By Ollantay Itzamná
Fuentes: Rebellion
In March 1954, the US government promoted and carried out the X Summit of the Organization of American States (OAS), in Caracas, Venezuela, with the aim of punishing the National Revolution of Guatemala (1944-1954).
Two months after that Summit, where the Foreign Minister of Guatemala, almost crying, asked for the non-intervention of the US military in his country, the constitutional president of Guatemala, Jacobo Árbenz, was violently overthrown by mercenaries in the most humiliating way… Before expelling him from the country , they exposed him in his underpants at the La Aurora international airport… That legendary man died in misery abroad.
At that Summit, Guillermo Toriello, the Foreign Minister of Guatemala (later called Chancellor of Dignity) was the only one who voted against that OAS Resolution that “suppressed” the principle of “non-intervention” and opened the doors to the bloody American interventionism (coups d’état) in the Abya Yala Continent.
The US argument to overthrow the Árbenz government was: “communism threatens the peace of America”.
70 years later, the OAS returns, with Almagro, to defend democracy in Guatemala
In August 2023, the month of Pachamama in the Plurinational Abya Yala of the South, Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the OAS, is received in Guatemala as if he were a medieval Consul of the Roman Empire.
The second round elections will be on August 20. In this context, Almagro arrives, the criminal of the massacres of the Coup d’état in Bolivia, 2019, as the “great redeemer” for Guatemala.
To prepare for the arrival of Almagro/OAS as the redeemer in the Central American country, the Creole State and its oligarchs created the basic conditions.
They installed and manipulated in people’s imagination fears and desires such as: “The State is dying because of corruption”, “democracy is in danger”, “our institutions are dying”, etc. In fact, the bicentennial State of Guatemala was and is constitutively corrupt/corrupting. Democracy never existed for everyone (the demographic majorities were never in government, nor did they hold public office). But, with these and other hoaxes, Guatemalan identity is frightened, making use of the constant collective anomie in which it subsists. And of course, there is no collective anomie without selective amnesia, and these necessarily cause collective “self-defeat” and neophobia (fear of change).
Banish plurinationality from Guatemala and the Continent
In recent years, the proposal for a plurinational State began to be promoted in Guatemala through a process of the Popular and Plurinational Constituent Assembly (ACPP). It is energized by indigenous people and peasants.
They even created their own political organization, Movement for the Liberation of the Peoples (MLP), to participate in the elections and materialize the plurinational State.
In the 2019 general elections, the MLP came to occupy 4th place at the country level. But, this organization, unconstitutionally, and due to the silence of the “current defenders” of Guatemalan democracy, was excluded from the 2023 general elections, and legally annulled.
At present, the North American attack against the proposal of plurinationality has already succeeded in removing the MLP from its path, in addition to “distance” from the plurinational commitment ancestral authorities, leaders and Mayan and mestizo intellectuals who at some point “flirted” with the idea of multinationality.
Now, many “plurinationals” receive with applause (if not as an act of contrition) the North American Consul sent to “sweep away the proposal of plurinationality.”
What results has the presence of the OAS/USA had in Guatemala in these 70 years?
Guatemala was not only a political-military laboratory for the perverse trials of US interventionism, like what happened in 1954. It was also a biological laboratory. In the Central Penitentiary of Guatemala, the US government inoculated hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners with syphilis and gonorrhea to test the results of their drugs…
70 years ago, the US/OAS overthrew the National Revolution project headed by none other than Juan José Arévalo, father of the current presidential candidate of the Semilla party, Bernardo Arévalo, under the promise of: development, security, democracy, institutionality.
If one looks in the rear-view mirror at this short story…, what one sees is a bloody path, full of misery, hunger, contamination, dispossession, racism, tyrannies, corruption…
70 years later, a world power country in child malnutrition (8 out of 10 children under 5 years of age in a situation of malnutrition). World power in socioeconomic inequality product of neoliberal looting. A hungry country, where there are more helicopters than birds flying in the air. A small country, where dignity and sovereignty, like rights, are too far away for the vast majority.
But, the worst legacy of this unredeemed crime of 70 years is the providentialist spirit (waiting for the arrival of the executioner as redeemer) that inhabits Guatemala, the result of anomie, intellectual self-censorship, the self-defeat of “revolutionaries”, the fear of structural changes. Perverse gringo: he inoculated fear of communism, now he inoculates fear of plurinationality.
In 1948, the medical administrator of the Guatemala Central Penitentiary, Dr. Robles Chinchilla, after inoculating Guatemalan prisoners with venereal diseases, wrote with gratitude to the American doctor of the US Public Health, John C. Cutler. : “Our eternal gratitude for the noble and gentle way in which you have alleviated the suffering of our prisoners” “You. He’s been a real philanthropist.” This sums up the disastrous history of the US’s 70 years in Guatemala.
Why do politicians, rulers, priests, bishops, intellectuals, journalists, ancestral “authorities” prostrate themselves before the executioner of Guatemala?
I was already referring to the inoculation of syphilis, the fear of communism, now, the rejection of plurinationality…
In 2018, D. Trump, president of the US, called countries like Guatemala “shit holes” that send thousands of migrants daily as slave labor to sustain both economies.
In spite of all this public information, why do Moors and Christians, masters and slaves, scholars and laymen…, prostrate themselves before the executioner of the Americas? Everyone will have their answer. The only certainty is that these actions are as lethal as the executioner’s actions. And no matter how much the genuflexors repent and make acts of contrition post factum, the damage is suffered by their descendants.
Ollantay Itzamna. Defender of the Rights of Mother Earth and Human Rights from Abya Yala.
