Israel,Guatemala,and the agricultural roots of an authoritarian internationalism

Introduction

On 6 December 2017, President Donald J. Trump unilaterally announced his decision to move the US Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in preparation for the 70th anniversary of the formation of the Israeli State and the Palestinian Nakba, which expelled over 600,000 people from their homes. Trump’s decision effectively ended any plan that included East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state and was swiftly greeted with international condemnation and massive protests. On 21 December, 128 countries voted in favor of a UN non-binding resolution to declare “null and void” any actions meant to alter Jerusalem’s status and calling on all countries to immediately halt any plans to move their embassies to Jerusalem. Protests erupted worldwide.

In the face of seemingly international widespread disapproval, Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales announced that he would follow Trump’s decision and move Guatemala’s embassy. On 6 March 2018, Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales became the first Latin American president to ever speak at the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC). For an organization that centralized right-wing US-Israeli political alliance building, allocating a full 30 minutes to hear from the leader of a Central American government was unprecedented. Nevertheless, Morales’ speech reinforced for its thousands of participants that Israel could count on new right-wing governments throughout Latin America as allies in the UN. Morales (AIPAC, 2018) reminded audience members that Israeli–Guatemalan political and diplomatic alliances stretched back to the founding of Israel, telling the crowd that Guatemala also was the second country to officially recognize the state of Israel in 1948.

On 14 May, the 70th anniversary of the formation of the Israeli state, the United States became the first country to officially move their embassy, with Guatemala moving theirs 2 days later. In addition to the US delegation that included Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, a Guatemalan delegation included Morales and more than two dozen high-ranking officials. On 16 May 2018 with Morales and Netanyahu attending the ceremony, Guatemala opened their embassy in Jerusalem. Netanyahu later commented at the ceremony: “It’s not a coincidence that Guatemala is opening its embassy in Jerusalem right among the first. You were always amongst the first” (Heller, 2018). Nine days following Guatemala’s embassy move that effectively denied Palestinians a claim to Al Quds (Jerusalem) as a capital for a future state, Guatemalan foreign minister Sandra Jovel admitted that conservative US casino magnate Sheldon Adelson had chartered a private Boeing 767 for Guatemala’s official delegation to travel to Israel for the relocation of its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem (Associated Press, 2018). Since this move, right-wing authoritarian candidates have increasingly won political, leading to the Israeli state developing new political and military alliances internationally. From India, Brazil, and the Philippines, to Saudi Arabia, Colombia, and Guatemala, a coalition of right-wing nationalists has formed an eerily authoritarian settler colonial international. Why did Guatemala choose to support Israel by moving their embassy to Jerusalem?

This article locates a precursor of these political alliances in the multidirectional militarized practices between Israel, Guatemala, and the United States in the early 1980s. It traces the transnational circuits of counterinsurgency strategies and agricultural technologies between Israel, Guatemala, and the United States during the 1980s and concludes by considering how understanding agricultural technology as a strategy of militarization can reshape Palestinian solidarity and immigrant rights coalitions in the United States. I argue that Israeli support throughout the high-points of the Guatemalan Civil War in Efrain Rios Montt’s genocidal rural counterinsurgent campaign provided a testing ground for the current militarization alliances between Israel, the United States, and Guatemala. Under the Rios Montt dictatorship, Israeli arms dealers and agricultural experts, along with USAID (the United States Agency for International Development) officers, sought to weaponize the environment by creating a model village program as part of a broader rural counterinsurgency program that would leave 200,000 indigenous people dead or disappeared between 1960 and 1996. I track the transregional political histories of agricultural expertise and rural counterinsurgency between the United States, Israel, and Guatemala, to build an analysis that takes seriously what Paul Amar (2013) has named “the generative nature of linkages between… the Middle East and South America”(p. 41).

