Killings of Trade Union Activists Continue in Guatemala

Source: International Trade Union Confederation

Killings of Trade Union Activists Continue in Guatemala
Tuesday, 31 May 2011, 3:48 pm

Brussels, 30 May 2011 - Yet another trade union leader has been brutally murdered in Guatemala for exercising his union activities. The ITUC and its affiliated organisations in Guatemala, the CUSG, CGTG and UNSITRAGUA, have firmly condemned the assassination of Idar Joel Hernández Godoy, finance secretary of the Izabal banana workers' union SITRABI, affiliated to the CUSG.

This is not the first time a SITRABI member has been the target of deadly anti-union repression. On 10 April, Oscar Humberto González Vázquez, also a grassroots leader of SITRABI, was found shot dead with 35 bullet wounds.

In a letter to President Colom, the ITUC urged him to take every action necessary to end, once and for all, this tide of anti-union murders and generalised violence, which has risen to even greater heights during his time in office, reminding him, as stated in the Constitution of Guatemala, that "it is the duty of the state to guarantee life, freedom, justice, peace and the full development" of its citizens.

"It is crucial that everything possible be done to track down all those responsible for this latest abominable act," said ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow. "Over three years ago, during the inauguration of the ITUC conference against impunity in Guatemala, President Colom expressed his political resolve and commitment to fight for social justice, genuine rule of law and for an end to impunity in Guatemala", but unfortunately these promises have gone unfulfilled.



Read more: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1105/S00746/killings-of-trade-union-activists-continue-in-guatemala.htm

U.S. company is behind this. Nothing surprises me anymore.

is run by the Boogeyman. It is a very dangerous place. People are murdered all the time and no one is ever sure who did it or why. It can be the police or the death squads, the drug cartels, the army, anti-union thugs, the crime syndicates or just someone settling a score. The MOs are always pretty much the same: People are "disappeared" or are tortured, shot and left to be found. Both send a message. The message is that the Boogeyman is always watching.

It's power was so absolute as far back as 1928 it could command the full backing of the U.S. military in its aggression against the Guatemalan desperately underpaid workers asking for better wages:

Banana massacreSee also: Banana massacre

One of the most notorious strikes by United Fruit workers broke out on 12 November 1928 on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, near Santa Marta. On 6 December, Colombian Army troops allegedly under the command of General Cortés Vargas, opened fire on a crowd of strikers gathered in the central square of the town of Ciénaga. Estimates of the number of casualties vary from 47 to 2000. The military justified this action by claiming that the strike was subversive and its organizers were Communist revolutionaries. Congressman Jorge Eliécer Gaitán claimed that the army had acted under instructions from the United Fruit Company. The ensuing scandal contributed to President Miguel Abadía Méndez's Conservative Party being voted out of office in 1930, putting an end to 44 years of Conservative rule in Colombia. The first novel of Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, La Casa Grande, focuses on this event, and the author himself grew up in close proximity to the incident. The climax of García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is based on the events in Ciénaga, though the author himself has acknowledged that the death toll of 3,000 that he gives there is greatly inflated.<15>

~snip~
The telegram from Bogotá Embassy to the U.S. Secretary of State, dated December 5, 1928, stated: “I have been following Santa Marta fruit strike through United Fruit Company representative here; also through Minister of Foreign Affairs who on Saturday told me government would send additional troops and would arrest all strike leaders and transport them to prison at Cartagena; that government would give adequate protection to American interests involved.”<16>

The telegram from Bogotá Embassy to Secretary of State, date December 7, 1928, stated: “Situation outside Santa Marta City unquestionably very serious: outside zone is in revolt; military who have orders "not to spare ammunition" have already killed and wounded about fifty strikers. Government now talks of general offensive against strikers as soon as all troopships now on the way arrive early next week.”<17>

The Dispatch from US Bogotá Embassy to the US Secretary of State, dated December 29, 1928, stated: “I have the honor to report that the legal advisor of the United Fruit Company here in Bogotá stated yesterday that the total number of strikers killed by the Colombian military authorities during the recent disturbance reached between five and six hundred; while the number of soldiers killed was one.”

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Fruit_Company

~~~~~

1954 Guatemalan coup d'étatFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état was a covert operation organized by the United States Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, the democratically-elected President of Guatemala.

Árbenz's government put forth a number of new policies, such as seizing and expropriating unused, unfarmed land that private corporations set aside long ago and giving the land to peasants. The U.S. intelligence community deemed such plans communist in nature. This led CIA director Allen Dulles to fear that Guatemala would become a "Soviet beachhead in the western hemisphere".<1> Dulles' concern reverberated within the CIA and the Eisenhower administration, in the context of the anti-communist fears of the McCarthyist era.

Árbenz instigated sweeping land reform acts that antagonized the U.S.-based multinational United Fruit Company, which had large stakes in the old order of Guatemala and lobbied various levels of the U.S. government to take action against Árbenz.<2> Both Dulles and his brother were shareholders of United Fruit Company.<3>

The operation, known by the code name Operation PBSUCCESS, lasted from late 1953 to 1954. The CIA armed and trained an ad-hoc "Liberation Army" of about 400 fighters under the command of a then-exiled Guatemalan army officer, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas, and used them in conjunction with a complex and largely experimental diplomatic, economic, and propaganda campaign. They even established a Voice of Liberation radio station, actually located across the border in Honduras, which relayed programming originating in Miami, and pretended to be the spontaneous voice of patriots opposed to the elected government. The operation effectively ended the experimental period of representative democracy in Guatemala known as the "Ten Years of Spring", which ended with Árbenz's official resignation.<4>

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

~~~~~
Another season of relentless, inhuman violence against Guatemalans was initiated by Ronald Reagan.

May 26, 1999
Reagan & Guatemala’s Death Files
By Robert Parry

~snip~
The grisly reality of Central America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war. The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s.

Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved. The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages … are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's history," the commission concluded.

The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the north, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide." (WP, Feb. 26, 1999) Besides carrying out murder and “disappearances,” the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found.

The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some (of these) state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.

More:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/052699a1.html

ETC.

Or doesn't Guatemala have sufficient oil reserves to merit the attention of the popular media and our elected officials?