I fully agree with you, and you would have been probably interested in a conversation I had in the late 1980's with a Catholic priest who was the pastor of the two lay missionaries and two nuns who were raped and killed by death squads in El Salvador that were sponsored by the government there-- a government that we supported. The State Department under Reagan never even ask him any questions dealing with that case even though the guys who committed this atrocity were clearly connected to the government, which was easily established after their government was out of power.
The priest also got into how we were leaving weapons there for that terribly oppressive government even though it was against U.S. law to do so. The reality is that we were supporting oppression, and doing so because many of the companies there had U.S. connections.
Yes, I had heard a little of these stories, because I paid a little more attention to the news than most people back in the 80's, but I think the real difference for me was hearing about the death squads that cleared Mayan rural villages from northwest Guatemala directly from someone who lived it....someone who, at age 13 was woken in the middle of the night and had to flee with most of his family into the jungle ahead of armed mercenaries bent on raping and killing any stragglers. Think about this next time you hear that term:
counter-insurgency - this is what counter-insurgency was all about!
The big difference between Vietnam and Guatemala, and other nations where counter-insurgency was applied, was that the Americans and Vietnamese allies in Vietnam did not have a coherent plan for dealing with uncooperative farmers, and were not willing to terrorize the locals. There were rogue elements who did rape and murder and look for revenge as they went through villages, but it was after Vietnam that the generals and military strategists worked out the plan for how to prop up unpopular local despots who act on behalf of wealthy and mostly foreign interests.
So, by the time they get to Guatemala and engineer a military coup that brings Ephraim Rios Montt to power...the man willing to do anything and everything to be top dog, the strategy becomes one of soldiers and hired mercenaries taking off their uniforms and thinly disguising their appearance, as they lead an assault to clear out all of the villages, so that the guerillas have no civilian cover.
As my friend describes the situation in his home - most of the Mayans did not see themselves as taking sides in the war between the plantation owners to the south and the marxist insurgents who were often coming from the Yucatan - across the Mexican border. The key difference is one that I have heard from Vietnamese in the restive south during the Vietnam War - the guerillas were well-trained by their officers to respect the locals and try to win their trust. They usually stayed outside of a settlement and only the leaders entered to ask about troop movements and request some food. They were careful not to be greedy, and only take as much as necessary for the coming days. Any guerilla who committed rape or similar crimes would be taken out and shot by his own leaders.
Whereas the military units were made up of Spanish-speaking soldiers from the cities in the south (most of the Mayans did not speak Spanish, so there was a language barrier same as existed for the Americans in Vietnam). So, it was not a matter of the Mayans becoming communists and wanting a revolution; since their lives were largely unaffected by events in the south and they wanted it to stay that way. Just as in Vietnam, Iraq and every other example where we hear about the mistakes of American forces and their proxies in these Neocolonial wars - the leaders never bother to learn much of anything about the people they are trying to control. So, they have gone the route of counter-insurgency, and using terror and mass surveillance to maintain oppressive regimes....what else is new?
My friends' wife - who was from El Salvador, tells a different...though similar themed story of her youth as happened to her husband. In her case, her family was a comfortable middle class family living in the capital - San Salvador when the revolution started. Her father was a doctor who became a professor at the University in the capital. Although he was teaching in the medical department, all of the staff and students of the University were considered suspect by a series of military regimes. So, when one night, the front door was busted down and unidentified men wearing masks grabbed him out of his bed and took him away, his family spent days and weeks not knowing where he was taken, or why, or what was happening to him. All they knew was that the Government took him away and would not tell them anything. In their case, they were lucky, because her father was returned about five or six weeks later....many who were disappeared in the night were never seen again...and the sense of angst - not knowing if or when some paramilitary forces would come for you in the night made everyone who was educated totally paranoid. So, after that, it was an easy decision to get out of the Country as soon as possible. Her father became a doctor in Mexico, where she met her future husband, and the two of them eventually found their way to Canada, rather than trying to go to the U.S., like many of their relatives have done or tried to do over the years.
Well, that's their personal testimonials in a nutshell, and hearing the stories first hand leaves you with a different impression of these situations than when you read some little blurb about it in Time Magazine or Newsweek at the time...usually in the waiting room of the dentist office in my case.
What I forgot to get to is how they see religion and the Catholic Church - because I would have expected back when I first started talking to them about these stories, that the cooperation of Pope John Paul II and the Catholic hierarchy would drive them out of the Catholic Church and lead them to some other religion or no religion at all. But, although they have some differences on the merits of Catholicism (which they still belong to) they make a clear distinction between the Vatican and what they see as the Church: the local priests and fellow worshipers. Worth noting that one of the few top clerics who refused JPII's order to abandon Liberation Theology and follow the orders of the anti-communist dictators, was Archbishop Oscar Romero - who became such an important moral leader of the opposition in El Salvador, that the only way the Regime (and the CIA) could deal with him was to hire an assassin to shoot him!
But, in many other cases, the roles and behaviours of the top clerics is either muddled or on the side of the dictators. In the case of this new pope - Francis, he is on both sides of the ledger...as his supporters can point to circumstances where he interceded on behalf of detained priests and others; while on the other side, there are lots of pictures of him shmoozing with the Dictator and his henchmen, and the fact that he was considered an asset by the CIA-sponsored regime. So, who knows! He may have been opposed to the dictators and working as best he could for the people. One thing was for sure, the Catholic clerics who were truly courageous and held to their convictions, were either shot or disappeared in the night like so many thousands of others during the Dirty Wars.
