POWER OUTAGES: ACEP Not Happy and Demands Time Table

Ishmael Ackah

By Ekow Mensah

The Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP) is not happy with current power outages and has warned of its dire consequences for institutional planning.

Dr Ishmeal Ackah, a policy adviser at ACEP says the short fall in the supply of power is seriously undermining planning in major institutions.

According to starfmonline.com, Dr Ackah claimed that Ghana shed 170 megawatts of power during off peak time and about 200 megawatts during peak time.

Many parts of Accra have been experiencing power outages for periods ranging from 6 to 12 hours over the last three weeks.

Unfortunately, officials of the power sector maintained a tight-lip over the affairs until recently.

Dr Ackah said consumers need to be told when their lights will go off.

“Give us a time table so people can plan” he said.

He disclosed that last week, the Volta River Authority (VRA) got some fuel which should take between 9 to 14 days to treat.

“The situation is going to be temporal, but we need to be informed and given a timetable and not just a time table but plans the government has made to prevent a re-occurrence.

Editorial

POWER SUPPLY

Erratic power supply is a real danger for all businesses especially small scale enterprises.

It leads to increasing cost of production and removes predictability as an element of production.

It has been suggested that erratic power supply was one of the reasons why the Ghanaian electorate decided to punish the Mahama administration by voting it out.

The Insight is surprised that Ghana is experiencing erratic power supply at this time, given the fact that installed capacity has more than doubled.

In our view the problem could only be caused by inadequate supply of fuel or a mechanical fault.

Our advice to the new administration is that they ought to do everything possible to restore regular power supply as quickly as possible or they may face consequences which may not be pleasant.

Liberia’s journey to national ownership

As Liberia gears up for the election, much debate has been generated around the successes of her administration and the delivery of promises made. Photo: ISS

By Amanda Lucey and Tafadzwa Munjoma

Liberia must decentralise if it wants inclusive, sustainable peace, writes Tafadzwa Munjoma, and Amanda Lucey.

In October 2017, Liberia will hold what is expected to be a hotly contested election. The leaders of 22 political parties will be vying to replace President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected female leader.

As Liberia gears up for the election, much debate has been generated around the successes of her administration and the delivery of promises made. During her two terms at the helm, Sirleaf has made substantial efforts to ensure sustainable peace. However, for these efforts to continue enjoying a chance of success, they need to be country-owned: not just by the national government, but also by an inclusive social compact between the government and its society.

One way to achieve this is through a reinvigorated process of decentralisation. Liberia has a number of policies, reforms and agendas in place to ensure this happens. Why is decentralisation important, and how can it be achieved?

Decentralisation involves transferring power to local government structures to allow for more context-specific governance, as well as transparency and accountability. In this way, it also enables more representative ownership in decision-making structures.

Inclusive national ownership is widely acknowledged to be vital in peacebuilding processes. As noted by the 2015 UN Peacebuilding Review, inclusive national ownership means that peace cannot be imposed, but must be built by domestic stakeholders. This goes beyond the strategies and priorities of national government to being broadly shared across all social divides. A wide spectrum of political opinions and domestic actors must be heard – particularly from women and youth. True national ownership is about people owning the solutions and national processes.

The 2003 Comprehensive Peace Deal ended a 14-year-long protracted civil war in Liberia and paved the way for the 2005 presidential elections. Post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts in Liberia hinged on addressing the root causes of the unrest.

In 2005, the country established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to confront the complex and brutal legacies of the past. The subsequent report, released in 2009, attributed the causes of the conflict to poverty, corruption, broad inequalities, land tenure and violations of economic, social and cultural rights. It made strong recommendations for the decentralisation of political and economic power.

As noted by the report, Liberia harbours a history of exclusion, which stems from the official settling of freed slaves from the United States in Liberia as early as 1822. These former slaves became the elite and fostered a culture that excluded native Liberians. This also caused a disconnect between the decision-making processes led at the national level, and the community-level, traditional processes on the ground. Monrovia holds all core functions of the government institutions, and there is no real cohesion with the greater part of Liberia in the 15 counties.

There have been attempts to decentralise government services and institutions in order to increase national ownership. However, these efforts have, at times, focused more on deconcentration (which means localising services, while decision-making remains at national level), rather than a true process of decentralisation, which allows a broader decision-making process through localised policies.

