War and responsibility

Like Grace and Rachel, I want to talk about Rios Mont and the atrocities that the army carried out during his presidency. Lovell sites an editorial about one specific massacre: "It would be difficult for any person in their right mind to imagine this kind of extermination...How is it possible for a human adult to murder, in cold blood, a baby of less than a year-and-a-half?" What I don't understand (and I doubt very many people understand this) is how anybody can make the conscious decision to torture and kill an innocent person, particularly a baby or a child who could not have possibly done anything wrong. Were these soldiers just evil?

To my frustration, I can't actually believe that every man who carried out these acts was completely evil, even though the acts themselves clearly were. As we have discussed in class before, many of the soldiers were Mayans who were forced into armies or guardias. They didn't plan to become killers or torturers. So what happened that made them do things that I can't imagine even considering?

I think that this question brings us back full-circle to the systematic institutionalization of violence. By himself, a man would probably not make the decision to torture and kill entire families and villages. However, under a hierarchical military system, an individual's decisions are not the most important force. A politician or military officer can tell those below them in the power ladder to kill all people in a village, because they are insurgents (or for some other apparently sensible reason). After the word has gone through several people down to the soldiers, it is not the soldier's responsibility to decide what is right or wrong. In order to keep their position of safety within the army, they do what they are told. They are trained not to think about right or wrong, but only to follow orders, and certainly threats on their own lives, peer pressure, and personal frustration all contribute to the acts that they carry out. The military setting can be manipulated to become a complete moral vacuum. In the end, the setting and necessity of following orders acts to brain wash the soldiers. (This is why I am scared in general of strong military systems.)

Then the question is: who is accountable? In one section, Lovell focuses on Mont specifically: "Watching and listening to him, I found myself bombarded by questions. Is this man evil? If s on what grounds? Because he himself directly sanctioned the slaughter of his fellow Guatemalans? How could he? Is he not a Christian? Isn't he a son, a husband, a father who appreciates the value of life?...Has the bloodbath been planned from above, or is it the work of soldiers in the field, gone mindlessly out of control? With whom does responsibility and the burden of truth ultimately rest?" (62)

As much as I think there needs to be accountability and justice after the horrors that so many Mayans went through, how does anybody make sense of the violence and allocate blame? I think that we can agree for the most part that Mont was a pretty horrible person, and that what happened is partially his fault, but certainly there were others at blame as well. How do we determine where all of this hatred and violence came from and how it developed? In a lot of ways I think we will never truly understand.

As a final question, Lovell's descriptions of the evangelical groups in Guatemala seemed to leave a lot open to interpretation. As foreigners, what was their (and even our) responsibility to understand the situation? How much did they know about the massacres going on? How much were foreigners blinded by propaganda and the hype surrounding the Cold War? Clearly, our government ignored signs about massacres, but did tourists and missionaries do the same? I thought about that a lot as I read through the Lovell chapters.