Why We Can’t Always Trust the News Media: Reports on Guatemala’s Former President Unmask the Effects of Bias

Efraín Ríos Montt, an evangelical Christian, became president of Guatemala as the result of a military coup in March 1982. His administration was overthrown in another military coup in August 1983, although exact reasons for the overthrow are still unclear. While in office, Ríos Montt was harshly criticized in the U.S. press as a bloodthirsty killer who set out to exterminate the Mayan Indians of Guatemala. That criticism contributed to his political problems, and it confused many U.S. evangelicals, who had rejoiced at the thought of a committed Christian as head of state. Much of the criticism of Ríos Montt was unfair, and this article considers several significant distortions.

It was a special day at the Church of the Word School in Guatemala City. It was parent-teacher day, March 23, 1982. The school’s academic director, Efraín Ríos Montt, was bustling from classroom to classroom, talking to parents and checking with teachers. Suddenly, a few of the elders appeared, looking concerned. Parents had begun calling in. They had heard radio reports of a coup at the National Palace downtown. Were they still supposed to come to school? Would the children be sent home? The elders, the pastor, and the director huddled briefly and decided to keep the school open. Dismissing the crowd would only mean confusion. If there really were a coup, the streets would already be choked with military traffic. Ríos Montt (“Brother Efraín” to everybody) wandered up to the roof. There he saw air force jets and helicopters buzzing about the palace.

Suddenly, there were more phone calls. The radio was now reporting that the young officers who had just overthrown the government were asking Efraín Ríos Montt to present himself at the palace. That was a shock, but then again, not really so.

Ríos Montt was a respected army general, now in retirement. He was formerly chief of staff and head of the national military academy. He had run for the presidency eight years before as a reformist candidate against Kjell Laugerud, hand-picked successor to the highly corrupt, unpopular incumbent, Arana. The country had not had an army general running as a reformer before, and at first people didn’t know what to make of the man. Ríos Montt was the candidate of the Christian Democrat party, which was slightly left of center, and directly at odds with the MLN, the party of the right-wing military dictators that had produced some of Guatemala’s darkest days.

The right wing worked hard against Ríos Montt. According to a new book by Joseph Anfuso and David Sczepanski (He Gives—He Takes Away, Radiance Publications), “Laugerud’s party published ads depicting Ríos Montt as Lenin and linking him with Communists and leftist guerrillas. A Chilean colonel was even brought to Guatemala to speak about the connection between the DC party and the Marxists.” The campaign to brand Ríos Montt as a Communist is ironic. Eight years later, in 1982, leftists would paint him as a bloodthirsty right-wing dictator. The willingness of the American press to carry these charges unchallenged would help destroy him politically. Guatemala, like all Central American countries, counts heavily on the United States as a trading partner and source of foreign aid. Good will is a vital commodity.

By election day, Guatemala voters evidently had warmed up to the strange idea of a military reformer as president. Victory for Ríos Montt seemed close. As election results reporting his widening lead were being broadcast on election night, the television station suddenly went blank, according to the account by Anfuso and Sczepanski. First there was confusion, then suspicion. When television broadcasts resumed the next day, the worst fears of the Ríos Montt camp were confirmed. The reports said Kjell Laugerud was far ahead, and he was soon declared the victor. That touched off cries of fraud all across the country. Disgusted, Ríos Montt dropped out of politics, although he served a stint as a diplomat in Spain for his country.

After his return to Guatemala in 1977, an old friend who had become a Christian invited him to attend a Bible study conducted by the pastors of the Church of the Word, an independent, evangelical church that grew out of a relief effort following Guatemala’s devastating earthquake of 1976. Ríos Montt, a Catholic, consented to go. The pastors of the church were well aware of who their new guest was, and they were a little suspicious of him at first, but that suspicion faded. Ríos Montt became an enthusiastic evangelical Christian, effusive about his faith, eager to help. It was natural that he should become a leader in the church.