To facilitate the process, Liberia has established several County Service Centres – a one-stop shop where documentation-related services including permits, licences and certifications are offered at the same value and cost as in Monrovia. The four County Service Centres that are currently operating have reportedly provided services to some 22 363 people over a period of seven months. Yet limited resources have once again hindered full implementation. Furthermore, these centres do not allow greater participation in localised government structures. As such, these efforts demonstrate attempts at deconcentration, rather than decentralisation.

The Liberian government has recognised the need for decentralisation as a means to achieving real ownership of the country’s peacebuilding process. This is encapsulated in the Agenda for Transformation 2012-2017; a five-year, consensus-driven and country-specific development plan. Here, the agenda specifically states: ‘The Government will recast its relationship with citizens, and all government functions will be geared to provide services to the population.’

In 2010, the government of Liberia approved The National Policy on Decentralisation and Local Governance, a 10-year road map that calls for political, fiscal and administrative powers to be decentralised and transferred to local governments. This was followed by the Decentralisation Implementation Plan. Despite these policies, the process of decentralisation has been hindered by a lack of political will, limited human and financial resources, and most importantly, the need for constitutional reform and a local government act.

To finance the rolling out of the decentralisation agenda, revenue collection and expenditure must be managed efficiently. In this regard, however, the political will to divert resources to local government remains a challenge. Human resources and institutional capacity are needed to enhance the implementation and efficiency of services. Further, the exact roles of sub-national and national levels of government should be clarified.

If Liberia is to achieve truly inclusive national ownership, the government must make decentralisation a priority. In this regard, it needs to expedite the legal reforms initiated through the constitution review process and the draft local government legislation. It is the government’s responsibility to ensure that adequate resources have been catered for in the national budget.

There is more to decentralisation than providing resources through basic services: it speaks to developing a social compact between the government and its society to ensure ownership of all solutions in moving the country forward. This will necessarily involve dialogues with communities to formulate shared visions of local governance. Decentralisation is vital for Liberia, and if sustainable peace is to be achieved, it must be given priority.

Homage to Fidel Castro: Important lessons for humanity

Commandante Fidel Castro

By Benedict Wachira

In his 20s, Castro already attempted to liberate his country from the grip of a military dictatorship. Eventually he succeeded. And once in power, his single agenda was to serve the Cuban people - and humanity through internationalist solidarity. What are the masses of young people languishing in poverty and hopelessness under misrule throughout Africa and the Global South waiting for? Arise!

As El Comandante Fidel Castro’s ashes are interred today (4th December 2016) in Santiago de Cuba, the place where the July 26th rebel movement began its journey to overthrow dictatorship and capitalism, there are many lessons that Kenyans and the whole of humanity can learn from the life of this great legend.

He remains a great inspiration to the young people of this country who are disturbed by the ever rising levels of poverty, greed and corruption. In his 20s, Fidel’s conviction for a just society led him into organising two attempts to overthrow the then military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and he was eventually successful at the young age of 32.

Fidel disembarked from the Granma boat with a rebel army of 87 men and got to the Sierra Maestra mountains with less than twenty guerrillas. Through such actions, he continues to inspire those working for a better society but are few in numbers. He was never discouraged by the loss of combatants or the greater fire-power of Batista’s army; he understood that what he needed on his side was the support of the masses and not bigger guns.

Fidel teaches us to always be prepared. It was through preparation and working with the masses that Fidel Castro was able to defeat the U.S-trained soldiers who invaded Cuba in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs. It is this preparedness that has deterred the U.S from militarily invading Cuba since then.

Unlike the primitive accumulation tendencies that we see with our African leaders, Fidel Castro and his leadership never sought material riches for themselves. They worked hard to ensure that every Cuban had equal and unlimited opportunities to achieve what they humanly could. That is how Cuba was able to achieve unparalleled successes in the fields of education, preventive and curative health, sciences, gender and racial equality, housing and employment among other aspects of human development. All this was achieved in spite of the existence of the most brutal economic, commercial and financial blockade from the U.S that has been in place for over 50 years.

