[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 116 (Friday, September 5, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1678-E1679]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




       FOREIGN OPERATIONS EXPORT FINANCING, AND RELATED PROGRAMS 
                        APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 1998

                                 ______
                                 

                               speech of

                       HON. ESTEBAN EDWARD TORRES

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 4, 1997

       The House in Committee of the Whole House on the State of 
     the Union had under consideration the bill (H.R. 2159) making 
     appropriations for foreign operations, export financing, and 
     related programs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 
     1998, and for other purposes:

  Mr. TORRES. Mr. Chairman, the recent release by the CIA of roughly 5 
percent of the documents in its possession which pertain to its 40-
year-old controversial role in Guatemala provides extraordinary 
insights into the lengths to which the U.S. Government was prepared to 
go in order to achieve its cold war antisubversion goals. The documents 
provide a good argument for the need to close institution like the 
School of the Americas [SOA], a product of an era in which a growing 
consensus of critics say Washington's paranoia was enshrined as its 
official Guatemalan policy. The following research memorandum, authored 
by Gretchen Oelsner, research associate for the Council on Hemispheric 
Affairs, demonstrates the need for the United States to end its support 
for the School of the Americas.


                            Torres Amendment

  The School of the Americas was instrumental in providing the venue 
for covert liaisons with key Guatemalan army personnel, often resulting 
in longstanding relationships. By training their young officials, and 
subsequently recruiting some of them for the CIA's payroll, Washington 
was able to ensure cooperation with its anti-Communist policy, even at 
the eventual cost of a friendly country's sovereignty and democratic 
institutions. On Wednesday, July 9, Representative Esteban Torres 
introduced an amendment to the Foreign Aid appropriations bill which 
would have limited funding for the School of the Americas, but it was 
defeated by a narrow margin (23-21). The tight vote suggests that there 
is hope that the School of the Americas eventually will be closed down. 
It is imperative that the amendment on the floor today succeed because 
its approval would be an important step in ending a legacy of human 
rights violations by U.S.-trained members of the Guatemalan armed 
forces.
  CIA involvement in Guatemala began when the country's popularly 
elected president Jacobo Arbenz threatened in the early 1950's to 
nationalize mainly underutilized land holdings controlled by the United 
Fruit Co. and offered to remunerate the U.S. Goliath at the 
artificially low rate of assessment that the company itself had placed 
on its land for tax purposes. With strong personnel connections to 
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Director of 
Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, the company was able to arrange for 
the CIA to inaugurate an effective scenario in response to fast-
breaking developments in the country. By backing Lt. Col. Castillo 
Armas, one of its contracts in the Guatemalan Army, the State 
Department, along with the CIA, orchestrated a successful coup against 
Arbenz in 1954. Forty years of terror, torture, and death squad 
activity followed, often in part funded and directed by Washington, 
which resulted in the deaths of more than 150,000 civilians.


                           Mysterious Deaths

  The most recent instance of CIA activity in the country involved the 
suspicious deaths of Michael DeVine in 1990 and Efrain Bamaca Velasquez 
in 1992. DeVine, a U.S. citizen, was an innkeeper residing in the 
Peten, a heavily forested region of the country known for its Mayan 
antiquities and valuable hardwood. Later, it was established that he 
had been assassinated and beheaded by a Guatemalan military unit in 
June 1990, perhaps after he happened upon a smuggling operation being 
run out of the zone's military compound. In response to this grisly 
incident, and to the Guatemalan military's failure to comply with a 
promised vigorous investigation into the circumstances behind DeVine's 
death, Congress ceased aid shipments to the Central American country. 
However, the CIA was quick to replenish the funding gap. Both the 
Clinton and Bush administrations admit that $5 to $7 million were 
secretly funneled annually to the Guatemalan Armed Forces, though Bush 
officials insist the funds were used to pay CIA sources and placate the 
armed forces, not for the purchase of weapons.

  Another victim of the violence was Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a leftist 
guerrilla leader married to Washington, DC lawyer Jennifer Harbury. 
Contrary to information provided at first by Guatemalan military 
reports as well as United States diplomats, a United States Defense 
Intelligence Agency document stated that ``Bamaca was not killed during 
a firefight with army troops, but was captured, interrogated, and 
killed.''


