Gospel Outreach gained notoriety when one of its elders, Gen. Rios Montt, became president of Guatemala during the 1982 military coup.
By 1982, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency was well-entrenched in Guatemala. In 1954, the CIA had joined with the United Fruit Company, wealthy plantation owners and the military to overthrow the freely-elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. A protracted civil war ensued in this country through the 1970s, which took a turn for the worse in the early 1980's, at which time the Guatemalan army, backed by the CIA, began a campaign of genocide against the Maya peoples. Several hundred Indian villages were obliterated and their inhabitants were either killed or forced into exile in Mexico. 28. Altogether, the Guatemalan war claimed over 200,000 lives, mostly Mayan civilians. According to a recent U.N report, at least 626 massacres took place during the country's 36-year war and, in recent years, 125 massacre sites have been exhumed. Most of the victims were Maya Indians. Only two court trials have been conducted in which state prosecutors filed criminal charges and only one of these cases led to convictions. In 1998, three former members of an army-trained civilian patrol were sentenced to death for their role in a 1982 massacre of 130 civilians outside the town of Rio Negro. 29.
The rise of El Verbo Church elder, Rios Montt, to President of Guatemala in 1982, the terrorist operations of his regime and his support among leading U.S. evangelical ministers are documented in the Public Information Research Database file on Gospel Outreach: "Gospel Outreach is an evangelical Pentecostal church with headquarters in Eureka, California and Guatemala. It grew out of the 'Jesus People' movement of the 1960s in the United States. . After the 1976 earthquake, 28 Gospel Outreach evangelicals from California arrived in Guatemala to help rebuild the country and establish El Verbo church.
"An early convert was General Efrain Rios Montt, who became president after a military coup in March 1982.
"According to the Latin American Institute of Transnational Studies, 'Within the first nine months of Rios Montt's administration, 12 evangelical pastors were assassinated; 69 were kidnapped; 45 disappeared; 15 were jailed; 11 foreign missionaries were expelled; 88 evangelical temples were destroyed; and 50 more were occupied by the Army.' By 1986, Verbo Ministries reported 250 congregations. Verbo Ministries also runs a Leadership Training School with over 1000 members directed by Rios Montt himself. . .
"Rios Montt has been supported by Pat Robertson (Christian Broadcasting Network), Jerry Falwell (Moral Majority, Thomas Road Baptist Church, Liberty Federation), and Loren Cunningham (Youth with a Mission). They have worked with the Florida Cuban community. . . Jimmy Swaggart Ministries has provided financial support for the schools of El Verbo in Guatemala. This is done under the ‘Programa Ayuda Infantile,’ a branch of the Swaggart ministry.” 30. Pat Robertson's organization funded Gospel Outreach to help Rios Montt build ‘model villages’ for the Guatemalan peasants. These model villages were, like the Jesus Movement, “based on ‘communitarianism,’ a system of church-centered community ownership of property that vaguely would include private ownership of homes and land.” 31. Gospel Outreach’s fundraising arm in the U.S., International Love Lift, was able to raise $1.5 million for Rios Montt’s program. The authors of Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, describe the fruit of Gospel Outreach – which turned out not to be model villages, but a genocidal campaign that was perpetuated largely because of Evangelical funding and petitions to President Reagan: “The irony of [Gospel Outreach’s] name was outranked only by the name of its fund-raising arm in the United States, which was endorsed by TV evangelist Pat Robertson: International Love Lift. . .
“Love was beginning to take on a strange look . . .
“Within three months of Rios Montt’s self-declaratoin as ‘God’s choice,’ in June 1982, Amnesty International would issue a special report, Massive Extrajudicial Executions in Rural Areas Under the Government of General Efrain Rios Montt. Its ‘partial listing of massacres,’ totaling more than sixty, included one village where survivors witnessed soldiers beheading men, battering children’s heads against rocks, and raping women. More than 500 Indian people were killed in three villages in the departments of Quiche and Huehuetenango on March 23. In addition, 100 people were slaughtered in three villages in Alta Verapaz between March 24 and March 27; 250 people, in three villages in Chimaltenango the first two weeks of April; 100, in the village of Nangal alone in Quiche on April 5; 193, in Rio Negro on April 15; 54, in Macalbaj on April 18; and 100, in Josefinos on April 20.
“Machine guns, grenades, and machetes were used with sadistic abandon. Most of the victims were women and children. In Alta Alta Verapaz, home of the Kekchi Indians, more than 1,000 of the 2,500 communities in the province were abandoned or destroyed. Those communities that remained were decimated by losses. In one municipality, Santa Cristobal Verapaz, up to 10,000 of the 28,000 residents were believed by local authorities to have died. . .
