Washington to once again express their potential friendliness to the United States, they received a cool reception, being seen only by a low-level State Department official.{29}
In November MPLA representatives came to Washington to plead for the release of two Boeing jet airliners which their government had paid for but which the State Department would not allow to beexported. John Stockwell relates the unusual development that the MPLA men were accompanied by Bob Temmons, who until shortly before had been the head of the CIA station in Luanda, as well as by the president of Boeing. While the two Angolans and the man from Boeing petitioned the State Department, the CIA man made known to Agency headquarters that he had come to share the view of the US Consul General in Luanda “that the MPLA was best qualified to run the country, that it was not demonstrably hostile to the United States, and that the United States should make peace with it as quickly as possible.”
The State Department’s response to the MPLA representatives was simple: the price for any American co-operation with the Angolan government was Soviet influence out, US influence in.{30}                                                                  go to notes

A congressional cutoff of aid to the FNLA/UNITA, enacted in January 1976, hammered a decisive nail into their coffin. Congressmen did not yet know the full truth about the American operation, but enough of the public dumbshow had been exposed to make them incensed at how Kissinger, Colby, et al. had lied to their faces. The consequence was one of the infrequent occasions in modern times that the US Congress has exercised a direct and pivotal influence upon American foreign policy. In the process, it avoided the slippery slope to another Vietnam, on top of which stood Henry Kissinger and the CIA withåshoes waxed.{37}
By February, the MPLA, with indispensable help from Cuban troops and Soviet military equipment, had all but routed their opponents. The Cuban presence in Angola was primarily a direct response to South African attacks against the MPLA. Wayne Smith, director of the State Department’s Office of Cuban Affairs from 1977 to 1979, has written that “in August and October [1975] South African troops invaded Angola with full U.S. knowledge. No Cuban troops were in Angola prior to this intervention.”{38}
Savimbi at this time again considered reaching an understanding with the MPLA. The response from Washington was: Keep fighting. Kissinger personally promised UNITA continued support if they maintained their resistance, knowing full well that there was no more support to give. During the two weeks that Savimbi waited for his answer, he lost 600 men in a single battlefield.{39} Yet, incredibly, less than two months before, the Secretary of State had stated: “We are not opposed to the MPLA as such … We can live with any of the factions in Angola.”{40} The man was wholly obsessed with countering Soviet moves anywhere on the planet — significant or trivial, real or imagined, fait accompli or anticipated. He was perhaps particularly driven in this case, for as he later wrote: “Angola represents the first time that the Soviets have moved militarily at long distance to impose a regime of their choice.”{41}
If this seems far removed from how the academics tell us American foreign policy is made, it’s still more plausible than the other explanation commonly advanced for the policy in Angola, viz: it was done to please Sese Seko Mobutu, the head of Zaire, characterized as America’s most important ally/client in Africa, if not in the Third World.{42} (Zaireåwas home to the CIA’s largest station in Africa.) Mobutu desired an Angolan government he could sway, primarily to prevent Angola being used as a sanctuary by his arch foes, the rebels from Katanga province in Zaire. Accordingly, the Zairian leader committed his US-equipped armed forces into combat in Angola, on the side of the FNLA, for Holden Roberto happened to be a relation of his, although Roberto and the FNLA had little else going for them. As Professor Gerald Bender, a leading American authority on Angola, testified before Congress in 1978:

Although the United States has supported the FNLA in Angola for 17 years, it is virtually impossible to find an American official, scholar or journalist, who is familiar with that party, who will testify positively about its organization or leadership. After a debate with a senior State Department official at the end of the Angolan civil war, I asked him why the United States ever bet on the FNLA. He replied, “I’ll be damned if I know; I have never seen a single report or memo which suggests that the FNLA has any organization, solid leaders, or an ideology which we could count on.” Even foreign leaders who have supported Holden Roberto, such as General Mobutu, agree with that assessment. When asked by a visiting U.S. Senator if he thought Roberto would make a good leader for Angola, Mobutu replied, “Hell no!”{43}

