WHERE WE ARE GOING [and] WHERE WE HAVE BEEN

                                                  WHERE WE ARE GOING

Many people in Alaska the last few months have been wondering if global warming has stopped. Here in South-Central AK, Anchorage had it's 3rd coldest April since records began at the airport location in 1940, as well as abundant snowfall, making for prime nordic skiing. And most areas across the state had similar conditions. May continued in this vein. On the 17th, it was snowing right here at the Chugach Front Research Centre, and we picked up about 15 cm! (while our research-assistant Kluane was getting his birthday steak, he just turned 3, all grown up now!). In fact, it was the second-latest measurable snowfall in Anchorage, since 1940. 

In the back-country about 10 km into the Chugach mtns., from its western front, snow conditions here just at 700 metres (2300 ft) in mid May were looking much like they would in March, with excellent packed powder and very little melt.

But, as you can see from this global surface temperature anomaly plot for the month of April 2013, although most of Alaska, and south through much of Canada into the central US was below-average, much of Siberia experienced above-average temperatures of about the same magnitude of departure from the means.

This extended cold period in Alaska makes sense to us, because as we have mentioned previously, the northern hemisphere jet stream seems to be slowing down, related to the loss of Arctic sea ice cover and decreased temperature gradients from the Equator northward.

http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2013/02/arctic-amplification-is-slowing.html

 

And if the area you are in just happens to be stuck under a stationary low pressure trough in the jet stream, then cooler/wetter conditions will occur for an extended period. Warmer and drier if your area is stuck under a ridge ahead of or behind such a trough, as has been occurring in Siberia recently.

 

Latest research is also showing the melting conditions that occurred in Greenland last year, will likely become the norm in the next few decades. Which is not good news for sea-level rise scenarios.

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/widespread-melting-in-greenland-a-sign-of-things-to-come-16018

 

As you probably know, globally-averaged atmospheric CO2 concentrations have reached 400 ppm recently, up from about 280 ppm 150 years ago, before the bulk of the "industrial revolution" and large-scale fossil fuel combustion. Well, as it turns out, there have been periods in the "relatively" recent geologic past where atmospheric concentrations have been that high, or even higher. From naturally-occurring volcanic activity, it is thought. And using various "proxy" methods of reconstructing temperatures from fossil data, it turns out that temperatures in the Arctic were as much as 5-10C warmer (9-18 deg F) on average, than they are currently (and global sea levels were 10-30 metres higher!). But what does that mean, as far as climatic conditions, and the ecosystems in the Arctic, what were they like during those times?

 

Fortunately, more light is being shed on that thanks to research on-going in northern Siberia at Lake El'gygytgyn, which was never scoured away by ice sheets during the ice ages of the past several hundred thousand years. So there are actually pollen traces in sediments dating from 2.2 to 3.6 mya, providing a fascinating glimpse of what conditions were like there in a currently very cold, treeless Arctic environment. Give this article a read, we're putting in some comments with it, and also afterward we'll discuss in more detail what we think may occur here in Alaska.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130509142048.htm 

Ice-Free Arctic May Be in Our Future, International Researchers Say

May 9, 2013 — Analyses of the longest continental sediment core ever collected in the Arctic, recently completed by an international team led by Julie Brigham-Grette of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, provide "absolutely new knowledge" of Arctic climate from 2.2 to 3.6 million years ago.

"While existing geologic records from the Arctic contain important hints about this time period, what we are presenting is the most continuous archive of information about past climate change from the entire Arctic borderlands. As if reading a detective novel, we can go back in time and reconstruct how the Arctic evolved with only a few pages missing here and there," says Brigham-Grette.

Results of analyses that provide "an exceptional window into environmental dynamics" never before possible were published this week in Science and have "major implications for understanding how the Arctic transitioned from a forested landscape without ice sheets to the ice- and snow-covered land we know today," she adds.

Their data come from analyzing sediment cores collected in the winter of 2009 from ice-covered Lake El'gygytgyn, the oldest deep lake in the northeast Russian Arctic, located 100 km north of the Arctic Circle. "Lake E" was formed 3.6 million years ago when a meteorite, perhaps a kilometer in diameter, hit the Earth and blasted out an 11-mile (18 km) wide crater. It has been collecting sediment layers ever since. Luckily for geoscientists, it lies in one of the few Arctic areas not eroded by continental ice sheets during ice ages, so a thick, continuous sediment record was left remarkably undisturbed. Cores from Lake E reach back in geologic time nearly 25 times farther than Greenland ice cores that span only the past 140,000 years. [there are no lakes like this in Alaska, that could provide that long of a record, eds.. ]

"One of our major findings is that the Arctic was very warm in the middle Pliocene and Early Pleistocene [~ 3.6 to 2.2 million years ago] when others have suggested atmospheric CO2 was not much higher than levels we see today. This could tell us where we are going in the near future. In other words, the Earth system response to small changes in carbon dioxide is bigger than suggested by earlier climate models," the authors state.