Under Rios Montt’s genocidal counterinsurgency campaigns in Guatemala, Israeli agricultural experts taught Guatemalan police and army officers to build model villages—highly regimented villages of internally displaced refugees that would be built on the smoldering remains of villages that had recently been ethnically cleansed by the Guatemalan Army. Indigenous villagers would sell their labor to produce high-yield monocropped coffee for the global market while surrounded by military personnel and under the umbrella of modernization and agricultural development. Through what H.L.T. Quan (2017) called “savage developmentalism”(p. 192)—the overarching logic of modern economic developmental programs that rely on expansionism, order, and anti-democracy; and the consequences of which necessarily entail a great deal of cruelty and dehumanization, Guatemalan and Israeli military officers shaped a counterinsurgent-imagined geography. This imagined geography (Marzec, 2016; Fields, 2017; Said, 2000) would seek to transform the Guatemalan economy to separate Indigenous people from the insurgent organizations that sought to organize them. According to this imagined geography, the military would use economic incentives to entice and tame Indigenous people into living in model villages and growing monocropped beans and coffee, isolating insurgent groups in the highlands to be quarantined and killed. In the counterinsurgent-imagined geography, environmentalist language in Guatemala delegitimized Indigenous knowledge of agriculture and relegated it temporally to be distinctly premodern. USAID, Israeli state officials, and the Guatemalan police coordinated to transform Guatemalan economy to emphasize the monocrop coffee and beans in response to the global market and the US demand for specialty coffee. To allow the coffee to grow faster, the military actively discouraged growing the shade-tolerant milpa trifecta of beans, corn, and squash that had traditionally been grown and naturally supported one another. Instead, beans, like the insurgent groups, were isolated and grown on model villages, where bean production was heavily regulated through Rios Montt’s Frijoles y Fusils programs.

Rios Montt’s rural counterinsurgency movement thus sought to starve everyone in the rural areas and then used the language of productivity to civilize the Indigenous people. Indigenous people in Guatemala could only achieve settler modernity by joining model villages and growing monocropped food—beans and coffee (Rifkin, 2017). Indigenous Maya and Palestinians faced this settler colonial conundrum in their lived experience in the highly regulated model villages—inspired by developmentalist discourse of modernization. Guatemalan military officers have openly praised and employed Israeli advisors, weapons, and tactics tested in the West Bank and Gaza Strip throughout the Guatemalan Civil War. Guatemalan officers drew explicit parallels between the Indigenous people living in the highlands of Guatemala and the Palestinian people living in the West Bank. They argued that both Israel and Guatemala faced a similar dilemma: hungering for the land—to grow coffee, but not wanting the Indigenous people on the land (Pieterse, 1985). These Cold War-era transnational strategies of political violence, surveillance, and sovereignty shaped contemporary South-to-South alliances of the emerging authoritarian internationalism we face today.

By highlighting this circuit, I challenge the standard progressive perception that the United States was the sole military aid to the Guatemalan dictatorship over the course of Guatemalan Civil War. While the United States played a massive role in training and supporting Guatemalan military officers, along with other Latin American military officers at the infamous School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA, they were not alone (Gill, 2004; Robin, 2003). Focusing on US military and counterinsurgency support for Guatemala maintains the assumption that knowledge flows solely from the Global North to the Global South. Such thinking has barricaded us from thinking about transnational networks of both solidarity and counterrevolution that elude North–South unidirectional connections. Instead, we gesture to the multidirectionality of military and agricultural technology circuitry between Israel, the United States, and Guatemala. A renewed focus on agriculture and the environment can help reshape tactics for leftist movements for Palestine solidarity in the United States committed to connecting with immigrant rights movements.

Roots in Guatemalan model villages

Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales came to power after his predecessor, Otto Perez Molina, a former head of military intelligence and graduate of the infamous US-based School of the Americas, was arrested on charges of corruption and forced to resign in 2015. Shortly after Molina’s election in 2011, reports from the United States National Security Archive claimed that Molina was a key military officer involved in the scorched earth counterinsurgency campaigns carried out under military dictator Efrain Rios Montt (Willard, 2011).