Through Fidel, a lesson on resilience and being true to self is learnt. Not many countries can survive a blockade such as the one that has been imposed on Cuba. Through resilience, Cuba has not only survived that blockade, but has managed to mobilize the whole world into condemning this U.S aggression. Every year at the UN General Assembly, virtually all countries except the U.S and Israel vote against the blockade. Fifty-four years into the blockade, the U.S President Barack Obama admitted that its policy had failed and he began the process of normalization of relationships between the two countries. However, the blockade still remains in force.

After the fall of the USSR, Cuba lost its closest trading partner and the Cuban economy was brought to its knees. Many countries abandoned Socialism; many Socialist political parties across the world dropped Marxism-Leninism as their ideology; and many Marxists intellectuals and politicians no longer wished to be identified with Socialism. However, Cuba’s Socialism did not fall with the fall of the wall. The country instead diversified and realigned its Socialist economy by moving towards green energy, popular organic farming, pharmaceutical and biomedical technology and other niches that are today the envy of many.

Out of this resilience and inspiration, Socialist countries began to rise a decade later in Latin America, from Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua to Ecuador. Leftist governments also came into power in Argentina, Brazil and other Latin American countries. Throughout Africa, the old 'Marxist' intellectuals were replaced by young Marxist revolutionaries whose understanding was/is not pegged on Mother Russia but on the principles of equality and prosperity of humanity, just like Fidel Castro did.

Under the leadership of Fidel Castro, Cuba taught the world the most important lessons on giving and solidarity. Cuban universities have awarded thousands of full scholarships to youth from developing countries who are now serving their countries as doctors and other professionals. Cuba does not award these scholarships because it is a rich country. In fact, Cuba’s GDP is smaller than that of many developing countries, including Kenya. Cuba gives because sharing is a human responsibility. This poses a challenge to countries like Kenya that are surrounded by worse off countries. How many scholarships does Kenya give to young people from Somalia, South Sudan or the DR Congo?

Cuban combatants have fought alongside their African compatriots in their struggles against colonialism and imperialism. Cubans assisted Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Ethiopia and South Africa either in their struggle for independence or in their wars against external aggression. And as Raul Castro once said while in Angola, Cuba fought alongside Africans and left not with coffee or minerals, but with the body bags of their heroic soldiers. Cuba’s internationalist policy is unlike the U.S globalization policy; Cuba did not sacrifice its children so that they could exploit and dominate others, but it did so to fulfil its internationalist duty to humanity.

Western Sahara, continues to be Africa’s last colony up to this day. Are African countries waiting for Cubans to come and fight for the decolonization of the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic? Do we think petitions and African Union commission reports will convince Morocco to leave Western Sahara? Haven’t we learnt anything from the sacrifices of the Cuban people?

Today, Cuba continues with this internationalist practice, but now by sending humanitarian ‘combatants’ wherever humanity needs them. From hurricane crises in Asia and the Americas, to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, Cuban doctors have always been on the frontlines of fighting and containing these disasters. While commenting on the Haitian earthquake, one Haitian expressed his gratitude to the Cuban doctors by stating that “After God, Fidel.”

Fidel gave us lessons on how to fight today's emerging crimes like terrorism. In the 1980s and the 1990’s, terrorists from Miami (supported by the CIA) tried to destroy Cuba’s tourism industry by bombing hotels, Cuban airplanes and other economic interests, even going to the extent of using bio-terrorism on innocent civilians. Rather than terrorise and alienate innocent civilians like the Kenyan government is doing today, Fidel sent his security personnel to infiltrate the enemy and unearth terror plans before they happened. That is how the world famous Cuban anti-terrorism heroes, popularly known as the Cuban Five came to be (They were arrested in the U.S and given harsh life sentences for espionage, but were freed by President Obama in December 2014).

Throughout his life, Fidel has survived hundreds of assassination attempts on his life and worst still on his character, but this never dampened his resolve. They lied about his wealth but he continued living a simple life. They lied about human rights violations but he continued to provide the highest attainable human rights for his people. Even at his death, reactionary media continues to desecrate his name by publishing lies about this great revolutionary. Fidel has taught us to ignore the liars and detractors and instead soldier on and do what is right.