Important to the story are the fossil pollen found in the core, including Douglas fir and hemlock. These allow the reconstruction of vegetation around the lake in the past, which in turn paints a picture of past temperatures and precipitation. [the fact that Douglas fir and hemlock trees were growing in this now-frigid treeless Arctic environment, must have meant that conditions were similar to those in the US states of Washington, Oregon, northern Idaho, and western Montana, where these trees are prevalent now. Here is a photo we took in 9/2010, below, near Mt. Adams, WA showing the 3740m volcano (tree line is around 2100 metres) with it's lush forests of Douglas fir, western red-cedar, hemlock, and grand fir on it's lower slopes, contrast that with the currently bare treeless slopes around Lake E. eds...]

Another significant finding is documentation of sustained warmth in the Middle Pliocene, with summer temperatures of about 59 to 61 degrees F [15 to 16 degrees C], about 14.4 degrees F [8 degrees C] warmer than today, and regional precipitation three times higher. "We show that this exceptional warmth well north of the Arctic Circle occurred throughout both warm and cold orbital cycles and coincides with a long interval of 1.2 million years when other researchers have shown the West Antarctic Ice Sheet did not exist," Brigham-Grette notes. Hence both poles share some common history, but the pace of change differed.

Her co-authors, Martin Melles of the University of Cologne and Pavel Minyuk of Russia's Northeast Interdisciplinary Scientific Research Institute, Magadan, led research teams on the project. Robert DeConto, also at UMass Amherst, led climate modeling efforts. These data were compared with ecosystem reconstructions performed by collaborators at universities of Berlin and Cologne.

The Lake E cores provide a terrestrial perspective on the stepped pacing of several portions of the climate system through the transition from a warm, forested Arctic to the first occurrence of land ice, Brigham-Grette says, and the eventual onset of major glacial/interglacial cycles. "It is very impressive that summer temperatures during warm intervals even as late as 2.2 million years ago were always warmer than in our pre-Industrial reconstructions."

Minyuk notes that they also observed a major drop in Arctic precipitation at around the same time large Northern Hemispheric ice sheets first expanded and ocean conditions changed in the North Pacific. This has major implications for understanding what drove the onset of the ice ages.

The sediment core also reveals that even during the first major "cold snap" to show up in the record 3.3 Million years ago, temperatures in the western Arctic were similar to recent averages of the past 12,000 years. "Most importantly, conditions were not 'glacial,' raising new questions as to the timing of the first appearance of ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere," the authors add.

This week's paper is the second article published in Science by these authors using data from the Lake E project. Their first, in July 2012, covered the period from the present to 2.8 million years ago, while the current work addresses the record from 2.2 to 3.6 million years ago. Melles says, "This latest paper completes our goal of providing an overview of new knowledge of the evolution of Arctic change across the western borderlands back to 3.6 million years and places this record into a global context with comparisons to records in the Pacific, the Atlantic and Antarctica."

The new Lake E paleoclimate reconstructions and climate modeling are consistent with estimates made by other research groups that support the idea that Earth's climate sensitivity to CO2 may well be higher than suggested by the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

It really is quite amazing to think that it was so much milder and humid during that time in Northern Siberia, at the latitude of 68N. For hemlock and Douglas fir trees to be able to grow there, would have meant that winter temperatures must have rarely, if ever, dropped below -40C, and probably stayed between +5C and -30C most of the time (41F to -22F). Contrast that with Yakutsk, Siberia, further south at the latitude of 62N. Until relatively recently, the average high/low temperature for January in that city was -40C/-48C (-39F/-57F)! 

 The fact that there are still no trees growing around Lake E also means that average summer daytime high temperatures are probably only 10-13C (50-56F), whilst the research is showing that temperatures there 2.2-3.6 mya were 8-10C warmer. Meaning that summer daytime temperatures there were probably routinely 20-25C (68-77F). We think that for these mild of conditions to have been able to occur there, the Arctic ocean probably stayed unfrozen through the winter, at least along the southern continental margins. Because currently, when there is a solid Arctic sea ice cover from roughly late October through April, this ice sheet acts as a continental land mass in the radiative sense. That is, radiative heat loss is very strong during clear weather during long polar nights, allowing temperatures to drop to -30C to -50C. Under open-water conditions in winter, the northern coastlines of Eurasia and North America would have been much warmer.  

