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Remembering genocides in Guatemala
Rights Action does not lightly denounce Israel’s U.S. and Western-backed ethnic cleansing death and destruction in Palestine. We remember the genocides and scorched earth massacres carried out by U.S. and Western-backed military regimes in Guatemala in the 1970s- 80s, targeting and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, a majority being Mayan indigenous.
During the worst years (1978-1983) of genocides and massacres, U.S. allies/“proxy states” Britain, France, Israel, Chile’s Pinochet regime and the Argentinean Generals also provided military aid, weapons and training to the Guatemalan regimes. Sectors of the Guatemalan Army receiving training from Israel referred to some of what they were doing as the “Palestinization” of the Mayan peoples. (Links to information 1, 2, 3 about Israel’s role in Latin America in the 1970s and 80s supporting U.S.-backed military regimes)
Today, Rights Action continues to fund on-going work and struggle, led by victim-survivors of the genocides, for truth, memory and justice. Over 40 years later, there has been almost no justice or reparations for these Western-backed atrocities … all “justified” at the time as part of the “war on communism”.
The devastating legacies of the genocides and State repression are an on-going lived experience today in the lives and communities of the survivors, their children and grand-children.
Accountability for U.S. and Western complicity
As we try to do with our work in Guatemala and Honduras, Rights Action encourages and supports education, organizing and activism work to hold the U.S.-led West legally and politically accountable for supporting, enabling and legitimizing Israel’s systematic crimes against humanity and war crimes against Palestine and the Palestinian people.
Urgent need to diversify media sources
Rights Action urges any and every one to diversify their news sources, as a necessary antidote to the oftentimes harmful, misleading reporting coming from much of the mainstream government and corporate media in the U.S., the E.U. and Canada. We recommend daily news provided by Al Jazeera news (https://www.aljazeera.com), Democracy Now (www.democracynow.org).
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