It was also natural on the day of the coup, when the young officers asked for Ríos Montt to present himself at the palace, that the elders of the Verbo Church huddled in prayer. Ríos Montt’s wife, María Teresa, rushed to the church when she heard the news of the coup, and she joined the little prayer group. Ríos Montt and the elders decided not to respond to the appeal. They just weren’t sure that the church should get involved. Besides, they didn’t have any idea why the officers would want Ríos Montt.

In the middle of this quandary, the group was interrupted. Someone came to say that the officers were now calling the church school looking for Ríos Montt. If that were true, there was no point in ignoring the situation. Pastor Carlos Ramírez recalled his feelings this way: “I was not just confused, I was in knots. I was scared, I was worried, I was shocked. I was everything. Efraín said, ‘I’m scared, but I’m at peace.’ ” Ríos Montt talked to the officers by telephone. They said they wanted his counsel, but they wanted it in person. (It would be learned later that the overthrown president, General Lucas García, would not surrender to the young officers. He would only turn over his authority to another general. Not wishing bloodshed, the officers consented and issued their appeal for Ríos Montt.)

Now the elders had to figure out how to get him to the palace. They knew that his life was in extreme danger until they could get him under the army’s protection. One of the elders had a van with darkened windows. The group decided to use that. Then someone remembered it still had Texas license plates, and it would look a bit odd driving up to the palace. Oh well, it was better than nothing. Ríos Montt got in and somehow they made it through the heavy traffic to the palace. Later that same day, Ríos Montt presented himself as leader of a three-member junta. He attributed the day’s rather unusual turn of events to the will of God.

But Can This Be The Will Of God?

Guatemala. Is that the place in Cuba where the U.S. military still has a base? No, that’s Guantánamo. Guatemala is in South America, right? No, Central America.

The truth is, most Americans don’t know a lot about this part of the world. Nor do they know much about the string of repressive military dictators who have controlled Latin American countries, much of the time with U.S. consent. Nor do Americans know much about the appalling social conditions that have spawned brutal guerrilla insurrections.

And so, naturally, when the dust settled in Guatemala on March 23, 1982, Americans found out much of what they were to know about the coup from the daily news reports. Evangelical Christians were quick to catch the peculiar elements of this particular coup. This Ríos Montt openly attributed to God his sudden rise to power, and he was described as a man who would drop to his knees in prayer during governmental meetings. He was a man who spoke of morality and Christian ethics during his weekly Sunday night radio addresses to the nation. (Although he spoke of basic decency during these addresses, he did not preach evangelical Christianity. It was his insistence on basic morality that was dubbed “religious fanaticism” by his political opponents. It is part of what led to his overthrow.)

Large sections of the evangelical community in the United States became fascinated by, and began praying for, Ríos Montt. That a Christian could be brought to power in a country like Guatemala, with such a sordid history of corruption and civil strife, was exhilarating.

In the weeks following the coup, the U.S. news reports revealed that Ríos Montt was arresting some corrupt government and police officials and had put an end to the rampant urban political killings that had characterized the previous regime (it was unprecedented ugliness of this sort that had helped bring about the coup). But soon the news turned sour. It seemed that the Guatemalan army, under direct orders from Ríos Montt, was destroying Indian villages in the back-country highlands in order to root out guerrilla forces, and slaughtering hundreds of civilians in the process. Human rights violations charged to the army, such as wanton rape, torture, and murder quickly became the central issue of Ríos Montt’s government. It dominated reports about Guatemala in the American news media, and it raised hackles in the U.S. Congress, so much so that critically needed foreign assistance to Guatemala was delayed. If these ugly reports out of Guatemala were true, then this man who prayed publicly, who attributed his very presence in the National Palace to the grace of God, seemed to be grinding his heel into all that is meant by Christian compassion and love. If the newspapers were right, Ríos Montt was an embarrassment to Christianity, and some Christian publications began saying so.