The Eurasian land mass is much bigger than North America, and contains more land in the latitudes of 40N-70N. Thus in winter, when the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the sun, the Eurasian land mass cools much more strongly than does North America. Wintertime temperatures in places like China, Japan, Korea, and southern Siberia, are much colder than areas in eastern North America at similar latitudes.

Thus, we would expect that Alaska would experience somewhat warmer temperatures in winter than Lake E, once the climate system "catches up" to our current 400 ppm CO2 (and it's likely to reach at least 500-550 ppm by 2080 under current emissions scenarios). Below are the current average maximum temperatures for Yakutsk, Siberia, which is at 62N. Summer highs there are warmer than Lake E, because it is further south, and much further removed from the Arctic coast.

http://www.worldclimate.com/cgi-bin/data.pl?ref=N62E129+1200+0048255G2

The numbers in this link are the average maximum temperatures for Fairbanks, here in Alaska. Note how much milder they are than those for Yakutsk.
http://www.worldclimate.com/cgi-bin/data.pl?ref=N64W147+1300+502968C

Before going any further, let's look at some climate data for an inland area in North America that is relatively moist, still has a fairly cool winter, but is mild enough to allow the growth of hemlock and Douglas fir trees. A beautiful area where these climatic conditions occurred until recently, were favoured upslope areas in the Northern Rocky mountains, in the US states of Idaho and Montana, in their northern, and western portions, respectively.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsuga_heterophylla
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_fir

As you can see, from this photo of Avalanche Creek, in Glacier National Park, Montana, it is quite moist and lush there during the summer, yet a real winter snowpack occurs, and temperatures can drop to -30C (-22F) occasionally during winter. Below are monthly mean temperatures and precipitation data for West Glacier, Montana. Period of Record : 10/1/1949 to 3/24/2013
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?mt8809

Note the relatively mild winter-time temperature averages, and the 30 inch annual precipitation (76cm). Thus, in our estimation, climatic conditions around Lake E., at 68N, must have been similar to this 2.2-3.6 mya, when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was around 400 ppm.  Siberia would still experience, even under the 400 ppm CO2 scenario, the coldest winter-time temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere. But the current coldest climate that still allows for the growth of Douglas fir/hemlock trees is in the favoured upslope areas of southern British Columbia, Canada, and northern Idaho/western Montana, USA.  That is a huge difference between the frigid Arctic climate Lake E still experiences (but that is changing). Annual precipitation values in Arctic areas like Lake E., are currently only around 5-10 inches (11-25cm). Douglas fir and hemlock trees generally only grow in climates that receive at least 18-20 inches of precipitation annually (hemlocks are an even moister species, and usually require 25-30 inches or more).

Now, since Alaska is surrounded by the Arctic Ocean, Bering Sea, and Pacific Ocean on three of it's sides, under the warmer climate scenario as found 2.2-3.6 mya, open water conditions over the Arctic Ocean and Bering Sea (except perhaps briefly in the depths of winter, a thin transitory ice cover might form), would likely lead to even milder conditions.

Under the warmer climate scenario, a good current analogue for Fairbanks, in the interior, which has very cold winters (but not as cold as Siberia!) might be The Dalles, Oregon. Fairbanks lies at only 100 metres elevation, hundreds of km inland, and so is fairly dry, receiving on average only 10-12 in. of precipitation (30.5 cm) annually. Here are climate data for The Dalles, Oregon. Period of Record : 1/ 1/1893 to 2/28/2013
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?or8407

The Dalles is 150 km inland from the Pacific Ocean, and lies in the "rain-shadow" of the Cascade Mountains, and hence is fairly dry. And heading further inland from there, annual precipitation drops even further to 7-9 inches, at the lowest elevations in central Washington, along the Columbia River. Here are the current climate data for Fairbanks, take a moment to mull that over. When the climate system "catches up" to our current 400 ppm CO2, and then even higher levels after that, eventually the Alaska Interior will likely see conditions more like those from The Dalles, Oregon, or even warmer!
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?ak2968

This also means that the current boreal forest cover throughout Interior Alaska of black/white spruce, aspen, birch, balsam-poplar, and willows, would be unable to grow under these much warmer/drier conditions. Dry valley areas like Fairbanks would transition to just having a grass/sagebrush biome, perhaps with scattered areas of aspen and ponderosa pine on cooler, north-facing slopes.

 

Now what about Anchorage, the biggest city here in Alaska, where over 50% of the people in the state live. What can we expect under the 400ppm CO2 warming scenario here? Let's look at the current data:
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?ak0285

These numbers are for the Anchorage airport, which is somewhat milder in winter, and cooler in summer, than the Chugach Front Research Centre, which lies at the foot of the Chugach mountains, 15 km further inland. Note how relatively dry it is in summer here, the Chugach mountains block precipitation that tries to move in from the south through east and northeast when there are low pressure systems in the Gulf of Alaska. Which occur there very frequently.