US–Israeli–Guatemalan relations must be situated in the backdrop of post-WWII Cold War geopolitical realities. Indeed, the flow of food production can help explain and situate the US and Israeli support of Guatemalan model villages. The political and economic destruction that WWII wrought upon Western European colonial powers helped catalyze the breakup of old European empires into a host of newly liberated and decolonized nations throughout Africa and Asia. The United States, having had no devastating war fought on its own soil, had provided massive food aid to European countries. Following the end of WWII, the United States faced a food problem. As European tanks became tractors and battlefields became plowable land, Europe imposed stiff agricultural tariffs to protect its own decimated industry. Small-scale US farmers throughout the Midwest, who had taken out loans for future crop harvests from large banks to feed Europe, were set to lose billions of dollars and most small-scale farmers went bankrupt. In response to decreasing European food demand, the USAID coordinated the single largest transfer of food from the Global North to the Global South under the banner of “food aid.” Ushering in what Eric Holt-Gimenez (2017) has called a new food regime, the surplus grains that US farmers had grown, which would have rotted otherwise, were sent in droves to the Global South. This international flow represented a dramatic reversal in food distribution worldwide. Under colonial regimes, food and natural resources were forcibly extracted from the Global South to the Global North through the blood and on the backs of native Brown and Black people (Galeano, 1973; Rodney, 1972). In a historic reversal, food and agricultural technology began to flow the opposite way as part of what would be known as the Green Revolution.

While the introduction of food aid and new agricultural technology initially increased crop yields throughout Latin America, it often took up the most fertile land and redirected crop growth from intercrop culturing to monocropping to sell to the global market. Furthermore, the Green Revolution and concurrent discourses about modernization dovetailed with US aims to stem the threat of global communist takeover with the promise of economic aid. This logic is perhaps best articulated in Walt Whitman Rostow’s The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. This book could be considered a manual of developmentalist military intervention. In Stages of Growth, Rostow outlined a universal trajectory of development that he believed social and economic engineering could produce throughout the Global South. Ultimately, Rostow saw the massive decolonization struggles throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America as only adjuncts to the “Eurasian arena of power” (Rostow, 1960: 121), a world redeemed through the planetary spread of US-style mass consumerism.

While Rostow planned to use the Green Revolution as a counterinsurgent anti-communist tactic, another equally important development occurred in the United States. Beginning in the 1970s, the US demand for specialty coffee skyrocketed. Guatemala’s economy revolved around the boom-and-bust cycles of the global coffee market. Increasing global demand shaped the advice that USAID experts gave Guatemala—encouraging monocrop growth of coffea arabica. An evergreen red-berried shrub from the mountains of southwest Ethiopia, were used heavily across the Islamic world beginning in the 16th century before coffee plantations were established throughout the Caribbean. Braided into peoples’ hair from the Bambara people to the Caribbean, before finally making their way to Guatemala, intercropping was central to the coffee beans’ life (Carney, 2011: 132). Coffee was traditionally grown through a system of intercrop culturing with shade-tolerant legumes like protein-rich beans in Guatemala. The taller coffee plants provided shade to the heartier beans, which would snake around the coffee plants for structural support and fix the soil to provide necessary mineral nitrates to the coffee (Kimmerer, 2013: 133–134). Meanwhile, beans would provide production in the first 5 years that the coffee bean plants grew before they could begin producing beans to be roasted. Beginning with the Green Revolution and a desire to increase coffee yields and profits on the global market, USAID and Israeli advisors supported landed Ladino elites in Guatemala, who rejecting intercropping in favor of large coffee plantations built for global consumption. By no longer intercropping beans with the coffee in highland plantations, the landed elites could guarantee higher coffee yields and higher profits with corporate fertilizers. Ladino elites replaced beans—which traditionally provided nitrates to the corn, squash, and coffee—with nitrate fertilizer over large swaths of the Guatemalan highlands. This monocropping strategy made Guatemalan food production of beans—a central crop for Guatemalans historically—fall, leading to further dependence on foreign food import. The genocidal elimination practice that the Guatemalan military would enact was rooted in the hunger for the land without the people, a fear of communism, and a desire to meet the growing global demand for coffee that Guatemala needed to protect.