The Army And The Indians

Guatemala is a country of fierce cultural discrimination. The majority of its population is Mayan Indian—rural, agricultural people who have maintained their ancient customs and dress. The “Ladinos” are in the minority but control Guatemalan society and government. They have historically mistreated the Indians, particularly when wealthy Ladino landowners have wanted more Indian land for themselves. (Ladinos are Guatemalans of Spanish descent, or Indians who have adopted Spanish dress and customs.) The army, guardian of the rightist regimes that have protected the land-owning interests of Guatemala, have been particularly brutal in dealing with the Indians, both because of endemic discrimination and because some Indians were persuaded to join the Marxist guerrilla movements that began fighting in the 1960s. By the time Ríos Montt came to power in 1982, a vicious guerrilla war was in full rage in the highlands. The Indians were caught in the middle. Often they became victims, because guerrillas concealed themselves in Indian villages, and army troops sometimes overreacted against innocents in trying to root out the combatants. It was not unknown for the soldiers to exterminate entire Indian villages that collaborated with guerrillas.

It fell to Ríos Montt to press the battle against Marxist revolution, while punishing army troops who brutalized innocent Indians. It was a frustrating task, particularly so because it was only by the army’s consent that he was president in the first place. Nonetheless, he began to succeed. The U.S. embassy in Guatemala, as well as evangelical Christian missionaries throughout the country, began reporting that the army’s attitude toward the Indians had markedly improved, and that human rights violations were declining.

Why, then, were the papers printing reports to the contrary? Was Ríos Montt a bloodthirsty killer or was he not? The decisive judgment may be left for historians. But an important factor in the equation is that Ríos Montt was at the mercy of an international press already skeptical of any military dictator who gained office in a coup. Ríos Montt’s moralizing, and his frequent references to God, only gained for him the adjective “eccentric.” His religious proclivities were just one more strike against him.

Ríos Montt And Amnesty International

The press was much more inclined to be sympathetic to the reports of army atrocities. And in Guatemala, in 1982, a vicious propaganda campaign was being waged by guerrilla organizations. The Washington Post reported last January, “A steady barrage of guerrilla propaganda invariably defines rebel attacks on the government militias as blows against the official agents of repression, and the government’s attacks on guerrilla militias as massacres of civilians.” The revolutionary groups in Guatemala appeared to be grossly distorting the human rights picture in order to promote the aims of Marxist revolution, the ultimate goal. Amnesty International, an agency widely respected for its worldwide campaigns to free political prisoners in totalitarian countries, began passing on this information. In July 1982, it issued a highly critical report on human rights violations of the Ríos Montt administration. The report was carried largely unchallenged in U.S. newspapers. Because of the record of past military rulers, the press was disposed to believe the kinds of things Amnesty International had to say about Ríos Montt, and it was not inclined to dig deeper. Had the press done so, it might have been more balanced.

Like all public pressure groups, Amnesty International uses the press to publicize its information. Like every other organism that depends on the press, it must clamor for attention. In its July 1982 report on Guatemala, Amnesty offered gory anecdotes of atrocities and blamed them on the army, even though it admitted here and there in the report that its information could not be verified. It also provided a body count of 2,186 murdered innocents, even though it hedged on the accuracy of the figures. The press, with its need to reduce and simplify, didn’t pick up on the doubts, only on the numbers and descriptions of atrocities. The result was a slamming indictment against the Ríos Montt government. (Amnesty gathered none of its information firsthand. Ríos Montt had publicly invited all human rights organizations to make personal inspections. Amnesty did not go because it said no specific invitation had been sent to its headquarters in London.)

Amnesty International accepts information from all sources, and at times, understandably, must conceal their identity. Based on the little it did reveal about its Guatemalan sources, it appears the organization accepted uncritically what the allies of the Marxist guerrillas had to say, even though antigovernment propaganda is a staple of guerrilla strategy. Amnesty seemed much less willing to report the government’s view of the same incidents. This moved the American embassy in Guatemala to undertake an incident-by-incident analysis of atrocities reported by Amnesty and other human rights organizations. It reported its findings in a long cable to the U.S. State Department. It is worth quoting part of the embassy report:

As a spokesman for its London office said, “Amnesty International does not regard the political views of any source, or the fact that a source may be considered suspect by another party to the conflict, as reason for refusing to consider testimony.” The spokesman did not say why the AI had refused to consider GOG [Government of Guatemala] testimony in almost all the incidents of massacres in its … report.