What we think could be a good representation of climate conditions for Anchorage under the 400ppm CO2 level scenario would be those currently experienced in Port Townsend, WA.

http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?wa6678

 

Summer-time temperatures there are fairly cool due to the proximity of the cool waters of the Strait of Juan de Fuca/Puget Sound, yet the annual precipitation is only 18.7 inches (47.5cm), due to the shadowing influence of the Olympic mountains, which blocks precipitation from the southwest through south. Note how infrequent snowfall is there, and that monthly mean snow depths in the coldest months are still zero. Forest cover around Anchorage would likely transition from the current boreal forest species of birch/aspen and white/black spruce, to the Douglas fir/ponderosa pine species found in drier coastal areas around Puget Sound, WA.

 What about around the Gulf of Alaska, where milder maritime conditions already allow thick "rain-forest" type vegetative growth to occur? Say, just 100 km south of Anchorage, in Seward, what might it be like there under the warmer scenario? Following are the current monthly averages for Seward.

http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?ak8371

 

We think a good analogue for Seward under the 400ppm CO2 warming scenario would be the conditions currently found along the Washington and Oregon coastlines, cool and moist, but lacking any but the most transitory winter snowfalls/snowcover, and rarely experiencing winter temperatures below -10C (14F). This climate allows for the rapid growth of the temperate rainforest cover of Douglas fir, hemlock, western red-cedar, sitka spruce, and grand fir. Some of these can reach 100 metres in height with 5-10m trunk diameters at their bases, in favoured areas. As we see in this photo, which your lead editor took last October, just north of Newport, Oregon, about 2km inland in a 300m deep canyon.

Here are the monthly averages for Newport, Oregon. Note the very mild winter temperatures, but still cool summers, due to the proximity of the cold waters of the Pacific Ocean.
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/cliMAIN.pl?or6032

In this case, the current thick vegetative cover found around the Gulf of Alaska coastline of Sitka Spruce and hemlock, would slowly transition to that currently found further south in Washington and Oregon. With Douglas fir, western red-cedar, and grand fir mixing in, and becoming larger, with longer growing seasons, but still-abundant moisture.

 

Now, in all these scenarios we have presented you, with climate data that could represent areas in Alaska under a future 400ppm CO2 warming, nowhere have we mentioned how long it will take for these warmer conditions to be reached. That's because this is a great unknown. Obviously, the longer this takes the better, to allow the ecosystems and humanity in general to adapt. As we mentioned previously, over the past 60 years, roughly, temperatures have warmed 3F (1.7C) on the average in Alaska.

http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2011/05/fahrenheit-2051.html

 

Temperatures will continue to warm at least another 4-8C, or more, to "catch-up" with atmospheric CO2 levels of 450-550 ppm, which hopefully will be as high as they reach, before changes in our political/economic systems allows societies to transition to renewable, non-greenhouse gas emitting power sources for energy/transportation needs (if that is even possible before dire collapse scenarios occur).

http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2010/06/run.html

 

How long will this be? We think it will be 50-80 years, at the minimum, before temperatures in Alaska, and throughout the Arctic, reach these levels. Which is a very short time geologically speaking, and would create large stresses on all the ecosystems (and already are) in the Arctic.

 

We also expect that the current trends we are seeing in our climatic conditions in Alaska will continue, and amplify in frequency and strength, as warming increases. Which will have unfortunate effects for most of us in Alaska.

http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2012/09/williwaw-woes.html

 

http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2009/03/warning-lights-are-flashing-australia.html

 

Likewise, the snowy winters we have seen recently in south-central Alaska, will transition to increasingly warmer and wetter ones, as the jet stream continues to move further north with the increasing warming.

 http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2012/04/winter-of-our-content-south-central.html

 

We do hope that climate-change modeling can help to refine timelines for the coming warming, not just here in the Arctic, but throughout the World. To help societies adjust to the coming changes, which are a matter of when, not if. For if climatic conditions in the Arctic under a 400 ppm CO2 concentration were similar to those currently in the northwestern lower 48 states, what do you think conditions would be like in California, or Arizona, let's say, when 500 ppm CO2 is reached, and then the climate system "catches up"?

 

                                             WHERE WE HAVE BEEN

 

 For a break from more serious information, we thought we'd provide you with a few pictures from our activities of the past month. During the latter part of April and into early May, your lead editor flew south to balmy San Diego, CA, where I grew up. And where my sister and brother still live. Always an interesting place to visit, with a large variety of experiences possible.

 

The immediate coastline, especially from La Jolla north to Del Mar, is our favourite area of San Diego, and where I always venture to first, and spend the most time.