Kissinger himself told the House investigating committee that promoting the stability of Mobutu was one of the prime reasons for the American policy in Angola.{44} Yet, even if this were one of Kissinger’s rare truthful remarks about the Angola situation, and even if this could be a valid justification for serious intervention in a civil war ina third country, his statement challenges, if it does not defeat, comprehension; for in June 1975, a month before the United States shipped its first major arms package to the FNLA, Mobutu had accused the US of plotting his overthrow and assassination, whereupon he expelled the American ambassador (see Zaire chapter).
The Secretary of State, never at a loss for the glib line custom-made for his immediate audience, also told Israeli officials that failure to stop the Russians in Angola “could encourage Arab countries such as Syria to run risks that could lead to a new attack on Israel, backed up by the Russians.”{45}
The American ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Moynihan, did not greatly enhance the level of discussion when he declared that if the United States did not step in “the Communists would take over Angola and will thereby considerably control the oil shipping lanes from the Persian Gulf to Europe. They will be next to Brazil. They will have a large chunk of Africa, and the world will be different in the aftermath if they succeed.”{46}  A truly baroque train of thought, and another example of what cold- war conditioning could do to an otherwise intelligent and educated person.
With only a change in place names, similar geo-political- domino theories have been put forth to give a veneer of rationality to so many American interventions. In this case, as in the others where the “communists” won, nothing of the sort ensued.
“In all respect to Kissinger,” Jonathan Kwitny has written, “one really has to question the sanity of someone who looks at an ancient tribal dispute over control of distant coffee fields and sees in it a Soviet threat to the security of the United States.”{47}
å     The MPLA in power was restricted by the same domestic and international economic realities which the FNLA or UNITA would have faced. Accordingly, it discouraged union militancy, dealt sternly with strikes, exhorted the workers to produce more, entered into commercial contracts with several multinationals, and did not raise the hammer and sickle over the president’s palace.{48} The MPLA urged Gulf Oil Co. to continue its exclusive operation in Cabinda province and guaranteed the safety of the American corporation’s employees while the fighting was still heavy. Gulf was completely amenable to this offer, but the CIA and the State Department put pressure on the company to discontinue its royalty payments to the MPLA, thus jeopardizing the entire oil venture in a way that the “Marxist” government never did. One aspect of this pressure was a threat by Kissinger to open an investigation of international bribery by the company. Gulf compromised by putting its payments into an escrow bank account until the civil war came to an end of sorts a few months later, at which time payments to the MPLA were resumed.{49}

The civil war in Angola did not actually come to an end in 1976 as it appeared to, for the fighting lingered on intermittently, sometimes moderately, sometimes ferociously.
In 1984 a confidential memorandum smuggled out of Zaire revealed that the United Statesand South Africa had met in November 1983 to discuss destabilization of the Angola government. Plans were drawn up to supply more military aid to UNITA (the FNLA was now defunct) and discussions were held on ways to implement a wide range of tactics: unify the anti-government movements, stir up popular feeling against the government, sabotage factories and transport systems, seize strategic points, disrupt joint Angola-Soviet projects, undermine relations between the government and the Soviet Union and Cuba, bring pressure to bear on Cuba to withdraw its troops, sow divisions in the ranks of the MPLA leadership, infiltrate agents into the Angolan army, and apply pressure to stem the flow of foreign investments into Angola.
The United States branded the document a forgery, but UNITA’s representative in Washington would neither confirm nor deny that the meeting took place. He stated, however, that UNITA had “contacts with US officials at all levels on a regular basis”.
The aim of the operation, according to the memorandum, was to force part of the Angolan leadership to negotiate with UNITA, precisely what Washington had successfully discouraged years earlier.{52}
A month after the reported US-South Africa meeting, the UN Security Council censured South Africa for its military operations in Angola, and endorsed Luanda’s right to reparations. Only the United States, abstaining, did not support the resolution.{53}
In August 1985, after a three-year battle withCongress, the Reagan administration won a repeal of the 1976 prohibition against US military aid to rebel forces in Angola. Military assistance began to flow to UNITA overtly as well as covertly. In January 1987, Washington announced that it was providing the rebels with Stinger missiles and other anti-aircraft weaponry. Three months earlier, Jonas Savimbi had spoken before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France in an appeal for support. Following his talk, however, a plenary session of the Parliament criticized American support for the guerrilla leader and passed a resolution which described UNITA as a “terrorist organization which supports South Africa.”{54}
Finally, in September 1992, elections were held, but when it became apparent that the MPLA would be the winner in a run-off — in polling which the UN certified to be free and fair — Savimbi refused to accept the result. He ended a year-old cease-fire and launched one of UNITA’s largest, most sustained offensives of the war, still being supplied by South Africa, and, in recent years, by American “private” airlines and “relief” organizations with interesting histories such as previous contacts to the Nicaraguan contras.{55}
In May 1993, Washington finally recognized the Angolan government. In January, just before the Clinton administration took over, a senior State Department official had declared: “Unita is exactly like the Khmer Rouge: elections and negotiations are just one more method of fighting a war; power is all.”{56}
The war — which had taken more than 300,000 lives — was still raging in 1994, continuing to produce widespread hunger and what is said to be the highest amputee rate in the world, caused by the innumerable land mines.

