"LaRouche on the pact with terror in Guatemala" (excerpt from interview transcript, 1996). Complains that a "process of demobilizing the resistance against terrorism" is underway, and that Guatemala has "signed a pact of submission, in effect, to the terrorists..." In other words, LaRouche opposes the policy of replacing military rule and murderous civil war with a democratic system--he wanted the killing to go on. His prediction of a terrorist takeover in Guatemala (like most of his predictions) has been revealed over the last decade to be completely wrong.
LaRouche (1996) boasts about his relationship with the former Guatemalan death-squad regime. "During 1985...I assisted the government of Guatemala with technical advice on the matter of narco-terrorists within and athwart its national borders. The proximate outcome of this technical advice was one of the most successful anti-narco-terrorist operations of the 1980s, conducted entirely by sovereign forces of Guatemala, called 'Operation Guatusa.'"
LaRouche's security chief Jeffrey Steinberg makes excuses for the Guatemalan deaths squads (1986). Steinberg had become enamored of the Guatemalan army after accompanying soldiers on Operation Guatusa, which was actually a typical brutal incursion into the highlands (by his own admission, he was kept safely away from the front lines). He states in defense of the Guatemalan regime:
"The urban-based side of the insurgency buildup has been facilitated by the non-stop anti-Cerezo [he means Guatemalan President Vinicio Cerezo] agitation of the GAM, the so-called Mutual Support Group, which is the principal Guatemalan front of the international human rights mafia. Using doctored studies prepared by Amnesty International and OxFam, GAM is claiming 40,000 'disappeared' persons were killed by the Guatemalan 'death squads' over the past decade. GAM demands that Cerezo dismantle the armed forces and institute the kind of show-trials of the generals that President Alfonsin has carried out under IMF orders in Argentina."
The reference to Argentina reflected the viewpoint of LaRouche's ally Col. Seineldin, whose attempted coup d'etats were aimed at getting amnesty (and indeed, vindication) for Argentina's worst military and secret-police torturers, rapists and mass murderers.
Steinberg's U.S. activities in the 1980s led to his indictment in Boston federal court on felony obstruction of justice charges along with other LaRouche security operatives and the Boss himself. A mistrial ensued in 1988 after the Central Intelligence Agency failed to turn over files about the LaRouche org's relationship to the intelligence community that had been requested by defense lawyers in expectation that the CIA would stonewall the request, thus allowing the defense to possibly persuade jurors that the indictments of LaRouche and his associates on what were primarily credit card fraud charges were motivated by a vast government plot.
The gambit did not work for LaRouche in a second federal trial in Alexandria, Va. later that year in which he and several followers (not including Steinberg) were convicted of mail fraud.
LaRouche aides supposedly accompanied a Guatemalan military delegation to the Pentagon in 1985 to discuss the success of Operation Guatusa. This claim is made in a 2005 EIR polemic aimed at discrediting former Catholic members of the LaRouche organization whom LaRouche had purged over the preceding five years. Essentially LaRouche tries to blame all of his sinister activities in Latin America on these individuals. The absurdity of such a claim is shown by the preceding three files above. Read here the entire text of the polemic, which was written by convicted felon William Wertz (a key figure in LaRouche's loan scams in the 1980s).