Great opportunities for hiking, running, swimming, surfing, scuba diving, and kayaking can be found here, and in which we liberally partake. Kayaking around La Jolla shores beach and to La Jolla Cove, allows you to get up close to the playful sea lions which have greatly increased their numbers in that area, since I was a child in the late 1970s/early 1980s.

They sure are fun to be around, with their bellowing and playful antics, as long as you don't get too close and interfere in their activities.

Whilst on a short side trip north to the appalling dystopian urban agglomeration of the Los Angeles/Hollywood area, our great friend Erik Skye and I were able to do a nice hike in the Hollywood hills, and look back upon it absent it's usual thick air pollution.

I am always on the lookout for representative creatures of whatever ecosystem I happen to be in. And so I was very happy to see this young rattlesnake on the trail, near the top of the Hollywood hills.

These young ones can be even more dangerous than mature rattlesnakes, as they are unable to control the amount of venoum they release during a bite. Hence, I stayed at least a metre away from it.

 

My favourite hike of the San Diego trip was in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, 110 km to the east, in Palm Canyon.

http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=25225

 

Both on this hike, and in a previous one in 2012, I have seen the shy, endangered desert bighorn sheep. Always a special experience to be close among these tough, but graceful and gentle creatures. To see them nibbling on the desert vegetation, and hear the clacking of their hooves, as they clamber up the steep, rocky canyon walls.

Other denizens of this beautiful remote desert canyon were out for our enjoyment, though not knowing if they were venomous, made us keep our distance.

This Chuckwalla though, we knew not to be venomous, it was trying to elude us before we could get a good photo.

During this time, my left leg was becoming increasingly stiff and sore, due to the titanium screws and plate that were installed last October. Keeping me from running, and causing my hiking to be slower and usually painful. This metal hardware was necessary though to re-build my tibia, which was broken in the running accident that I experienced last fall.

http://akprogressive.blogspot.com/2012/10/electoral-thoughts-and-helping-hands.html

 

Surgery had already been scheduled for the 15th of this month to remove it, as it had served it's purpose, allowing me to walk again, and in it's absence, hopefully to run again. So I had to spend a frantic time after returning from my San Diego trip to prepare for this and a return to temporary disability.

 

The operation to remove the hardware went well, so far with no complications, though the leg is still exceedingly swollen and stiff. Of course, it has only been 8 days after a 15cm incision, and 5 holes (3 for arthroscopic investigation around the knee, which found good conditions, thankfully) were done. Your lead editor hopes to be able to run with the rest of the APR staff again by August. Cheers.

 

 

 

TWO WEEKS OF JUSTICE

Our apologies for the month-long publishing absence. A family vacation, combined with medical issues forced us to take a break for a bit, though of course we are always prowling the "alternative" and corporate media for important issues to offer our commentary upon. We'll include some pictures of our recent activities in a still-developing article concerning some important global warming research findings from Siberia, about the past Arctic climate 2.2 to 3.6 mya (million years ago), when atmospheric CO2 levels were around the same levels as they are currently (400 ppm).

 

                                              TWO WEEKS OF JUSTICE

There was much celebration week before last throughout Latin America and in Progressive circles in the rest of the World, when the brutal former Guatemalan dictator (and fundamentalist Christian (!)) Efrain Rios Montt was convicted of genocide against Indigenous people in his country during his rule in the 1980s. And given an 80 year prison sentence, to start immediately.

His (and subsequent Guatemalan politician's) program of scorched-earth terror on the peasantry and any other perceived "Marxists" or leftists in Guatemala was entirely supported at the highest levels during the Reagan presidential administrations in the 1980s, and it is estimated up to 100,000 people were murdered during this time. Thus it was that the long-suffering people of Guatemala, and throughout Latin America were given hope that justice can be served, and future massacred prevented, even if it takes 30 years to happen. And people in other countries were also hopeful that more recent war criminals, such as ex US Vice President Dick Cheney and other leading officials from the G.W. Bush administration could some day face prosecution for their crimes in prosecuting the illegal invasion, occupation, and destruction of the sovereign nation of Iraq. A country which was never a threat to the US, or any others.

