Page 193 - Fascism: The Bloody Ideology Of Darwinsim

Third World Fascists 193

mouths and wait for an order. If the detainee refused to talk, then the dog was
told to bite.
The brutality in Guatemala was also horrifying. In the 1960s and 1970s,
the fascist regime which overthrew the country's first and only elected
president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954, turned the country into killing-fields.
Among the fascists' targets, in conformity with fascism's general hatred of
religion, were men of religion. Amnesty International announced that between
October 1966 and March 1968, some 8,000 Guatemalans, including many
priests, were killed by "death squads." In 1972, the number of death squad
victims went up to 12,000, and to 20,000 four years later.
The Roman Catholic Bishops Conference described the government's
policy as "genocide." In Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since
World War II, the American writer William Blum explained the torture methods
used by the Guatemala regime:

Anyone attempting to organize a union or other undertaking to
improve the lot of the peasants, or simply suspected of being in support
of the guerrillas, was subject ... unknown armed men broke into their
homes and dragged them away to unknown places ... their tortured or
mutilated or burned bodies found buried in a mass grave, or floating in
plastic bags in a lake or river, or lying beside the road, hands tied
behind the back ... bodies dropped into the Pacific from airplanes. In the
Gual area, it was said, no one fished any more; too many corpses were
caught in the nets ... decapitated corpses, or castrated, or pins stuck in
the eyes ... a village rounded up, suspected of supplying the guerrillas
with men or food or information, all adult males taken away in front of
their families, never to be seen again ... or everyone massacred, the
village bulldozed over to cover the traces ... seldom were the victims
actual members of a guerrilla band. One method of torture consisted of
putting a hood filled with insecticide over the head of the victim; there
was also electric shock — to the genital area is the most effective. 133
William Blum quotes a statement by a female native Guatemalan. Taken
for questioning, along with her family, on charges of being an "opponent of the
regime," Rigoberta Menchú Tum described what happened to her on
December 9, 1979:

On 9 December 1979, my 16-year-old brother Patrocino was captured
and tortured for several days and then taken with twenty other young
men to the square in Chajul ... An officer of [President] Lucas Garcia's
army of murderers ordered the prisoners to be paraded in a line.... I was