If they [the human rights groups] do not consider as suspect reports from groups in Guatemala currently involved in a war against the GOG, then by what criterion do they refuse to accept the word of the GOG as equally valid?”

In incident after incident in which Amnesty International reported or hinted that government troops massacred innocent civilians, government and U.S. embassy information alleged that terrorists had struck first. For example, AI said that on April 3, 1982, 13 peasants were killed in the village of Nicabaj. There was no elaboration. Coming as it did in a long list of military “extra-judicial executions,” the clear implication was that the army had done it. But according to the embassy, Guatemalan press reports quoted eyewitnesses who said that terrorists had shot the people.

Amnesty International said that on April 12, 1982, 12 people were massacred in the village of Santa Rosa. It did not report the army’s version, that terrorists killed 12 peasants in a claymore mine attack on a truck, from which they stole food. (Claymore mines, reportedly, are often used by guerrillas.)

AI did not report at all an account in the newspaper Diario Grafico, which said terrorists attacked a village in Chimaltenango department in mid-April, and that the attack was repelled by fire from an army helicopter. A left-leaning human rights organization, the Washington Office on Latin America, did report the incident, but it said the army murdered the village population. This last incident is typical in that incidents of guerrillas attacking civilians did not appear at all or were played down in Amnesty’s report. AI explains that it deals with illegal actions of governments against noncombatants, not with the actions of armed guerrillas against governments. But because guerrillas commonly hide among unarmed civilians, it is often hard to tell who’s who.

From the Amnesty report, one might not even guess there was a guerrilla war going on. When AI referred to the guerrillas in its report, it usually called them the “opposition,” as if they were no more than political opponents. When AI did use the term guerrilla, it did so innocuously. The report said most of the army’s “extra-judicial executions” were in areas in which guerrillas were “active.” Active how? Carrying picket signs? Passing out literature? Hardly. They were combat units fighting for violent, Marxist revolution. The Amnesty International report did not mention this.

Reports on Guatemalan guerrilla raids, political killings, and armed attacks on the army were regularly issued through Havana. The Marxist nature of the guerrilla groups was clear, from their revolutionary rhetoric down to their very party emblems. Two of the organizations, the Guatemalan Labor Party (known by its Spanish abbreviation PGT) and the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), use the Communist hammer and sickle on their insignias. A third group, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) uses the face of Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary who, with Fidel Castro, overthrew the government of Cuba in 1959. These groups, along with a fourth, the Organization of People in Arms (ORPA), were locked in bloody combat with the Guatemalan military as Ríos Montt stepped into office.

In one paragraph of its human rights report, AI did identify several sources of its information about army atrocities. This shows clearly that AI was indeed giving much heavier weight to the guerrilla side than to the government’s. One source AI identified was the “opposition groups,” that is, the guerrillas themselves. Another was “Christian groups such as the Justice and Peace Committee.” This is an organization of church activists in Guatemala who are in sympathy with Marxist revolution. Still another source was the CUC, the Committee for Peasant Unity, another revolutionary organization. One of its acknowledged goals is violent sabotage for the purpose of demoralizing its enemy, that is, the Guatemalan government. One of its actions was to take over and threaten to blow up the Brazilian embassy in Guatemala City.