return to mid-text    

NOTES
1. New York Times, 25 September 1975; 19 December 1975.

55. The Guardian (London), 25 June 1990, p. 10; Sharon Beaulaurier, “Profiteers Fuel War in Angola”, Covert Action Quarterly (Washington, DC), No. 45, Summer 1993, pp. 61-65.

  BULGARIA  1990/ALBANIA 1991 

Teaching communists what democracy is all about

For American anti-communist cold-warriors, for Bulgarian anti-communist cold-warriors, it couldn’t have looked more promising.
The cold war was over. The forces of Western Civilization, Capitalism and Goodness had won. The Soviet Union was on the verge of falling apart. The Communist Party of Bulgaria was in disgrace. Its dictatorial leader of 35 years was being prosecuted for abuses of power. The party had changed its name, but that wouldn’t fool anybody. And the country was holding its first multiparty election in 45 years.
Then, the communists proceeded to win the election.
For the anti-communists the pain was unbearable. Surely some monstrous cosmic mistake had been made, a mistake which should not be allowed to stand. It should not, and it would not.

Washington had expressed its interest early. In February, Secretary of State James Baker became the most senior American official to visit Bulgaria since World War II. His official schedule said he was in Bulgaria to “meet with opposition leaders as well as Government officials”. Usually, the New York Timesnoted, “it is listed the other way around”. Baker became deeply involved in his talks with the opposition about political strategies and how to organize for an election. He also addressed a street rally organized by opposition groups, praising and encouraging the crowd. On the State Department profile of Bulgaria handed to reporters traveling with Baker, under the heading “Type of Government”, was written “In transition”.{1}
In May, three weeks before election day, a row broke out over assertions by the leader of the main opposition group. Petar Beron, secretary of the Union of Democratic Forces, a coalition of 16 parties and movements, said that during UDF’s visits to Europe and the United States, many politicians pledged that they would not provide financial assistance to a socialist Bulgaria. This would apply even if the Bulgarian Socialist Party — the renamed Communist Party — won the elections fairly. Beron stated that:

Western leaders want lasting contacts with governments which are building Western-style democracy and economies. The British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, was particularly categorical. He said he was drawing up a declaration to go before the European Community to refuse help for the remaining socialist governments in Eastern Europe.{2}