I therefore reiterate the homage that Carlos Aznárez paid to Fidel Castro when he wrote:

 "So, when difficulties seem too much, and we believe we’re running out of strength, when we lack answers and when confusion makes us doubt about who the enemy is, when times are dark and without hope, let’s go back to Fidel, to his ideas, to his ethic, to his audacity, to his courage, to his revolutionary power, and let’s rise again to continue this wonderful adventure to take the skies.”

A little heartbroken but never defeated, we salute you, dear Commander. We will turn back to you every now and then and ask you: “Are we doing well, Fidel?”  

An avid reader, a sportsman, an arts enthusiast, a teacher, a great leader, a prolific writer, an environmentalist, an orator, a thinker, a fighter, and above all, a Communist.

Hasta Siempre Comandante,
Long Live Fidel Castro!
Long Live Socialism!
We shall be Victorious!

December 4th 2016, 6:41am.

* Benedict Wachira is Secretary General, Social Democratic Party of Kenya (SDP).

Fake News, Propaganda and Threats to Journalism

By Professor Piers Robinson

Threats to journalism and journalistic autonomy come in many forms. At the most extreme, journalists are directly threatened, intimidated and, all too frequently, harmed by political actors seeking to influence the ‘information environment’.

As a form of coercion, aimed at controlling what journalists write and say, threats and attacks can be understood as a form of propaganda: as a kind of ‘propaganda of the deed’ they function not only to silence individual journalists but also to send an unequivocal message to other journalists.

More common forms of propaganda involve approaches to shaping perceptions and actions through the manipulation of information. Although of a different scale to threats and killings, their effect can also be profoundly damaging to the autonomy of journalists. Understood by some to refer to any form of persuasive communication, most definitions of propaganda throughout the 20th and 21st century have recognised that, at some level, propaganda is a form of persuasion that works via manipulation and subversion of the rational will.

One important way in which propaganda manifests itself, and perhaps the one which is most frequently associated with propagandistic communication, involves some form of deception. Whether through outright lying, omission of important information, distortion or misdirection, propaganda frequently involves manipulation through deceiving people with respect to reality.

For Western publics, the most recent high-profile and well-documented example of this occurred in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During this period, through a combination of distortion and omission, US and UK government information campaigns misled many people into believing there was a clear and imminent threat from Iraqi WMD.  As Chilcot, (chair of the Iraq Inquiry) recently noted, Tony Blair went ‘beyond the facts of the case’ in promoting the war against Iraq.

Of course, recently, the issue of deception and manipulation has become a major focal point for debate in the so-called ‘fake news’ crisis. Much of this debate has been driven by concerns from within the liberal centre ground that political crises surrounding the debate in the UK over Brexit, and the election of Trump as US President, have been fuelled by the resort to outright lies by anti-establishment actors utilising alternative media outlets.

At the same time, the term ‘fake news’ has itself become a propaganda meme providing a useful shorthand to discredit information being provided by alternative media, whether truthful or deceptive, and serving to underpin the frequent allegations being levelled at Russia with respect to interference in the US elections and its military actions in Syria. At this point, no evidence has been presented to confirm the allegations being levelled at Russia. Moreover, there has been little sustained mainstream media attention to the content of the DNC (Democratic National Congress) leaks/hack which have fuelled so much of the controversy regarding the US elections and alleged Russian information warfare.

Indeed, these leaked/hacked emails, released by Wikileaks, showed that the DNC actively favoured Clinton over Sanders during the primaries whilst evidence of question fixing with CNN was also revealed. There are no serious challenges to the authenticity of these emails and, as such, they do not appear to be actual examples of fake news. This has not stopped, however, media coverage linking Russia with the leaks and, arguably, conflating all of this with a fake news/propaganda narrative.

Moreover, whilst the fake news debate has been overwhelmingly focused on alternative media and external actors (i.e. Russia), little attention has been paid to the use of deception and propaganda by Western governments.

Moving beyond claims and counter-claims regarding fake news, bias and deception, it is also critical to recognise that propaganda involves coordinated actions and activities beyond simply the crafting of manipulative media messages: It also involves the mobilisation of resources and physical actions.