In 1954, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), fearing the spread of Soviet-sponsored communism and wanting to protect US agricultural economic interests, worked with local elites to oust progressive reformist president, Jacobo Arbenz. The 1954 US-backed coup cut short that dream and instituted the start of a reign of terror and formalization of the counterinsurgent state. A new military dictator, Carlos Castillo Armas, was flown into Guatemala on a US embassy airplane to take Arbenz’s place, ushering in decades of anti-democratic rule. Arbenz’s attempted land reform was abolished, leading to massive rural dispossession. The four insurgent groups—the Rebel Armed Forces (FAR), the Guerrilla Army of the poor (GP), the Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms (OPRA), and the Guatemalan Workers’ Party (PGT)—attempted to mobilize mass rural support for revolution against an increasingly murderous state. By the early 1970s, these guerrilla organizations had come to the conclusion that focused, small, vanguard strategy of the foco that worked in the 1959 Cuban Revolution was overly militaristic and lacked a mass basis. Instead, guerrilla organizations were beginning to rearticulate themselves in novel forms, beginning to reach out in an effort to build organic links with indigenous communities. The armed struggle reached its apex in the early 1980s, recruiting between 6000 and 8000 armed fighters and 500,000 active collaborators and supporters between 1980 and 1981.

Strong rural peasant support for Guatemala’s revolutionary movements led Guatemalan regimes to incorporate agricultural “pacification” programs into their counterinsurgency programs. A major aspect of these programs was agricultural resettlement schemes. Major Frederick F. Woerner, the US advisor who directed the advisory staff in Guatemala from 1966 to 1968, described these resettlement schemes as “a military weapon in counterinsurgency. I wish I could say that our main concern is in improving nutrition… These are only by-products. The security of the country is our mission” (Tobis, 1968). Woerner’s comment demonstrates that supposed technical assistance programs from the United States to Guatemala covered a covert objective: controlling the rural population and combating guerilla movements. The guerrilla organizations were defined by the state as internal enemies and became the targets of a coordinated counterinsurgency effort on the part of military, police, and paramilitary death squads. The army, fortified with Israeli and US guns and technical expertise, crushed the insurgency and killed or disappeared tens of thousands of civilians.

By 1977, the extent of human rights abuses in Guatemala led US President Jimmy Carter to conclude that, if Guatemala City did not initiate reforms the opposition movement might grow, possibly taking the country out of the American sphere. President Carter believed that he could foster government reform by banning arms supply to Guatemala, prompting him to point to an increased concern for human rights as justification for halting arms trade to Guatemala. The new US focus on human rights policies infuriated the Guatemalan government, which opposed US human rights policy on the basis that “it could not accept unilateral judgment of its actions” and that these policies were “interventionist” (National Security Archive, 1978). Yet after Guatemala was cut off from US military aid and assistance, Guatemala immediately turned to Israel to provide them with these assets. In this time, Israel played a critical role in supplying weapons and expertise to “support in [the Guatemalan] battle against the guerillas” (Karni, 1986), a role that the United States encouraged. In 1981, Ya’acov Meridor, Israeli economic coordination minister, told a gathering of Israeli businessmen: “Israel coveted the job of top Washington proxy in Central America. We [said] to the Americans: Don’t compete with us in Taiwan… South Africa… or Latin America or in other places where you cannot sell arms directly… Let us do it. You will sell the ammunition and equipment through an intermediary. Israel will be your intermediary” (Black, 1983: 44). The US weapons ban installed under Jimmy Carter did not cripple the Guatemalan government’s ability to carry out widespread human rights abuses and repression. Financial assistance to Guatemala, refused by the US Congress was supplied instead by Israel through the back door, to be repaid out of the US$2.5 billion of US Aid going to Israel annually. This relationship would be most present in the plantation-style model villages that the Guatemalan army created.

Model villages have historically functioned as a key component in colonial asymmetric warfare and counterinsurgency. (Khalili, 2013) The US military forced Vietnamese people onto what they called strategic hamlets as part of the Vietnam War. Black Feminist Toni Cade Bambara (1977) notes their presence terrifyingly in a short story in her collection, The Seabirds are Still Alive. Bambara, who traveled to North Vietnam with a delegation of Marxist/Leninist feminists on the invitation of the Vietnam Women’s Union, in July 1975, would use lessons from Vietnam in her short stories. In The Seabirds are Still Alive, Bambara describes an American government agent who was sent to Vietnam to destabilize the region, under the guise of selling rural water development programs. She noted that “USAID officers were in the company of known militia assassins.” An internationalist, Bambara’s short story points to her understanding of the deep ties between agricultural development, counterinsurgency, and model villages in Vietnam. The modeling of rural counterinsurgency had dress rehearsals to employ previous to its use in Vietnam, where Israeli had secretly provided weapons and agricultural development to the South Vietnamese, with US tacit support. Agent Orange, developed at Princeton University and tested in Vieques, Puerto Rico, before being used in Vietnam, was also debated being used in Guatemala (Gonzalez, 18 July 2018, interviewed by author).