These, then, seem to have been the sources for Amnesty International’s human rights report on Guatemala. The findings were carried widely by the U.S. press, and they helped form American opinion about Ríos Montt. These were especially jarring revelations for evangelical Christians, who had hoped for so much from such a transparently Christian head of state. The same paragraph in the Amnesty International report that identified some of these organizations as its sources went on to say that groups such as these provided it with “detailed reports of … men being beheaded, women burnt to death, and children bashed to death against rocks.” This particular portion of the report was singled out for quotation in many newspapers, and served as the basis for outraged editorials against Ríos Montt. Yet newspapers did not report that the information came to Amnesty International from guerrilla sympathizers or guerrillas themselves. Neither did many papers report the government versions of incidents such as these, most likely because Amnesty International did not carry them, and the press was not inclined to research them independently.

(Rona Weitz, a Latin American specialist in Amnesty International’s Washington, D.C., office, said that it was not true that all sources for its July 1982 report were sympathetic to the revolution, despite what the report indicates. She said some evangelical sources, presumably inclined to be more favorable toward Ríos Montt, would not talk with AI, although she declined to name them. She said further that AI generally tries to verify its information from two independent sources, and even though it cannot guarantee the accuracy of what it reports, it believes its information represents a fair picture of what took place in Guatemala.)

No one denies that the Guatemalan army illegally killed noncombatant Indians while fighting guerrillas. Amnesty International holds governments accountable to international human rights conventions, and is within its mandate in criticizing Ríos Montt because of the killing. The problem is, Amnesty’s picture is one-sided. Firsthand interviews with a wide range of people in Guatemala, both supportive and critical of the government, present a much different understanding. Ríos Montt’s predecessor had so unnerved the country by political terrorism and official corruption that young military officers were moved to overthrow him and install Ríos Montt. He tried hard to end these problems, and largely succeeded. He appointed Indians to the country’s Council of State, and he quietly started a land reform program that would reclaim land stolen from them. These measures infuriated the country’s right-wing politicians, and probably contributed to Ríos Montt’s ouster. Only in the back-country highlands, where guerrillas were still fighting, were civilians getting killed. It was desperately hard to know for sure in each case whether these were innocent Indians or guerrilla collaborators, and who was responsible for the killing—the army or the opposition. To focus solely on this ill-defined guerrilla war as Amnesty International’s mandate required it to do, and to ignore the general improvements made by Ríos Montt, was a distortion of the broad picture in Guatemala.

The Other Side Of The Story

Was there any credible, independent evidence to show that Ríos Montt was not just another murderous dictator? Yes, there was, but it was largely ignored in the press. It is best judged by way of contrast to a magazine article that appeared in the April 11, 1983, issue of The New Republic, a moderately liberal magazine with a small but influential following in Washington, D.C. The magazine is read widely by the Washington press corps, and it is the national press that has done so much to formulate opinion about the Ríos Montt administration in Guatemala. When this article appeared in the magazine, the harm to Ríos Montt was irreparable.

The article was entitled “The Guns of Guatemala” and was written by a New York free-lance writer named Allan Nairn. It was devastating in its description of Guatemalan army cruelty purportedly committed under Ríos Montt. The article helped inflame congressional feeling against the government, and it caused some conservative Christian leaders, who had no personal understanding of what was happening in Guatemala, to grow in their disgust for Ríos Montt. Was the man sick? Was his religious faith fraudulent? Was he proclaiming religious beliefs out of some unknown scheme to win the hearts of Christians in the United States? Those are the kinds of thoughts that rush to the fore as one reads the New Republic article.

Some of Nairn’s research took place in Nebaj, a town in the mountainous Quiche department (province) of Guatemala. It was the region of some of the heaviest fighting between the army and guerrillas, and it was the site of a large encampment of Indian refugees. Nebaj is also the home of Ray and Helen Elliott, an American Wycliffe missionary couple who have lived in the area since 1953. They came to Guatemala to translate the New Testament into the local Ixil Indian language, and because they have taken the trouble to learn Ixil and to befriend the Indians, they know the local people and customs better than any other outsider. Ray Elliott has spent substantial amounts of time in courts and government agencies helping Indians who had been cheated out of their property or who otherwise found themselves victims of discrimination. The Elliotts are respected fixtures in the Nebaj Indian community.

