November 9, 2004

Letter to The Current, Canadian Broadcast Corporation

[From Grahame Russell, Toronto human rights lawyer, co-director of Rights
Action, www.rightsaction.org. Grahame has worked on international
development, relief and human rights issues for over 20 years, including
living in Mexico and Central American for over 9 years. In 1995, Grahame
worked with MINUGUA, United Nations Human Rights Mission in Guatemala.]

I write concerning The Current’s November 9 report on Guatemala, now that
MINUGUA (United Nations Human Rights Mission) is pulling out. The Current
gave due coverage to the legacy of suffering and trauma in Guatemala, as set
out in the moving interview with the women from Vancouver who works with
survivors of Guatemala's genocide and repression, including torture and
rape.

The Current then avoided addressing or even referring to the complicit and
negative role that Canada and particularly the USA played in Guatemala's
horror story.

This factoring out of how governments and private economic interests in the
global north contribute to and benefit from Guatemala's poverty,
exploitation, racism and repression serves to entrench the racist status quo
that exploits and uses repression to crush forces for change.

Through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, the USA, with direct or acquiescent support
of the west, funded, armed, trained and actively participated in Guatemala's
terrorism against its own population. To analyze this properly would
undermine western propagated versions of the ‘war on terrorism’ - that we,
the good, are fighting ‘others’ who use terrorism.

In Guatemala, the western-backed military carried out a horrific campaign of
terrorism against its majority, Mayan population, including genocide,
massacres, disappearances, assassinations, torture, rape as a tool of
repression, etc. Across the country today, communities are still – 22 years
later – digging up the mass graves where their massacred loved ones were
dumped. No justice has been done against the military and political leaders
who planned and oversaw the genocide. Many of them are in high military and
political offices today.

The Current's decision not to address the complicit role of the US, and of
Canada to a lesser degree, distorts a proper understanding of what happened
in Guatemala. It distorts what is happening now in Guatemala.

Your interviewee from the departing MINUGUA spoke directly, critically, but
even too hopefully about Guatemala's present and future situation. The
situation of poverty, racism and repression in Guatemala is constant,
normal, and dire. It is not - as the MINUGUA representative acknowledged -
really changing.

Through Canada’s "free" trade and aid policies and through our IMF, World
Bank and Inter-American Development Bank policies, we contribute to and
benefit from Guatemala's unjust economic system. The Canadian government is
aggressively pressuring the Guatemala government to open their resources for
exploitation by our mining companies.

Companies [like INCO] had strong and beneficial relations with the worst
Guatemalan military regimes of the 70s, 80s, 90s, and the number of Canadian
mining companies flooding Guatemala is increasing considerably. Attached,
you will find information about INCO’s past and on-going operations in the
most recent influx of Canadian mining companies that are in exploiting and
benefiting from Guatemala's unjust economic model.

Would the CBC do an investigation into INCO's operations in Guatemala,
beginning in 1965, and continuing today? The UN Truth Commission, that
found that over 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala and that genocide
was planned and carried out in various Mayan-regions of Guatemala, also
found that INCO's wholly-owned EXMIBAL was directly involved in human rights
violations, in collusion with the military.

Would the CBC do an investigation into the recent spike in Canadian mining
companies flooding across poverty and repression ravaged Guatemala (and
other countries, like Honduras) and how our mining interests and needs
impact negatively on the needs of the poor majorities in places like
Guatemala and Honduras?

The future well-being of places like Guatemala (a proposition that is
unlikely) is dependent on how the issues that beset Guatemala are portrayed.
In the measures that the political and information power-holders of rich and
dominant countries [like Canada] continue to analyze the poverty, racism and
repression of places like Guatemala in a narrow, nation-state framework,
divorced from how we contribute to and benefit from their miseries, we
condemn them to the repetition of their cycles of poverty, racism and
repression.

Phew. Thus ends global power and politics rant # 2343465346.

Grahame Russell
416-654-2074, 161 Oakwood Av, Toronto.