Meanwhile, the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington’s specially created stand-in for the CIA (see Nicaragua chapter), with funding in this case primarily from the Agency for International Development, was pouring some $2 million into Bulgaria to influence the outcome of the election, a process the NED calls promoting democracy. This was equivalent to a foreign power injecting more than $50 million into an American electoral campaign. One major recipient of this largesse was the newspaper of the opposition Union of Democratic Forces, Demokratzia, which received $233,000 of newsprint, “to allow it to increase its size and circulation for the period leading up to the national elections”. The UDF itself received another $615,000 of American taxpayer money for “infrastructure support and party training” … “material and technical support” … and “post-electoral assistance for the UDF’s party building program”.{3}
The United States made little attempt to mask its partisanship. On June 9, the day before election day, the US ambassador to Bulgaria, Sol Polansky, appeared on the platform of a UDF rally.{4} Polansky, whose early government career involved intelligence research, was a man who had had more than a passing acquaintance with the CIA. Moreover, several days earlier, the State Department had taken the unusual step of publicly criticizing the Bulgarian government for what it called the inequitable distribution of resources for news outlets, especially newsprint for opposition newspapers, as if this was not a fact of life for genuine opposition forces in the United States and every other country in the world. The Bulgarian government responded that the opposition had received newsprint and access to the broadcast outlets in accordance with an agreement between the parties, adding that many of the Socialist Party’s advantages, especially its financial reserves, resulted from the party’s membership of one million, about a ninth of Bulgaria’s population. The government had further provided the printing plant to publish the UDF newspaper and had given the opposition coalition the building from which to run its operations.{5}
The Socialists’ lead in the polls in the face of a crumbling economy perplexed the UDF, but the Bulgarian Socialist Party drew most of its support from among pensioners, farm-workers, and the industrial workforce, together representing well over half the voting population.{6} These sectors tended to associate the BSP with stability, and the party capitalized on this, pointing to the disastrous results — particularly the unemployment and inflation — of “shock therapy” free enterprise in Russia.{7} Although the three main parties all proposed moving toward a market economy, the Socialists insisted that the changes had to be carefully controlled. How this would be manifested in practice if the BSP were in charge and had to live in an extremely capitalist world, could not be predicted. What was certain, however, was that there was no way a party named “Socialist”, née “Communist”, recently married to the Soviet Union, could win the trust and support of the West.
As it turned out after the second round of voting, the Socialists had won about 47 percent of the vote and 211 seats in the 400-seat parliament (the Grand National Assembly), to the UDF’s 36 percent and 144 seats. Immediately following the first round, the opposition took to the streets with accusations of fraud, chanting “Socialist Mafia!” and “We won’t work for the Reds!” However, the European election observers had contrary views. “The results … will reflect the will of the people,” said the leader of a British observer delegation. “If I wanted to fix an election, it would be easier to do it in England than in Bulgaria.”
“If the opposition denounces the results as manipulated, it doesn’t fit in with what we’ve seen,” a Council of Europe delegate declared.
Another West European observer rejected the opposition claims as “sour grapes”.{8}
“Utter rot” was the term chosen by a conservative English MP to describe allegations of serious fraud. He asserted that “The conduct of the poll was scrupulously fair. There were just minor incidents that were exaggerated.”
“The opposition appear to be rather bad losers,” concluded one Western diplomat.{9}
These opinions were shared by the many hundreds of observers, diplomats and parliamentarians from Western Europe. Nonetheless, most of the American observers were not very happy, saying that fear and intimidation arising from “the legacy of 45 years of totalitarian rule” had produced “psychological” pressures on Bulgarian voters. “Off the record, I have real problems with this,” said one of the Americans. Asked if his team’s report would have been as critical had the opposition won, he replied: “That’s a good question.”{10}
Members of the British parliamentary observer group dismissed reports that voting was marred by intimidation and other malpractices. Most complaints were either “trivial” or impossible to substantiate, they said. “When we asked where intimidation had taken place, it was always in the next village,” said Lord Tordoff.{11}
Before the election, Socialist Prime Minister Lukanov had called for a coalition with opposition parties if his Bulgarian Socialist Party won the election. “The new government,” he said, “needs the broadest possible measure of public support if we are to carry through the necessary changes.”{12} Now victorious, he repeated the call for a coalition. But the UDF rejected the offer.{13} There were, however, elements within the BSP which were equally opposed to a coalition.
The opposition refused to accept the outcome of the voting. They were at war with the government. Street demonstrations became a daily occurrence as UDF supporters, backed by large numbers of students, built barricades and blocked traffic, and students launched a wave of strikes and sit-ins. Many of the students were acting as part of the Federation of Independent Student Societies (or Associations), which had been formed before the election. The chairman of the student group, Aptanas Kirchev, asserted that the organization had documentation on electoral abuses which would shortly be made public. But this does not appear to have taken place.{14}