Israeli aid to Guatemala came in their role as agricultural and military advisors. In addition to police and military training, military advising involved assistance in electronic surveillance systems, intelligence gathering, and military resettlement projects in former insurgent areas. Peasants were brought in from small scattered plots and forced to live on a reduced area laid out in a grid system, where they were held under constant surveillance by members of the “civil patrols” which would report all of their villagers’ whereabouts.

“In short, a population that once was scattered over a large expanse is now concentrate in communities that can be easily guarded and controlled… All town residents queried out of hearing of army civic-action teams said they were forbidden to leave… The army says we have to remain here, said a thirty-year-old man… If anyone tries to leave here, they kill him” (Jenkins, 1985).

When US Congress forbade US forces to train the Guatemalan internal police forces in 1977, the Israelis stepped in and “set up their intelligence network, tried and tested on the West Bank and Gaza” (Hentoff, 1980). Former Israeli soldiers offered courses on why the United States and the British failed in Vietnam and Malaysia, while Israelis were “successful” in their counterinsurgent occupation of the Palestinians. Israeli advisors conducted joint military exercises with the infamous G-2 police intelligence unit, including interrogation and torture methods (Black, 1983). The Guatemalan government adapted old US counterinsurgency manuals, combining these with new Israeli strategies. Guatemalan right-wing politicians called for the “Palestinianization” of the Guatemalan indigenous population (Black, 1983). The Guatemalan government, facing a broad-based popular movement, came to resemble the Israelis on the West Bank and Gaza, using force to stop dissent, and also necessitating a long-range effort at social control. The majority of Israeli exchange programs have concentrated on the agrarian sector. Following Israeli workshops, which showed the benefits of the kibbutz model, Guatemalan counterinsurgency specialists implemented their own forced removal by forcing indigenous communities that were suspected of working with leftist movements to organize through model villages.

One month before the infamous 29 May 1978 Panzos massacre that left 35 Quiche people murdered by the time that a military detachment stopped firing at them for announcing a visit of a union to discuss peasant complaints against local planters, a 2-year program of grants began for Guatemalan officers to study cooperativization and rural development under the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s International Cooperation Division (Jamail and Gutierrez, 1987). The Lucas Garcia regime was particularly interested in Israel’s Rehovot land settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which were workable models of rural development that precluded the need for serious land reform. Security and land—pillars of settler colonialism—became central in the militarization and war-making in Guatemala. The Guatemalan dictatorship bought Israeli weapons because they were globally renowned as outstanding and “battle-tested” against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Colonization projects in the Occupied Palestinian Territories were carried out under military regulation, designed to colonize and redevelop what Israelis named as infertile land, clashing with the wishes of Palestinians. These elements of the Israeli Rehovot program and the plan for the Negev found their way into Lucas’ Integral Plan of Rural Communities in 1979, a program of agricultural development in highland zones of conflict. In Israel’s Physical Master Plan for the Negev of 1976, 100 Jewish agricultural settlements were projected for the northwestern Negev and along the border of the West Bank (Falah, 1983). By the late 1980s, 95 new Jewish communities, including the towns of Lehavim and Meitar, had been established in the Negev as part of the state’s overall policy of settlement building.