After Ríos Montt took over the government, the Elliotts noticed a profound improvement in the manner in which Indians were treated by the army. When individual officers did abuse them, the Indians reported to the Elliotts, and they in turn complained to the government. They found their complaints were heard in the National Palace. When Nairn visited Nebaj, he interviewed the Elliotts and learned about the substantial changes for the better. But he did not seem to be interested much in what they had to tell him. Helen Elliott recalled the interview with Nairn this way:

“He apparently had his story written before he came to the field. He was totally cynical about the present [Ríos Montt] government. He told us we were the only intelligent people who had faith in the president. He is predisposed to interpret everything in a negative way, with the administration. He assumes that being missionaries we are therefore naïve. He assumes that when he questions people he finds out the truth whereas we don’t.”

Ray Elliott had this to say: “We gave him plenty of stuff to go on to begin to balance the picture. He wasn’t receptive at all. He told me in so many words that he couldn’t understand how we could possibly be such dupes as to be taken in by a shyster like Ríos Montt.”

Even with this forewarning, when the Elliotts saw the resultant article, they were chagrined. Not only was their point of view completely absent, but Nairn seemed to go out of his way to distort facts against the Ríos Montt administration.

For example, Nairn wrote of “four guerrillas who had been executed” on a certain day in Nebaj. When Ray Elliott read that it stopped him cold. He too had been in Nebaj when the army “execution” had taken place. His understanding of the event was somewhat different. “The day before,” to which Nairn had referred, was apparently September 13, 1982, a holiday. Elliott and a physician friend were walking across the town square to visit an ill Ixil Indian. Elliott commented on how nice it was to feel a festive atmosphere in town after so many years of tension under the previous government. Suddenly, there was a loud blast, followed immediately by what Elliott took to be rifle fire. They finished their medical visit and later went to the town health center to see if they could help. When they arrived, they saw 11 soldiers being treated for wounds. Several of them were seriously hurt.

Elliott learned what had happened. Four Indians in the holiday crowd had been identified as guerrillas and were followed to the edge of town by members of a town civilian patrol. There they were arrested, frisked (inefficiently, as it turned out), and returned to the army prison barracks. As they were being led into the detention room, one of them doubled over in feigned stomach pain, then straightened up, brandishing a grenade with its pin pulled. He threw the grenade into the middle of a group of soldiers. It exploded, and the four guerrillas immediately were shot. Another of the four, as it turned out, still had a pistol concealed in his clothing. This was the nature of the “execution” that Nairn mentioned.

Elsewhere in his article, Nairn paints a picture of army patrols sweeping through the mountains, forcing Indians out of their villages and away from the guerrillas, where they supposedly were quite happy. Nairn writes:

Each patrol officer, after describing the success of his sweep, would casually point to his local mountain and say that 50 to 75 guerrilla combatants were still at large. Lieutenant Sierra estimated that 70 guerrillas were moving in the mountains immediately surrounding La Perla [a coffee plantation]. “There are lots of them around here,” said Miguel Raimundo, a sergeant in Nebaj, a medium-sized army-occupied town south of La Perla. “It’s hard to fight them. There are about 300 of them—the ones who fight.” Just outside Nebaj, more than 2,500 peasants had been resettled on an army airstrip. “They didn’t want to leave voluntarily,” explained Felipe, a corporal who manned the 50-caliber machine gun that dominated the town from the church belfry. “The government put out a call that they would have one month to turn themselves in. So now the army is in charge of going to get all the people from these villages.”

