C.I.A. DEATH SQUADS
by Allan Nairn
from the Nation magazine, April 17, 1995
The U.S. government has systematic links to Guatemalan Army death squad
operations that go far beyond the disclosures that have recently shaken official
Washington. The news that the C.I.A. employed a Guatemalan colonel who
reportedly ordered two murders has been greeted with professions of shock and
outrage. But in fact the story goes much deeper, as U.S. officials well know.
North American C.l.A. operatives work inside a Guatemalan Army unit that
maintains a network of torture centers and has killed thousands of Guatemalan
civilians. The G-2, headquartered on the fourth floor of the Guatemalan National
Palace, has, since at least the 1960s, been advised, trained,
armed and equipped by U.S. undercover agents. Working out of the U.S. Embassy
and living in safehouses and hotels, these agents work through an elite group of
Guatemalan officers who are secretly paid by the C.I.A. and who have been
implicated personally in numerous political crimes and assassinations.
This secret G-2 / C.I.A. collaboration has been described by Guatemalan and U.S.
operatives and confirmed, in various aspects, by three former Guatemalan heads
of state. These accounts also mesh with that given in a March 28 interview by
Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, the C.I.A.- paid Guatemalan G-2 officer who has been
implicated in the murders of Guatemalan guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez
and a U.S. citizen, Michael DeVine.
One of the American agents who works with the G-2, a thin blond man in his 40s
who goes by the name of Randy Capister, has been involved in similar operations
with the army of neighboring El Salvador. Another, a weapons expert known as Joe
Jacarino, has operated throughout the Caribbean, and has accompanied G-2 units
on missions into rural zones.
Jacarino's presence in the embassy was confirmed by David Wright, a former
embassy intelligence employee who called Jacarino a "military liaison." Col.
George Hooker, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency chief in Guatemala from 1985
to 1989, says he also knew Jacarino, though he says Jacarino was not with the
D.l.A. When asked whether Jacarino was with the C.I.A. he replied, "I'm not at
liberty to say."
Celerino Castillo, a former agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration who
dealt with the G-2 and the C.I.A. in Guatemala, says he worked with Capister as
well as with Jacarino. He showed photographs of himself and Capister at embassy
events and in the field. Guatemalan sources say Capister meets regularly with
Guatemalan Army chiefs. He has been seen in meetings in Guatemala City as
recently as the spring of 1994.
When I reached Colonel Alpirez at the La Aurora base in Guatemala, he denied all
involvement in the deaths of Bamaca and DeVine and said he was never paid by the
C.I.A. But he discussed at length how the agency advises and helps run the G-2.
He praised the C.I.A. for "professionalism" and close rapport with Guatemalan
officers. He said that agency operatives often come to Guatemala on temporary
duty, during which they train G-2 men and provide "advice and technical
assistance." He described attending C.I.A. sessions at G-2 bases on
"contra-subversion" tactics and "how to manage the factors of power" to "fortify
democracy." He said the C.I.A. men were on call to respond to G-2 questions, and
that the G-2 often consulted the agency on how to deal with "political
problems." Alpirez said he was not authorized to give specifics on the technical
assistance, nor would he name the North Americans the G-2 worked with, though he
said they were "very good friends."
Other officials, though, say that at least during the mid 1980s G-2 officers
were paid by Jack McCavitt, then C.I.A. station chief, and that the "technical
assistance" includes communications gear, computers and special firearms, as
well as collaborative use of C.I.A.-owned helicopters that are flown out of the
Piper hangar at the La Aurora civilian air port and from a separate U.S. air
facility. Through what Amnesty International has called "a government program of
political murder." the Guatemalan Army has, since 1978, killed more than 110,000
civilians. The G-2 and a smaller, affiliated unit called the Archivo have long
been openly known in Guatemala as the brain of the terror state. With a
contingent of more than 2,000 agents and with sub-units in the local army bases.
the G-2-under orders of the army high command-coordinates the torture.
assassination and disappearance of dissidents.
"If the G-2 wants to kill you, they kill you," former army Chief of staff Gen.