As the war continued, on 3 November 1981, Guatemalan President Romeo Lucas Garcia inaugurated a brand-new Army Transmissions and Electronics School in his home province of Alta Verapaz. High-profile Guatemalan military officers and the Israeli ambassador to Guatemala arrived at the Schools’ opening ceremony, which Guatemalan Chief of Staff, Gen. Benedicto Lucas Garcia (the president’s brother) heralded as a “positive step” in bringing Guatemala up-to-date militarily (Beit-Hallahmi, 1985: 5). Gen. Lucas Garcia then thanked the Israeli ambassador “for the advice and transfer of electronic technology,” including new supercomputers that would track guerillas throughout the countryside (Diario de Centro America 5 November 1981). During the ceremony, the Director of the Army School, Col. Carlos Anibal Mendez Cabrera explained to the crowd that “teaching methods, the teaching teams, the technical instruments, books, and even the custom furniture were designed and built by the Israeli company DEGEM Systems” (Diario de Centro America 5 November 1981).

Decreased global prices for coffee led to economic stagnation under the Lucas Garcia regime. Grumblings from high-level military officials crystalized into plans to launch a military coup. Israeli military advisors’ key role in the Guatemalan government was perhaps best represented by their role in enabling the coup that allowed General Efrain Rios Montt to seize power from Romeo Lucas Garcia in March 1982. Rios Montt, who was brought to trial in January 2012 to face accusations of his role in the deaths of more than 1700 people during his 17-month-long military regime, began planning with Israeli advisors to stage a coup-de-tat in 1982 (Malkin, 2012). Seven days after the successful coup, in an interview with ABC News, Rios Montt credited the success of the coup to the fact that he had the support of “300 Israeli military and agricultural advisors at [his] home” in the weeks leading up to the coup (Haze, 1983).

What was smaller under the Lucas Garcia regime became magnified under Rios Montt. Under the Plan of Assistance to Conflict Areas (PAAC) launched in August 1982, the Israeli agrarian model became more explicit. PAAC Director Colonel Eduardo Wohler admitted in 1983 that Israel remained the main inspiration: “Many of our technicians are Israeli trained. The model of the kibbutz and the moshav is planted firmly in their minds, and I personally think it would be fascinating to turn our highlands into that kind of system” (Black, 1984: 158). The presence of Israeli advisers, along with Argentineans, was reported in 1982 when General Rios Montt launched “Plan Victoria,” a scorched earth counterinsurgency plan that included the “Techo, Tortilla, y Trabajo” (Housing, Tortillas, and Work)—a rural counterinsurgency program disguised as rural development. The “three Ts” succeeded an earlier program called Fusiles y Frijoles (Beans and Bullets), whereby highland indigenous Maya communities were offered the choice of small provisions of beans for cooperation with the government or death if they chose not to cooperate (Peckenham, 1984).

Government officials forced Ixhil people to grow beans in model villages through a monocropping system, rejecting the traditional way of cultivating beans alongside squash. The squash would normally produce phytochemicals to repel pests that would normally kill the beans. In 1982, Israeli military assistance to Guatemala was estimated at US$90 million annually (McClintock, 1985: 194). During the campaign, which would leave 15,000 highland indigenous people dead, General Benedicto Lucas Garcia, Chief of Staff of the Guatemalan army, in an interview with Israeli press, attributed the success of the “Three Ts” campaign to the presence of Israeli advisors, noting that “we appreciate Israel; we see the Israeli as the best soldier in the world today, and we look to him as a model and an example to us” (Hunter, 1987: 45).

Soon after Rios Montt’s seizure of power, the new Minister of Economy Julio Matheu made a visit to Israel, and a New Trade and Economic Cooperation Agreement became one of his first priorities. Israeli investment in Guatemala increased after a Trade and Economic Cooperation agreement was concluded during a 1982 visit to Israel by the Guatemalan Minister of Economics. Besides Tadiran Electronics, and the Israeli involvement in commercial aspects of the model village program, the Israeli company Netafim, which works on drip irrigation, registered to operate in Guatemala in 1982, 1 year after they opened their first international subsidiary in the United States. Israeli Ambassador Eliezer Armon was awarded Guatemala’s highest medal—the Order of the Quetzal. In an award ceremony, Armon was lauded by his hosts for “boosting the program under which Guatemalan grant-holders have gone to study on a wide range of specialized training courses which Israeli instructors have given here in a broad variety of productive activities” (Black, 1983: 157).