If the reader’s impression here is that the Indians were happy to be left in the guerrilla-controlled mountains, and resented the army’s efforts to roust them out, the impression is erroneous, according to Ray Elliott. First of all, he says, no Guatemalan Indian would willingly leave his land and crops for any purpose. He says further that there is ample testimony to show that thousands of Indians would nonetheless have gladly escaped from guerrilla control and thrown themselves on the mercy of the army if they thought they could risk the brutal guerrilla retaliation that would surely come. Some of those Indians did take the risk. In a report Elliott wrote as a response to Nairn’s article, he recounted one of those incidents, involving Indians from a village called Salquil:

Nairn was in Nebaj, as we were, in September, when word of the [August] flight from Salquil was well known in Nabaj. How did Nairn miss it? If he didn’t miss it, why did he not report it? Apparently because it didn’t help the case he was determined to make when he wrote. Some Salquil people had already been shot by guerrillas because they wanted to leave. Others were threatened with the same fate if they tried it. If army patrols approached Salquil, the guerrillas forced everyone into the woods, so that informers would not be available to testify of guerrilla mistreatment or whereabouts. In a very carefully orchestrated move, 237 Salquil people filtered out of their homes at night and met at a prearranged spot outside the village. Included were women at full term of pregnancy, little children, old men. Forty hours later they thanked God for leading them into the hands of the army in the town of Aguacatán. Women and children were crying, their feet swollen and bleeding. Old men as well as infants were being carried on the backs of those who were stronger. Two women gave birth within the first week after arrival in Aguacatán. Nairn had as much access as we did to the horror stories. They told of their mistreatment by their guerrilla “liberators,” yet not a hint of it appears in his report.

There were other pecularities in the New Republic article. Nairn quotes an ambulance driver as saying that 80 percent of the bodies recovered by his unit had been strangled, bound, and finished off either by 5.56-millimeter bullets, the kind used in army assault rifles, or by puncture wounds to the neck. Those punctures usually have four intersecting slices, characteristic of the army’s four-flanged bayonet, Nairn wrote.

The first problem is that some guerrillas carry U.S.-made M-16 rifles, which use bullets almost exactly the same size as the army’s. It is practically impossible to detect the slightly different-sized hole made in a human body by the two bullets. To say that all such bullet holes were made by one side or the other is not credible. (Serial numbers on M-16s captured from the guerrillas by the army show that the rifles are Vietnam War-vintage weapons, most probably captured by the North Vietnamese. How those weapons found their way to the Guatemalan highlands is a matter of speculation.)

The next problem is that the Guatemalan army uses Israeli-made Galil assault rifles, which are not equipped with bayonet mounts. Consequently, army infantry troops do not carry bayonets. That is easily confirmed by anyone observing infantry units in battle dress. Some troops carry machetes, but nobody in rural Guatemala would mistake a bayonet for a machete. Where, then, did Nairn get his information? It’s not clear. He did not respond to repeated phone calls or a letter seeking explanations. This writer did, however, speak to Nairn’s girlfriend (who so identified herself). She said she had accompanied him to Guatemala and was present during the interview with the Elliotts. She said they had not taken seriously the things the Elliotts had told them because the Elliotts seemed to be so biased in favor of Ríos Montt. She didn’t know where the bayonet information came from. (Nairn wasn’t the only one reporting it. There were press accounts describing Guatemalan army soldiers throwing babies into the air and bayoneting them as they came down. That’s difficult to do without bayonets.)

There is another issue with Nairn’s reporting, as well as with many other published reports about Guatemala during the Ríos Montt administration. It is the fact that accounts of atrocities are described haphazardly, without solid evidence that they occurred while Rios Montt was president.

For example, Nairn wrote the following:

Major Tito Arias, commander of the Nebaj base, said in mid-September that 2,000 people from the area of Sumal Grande had fled to the mountains and would be pursued by foot patrols and helicopters. Sergeant José Angel said his platoon went on operations frequently. I asked José Angel what his troops did when they would find refugees. “At times we don’t find them. We see them but they get away.”

“But when you find them, what do you do?”

“Oh, we kill them.”

“Are they a few people or entire villages?”

“No, entire villages. When we entered the villages we killed some and the rest ran away.”