Benedicto Lucas Garcia once said. "They send one of their trucks with a hit
squad and that's it." Current and former G-2 agents describe a program of
surveillance backed by a web of torture centers and clandestine body dumps. In
1986, then-army Chief of Staff Gen. Hector Gramajo Morales, a U.S. protege, said
that the G-2 maintains files on and watches "anyone who is an opponent of the
Guatemalan state in any realm." A former G-2 agent says that the base he worked
at in Huehuetenango maintained its own crematorium and "processed" abductees by
chopping off limbs, singeing flesh and administering electric shocks.
At least three of the recent G-2 chiefs have been paid by the C.I.A., according
to U.S. and Guatemalan intelligence sources. One of them, Gen. Edgar Godoy
Gaitan, a former army Chief of Staff, has been accused in court by the victim's
family of being one of the prime "intellectual authors" of the 1990 murder of
the noted Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack Chang. Another, Col. Otto Perez
Molina, who now runs the Presidential General Staff and oversees the Archivo,
was in charge in 1994, when, according to the Archbishop's human rights office,
there was evidence of General Staff involvement in the assassination of Judge
Edgar Ramiro Elias Ogaldez. The third, Gen. Francisco Ortega Menaldo, who now
works in Washington as general staff director at the Pentagon-backed
Inter-American Defense Board, was G-2 chief in the late 1980s during a series of
assassinations of students, peasants and human rights activists. Reached at his
home in Florida, Jack McCavitt said he does not talk to journalists. When asked
whether Ortega Menaldo was on the C.I.A. payroll, he shouted "Enough!" and
slammed down the phone.
These crimes are merely examples of a vast, systemic pattern; likewise, these
men are only cogs in a large U.S. government apparatus. Colonel Hooker, the
former D.I.A. chief for Guatemala, says, "It would be an embarrassing situation
if you ever had a roll call of everybody in the Guatemalan Army who ever
collected a C.I.A. paycheck." Hooker says the agency payroll is so large that it
encompasses most of the army's top decision-makers. When I told him that his
friend, Gen. Mario Enriquez Morales, the current Defense Minister, had reacted
to the Alpirez scandal by saying publicly that it was "disloyal" and "shameful"
for officers to take C.I.A. money, Hooker burst out laughing and exclaimed:
"Good! Good answer, Mario! I'd hate to think how many guys were on that payroll.
It's a perfectly normal thing."
Other top commanders paid by the C.I.A. include Gen. Roberto Matta Galvez,
former army Chief of Staff, head of the Presidential General Staff and commander
of massacres in the El Quiche department; and General Gramajo, Defense Minister
during the armed forces' abduction, rape and torture of Dianna Ortiz, an
American nun. Gramajo also managed the early 1980s highland massacres. Colonel
Hooker says he once brought Gramajo on a ten-day tour of the United States to
speak at U.S. military bases and confer with the U.S. Army Chief of Staff.
Three recent Guatemalan heads of state confirm that the C.I.A. works closely
with the G-2. Last year, when I asked Gen. Oscar Humberto Meiia Victores
(military dictator from 1983 to 1986) how the country's death squads had
originated, he said they had been started "in the 1960s by the C.I.A." Gen.
Efram Rios Montt (dictator from 1982 to 1983 and the current Congress
President), who ordered the main highland massacres (662 villages destroyed, by
the army's own count), said the C.I.A. did have agents inside the G-2. When I
asked Rios Montt-a firm believer in the death penalty-if he thought he should be
executed for his role in the slaughter, he leapt to his feet and shouted "Yes!
Try me! Put me against the wall!" but he said he should be tried only if
Americans were tried too. Specifically, he cited President Reagan, who, in the
midst of the massacres, embraced Rios Montt and said he was getting "a bum rap"
on human rights. Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo, civilian President from 1986 to 1991
(under whom the rate of killing actually increased), said "the C.I.A. often
contracts with our military and G-2 people," and that from what he knew they
"very probably" had people inside "who have participated with our G-2 in
technical assistance and advice. "
These C.I.A. operations are, of course, part of the larger U.S. policy. The Bush
and Clinton State Departments, for example, in the midst of a much-touted "cutoff"
of military aid to Guatemala after 1990, authorized-according to classified
State Department records-more than 114 separate sales of U.S. pistols and
rifles.
The killing of defenseless people has been state policy in Guatemala for thirty
years. The question is not whether the U.S. government has known-it is obviously
aware of its own actions. It is why, with overt and covert aid, it has helped
commit the army's murders.