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reports that 40 percent of students suffer from chronic malnutrition, while 2.5 million children in this country of 9 million suffer abuse that leads them to abandon school and become involved in crime. A quarter of a million have been orphaned by political violence. The condition of children is not very surprising when 87 percent of the population live below the poverty line (up from 79 percent in 1980), 72 percent cannot afford a minimum diet (52 percent in 1980), 6 million have no access to health service, 3.6 million lack drinking water, and concentration of land ownership continues to rise (2 percent now control 70 percent of the land). Purchasing power in 1989 was 22 percent of its 1972 level, dropping still further as the neoliberal measures of the 1980s were intensified.
    We need not linger on the record of mass slaughter, genocide in the highlands, disappearance, torture, mutilation, and other standard accompaniments of Free World victories; admittedly, a display of imperial benevolence that has been somewhat excessive in the case of Guatemala. The contours, at least, should be recalled. The terror began as soon as the US-run military coup succeeded in overthrowing the reformist capitalist democracy. Some 8000 peasants were murdered in two months in a terror campaign that targeted particularly United Fruit Company union organizers and Indian village leaders. The US Embassy participated with considerable fervor, providing lists of “Communists” to be eliminated or imprisoned and tortured while Washington dedicated itself to making Guatemala “a showcase for democracy.” At a comparable stage, the Khmer Rouge were condemned for genocide. Terror mounted again in the 1960s, with active US participation. The process resumed in the late 1970s, soon reaching new levels of barbarism. Over 440 villages were totally destroyed and well over 100,000 civilians were killed or “disappeared,” up to 150,000 according to the Church and others, all with the enthusiastic support of the Reagan Administration. Huge areas of the highlands were destroyed in a frenzy of irreversible environmental devastation. The goal was to prevent a recurrence of popular organization or any further thought of freedom or social reform. The toll since the US regained control is estimated at about 200,000 unarmed civilians killed or “disappeared,” and in the highlands, episodes that qualify as genocide, if the word has meaning. In an amazing triumph of the human spirit, popular forces and leaders continue their struggle against US-inspired neo-Nazism. 20
    The terror continues, still arousing little notice in the US or the West generally. The report of the Archbishop’s Office of Human Rights for the first half of 1992 reported at least 399 assassinations, many of them “extrajudicial actions” of the state security forces and their allies. “Every day dozens of attacks upon constitutional rights are reported.” The terror has its place in the neoliberal economic program. “Twenty union leaders fled into exile in 1991 because of death threats against themselves and their families,” according to the State Department’s annual human rights review. When workers began to form a legally recognized union in the US-owned Phillips-Van Heusen company in 1991, the result was death threats, raised production quotas and the shooting of an organizer to deter any threat to the working conditions that enable foreign-owned clothing assembly plants to make their contribution to the “economic miracle”: under $2 wages for 16 hours of work, stifling warehouses with few fans and locked exits, and physical and sexual abuse, according to a complaint by US unions to the US Trade Representative Office. 21
    As for the “showcase of democracy,” an election was scheduled for 1963, but it was prevented by a military coup backed by the Kennedy Administration to block the participation of Juan José