Nobody who knows the tragedy of the Guatemalan Indians can deny that the army has been guilty of such crimes. The last of all to deny this are the Elliotts, who have dedicated their lives to the Indians. But they had seen such a dramatic change in the attitude of the army toward the Indians under Ríos Montt that they are convinced such reporting is largely inaccurate. Major Arias became commander of the Nebaj region in July 1982, two months before Nairn did his interviewing in the area. The Elliotts knew Arias personally, were pleased at his attitude toward the Indians, and they knew that the Indians had come to trust the soldiers under Arias in return. Ray Elliott had also talked to Arias about the Sumal Grande operation. In it, the army was trying to free 2,000 Indians who were being herded forcibly toward the Mexican border by the guerrillas (who presumably would hide among them and be fed and clothed free by international relief organizations that were active on the Guatemala-Mexico border. This was standard guerrilla strategy to escape the army).

Given this background, when Sergeant José Angel says his platoon has gone on such operations frequently, Ray Elliott believes it is critical to know whether it was in the Ixil area as would be presumed from Nairn’s article, and whether it was before or after the March 23 coup, because Angel’s description fits much better the characteristics of the Lucas García regime than Ríos Montt’s. The article does not specify the location or the time period.

Many articles damaging to the Ríos Montt government appeared in American publications during the spring and summer of 1982. But some of them confused events before and after the coup, or left critically important dates unclear. On May 5, 1982, for example, the San Diego Union published a front-page article headlined: “Guatemalan Refugees: They Talk of Death.” The article said, “Even a casual conversation with the refugees, for the most part Mayan villagers, elicits talk of death—horrifying, unexpected death at the hands of Guatemalan troops. Refugees from the villages near Mexico—places such as La Unión, Santo Tomás, Pueblo Nuevo, Ixtahuacán, Los Angeles, Mayran—tell of a military campaign started last year and continuing today aimed at wiping them out.” The article goes on to describe three ugly incidents of military brutality. But one of those incidents was dated “two months ago,” which would put it in early March, several weeks before the March 23 coup. The second incident was dated March 14, nine days before the coup. The third incident was dated March 25, two days after the coup, but well before Ríos Montt’s morality campaign among the military took hold. It doesn’t matter much to the Indians which military dictator was in control at the time their loved ones were killed. It mattered a great deal to Ríos Montt who was striving hard to improve the ethics of his army officer corps to have the incidents reported more accurately.

Conclusion

Guatemala is a small country, one that does not normally intrude upon the conscience of North Americans. Editors of newspapers and general interest publications here know that Guatemala is of no particular importance to their readers, so they are not inclined to put time and money into long, analytical articles that might get to the bottom of things. When editors feel the need to publish something substantial about that part of the world, they tend to gather a lot of material under one label: Central America. This is understandable, but these articles usually fail to convey the quite individualized histories in each of these small nations. Not much that is really probing or connective reaches the American reader about any one Central American country.

For business reasons, then, American news organizations have not invested themselves in thoroughly understanding Guatemala. (This is painfully obvious. Several reporters called Ríos Montt an “evangelist” when they meant “evangelical.” Others reported that his rise caused a great growth in conservative Protestant religion in Guatemala. Actually, he was a product of it, not the cause.) Because American news organizations have not set their own course toward understanding this particular country, they are more easily blown to any course set for them. When Amnesty International charges atrocity, the news is printed. When a U.S. congressman makes a strident statement to win press attention, he gets it. There is no market for the probe, the challenge, or the deliberation. There is only a market for the quick, the brief, or the outrageous. And many are lined up to fill the demand.

The press is, with some exceptions, like any other business. The consumer gets what he demands. Americans are an insular people, more concerned with home than with abroad. We have little appetite for understanding the smaller foreign places on the planet, and so we are served little. Occasionally, as in the case of Ríos Montt and Guatemala, great misunderstandings are the result, and the witness of the gospel itself may be damaged.

Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer living in Santa Rosa, California. He is a distinguished contributor to several magazines. His latest book is Do You Sometimes Feel Like a Nobody? (Zondervan, 1980).

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