 

But alas, the Guatemalan government just yesterday rescinded the prosecution of General Montt, calling for a new trial. No doubt under heavy pressure from US/Multinational corporate interests (who are really the US government, the so-called Corporatocracy), who have a great interest in keeping surpressed documentation of the horrible activities that occurred in Latin America in the 1970s-early 1990s. Obviously none of this is appearing in the US corporate media, and even the BBCs coverage is rather perfunctory.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-22605022

 

It will remain to be seen what will come about during the new trial, we'll certainly keep you posted. In the meantime, it is essential that as many US citizens as possible read and understand what happened in Guatemala, and throughout Latin America during the 1970s-1990s. Because many of the same people currently prominent in "conservative" politics/movements in the US were part of the Reagan Administration, and hence, knew about and supported the brutality/genocides that occurred. Here are excerpts from a great article which appeared week before last, about Rios Montt's trial, and former history.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/12-2

"Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide

More than any recent U.S. president, Ronald Reagan has been lavished with honors, including his name attached to Washington’s National Airport. But the conviction of Reagan’s old ally, ex-Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt, for genocide means “Ronnie” must face history’s judgment as an accessory to the crime

by Robert Parry

The conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of genocide against Mayan villagers in the 1980s has a special meaning for Americans who idolize Ronald Reagan. It means that their hero was an accessory to one of the most grievous crimes that can be committed against humanity.

The courage of the Guatemalan people and the integrity of their legal system to exact some accountability on a still-influential political figure also puts U.S. democracy to shame. For decades now, Americans have tolerated human rights crimes by U.S. presidents who face little or no accountability. Usually, the history isn’t even compiled honestly.

Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide

By contrast, a Guatemalan court on Friday found Rios Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced the 86-year-old ex-dictator to 80 years in prison. After the ruling, when Rios Montt rose and tried to walk out of the courtroom, Judge Yasmin Barrios shouted at him to stay put and then had security officers take him into custody.

 

Yet, while Guatemalans demonstrate the strength to face a dark chapter of their history, the American people remain mostly oblivious to Reagan’s central role in tens of thousands of political murders across Central America in the 1980s, including some 100,000 dead in Guatemala slaughtered by Rios Montt and other military dictators.

Indeed, Ronald Reagan – by aiding, abetting, encouraging and covering up widespread human rights crimes in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala – bears greater responsibility for Central America’s horrors than does Rios Montt in his bloody 17-month rule. Reagan supported Guatemala’s brutal repression both before and after Rios Montt held power, as well as during.
 
Despite that history, more honors have been bestowed on Reagan than any recent president. Americans have allowed the naming of scores of government facilities in Reagan’s honor, including Washington National Airport where Reagan’s name elbowed aside that of George Washington, who led the War of Independence, oversaw the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and served as the nation’s first president.
 
So, as America’s former reputation as a beacon for human rights becomes a bad joke to the rest of the world, it is unthinkable within the U.S. political/media structure that Reagan would get posthumously criticized for the barbarity that he promoted. No one of importance would dare suggest that his name be stripped from National Airport and his statue removed from near the airport entrance.

But the evidence is overwhelming that the 40^th president of the United States was guilty as an accessory to genocide and a wide range of other war crimes, including torture, rape, terrorism and narcotics trafficking. [See Robert Parry's Lost History.]

 

Green Light to Genocide
Regarding Guatemala, the documentary evidence is clear that Reagan and his top aides gave a green light to the extermination campaign against the Mayan Ixil population in the highlands even before Rios Montt came to power. Despite receiving U.S. intelligence reports revealing these atrocities, the Reagan administration also pressed ahead in an extraordinary effort to arrange military equipment, including helicopters, to make the slaughter more efficient.
 

Rios Montt alongside supporter Ronald Reagan. (Photo: Upside Down World)“In the tortured logic of military planning documents conceived under Mr. Ríos Montt’s 17-month rule during 1982 and 1983, the entire Mayan Ixil population was a military target, children included,” the New York Times reported from Rios Montt’s trial last month. “Officers wrote that the leftist guerrillas fighting the government had succeeded in indoctrinating the impoverished Ixils and reached ‘100 percent support.’”

 

So, everyone was targeted in these scorched-earth campaigns that eradicated more than 600 Indian villages in the Guatemalan highlands. But documents from this period indicate that these counterinsurgency strategies predated Rios Montt. And, they received the blessing of the Reagan administration shortly after Reagan took power in 1981.

A document that I discovered in the archives of the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, revealed that Reagan and his national security team in 1981 agreed to supply military aid to Guatemala’s dictators so they could pursue the goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but people associated with their “civilian support mechanisms.”

This supportive attitude took shape in spring 1981 as President Reagan sought to relax human-rights restrictions on military aid to Guatemala that had been imposed by President Jimmy Carter and the Democratic-controlled Congress in the late 1970s. As part of that easing, Reagan’s State Department “advised our Central American embassies that it has been studying ways to restore a closer, cooperative relationship with Guatemala,” said a White House “Situation Room Checklist” dated April 8, 1981.

 

The document added: “State believes a number of changes have occurred which could make Guatemalan leaders more receptive to a new U.S. initiative: the Guatemalans view the new administration as more sympathetic to their problems [and] they are less suspect of the U.S. role in El Salvador,” where the Reagan administration was expanding military aid to another right-wing regime infamous for slaughtering its political opponents, including Catholic clergy.
 