For example, in relation to the current Syrian conflict, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton authorised the ‘training for more than a thousand (Syrian) activists, students, and independent journalists’ in order to promote her regime change preference in 2011. More prominently, the much-lauded White Helmets Syria Civil Defence entity has been critiqued for its function as a pro-intervention propaganda tool. This group, apparently set up to rescue injured civilians in Syria, and which has been an important source for Western mainstream media outlets, is heavily funded by Western governments and associated only with opposition groups and opposition-held areas.

We are also witnessing a worrying increase in organised attempts to silence dissenting voices here in the West. For example, the apparently self-styled Propornot entity now provides a list of news sites which it claims to be distributing Russian propaganda, whilst Professorwatch blacklists US professors accused (anonymously) for alleged liberal bias and ‘anti-American values’.

It is likely that these, and similar activities, are contributing to a significant restriction of freedom of expression here in the West, as well as across non-liberal democratic states, and are inhibiting news media from performing their expected roles as watchdogs and truth seekers. Indeed, as has recently been argued by Louis Allday, individuals challenging official claims regarding Syria have frequently been met with tirades of abuse whilst former British Ambassador to Syria Peter Ford and mainstream commentator Peter Hitchens have recently both stated that Western publics are being profoundly misled with regard to the reality of the situation in Syria.

We must now seriously entertain the possibility that the war in Syria has involved similar, if not greater, levels of manipulation and propaganda than that which occurred in the case of the 2003 Iraq War: In a nutshell, it appears increasingly likely that a Western-backed regime-change operation in Syria, which includes the supporting and arming of extremist groups, has been obscured via a propaganda campaign aimed at demonising Assad’s autocratic regime and promoting a simplistic narrative of good vs. evil.

Does it go too far to say there is now a crisis across Western public spheres whereby propaganda and ‘fake news’ emanating from mainstream media and governments has created a situation in which there is ‘major media malfunction’?

There probably is a crisis. Government communications strategies involving deceptive combinations of exaggeration and omission, as well as probably occasional outright lies, and the organisation of entities whose objective it is to shape the information environment, including via the intimidation of dissent and free thought, mean that journalistic autonomy and freedom are under severe threat.

When a country can be invaded based upon spurious and bogus claims regarding weapons of mass destruction whilst a second subjected to a five-year-long regime-change war based upon, it seems likely, propaganda and lies, all within the space of 10 years, there are signs that something is seriously wrong. The means are less brutal than those instances of threat and violence usually seen outside the West. But they are, nonetheless, effective. Before casting stones, the West needs to get its own house in order.

Professor Piers Robinson is chair in politics, society and political journalism at the the University of Sheffield.

The original source of this article is Spinwatch

Israel’s Shadowy Role in Guatemala’s Dirty War

By Gabriel Schivone

Last year was a busy one for Guatemala’s criminal justice system.

January 2016 saw the arrests of 18 former military officers for their alleged part in the country’s dirty war of the 1980s. In February last year, two ex-soldiers were convicted in an unprecedented wartime sexual slavery case from the same era.

Such legal proceedings represent further openings in the judicial system following the 2013 trial and conviction of former head of state General Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity. Although the Guatemalan Constitutional Court very quickly annulled the trial (finally restarted in March after fitful stops and starts, but currently stalled again), a global precedent has been set for holding national leaders accountable in the country where their crimes took place.

And in November, a Guatemalan judge allowed a separate case against Ríos Montt to proceed. The case relates to the 1982 massacre in the village of Dos Erres.

Ríos Montt was president from 1982 to 1983, a period marked by intense state violence against the indigenous Mayan peoples. The violence included the destruction of entire villages, resulting in mass displacement.

Mayans were repeatedly targeted during the period of repression that lasted from 1954 – when the US engineered a military coup – to 1996. More than 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala during that period, 83 percent of whom were Mayans.

The crimes committed by the Guatemalan state were carried out with foreign – particularly US – assistance. One key party to these crimes has so far eluded any mention inside the courts: Israel.

Proxy for US

From the 1980s to today, Israel’s extensive military role in Guatemala remains an open secret that is well-documented but receives scant criticism.

Discussing the military coup which installed him as president in 1982, Ríos Montt told an ABC News reporter that his regime takeover went so smoothly “because many of our soldiers were trained by Israelis.” In Israel, the press reported that 300 Israeli advisers were on the ground training Ríos Montt’s soldiers.

