Guatemala confronts a dark chapter

That's the title of a recent essay  at CNN by Mariano Castillo, writing about the trial of former Reagan favorite Rios Montt on charges of genocide.

Castillo makes a couple of grudging nods in the direction of the "critics who claim Washington turned a blind eye" to the excesses committed in the name of stamping out a leftist insurgency. In the interest of balanced reporting he points out more than once that the US can also take credit for the fact that this trial is now happening, for without the US, the judicial reforms that made the trial possible would not have happened.

All in all, it's a splendid whitewash of America's role in Guatemala's internal war.

In the second half of the twentieth century dark chapters were being written all over Central and South America and beyond. Rios Montt was one of many script assistants in the writing of those chapters, but the creative geniuses, the men with the vision, the head writers if you will, were all in Washington.

Some of them are still alive. If Guatemala can confront a dark chapter, perhaps America can too.

I await the trial of Henry Kissinger.