                  Putative murderer remains a free man

  Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a senior intelligence officer and SOA 
alumnus, implicated in the murders of both Bamaca and DeVine, 
acknowledges that he `routinely exchanged information with CIA 
officials.'' White House officials also have conceded that Alpirez 
received at least $60,000 from the CIA during 1990-92. In July 1992, 
shortly after embarrassing details of Alpirez's complicity in Bamaca's 
execution had surfaced, the agency terminated his contract, awarding 
him $44,000 in severance pay. While a later report by the CIA's 
Intelligence Oversight Board found that its agents neither had ordered 
nor had prior knowledge of DeVine's death, and that there was no way to 
definitively determine responsibility for Bamaca's killing, Justice 
Department officials did admit Alpirez was involved in DeVine's murder. 
Even though further evidence had indicated that the colonel ordered 
DeVine's death and supervised the torture and execution of Bamaca, he 
was later exonerated by Guatemalan officials. Outside observers 
maintain that it is astonishing that the agency claims to have had no 
knowledge of the murder of the U.S. citizen, even though one of its 
paid informers was involved in his death. This is especially so in the 
case of the guerrilla fighter Bamaca, whose cause the agency was 
spending millions of dollars annually to eliminate. Critics speculate 
that the CIA station chief felt it important that Bamaca be 
neutralized, so the agency sanctioned local Guatemalan authorities led 
by Alpirez, to have him tortured and killed.


                         School of the Americas

  Colonel Alpirez received important training at the ill-reputed School 
of the Americas, located at Fort Benning, GA, but then based in Panama. 
In fact, he attended the school twice, once in the Combat, Arms and 
Support Services in 1970, and later at the Command and General Staff 
College in 1989, just before he was involved in the high-profile 
murders. This institution has earned the nicknames ``School of Coups'' 
and ``School of Assassins'' because of the activities of many of its 
alumni--some of whom later gained renown as the worst human rights 
abusers in Latin America. Former Panamanian President, Jorge Illueca, 
had no trouble terming the school the ``biggest base for 
destabilization in Latin America.''
  The institution teaches combat skills, counterinsurgency operations, 
sniper fire, military intelligence, commando tactics and psychological 
warfare. When the Pentagon finally released the controversial training 
manuals used at the facility after their contents already had begun to 
leak, pages were found in them advocating such interrogation techniques 
as blackmail, detaining the innocent relatives of those being 
questioned, torture and murder.

[[Page E1679]]

  The clandestine tactics promoted by the CIA coincided with some of 
the training being offered at the institution. Subsequently, many SOA 
graduates, after having been signed on by the CIA, almost routinely 
were responsible for the torture and disappearance of ``subversives'' 
during the region's civil wars. According to the advocacy group, School 
of the Americas Watch, the school's alumni have been responsible for 
choosing targets for assassination, fashioning genocidal strategies 
which essentially legalized military atrocities throughout the 
eighties, helped plan and implement ex-President Sermon's 1993 auto-
coup and were the architects behind numerous extrajudicial executions. 
In addition, General Edgar Godoy Gaitan, Gen. Luis Francisco Ortega 
Menaldo, and Col. Otto Perez Molina were some of the SOA Guatemalan 
alumni who were on the CIA payroll as well as implicated in right-wing 
death squad killings.
  The Nation magazine, April 17, 1997, reported that U.S. undercover 
agents on the CIA payroll for decades had worked inside the Guatemalan 
G-2 army unit, one of the two brains behind the terror state, and which 
was known to have been responsible for the torture and murders of 
thousands of civilians. According to former military strongman Oscar 
Huberto Mejia Victores, Guatemala's death squads were initiated in the 
1960's by the CIA. Ortega Menaldo and Perez Molina both served as 
leaders of the G-2 forces during the eighties and nineties, at a time 
when its death squad activities and drug trafficking roles already were 
established.
  In the same way the U.S. Government denied knowledge of Bamaca's 
death, they did not admit some of the subject matter taught at the SOA. 
Only after then-Representative Torrecelli revealed the details of the 
rebel's death was the White House forced to confess its connections to 
the Guatemalan operations and its knowledge of the circumstances of 
Bamaca's death. It was not until a dirty tricks training manual was 
discovered and made public that Washington was forced to confess that 
it teaches terror tactics.
  Final closure to Guatemala's endless civil war cannot occur until the 
School of the Americas is shut down and culpable military and political 
figures are held accountable for their actions in the murders of United 
States and Guatemalan citizens.