Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [16]
Before long the Special Forces were operating in Laos and Vietnam. The war in Indochina was marked by colossal violence—carpet bombing by B-52s; napalm; large, conventional-style engagements between the North Vietnamese army and American forces. But it also involved intense counterinsurgency, at the heart of which was the Strategic Hamlet Program, which entailed the destruction, then reconstitution, of pro-Vietcong civilian communities.
No country saw a more devastating counterinsurgency than Guatemala. Beginning in 1981, the military government of General Rios Mont combined a genocidal, scorched-earth campaign against civilians with a classic “secure-and-hold” development strategy called frijoles y fusiles, or “beans and bullets.” After destroying Indian villages and massacring many of their inhabitants, the military concentrated the surviving civilians in “model villages.” They forced male survivors to participate in civil patrols, lightly armed vigilante forces that served as the eyes and ears of the military—and often as their human shields. An estimated one hundred thousand civilians were murdered during the Guatemalan Civil War, the vast majority by government forces.
I had an opportunity to see this war firsthand, in 1988, when I hiked across the Ixill Triangle in the highlands war zone. The trails were littered with government and guerrilla propaganda—small handbills exhorting the people to join one side or the other. The area was still at war, but the guerrillas were in retreat. Everywhere we saw the methods of counterinsurgency: trails cleared of trees on all sides, air patrols, civilian militia checkpoints, burnt villages, and new ones under strict government control. In one model village, a company of Guatemalan soldiers was dug in around a helicopter landing pad on the highest point of the ridge. Later, in 1991, I traveled with, and reported on, the Resistencia Nacional, part of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN. The hills of Cabañas, El Salvador, bore similar physical and social scars.
Today, the Guatemalan highlands and the small towns of El Salvador remain violent, but instead of guerrilla operations and counterinsurgency, the plague is crime. The global average homicide rate is less than eight per one hundred thousand, but the UN Office on Drugs and Crime reports that in Central America the murder rate between 2003 and 2008 averaged sixty-one per one hundred thousand in Honduras; fifty-two per one hundred thousand in El Salvador; and forty-nine per one hundred thousand in Guatemala.27 One Latin American scholar writing in 2006 found that “crime rates have risen globally by an average of 50 per cent over the past 25 years, and the phenomenon is widely considered to contribute significantly to human suffering all over the world. This is particularly the case in Latin America, where violence has reached unprecedented levels due to rising crime and delinquency.”28
All three of those countries were sites of intense counterinsurgency from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, and the legacy of that is anomie: a weakened society, a social fabric frayed, resulting in a gun culture with large populations of unemployed men habituated to violence, discipline, secrecy, pack loyalty, brutality; trained in the arts of smuggling, extortion, robbery, and assassination. In other words, an invisible army of criminals occupies society. The political class is steeped in violence, and much of it sees society as a battlefield; enemies must be destroyed, social problems eliminated by force. Walls and armed guards dominate the landscape. The police are hooked on habits of torture, disappearance, and drug running.29
Meanwhile, relative deprivation defines the psychological terrain: these societies are more unequal than ever, and the revolutionaries and progressive social movements, in raising class-consciousness, have enlightened the masses about the inherent unfairness of the situation.30 The spectacle of modern media, in