One Israeli adviser in Guatemala at the time, Lieutenant Colonel Amatzia Shuali, said: “I don’t care what the Gentiles do with the arms. The main thing is that the Jews profit,” as recounted in Dangerous Liaison by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn.

Some years earlier, when Congressional restrictions under the Carter administration limited US military aid to Guatemala due to human rights violations, Israeli economic and military technology leaders saw a golden opportunity to enter the market.

Yaakov Meridor, then an Israeli minister of economy, indicated in the early 1980s that Israel wished to be a proxy for the US in countries where it had decided not to openly sell weapons. Meridor said: “We will say to the Americans: Don’t compete with us in Taiwan; don’t compete with us in South Africa; don’t compete with us in the Caribbean or in other places where you cannot sell arms directly. Let us do it … Israel will be your intermediary.”

The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather program attempted to explain the source of Israel’s global expertise by noting in 1983 that the advanced weaponry and methods Israel peddled in Guatemala had been successfully “tried and tested on the West Bank and Gaza, designed simply to beat the guerrilla.”

Israel’s selling points for its weapons relied not only on their use in the occupied West Bank and Gaza but also in the wider region. Journalist George Black reported that Guatemalan military circles admired the Israeli army’s performance during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Their overseas admiration was so unabashed that rightists in Guatemala “spoke openly of the ‘Palestinianization’ of the nation’s rebellious Mayan Indians,” according to Black.

Military cooperation between Israel and Guatemala has been traced back to the 1960s. By the time of Ríos Montt’s rule, Israel had become Guatemala’s main provider of weapons, military training, surveillance technology and other vital assistance in the state’s war on urban leftists and rural indigenous Mayans.

In turn, many Guatemalans suffered the results of this special relationship and have connected Israel to their national tragedy.

Man of integrity?

One of the most haunting massacres committed during this period was the destruction of the El Petén district village named Dos Erres. Ríos Montt’s Israeli-trained soldiers burned Dos Erres to the ground. First, however, its inhabitants were shot. Those who survived the initial attack on the village had their skulls smashed with sledgehammers. The bodies of the dead were stuffed down the village well.

During a court-ordered exhumation in the village, investigators working for the 1999 UN Truth Commission cited the following in their forensics report: “All the ballistic evidence recovered corresponded to bullet fragments from firearms and pods of Galil rifles, made in Israel.”

Then US President Ronald Reagan – whose administration would later be implicated in the “Iran-Contra” scandal for running guns to Iran through Israel, in part to fund a paramilitary force aiming to topple Nicaragua’s Marxist government – visited Ríos Montt just days before the massacre.

Reagan praised Ríos Montt as “a man of great personal integrity” who “wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.” Reagan also assured the Guatemalan president that “the United States is committed to support his efforts to restore democracy and to address the root causes of this violent insurgency.” At one point in their conversation, Reagan is reported to have embraced Ríos Montt and told the Guatemalan president he was getting “a bum rap” on human rights.

In November 2016, however, judge Claudette Dominguez accepted the Guatemalan attorney general’s request to prosecute Ríos Montt as intellectual author of the Dos Erres massacre, pressing him with charges of aggravated homicide, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Among the 18 arrested this year was Benedicto Lucas García, former army chief of staff under his brother Romeo Lucas García’s military presidency. Benedicto, who was seen by some of his soldiers as an innovator of torture techniques for use on children, described “the Israeli soldier [as] a model and an example to us.”

In 1981, Benedicto headed the inauguration ceremony of an Israeli-designed and financed electronics school in Guatemala. Its purpose was to train the Guatemalan military on using so-called counterinsurgency technologies. Benedicto lauded the school’s establishment as a “positive step” in advancing the Guatemalan regime to world-class military efficiency “thanks to [Israel’s] advice and transfer of electronic technology.”

In its inaugural year alone, the school enabled the regime’s secret police, known as the G-2, to raid some 30 safe houses of the Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms (ORPA).

The G-2 coordinated the assassination, “disappearance” and torture of opponents to the Guatemalan government.

