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or indirectly.80 The terrorism, thievery, and autonomy of the Guatemalan military reached a temporary peak—later surpassed by Ríos Montt—during the reign of Lucas García (1978–82). This overlapped the brief interlude of the Carter humanrights policy, during which there was open criticism of the Guatemalan government and a brief and partial cutoff of arms supply from the United States under congressional pressure.81 Even during the Carter years, however, relations with Guatemala were not hostile—it was as if a child in the family were naughty and briefly put in the corner. Part of the reason for the willingness of the Carter government to provide no new arms supplies was that the bad boy was in no danger. In El Salvador in 1980, by contrast, where the Carter administration saw the possibility of a left-wing victory, support was quickly forthcoming to a right-wing terror regime.

During the Reagan years, the number of civilians murdered in Guatemala ran into the tens of thousands, and disappearances and mutilated bodies were a daily occurrence.82 Studies by Amnesty International (AI), Americas Watch (AW), and other human-rights monitors have documented a military machine run amok, with the indiscriminate killing of peasants (including vast numbers of women and children), the forcible relocation of hundreds of thousands of farmers and villagers into virtual concentration camps, and the enlistment of many hundreds of thousands in compulsory civil patrols.83 Reagan, however, visiting Guatemala in December 1982, commented that head of state Ríos Montt was “totally committed to democracy” and was receiving a “bum rap” on human-rights abuses. Two months earlier, AI released its report describing sixty different Indian villages in which massacres of civilians took place in a three-month period, with the total killed exceeding 2,500.84

The Reagan policy toward Guatemala was, as with South Africa, “constructive engagement.”85 From the beginning, the administration strove to embrace and provide arms to the military governments. Ongoing mass murder was merely an inconvenience. One method by which the administration sought to rehabilitate our relations with the Guatemala regimes was by continual lying about their human-rights record (with Reagan himself setting the standard). Stephen Bosworth, of the State Department, assured a House committee in July 1981 that the Lucas García government was successfully attacking the guerrillas “while taking care to protect innocent bystanders.”86 The State Department’s Country Report on Human Rights for 1981 also found it impossible to determine who was doing all the killing in Guatemala, and disappearances were attributed to the “right” and the “left,” but not to the government. Amnesty International, by contrast, in February 1981, gave detailed evidence that the thousands of murders were almost entirely governmental in origin, including those of the death squads, whose victims were targeted in an annex of Guatemala’s national palace under the direct supervision of President Lucas García.87

With the overthrow of Lucas García, suddenly, as if by magic, the Reagan administration line altered, and Stephen Bosworth “could not emphasize strongly enough the favorable contrast between the current human rights situation in Guatemala and the situation last December . . .” Melvyn Levitsky, deputy assistant secretary of state for human rights, told another congressional committee that “the United States cannot easily sustain a relationship with a government which engages in violence against its own people,” as with the Lucas García regime.88

When Lucas García was in power, Bosworth found it a caring regime that protected the innocent, and the State Department couldn’t determine that the government was doing any killing. With Lucas García ousted, the State Department discovered that he was an indiscriminate murderer and assumed a high moral tone about his behavior. That is, the State Department implicitly conceded that it was lying earlier and counted on the press not to point this out. Of course, the reason