The student movements were amongst the recipients of National Endowment for Democracy grants, to the tune of $100,000 “to provide infrastructure support to the Federation of Independent Student Associations of Bulgaria to improve its outreach capacity in preparation for the national elections”. The students received “faxes, video and copying equipment, loudspeakers, printing equipment and low-cost printing techniques”, as well as the help of various Polish advisers, American legal advisers, and other experts — the best that NED money could buy.{15}
The first victory for the protest movement came on 6 July, less than a month after the election, when President Mladenov was forced to resign after a week of protests — including a hunger strike outside of Parliament — over his actions during an anti- governmental demonstration the previous December. His resignation came after the UDF released a videotape showing Mladenov talking to his colleagues and appearing to say: “Shouldn’t we bring in the tanks?” Said a UDF official of the resignation, “We are rather happy about all this. It has thrown the Socialists into chaos.”{16}
The demonstrations, the protests, the agitation continued on a daily basis during July. A “City of Freedom” consisting of more than 60 tents was set up in the center of Sofia, occupied by people who said they would stay there until all senior Bulgarian politicians who served under the old communist regime were removed. When they were denied what they considered adequate access to the media, the protesters added to their demands the resignation of the head of Bulgarian television.{17} At one point, a huge ceremonial pyre was built in the street in which text books from the communist era were burnt, as well as party cards and flags.{18}                                          go to notes
The next head to fall was that of the interior minister, Atanas Smerdjiev, who resigned in a dispute over the extent to which the questioning of former dictator Todor Zhivkov should be public or behind closed doors. The Bulgarian people indeed had a lot to protest about; primarily a rapidly declining standard of living and a government without a president which seemed paralyzed and unable to enact desperately-needed reforms. But the question posed by some MPs — as thousands of hostile demonstrators surrounded the parliament building during the Smerdjiev affair — was “Are we going to be dictated to by the street?” “The problem,” said Prime Minister Lukanov, “is whether parliament is a sovereign body or whether we are going to be forced to make decisions under pressure.” His car was attacked as he left the building.{19} Finally, on 1 August the head of the UDF, Zhelyu Zhelev, was elected unopposed by Parliament as the new president.
A few weeks later, another demand of the protesters was met. The government began to remove communist symbols, such as red stars and hammer-and-sickles, from buildings in Sofia. Yet, two days later, the headquarters of the Socialist Party was set afire as 10,000 people swarmed around it. Many of them broke into the building and ransacked it before it wound up a gutted and charred shell.{20}
The protest movement in Bulgaria was beginning to feel and smell like the general strike in British Guiana to topple Cheddi Jagan in 1962, and the campaign to undermine Salvador Allende in Chile in the early ’70s — both operations of the CIA — where as soon as one demand was met, newer ones were raised, putting the government virtually under siege, hoping it would over-react, and making normal governing impossible. In Bulgaria, women demonstrated by banging pots and pans to signify the lack of food in the shops,{21} just as women had dramatically done in Chile, and in Jamaica and Nicaragua as well, where the CIA had also financed anti-government demonstrations.
In British Guiana, the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade had come down from the US to spread the gospel and money, and similar groups had set up shop in Jamaica. In Bulgaria in August, representatives of the Free Congress Foundation, an American right-wing organization with lots of money and lots of anti-communist and religious ideology, met with about one-third of the opposition members in Parliament and President Zhelev’s chief political adviser. Zhelev himself visited the FCF’s Washington office the following month. The FCF — which has received money from the National Endowment for Democracy at times — had visited the Soviet Union and most of the Eastern European countries in 1989 and 1990, imparting good ol’ American know-how in electoral and political techniques and for shaping public policy, as well as holding seminars on the multiple charms of free enterprise. It is not known whether any of the students were aware of the fact that one of the FCF’s chief Eastern European program directors, Laszlo Pasztor, was a man with genuine Nazi credentials.{22}
By October, a group of American financial experts and economists, under the auspices of the US Chamber of Commerce, had drawn up a detailed plan for transforming Bulgaria into a supply-side free-market economy, complete with timetables for implementing the plan. President Zhelev said he was confident the Bulgarian government would accept virtually all the recommendations, even though the BSP held a majority in Parliament. “They will be eager to proceed,” he said, “because otherwise the government will fall.”{23}
Witnesses and police claimed that Konstantin Trenchev, a fierce anti-communist who was a senior figure in the UDF and the leader of the Podkrepa independent trade union, had called on a group of hardcore demonstrators to storm the BSP building during the fire. He had also called for the dissolution of Parliament and presidential rule, “tantamount to a coup d’etat” declared the Socialist Party. Trenchev went into hiding.{24}
Trenchev’s Podkrepa union was also being financed by the NED — $327 thousand had been allocated “to provide material and technical support to Bulgaria’s independent trade union movement Podkrepa” and “to help Podkrepa organize a voter education campaign for the local elections”. There were computers and fax machines, and there were advisers to help the union “get organized and gain strength”, according to Podkrepa’s vice president. The assistance had reached Podkrepa via the Free Trade Union Institute,{25} set up by the AFL-CIO in 1977 as the successor to the Free Trade Union Committee, which had been formed in the 1940s to combat left-wing trade unionism in Europe. Both the FTUC and the FTUI had long had an intimate relationship with the CIA.{26}