While Guatemalan governments frequently changed hands – through both coups and elections – during the 1980s, Israel remained Guatemala’s main source of weapons and military advice.

Belligerence at the border

The Israeli military-security complex casts a long, intercontinental shadow over Guatemalans who are still fleeing the consequences of the dirty war.

In some areas along the US-Mexico border, such as in Texas, the numbers of migrants hailing today from Central America (but only from the countries combusted by US intervention – Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras) – has begun to outpace the number coming from Mexico.

According to information provided to this author by the Pima County Medical Examiner’s office in Arizona, many Guatemalans who have perished while crossing these desert borderlands originated from among the indigenous Mayan areas hit hardest by the 1980s genocide: El Quiché, Huehuetenango, Chimaltenango.

Southern Arizona has also seen a spike in undocumented Guatemalan migration. US firms and institutions have been collaborating with Israeli security companies to up-armor Southern Arizona’s border zone.

The Israeli weapons firm Elbit won a major government contract to provide 52 surveillance towers in Southern Arizona’s desert borderlands, beginning with the pilot program of seven towers currently placed among the hills and valleys surrounding Nogales, a border town split by the wall.

More towers are slated to surround the Tohono O’odham Nation, the second largest Native American reservation in the US. Already the number of federal forces occupying permanent positions on Tohono O’odham lands is the largest in US history.

Alan Bersin, a senior figure in the US Department of Homeland Security, described Guatemala’s border with Chiapas, Mexico, as “now our southern border” in 2012. That “southern border” was heavily militarized during Barack Obama’s eight years as US president.

We can safely expect that militarization to continue during Donald Trump’s presidency. Trump’s anti-migrant rhetoric during the presidential election campaign suggests it is likely to be intensified.

During the dirty war, tens of thousands of Guatemalans fled over this border into Southern Mexico. Today, Israel assists the Mexican authorities in Chiapas with “counterinsurgency” activities largely targeting the indigenous Maya community.

Though media reporting on Guatemala’s connection with Israel has dissipated, Israel’s enterprising efforts in the country have never diminished. Today, Israel’s presence in Guatemala is especially pronounced in the private security industry which proliferated in the years following the so-called Guatemalan peace process of the mid-1990s.

Ohad Steinhart, an Israeli, relocated to Guatemala at this opportune moment, originally working as a weapons instructor. Roughly two years after his 1994 move to Guatemala, he founded his own security firm, Decision Ejecutiva.

Steinhart’s modest 300-employee company is small compared with the colossal Golan Group, Israel’s largest and oldest private security conglomerate in Guatemala.

Founded by ex-Israeli special forces officers, the Golan Group has also trained Department of Homeland Security immigration agents along the US-Mexico border. The Golan Group has employed thousands of agents in Guatemala, some of whom have been involved in repressing environmental and land rights protests against mining operations by Canadian firms. The company was named in a 2014 lawsuit by six Guatemalan farmers and a student who were all shot at close range by security agents during a protest the previous year.

Guatemala’s use of Israeli military trainers and advisers, just as in the 1980s, continues. Israeli advisers have, in recent years, been assisting the current “remilitarization” of Guatemala. Journalist Dawn Paley has reported that Israeli military trainers have shown up once again at an active military base in Coban, which is the site of mass graves from the 1980s. The remains of several hundred people have so far been uncovered there.

The mass graves at Coban serve as the legal basis for the January arrests of 14 former military officers. This past June a Guatemalan judge ruled that the evidence is sufficient for eight of those arrested to stand trial. Future arrests and trials are likely to follow.

Scholars Milton H. Jamail and Margo Gutierrez documented the Israeli arms trade in Central America, notably in Guatemala, in their 1986 book It’s No Secret: Israel’s Military Involvement in Latin America. They worded the title that way because the bulk of the information in the book came from mainstream media sources.

For now, Israel’s well-documented role in Guatemala’s dirty wars passes largely without comment. But Guatemalans know better than most that the long road to accountability begins with acknowledgment.

Yet it is unclear how long it will be before we hear of Israeli officials being called to Guatemala to be tried for the shadowy part they played in the country’s darkest hours.

Gabriel Schivone is writing a book on US policy towards Guatemala.

The original source of this article is The Electronic Intifada