Anyone familiar with the political career of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan knows that fascism was his modus operandi. From his role as anti-socialist FBI snitch in Hollywood, to his brutal anti-democratic repression of the free speech movement as governor of California, Reagan was the archetypal ugly American.
So when I read of his cozy relationship with the brutal fascist dictator of Guatemala he assisted in the campaign of genocidal terror against the indigenous Maya, I was not surprised that a man so grotesquely inhumane as Rios Montt — who soon goes on trial in Guatemala for genocide — found a loyal companion in Reagan.
And while it is good that Montt is finally being tried, it is disturbing that Reagan’s self-identified ideological protege, Barack Obama, is now pursuing the same agenda of U.S. hegemony in Guatemala and the rest of Latin America.