Yes, mass murders have been conducted by individuals and governments. However, your point is that the US has conducted genocide. This event, while the US supported Efrain Rios Montt, was not directly involved. In my opinion, the US has only really attempted to destroy a peoples was during the expansion into the lands of what is now the US. Some may say this was an attempt at genocide others say it was war. I personally have serious issues with your attempt to put the US in the same light as Nazi Germany. You may disagree, which it appears that you do, so let's leave it at that.
The United States was chiefly an enabler of genocide in Guatemala. It planted the seeds for decades of violence in Guatemala when it eagerly declared the nation’s social democratic president, Jacobo Arbenz, a communist.
“I am definitely convinced if the president is not a communist," the U.S. ambassador, John Puerifoy,
said in December 1953, “he will certainly do until one comes along.” Five months later, the C.I.A., worried as much about the nationalization of United Fruit Company lands as the infiltration of Soviet power, toppled Arbenz in a coup.
Enraged by the U.S.-backed dictatorships that followed, unionists, students and dissident military officers took to the hills in the early 1960s to fight to resume the Arbenz reforms.
The U.S. turned a blind eye to the upper class's uniquely virulent racism that permitted slaughter in the name of anticommunism.
The U.S. government also provided the Guatemalan armed forces with a pretext for repression by establishing a national security doctrine that justified brutality in the interest of eradicating leftist subversion. It armed and assisted the military. It trained Guatemalan officers at U.S. military schools and deployed green berets to Guatemala during the 1960s.
By the early 1980s when the Mayan Ixil became victims of genocide, the United States had formally suspended military assistance. Though more preoccupied with combating leftist threats in El Salvador and Guatemala, aid trickled through to the Guatemalan army and President Reagan lifted the ban on the sale of military parts and equipment during the Ríos Montt administration.
In choosing to do so, the United States deliberately turned a blind eye to the Guatemalan genocide. The Reagan administration publicly supported army claims that guerrillas rather than soldiers were perpetrating atrocities and tried to polish the tarnished image of the Ríos Montt regime, encapsulated by Reagan’s claim that the general was being given a “bum rap.”
That being said, blaming the Guatemalan military and the United States only goes so far in explaining the genocide. National security doctrine excused repression by dictatorships throughout Latin America from the mid-1960s onward, yet it was only in Guatemala that repression constituted genocide.
A complete explanation of the genocide must account for the puppet master role played by Guatemala’s oligarchy. More powerful and intransigent than their Latin American colleagues – Guatemalan elites had little trouble enlisting the military in a ferocious struggle to preserve their stranglehold on political and economic power. In further contrast to its neighbors, Guatemalan society was (and remains) profoundly racist, fearful of the indigenous majority that it has continually dehumanized. That racism let the elite-military alliance use anticommunist counterinsurgency principles to justify the extermination of Mayan peoples and communities.
“Why do you ask why Indians were killed?’’ a member of the oligarchy once asked me. “A better question is why didn’t we kill more Indians?”
It was not an uncommon sentiment among his peers.
“I don’t feel anything toward the victims,’’ a defense lawyer in the Ríos Montt trial said, “why should I?”
We Enabled Guatemalan Genocide, but the Elite Committed It - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com