“ . . .after meeting Rios Montt in Honduras later that month, President Reagan insisted that the regime was ‘getting a bad deal’ from the accusations of massacres and deserved renewed military aid from the United States (which he granted the following month). Had not the White House received a flood of letters calling for renewed arms sales to Guatemala after Pat Robertson appealed to his 700 Culb television show for prayers and money for the regime?” 32. The Covert Action Information Bulletin reported in 1987 that the State of Israel, Guatemala's principle backer between 1977 and 1986, not only sponsored espionage and torture of Guatemalans, but employed members of Gospel Outreach’s Verbo Church to assist their agents. "Israel also installed computer surveillance equipment in Guatemala and, under the pretext of providing agricultural assistance, helped devise Rios Montt's 'beans and bullets strategic hamlets, modeled after the CIA's Operation Phoenix. . . [ed. note: ‘beans and bullets’ refers to Rios Montt’s policy, ‘If you are with us, we’ll feed you; if not we’ll kill you.’]
[Richard Paradise of Gospel Outreach] says he works under the auspices of the World Zionist Organization as a liaison with U.S. evangelicals, with the assigned role of working against anti-Semitism within the U.S. . . According to a special report entitled 'Sectas y Religiosidad en American Latina' published in October 1984 by the Chile-based Instituto Latinoamericano de Estudios Transnacionales, during Rios Montt's rule, members of Gospel Outreach's Verbo church took jobs in espionage and torture and accompanied Israeli and Argentinean experts during interrogation sessions." 33. Israel’s role was confirmed by a member of Israel’s Knesset according to CIABASE files on Death Squads: “Guatemala, 1981-89. Israeli Knesset member General Peled said in Central America Israel is 'dirty work' contractor for U.S. Helped Guatemala regime when Congress blocked Reagan administration. Israeli firm Tadiran (then partly U.S.-owned) supplied Guatemalan military with computerized intelligence system to track potential subversives. Those on computer list had an excellent chance of being ‘disappeared.’”
The following CIABASE records describe the CIA operation in Guatemala, courtesy of Reuters and The Nation: Guatemala, 1954-95. U.S. Undercover agents have worked for decades inside a Guatemalan army unit that has tortured and killed thousands of Guatemalan citizens, per the Nation weekly magazine. "working out of the U.S. Embassy and living in safe houses and hotels, agents work through an elite group of Guatemalan officers who are secretly paid by CIA and implicated personally in numerous political crimes and assassinations ''unit known as G-2 and its secret collaboration with CIA were described by U.S. and Guatemalan operatives and confirmed by three former Guatemalan heads of state. Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, Guatemalan officer implicated in murders of guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez --
husband of an American lawyer -- and rancher Michael Devine discussed in an interview how intelligence agency advises and helps run G-2. He said agents came to Central American country often to train G-2 men and he described attending CIA sessions at G-2 bases on "contra-subversion'' tactics and "how to manage factors of power'' to "fortify democracy'' the Nation quoted U.S. and Guatemalan intelligence sources as saying at least three recent G-2 chiefs have been on CIA payroll -- General Edgar Godoy Gatan, Colonel Otto Perez Molina and General Francisco Ortega Menaldo. `It would be embarrassing if you ever had a roll call of everybody in Guatemalan army who ever collected a CIA paycheck,'' report quoted Colonel George Hooker, U.S. DIA chief in Guatemala from 1985 to 1989, as saying. Human rights group Amnesty International has said Guatemalan army killed more than 110,000 civilians since 1978 with G-2 and another unit called Archivo known as main death squads. Reuters, 3/30/1995 Guatemala, 1960-90. Human rights groups say at least 40,000 Guatemalans "disappeared" in last 3 decades. Most were poor Indians. Anthropologists, led by Clyde Snow, dug away at a village site. Maria Lopez had a husband and a son in one grave. She said on morning of Valentine's Day 1982, members of anti-guerrilla militia took her husband and others. They had refused to join militias known as civil self-defense patrols and were killed. Six unknown clandestine graves in San Jose Pacho. Human rights groups blame most disappearances on army-run civil self-defense patrols set up under presidencies of General Lucas Garcia and Brig. Gen. Rios Montt. There are hundreds of clandestine graves filled with victims of the militias, right-wing death squads and brutal counterinsurgency campaigns. Washington Times, 8/5/1992, p. A9
-- Michael Pugliese