In the first week of November, several hundred students occupied Sofia University once again, demanding now the prosecution, not merely the removal, of leading figures in the former communist regime, as well as the nationalization of the Socialist Party’s assets. The prime minister’s rule was shaky. Lukanov had threatened to step down unless he gained opposition support in Parliament for his program of economic reform. The UDF, on the other hand, was now demanding that it be allowed to dominate a new coalition government, taking the premiership and most key portfolios. Although open to a coalition, the BSP would not agree to surrender the prime minister’s position; the other cabinet posts, however, were open to negotiation.{27}
The movement to topple Lukanov was accelerating. Thousands marched and called for his resignation. University students held rallies, sit-ins, strikes and protest fasts, now demanding the publication of the names of all former secret police informers in the university. They proclaimed their complete distrust in the ability of the government to cope with Bulgaria’s political and economic crisis, and called for “an end to one-party rule”, a strange request in light of the desire of Lukanov to form a coalition government.{28} In June The Guardian of London had described Lukanov as “Bulgaria’s impressive Prime minister … a skilled politician who impresses business executives, bankers and conservative Western politicians, while maintaining popular support at home, even among the opposition.”{29}
On the 23rd of November, Lukanov (barely) survived a no- confidence motion, leading the UDF to storm out of Parliament, announcing that they would not return for “an indefinite period”. Three days later, the Podkrepa labor organization instituted a “general strike”, albeit not with a majority of the nation’s workers.{30}
Meanwhile, the student protests continued, although some of their demands had already been partly met. The Socialist Party had agreed to restore to the state 57 percent of its assets, corresponding to subsidies received from the state budget under the previous regime. And the former party leader, Todor Zhivkov, was already facing trial.
Some opposition leaders were not happy with the seemingly boundless student protest movement. UDF leader Petar Beron urged that since Bulgaria had embarked on the road to parliamentary democracy, the students should give democracy a chance and not resort to sit-ins. And a UDF MP added that “The socialists should leave the political arena in a legal manner. They should not be forced into doing it through revolution.” Student leaders dismissed these remarks out of hand.{31}
The end for Andrei Lukanov came on 29 November, as the strike spread to members of the media, and thousands of doctors, nurses and teachers staged demonstrations. He announced that since his proposed economic program had not received the broad support he had asked for, he had decided that it was “useless to continue in office”. A caretaker coalition would be set up that would lead to new general elections.{32}
Throughout the period of protest and turmoil, the United States continued to give financial assistance to various opposition forces and “whispered advice on how to apply pressure to the elected leaders”. The vice president of the Podkrepa union, referring to American diplomats, said: “They wanted to help us and have helped with advice and strategy.” This solidarity gave rise to hopes of future American aid. Konstantin Trenchev, the head of Podkrepa, apparently out of hiding now, confirmed that opposition activists had been assured of more US assistance if they managed to wrest power from the former communists.{33}
These hopes may have had as much to do with naiveté as with American support for the UDF. The Bulgarians, like other Eastern Europeans and Soviet citizens, had led very sheltered political and intellectual lives. In 1990, their ideological sophistication was scarcely above the equation: if the communist government was bad, it must have been all bad; if it was all bad, its principal enemy must have been all good. They believed such things as: American government leaders could not stay in office if they lied to the people, and that reports of homelessness and the absence of national health insurance in the United States were just “communist propaganda”.
However, the new American ambassador, H. Kenneth Hill, said that Washington officials had made it clear to Bulgarian politicians that future aid depended on democratic reform and development of an economic recovery plan acceptable to Western lenders, the same terms laid down all over Eastern Europe.
The Bulgarian Socialists, while not doubting Washington’s commitment to exporting capitalism, did complain that the United States had at times violated democratic principles in working against the leadership chosen by the Bulgarian people. One reform- minded Socialist government official contended that Americans had reacted to his party’s victory as if it represented a failure of US policy. “The U.S. government people have not been the most clean, moral defenders of democracy here,” he said. “What cannot be done at home can be gotten away with in this dark, backward Balkan state.”{34}
In the years since, the Bulgarian people, particularly the students, may have learned something, as the country has gone through the now-familiar pattern of freely-rising prices, the scrapping of subsidies on basic goods and utilities, shortages of all kinds, and IMF and World Bank demands to tighten the belts even further. Politically, there’s been chaos. The UDF came to power in the next elections (with the BSP a very close second) but, due to the failing economy, lost a confidence vote in Parliament, saw its entire cabinet resign, then the vice president, who warned that the nation was heading for dictatorship. Finally, in July 1993, protesters prevented the president from entering his office for a month and demanded his resignation.
By 1994, we could read in the Los Angeles Times, by their most anti-communist foreign correspondent:

Living conditions are so much worse in the reform era that Bulgarians look back fondly on communism’s “good old days,” when the hand of the state crushed personal freedom but ensured that people were housed, employed and had enough to eat.{35}

But for Washington policy makers, the important thing, the ideological bottom line, was that the Bulgarian Socialist Party could not, and would not, be given the chance to prove that a democratic, socialist-oriented mixed economy could succeed in Eastern Europe while the capitalist model was failing all around it.
Nor, apparently, would it be allowed in nearby Albania. On 31 March 1991, a Communist government won overwhelming endorsement in elections there. This was followed immediately by two months of widespread unrest, including street demonstrations and a general strike lasting three weeks, which finally led to the collapse of the new regime by June.{36} The National Endowment for Democracy had been there also, providing $80,000 to the labor movement and $23,000 “to support party training and civic education programs”.{37}

NOTES                                    return to mid-text

1. New York Times, 11 February 1990, p. 20.

2. The Guardian (London), 21 May 1990, p. 6.

3. National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, D.C., Annual Report, 1990 (October 1, 1989 – September 30, 1990), pp. 23-4. The NED grants also included $111 thousand for an international election observation team.

4. Los Angeles Times, 3 December 1990, p. 13.

5. New York Times, 6 June 1990, p. 10; 11 February 1990, p. 20.

6. The Guardian (London), 9 June 1990, p. 6.

7. Luan Troxel, “Socialist Persistence in the Bulgarian Elections of 1990-1991″, East European Quarterly (Boulder, CO), January 1993, pp. 412-14.

8. Los Angeles Times, 12 June 1990.

9. The Guardian (London), 12 June 1990, p. 7.

10. Los Angeles Times, 12 June 1990; The Times (London), 12 June 1990, p. 15; The Guardian (London), 12 June 1990, p. 7.

11. The Times (London), 20 June 1990, p. 10.

12. The Guardian (London), 28 May 1990, p. 6.

13. The Times (London), 20 June 1990, p. 10.

14. The Times Higher Educational Supplement (London), 29 June 1990, p. 11.

15. NED Annual Report, 1990, op. cit., pp. 6-7, 23.

16. The Times (London), 7 July 1990, p. 11.

17. The Times Higher Educational Supplement (London), 13 July 1990, p. 9.

18. The Guardian (London), 12 July 1990, p. 10; The Times (London), 20 July 1990, p. 10.

19. The Times (London), 28 July 1990, p. 8; 30 July, p. 6.

20. Ibid., 27 August 1990, p. 8.

21. The Times Higher Education Supplement (London), 14 December 1990, p. 8.

22. Russ Bellant and Louis Wolf, “The Free Congress Foundation Goes East”, Covert Action Information Bulletin, Fall 1990, No. 35, pp. 29-32, based substantially on Free Congress Foundation publications.

23. New York Times, 9 October 1990, p. D20.

24. The Guardian (London), 29, 30 August 1990, both p. 8.

25. NED Annual Report, 1990, op. cit., p. 23; Los Angeles Times, 3 December 1990, p. 13.

26. Howard Frazier, editor, Uncloaking the CIA (The Free Press/Macmillan Publishing Co., New York, 1978) pp. 241-8.

27. The Guardian (London), 7 November 1990, p. 10.

28. The Times Higher Educational Supplement (London), 16 November 1990, p. 11.

29. The Guardian (London), 9 June 1990, p. 6.

30. The Times (London), 24 November 1990, p. 10; 27 November, p. 16.

31. The Times Higher Educational Supplement (London), 30 November 1990, p. 8.

32. The Guardian (London), 30 November 1990, p. 9; The Times (London), 30 November 1990, p. 10.

33. Los Angeles Times, 3 December 1990, p. 13.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 6 February 1994, article by Carol J. Williams.

36. Ibid., 13 June 1991, p. 14.

37. National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, D.C., Annual Report, 1991 (October 1, 1990 – September 30, 1991), p. 42.

56. New York Times, 17 January 1993, IV, p. 5.

magazine, 10 April 1995, p. 43.