These specialized trainings would primarily revolve around scorched earth policy. According to the scorched earth doctrine, where the security state had lost dominion and sovereignty to the degree that the Army could not see the distinction between the guerilleros and their peasant supporters, then entire Ixhil villages were to be erased from the map. Rios Montt’s concept of sovereignty legitimated the citizens of Guatemala through only the vision of the army. To be seen through model villages became the sole means of escaping death and destruction. The sovereign decision of “you are with us or you are against us” indeed would later become the overarching war strategy of George W. Bush, in whose cabinet many former US cabinet supporters of the Guatemalan war remained. This included Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Elliot Abrams, who had been pardoned in 1992 under Bush’s father, George H.W. Bush, for his major role in the Iran Contra Scandal. Abrams, despite not speaking Spanish, was given control of a large swath of US policy in Central America and claimed that he wanted to be remembered for “taking down the first communist revolution” (Abrams, 1983).

In the resettled areas, the Army consolidated their presence, bringing increased National and Treasury police units. By December 1982, the strength of the security forces was enlarged by the creation of civil patrols, to combat potential return of guerrilla movements. As Wohlers said, “under previous governments, the problem was that we pulled out leaving the subversive to take advantage of our absence to win over villages.” By May 1983, the high command was opening up new command centers, aiming to consolidate a system of regional military bases in all 22 departments. Chief of Staff General Hector Marioi Lopez Fuentes explained that “we need to continually reinforce not only territorial control, but also control of the pope. Where there is military presence throughout the republic, there will be no subversive presence.” At the same time, the army opened up a national munitions factory, using Israeli advice (Rubenberg, 1986).

The Civil Defense Patrols guard the entrances to the green villages, with nervous files of men and boys carrying sticks and machetes. Divided into groups of 10 men, each patrol found itself obliged to serve 1 day out of 3, guarding local installations of strategic value. Control of local population was greatly enhanced by the patrols, as Colonel Eduardo Wohlers noted (29 March 1983 and 6 May 1983, interviewed by George Black for San Jose Opaquely and Latin America Regional Report: Mexico and Central America): “Now, when men want to migrate to the coast to pick cotton, they have to check in with the army for permission to leave the Civil Defense Patrol.” Another Army captain in San Jose Opaquely, a medium-sized town in Chimaltenango explained: “That way, we always know where everyone is” (Black, 1983). The same law applied to the civilian population at large. Villagers who moved from place to place in areas of recent guerrilla activity—even if only carrying their produce to market—were obliged to carry the blue-and-white flag of Guatemala at all times, as a token of their loyalty.

The insistence to inscribe the nation-state onto Guatemalan indigenous people accomplishes three separate goals. First, indigenous people’s bodies, which had never been fully part of the nation-state, became marked by the sovereign power of the nation-state. This marking of the law upon their bodies mirrors traditional counterinsurgency strategies in Guantanamo by arguing that a person’s body is thus the property of the state and should therefore be tried under the state. The second is an effort of surveillance at a distance. The white and blue marked the indigenous body as Guatemalan and a supporter of the Guatemalan military. It is a full marker of the inscription of the nation-state onto the body. The Civil Defense groups served a dual function. They shielded the regular troops from the line of fire, and their casualties could be counted as civilian victims of communist terror. If engaged in combat, they were “the people’ defending their idyllic life against the guerrillas. This appropriation of indigenous people into forced conscription purposefully muddied the international moral waters.

By the end of Plan Victoria 82, the indigenous people—up to 100,000 in Mexico and a further million displaced inside Guatemala—began to look like a people stripped of their homeland. Army planners, when considering long-range resettlement pans for the Indians, looked hard at Israeli agricultural settlements as a model for reworking the devastated rural highland economy. In the highlands, these two phases would supposedly lay the groundwork for phase three, which the Army called “development,” which was the glean in the eye of the National Reconstruction Committee Planners. Their emergent vision was of militarized model villages where tamed Indian communities—no longer a political threat—would generate new income for themselves as the tottering national economy by farming cash crops. Colonel Eduardo Wohlers, head of the PAAC, foresaw in 1983:

The definitive transformation of the face of the Guatemalan highlands. We foresee huge plantation of fruits and vegetables, with storage and processing facilities and refrigeration plants. We aim to put in the entire infrastructure for exporting frozen broccoli, watermelons… a total of fifteen new crops. (Wohlers, 29 March 1983 and 6 May 1983, interviewed by George Black for San Jose Opaquely and Latin America Regional Report: Mexico and Central America)

Localized ways of living and being human were aggressively transformed so that monocultural productivity would smother the multitude of food production and humanity. The physical enclosure of alternative ways of growing food in favor of a commercialized coffee production in Guatemala also constitutes an epistemic enclosure, whereby alternative knowledge systems and ways of being were straitjacketed into a (European) monoculture. The combination of the military’s distorted vision of economic development as a tool of counterinsurgency evidences that the Guatemalan Armed Forces recognized the links between economic development and anti-indigenous nation-building projects. The promotion of model villages and food-for-work programs remade economic and social relations in the countryside. In short, counterinsurgency policies promoted indigenous conversion narratives which argued that through intelligent work, indigenous Maya people would be full citizens who would support the military and starve out the communist guerrilla movements.

A call for new strategies

How can understanding the roots of these Global South military connections help reshape Latinx/Palestine solidarity organizing? This article illuminates the sinews that suture Guatemala, the United States, and Israel as well as model villages to rural counterinsurgency scorched earth campaigns. By refocusing immigrant rights and Palestinian liberation in the United States, new solidarity possibilities emerge. Solidarity is not a hinging of absolute sameness between Latin American solidarity and Palestinian solidarity.

The most visible component of Palestinian solidarity throughout North America in the past 8 years has arguably taken place on college campuses. College divestment campaigns have highlighted university investment in military companies that supported the Israeli occupation in the West Bank, including General Electrics, Raytheon, and Caterpillar bulldozers. Students at Brown University constructed one of the first mock walls on college campuses that highlighted the fact that the same Israeli company (Elbit) had won contracts to build both the Israel Palestine Wall and the US–Mexico Wall. Students drew inspiration for their campaign from anti-apartheid work in South Africa, deciding to focus on building mock walls that would mirror the mock shantytowns that anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s had constructed. A conscious effort to build alliances between immigrant rights groups and student Latinx organizations and Palestinian solidarity grew rapidly since 2010. While scholarship and student activism have focused on border walls, checkpoints, and shared militarization tactics between Israel and Mexico, less attention has been paid to how agriculture and land link Guatemala and Palestine. As college campuses have been hit with a wave of counterrevolutionary repression recently, it becomes important to shift tactics away from the campus. Centralizing agriculture and land in analyses of Latinx-Palestinian solidarity refocuses campaigns on the struggles of farmworkers in the United States, many of whom have and continue to flee from Guatemala precisely as a result of the US- and Israeli-supported counterrevolutionary scorched earth campaigns.

The Israeli state is planning on focusing agriculture to allow capital to flow more freely when international boycotts threatened the movement of capital. Seriously taking it on requires placing the Israeli state within a matrix of global capitalism, rather than seeing the question of Palestine as exceptional in both time and space from the rest of the world. Karl Marx’s analysis of the origins of capitalist production recognized that each step in capitalist production presupposed the preceding step, as such the movement seemed to be a “never ending circle” (Marx, 1990: 873). In this sense, racial capitalism operates as a circulatory system of veins and arteries (Galeano, 1973). For capital to be profitable, blood must continue to flow through the bodily structure. BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement) as a global tactic forces a blood clot in the heart, making the blood of capital ossify and calcify until it is no longer profitable. Boycott congeals capital with blood and race. It forces capital to recognize the terrible truth that it runs from: that it is born in blood. In response, the counterinsurgent masquerade reroutes the blood flow to keep the racial capitalism’s body alive, like a coronary bypass. This agricultural coronary bypass sutures the connective tissue of the Frankensteinian monsters of capital that link this authoritarian international’s veins together. As white supremacy is a rapidly moving technology that operates throughout these transnational circuits, students and organizers in the United States committed to international social justice make blood clots to halt capital’s flow in the new scenes: agricultural campaigns outside of universities. A Latinx-Palestinian future is already here, hidden within the recesses of the settler colonialist present.