On Thursday last week, former Guatemalan president Alfonso Portillo was sentenced to five years and 10 months’ imprisonment for accepting US$2.5 million in bribes from Taiwan during his term in office between 2000 and 2004.
The payments were for public libraries. With adult literacy at about 75 percent in Guatemala, this was commendable. Instead, the money ended up in Portillo’s pocket, as he benefited from Taiwan’s craving for diplomatic recognition. Despite assurances from successive administrations that checkbook diplomacy does not feature in Taiwan’s foreign policy, Portillo said neither side was under any illusions.
Although the case scraped local headlines, little mention was made of a statement by the Guatemalan Foreign Ministry that Taiwan had agreed to submit a report. This pledge came in March, days after Portillo submitted a guilty plea in New York. Since then, Taipei has been conspicuously quiet.
Responding to inquiries, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) spokesperson Anna Kao (高安) reiterated the government’s rhetoric about foreign aid being founded on “seeking legitimate goals, acting lawfully and exercising effective administration.”
This dissembling cant flies in the face of the facts.
Yet the administration continues to throw money at allies, trumpeting the benefits to the citizens of these countries.
“All the aims are to help,” Kao said. “We are always thinking how the programs can be of positive influence for the people of our diplomatic allies.”
Guatemalan library goers might not see things in such an altruistic way.
Privately, ministry sources confirmed that Taiwan is indeed assisting Guatemala with its inquiries. Yet not, it appears, in a similar case involving former Salvadorean president Francisco Flores. Salvadorean President Mauricio Funes was reported to have recalled El Salvador’s ambassador to Taiwan to force Taipei’s hand in facilitating an investigation. MOFA strenuously denied any dispute, insisting that Salvadorean Ambassador Marta Chang de Tsien returned home to vote in the presidential elections. Why it took her a month to resume her duties was not explained.
Taiwan’s involvement in Guatemala runs deep. In May last year, Colin Alexander wrote in these pages of the need for Taiwan to come clean over its role in the Central American civil wars of the 1970s and 1980s. Alumni of Fu Hsing Kang College featured prominently in death squads that terrorized Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, and the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) contras.
The figurehead of Guatemala’s deaths squads, was Mario Sandoval Alarcon, a man who declared: “If I have to get rid of half of Guatemala so the other half can live in peace, I’ll do it.”
Alarcon strengthened ties with Taiwan in the early 1970s when elements of the military were receptive to overtures from China.
Taipei has always maintained that it offered only political warfare training — politicization of the military to pave the way for transition to democracy based on the Taiwan model and propaganda techniques for the indoctrination of the masses. Physical coercion, officials were adamant, was not part of the curriculum.
In Counterrevolution in China, an informative but fawning, account of General Wang Sheng’s (王昇) implementation of the political warfare program at Fu Hsing Kang, Thomas Marks supports this position.
“That individuals, subsequent to their training, may have participated in abuses, seems clear enough. That those abuses had nothing to do with the specifics of the training they received also seems clear,” he said.
Marks’ conclusion is corroborated by accounts from officers who were involved in the political warfare program. General Hector Gramajo, who personally oversaw many massacres of indigenous Guatemalans, spoke in glowing terms of the benefits of his nation’s Taiwan connection, saying it helped sow the seeds for democratization, albeit through military means.
“It’s the ideal place to train Guatemalan officers,” Gramajo told a reporter in a 1988 interview. “While the old man Chiang [Kai-shek (蔣介石)] kept saying the mainland was bad, now they are our brothers! Now Taiwan speaks of democracy, freedoms and political party organizing.”
One of Fu Hsing Kang’s most notorious graduates was Salvadorean Major Roberto D’Aubuisson. “Blowtorch Bob,” as he was known, oversaw the torture and murder of thousands of his compatriots during El Salvador’s civil war and the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.
D’Aubuisson described the course in Beitou as “the best class I ever studied,” stating that political legitimization of the military was what he valued most.
“Those lessons were what I applied when ... we started organizing civic groups,” he said.
There are indications that counterrevolution Taiwan-style involved more than winning hearts and minds. In their book Inside the League, authors Scott Anderson and John Lee Anderson quote Guatemalan Lieutenant-Colonel Domingo Monterrosa as admitting that pyschological terror against civilians also featured in the Fu Hsing Kang program.
While there is little concrete evidence that the Beitou courses included the practices for which attendees gained notoriety, Taiwanese must have known what kind of men these were. A US defense expert who visited the college in the 1990s told me he was stunned to see photographs on the walls featuring Latin American military figures implicated in human rights abuses.
Taipei did more than offer training. Along with Israel, South Africa, the Saudis and a host of nebulous front companies, Taiwan was a proxy for former US president Ronald Reagan’s funding of right-wing “freedom fighters.” In the best-known case, Taiwan played a part in the Iran-Contra affair, funneling two payments of US$1 million to the FDN through Oliver North in 1985 and 1986.
It is well-documented that Taiwanese advisers were in Central America when the murder and mayhem was at its apogee.
Virginia Garrard-Burnett, national coordinator of the Guatemala Scholars Network, who lived in Guatemala in the early 1980s, confirms Taiwanese boots were on the ground.
“The Taiwanese presence was all over... There were Taiwanese military trainers, Taiwanese fish farms — investment when others would not invest in Guatemala — and, rather suddenly, new Taiwanese restaurants that sprouted up in Guatemala City, presumably to serve the Taiwanese expat population,” she said.
The Central American region is now free of civil strife and the support that Taiwan currently offers is of a more mundane nature: troop deployments and strategy, logistics and air force training are among the courses that are taught at Fu Hsing Kang.
A current attendee revealed that recent donations to Guatemala have included two helicopters. In the past, these might have been used for troop drops in mountains and jungles as part of “pacification campaigns” against native Guatemalans. The inaccessibility of highland regions remains an issue, though these days, the purpose of such donations is to preserve life in these areas rather than snuff it out.
Taiwan’s record in Guatemala is not uniformly negative. Assistance projects helmed by Taiwanese technical experts have yielded benefits for the Central American nation in the fields of agriculture, health care and information technology.
Despite these achievements, the ugly side of Taiwan’s diplomacy should not be ignored. If Taiwan cannot be open about its past transgressions, how can it be trusted to refrain from future misconduct?
James Baron is a freelance writer and journalist based in Taiwan.
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