“State has concluded that any attempt to reestablish a dialogue [with Guatemala] would require some initial, condition-free demonstration of our goodwill. However, this could not include military sales which would provoke serious U.S. public and congressional criticism. State will undertake a series of confidence building measures, free of preconditions, which minimize potential conflict with existing legislation.”
 
In other words, the Reagan administration was hoping that the U.S. government could get back in the good graces of the Guatemalan dictators, not that the dictators should change their ways to qualify for U.S. government help...
 
...Reporting the Truth
U.S. intelligence officers in the region also kept the Reagan administration abreast of the expanding slaughter. For instance, according to one “secret” cable from April 1981 — and declassified in the 1990s — the CIA was confirming Guatemalan government massacres even as Reagan was moving to loosen the military aid ban.
 
On April 17, 1981, a CIA cable described an army massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory, because the population was believed to support leftist guerrillas. A CIA source reported that “the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas” and “the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved.”
 

The CIA cable added that “the Guatemalan authorities admitted that ‘many civilians’ were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants.” [Many of the Guatemalan documents declassified in the 1990s can be found at the National Security Archive’s Web site.]

 

Despite these atrocities, Reagan dispatched Walters in May 1981 to tell the Guatemalan leaders that the new U.S. administration wanted to lift the human rights embargoes on military equipment that Carter and Congress had imposed.
 
According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, when Guatemalan leaders met again with Walters, they left no doubt about their plans. The cable said Gen. Lucas “made clear that his government will continue as before — that the repression will continue. He reiterated his belief that the repression is working and that the guerrilla threat will be successfully routed.”
 
Human rights groups saw the same picture, albeit from a less sympathetic angle. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for “thousands of illegal executions.” [Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1981]
 
But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the horrific scene. A State Department “white paper,” released in December 1981, blamed the violence on leftist “extremist groups” and their “terrorist methods” prompted and supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
 
Fully Onboard
What the documents from the Reagan Library make clear is that the administration was not simply struggling ineffectively to rein in these massacres – as the U.S. press corps typically reported – but was fully onboard with the slaughter of people who were part of the guerrillas’ “civilian support mechanisms.”
 
U.S. intelligence agencies continued to pick up evidence of these government-sponsored massacres. One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province.
 
“The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance,” the report said. “Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed.”
 
The CIA report explained the army’s modus operandi: “When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed.” When the army encountered an empty village, it was “assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to. …
 
“The army high command is highly pleased with the initial results of the sweep operation, and believes that it will be successful in destroying the major EGP support area and will be able to drive the EGP out of the Ixil Triangle. … The well documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike.”
 

The reality was so grotesque that it prompted protests even from some staunch anticommunists inside the Reagan administration. On Feb. 2, 1982, Richard Childress, one of Reagan’s national security aides, wrote a “secret” memo to his colleagues summing up this reality on the ground:

 

“As we move ahead on our approach to Latin America, we need to consciously address the unique problems posed by Guatemala. Possessed of some of the worst human rights records in the region, … it presents a policy dilemma for us. The abysmal human rights record makes it, in its present form, unworthy of USG [U.S. government] support. …
 
“Beset by a continuous insurgency for at least 15 years, the current leadership is completely committed to a ruthless and unyielding program of suppression. Hardly a soldier could be found that has not killed a ‘guerrilla.’”
 
Rios Montt’s Arrival
But Reagan was unmoved. He continued to insist on expanding U.S. support for these brutal campaigns, while his administration sought to cover up the facts and deflect criticism. Reagan’s team insisted that Gen. Efrain Rios Montt’s overthrow of Gen. Lucas in March 1982 represented a sunny new day in Guatemala.

An avowed fundamentalist Christian, Rios Montt impressed Official Washington where the Reagan administration immediately revved up its propaganda machinery to hype the new dictator’s “born-again” status as proof of his deep respect for human life [as long as they are like him, eds..] . Reagan hailed Rios Montt as “a man of great personal integrity.”

By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called his “rifles and beans” policy. The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get “beans,” while all others could expect to be the target of army “rifles.” In October, Rios Montt secretly gave carte blanche to the feared “Archivos” intelligence unit to expand “death squad” operations in the cities. Based at the Presidential Palace, the “Archivos” masterminded many of Guatemala’s most notorious assassinations.
 
The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army conducting Indian massacres, but ideologically driven U.S. diplomats fed the Reagan administration the propaganda spin that would be best for their careers. On Oct. 22, 1982, embassy staff dismissed the massacre reports as a communist-inspired “disinformation campaign.”
 
Reagan personally joined this P.R. spin seeking to discredit human rights investigators and others who were reporting accurately about massacres that the administration knew were true. On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as “totally dedicated to democracy” and added that Rios Montt’s government had been “getting a bum rap” on human rights. Reagan discounted the mounting reports of hundreds of Mayan villages being eradicated.

In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in “suspect right-wing violence” with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt’s order to the “Archivos” in October to “apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit.”
 
Despite these facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala. “The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year” 1982, the report stated.
 
Indiscriminate Murder
A different picture — far closer to the secret information held by the U.S. government — was coming from independent human rights investigators. On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population.
 
New York attorney Stephen L. Kass said these findings included proof that the government carried out “virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents.”

Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass said, adding that children were “thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed.” [AP, March 17, 1983]

Publicly, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face. In June 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised “positive changes” in Rios Montt’s government, and Rios Montt pressed the United States for 10 UH-1H helicopters and six naval patrol boats, all the better to hunt guerrillas and their sympathizers.
 
Since Guatemala lacked the U.S. Foreign Military Sales credits or the cash to buy the helicopters, Reagan’s national security team looked for unconventional ways to arrange the delivery of the equipment that would give the Guatemalan army greater access to mountainous areas where guerrillas and their civilian supporters were hiding.
 

On Aug. 1, 1983, National Security Council aides Oliver North and Alfonso Sapia-Bosch reported to National Security Advisor William P. Clark that his deputy Robert “Bud” McFarlane was planning to exploit his Israeli channels to secure the helicopters for Guatemala. [For more on McFarlanes's Israeli channels, see Consortiumnews.com's "How Neocons Messed Up the Mideast."]

 

“With regard to the loan of ten helicopters, it is [our] understanding that Bud will take this up with the Israelis,” wrote North and Sapia-Bosch. “There are expectations that they would be forthcoming. Another possibility is to have an exercise with the Guatemalans. We would then use US mechanics and Guatemalan parts to bring their helicopters up to snuff.”

Hunting Children
What it meant to provide these upgrades to the Guatemalan killing machine was clarified during the trial of Rios Montt with much of the testimony coming from survivors who, as children, escaped to mountain forests as their families and other Mayan villagers were butchered.

As the New York Times reported, “Pedro Chávez Brito told the court that he was only six or seven years old when soldiers killed his mother. He hid in the chicken coop with his older sister, her newborn and his younger brother, but soldiers found them and dragged them out, forcing them back into their house and setting it on fire.

 

“Mr. Chávez says he was the only one to escape. ‘I got under a tree trunk and I was like an animal,’ Mr. Chávez told the court. ‘After eight days I went to live in the mountains. In the mountain we ate only roots and grass.’”

The Times reported that “prosecution witnesses said the military considered Ixil civilians, including children, as legitimate targets. … Jacinto Lupamac Gómez said he was eight when soldiers killed his parents and older siblings and hustled him and his two younger brothers into a helicopter. Like some of the children whose lives were spared, they were adopted by Spanish-speaking families and forgot how to speak Ixil.”
 
Elena de Paz Santiago, now 42, “testified that she was 12 when she and her mother were taken by soldiers to an army base and raped. The soldiers let her go, but she never saw her mother again,” the Times reported.
 
Even by Guatemalan standards, Rios Montt’s vengeful Christian fundamentalism had hurtled out of control. On Aug. 8, 1983, another coup overthrew Rios Montt and brought Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores to power.
 
Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to murder with impunity, finally going so far that even the U.S. Embassy objected. When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin suspected that “Archivos” hit squads were sending a message to the United States to back off even mild pressure for human rights.
 
In late November, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month, however, Reagan sent the spare parts anyway. In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too, in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the Guatemalan army.
 
By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army’s stubborn brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named Alberto Piedra, who favored increased military assistance to Guatemala. In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan’s State Department “is apparently more concerned with improving Guatemala’s image than in improving its human rights.”
 
Reagan’s Dark Side
Despite his outwardly congenial style, Reagan – as revealed in the documentary record – was a cold and ruthless anticommunist who endorsed whatever “death squad” strategies were deployed against leftists in Central America. As Walters’s “Talking Points” demonstrate, Reagan and his team accepted the idea of liquidating not only armed guerrillas but civilians who were judged sympathetic to left-wing causes – people who were deemed part of the guerrillas’ “civilian support mechanisms.”
Across Central America in the 1980s, the death toll was staggering — an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the Contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political “disappearances” in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during the resurgence of political violence in Guatemala. The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization emanating from Ronald Reagan’s White House.

It was not until 1999, a decade after Ronald Reagan left office, that the shocking scope of the atrocities in Guatemala was comprehensively detailed by a truth commission that drew heavily on U.S. government documents declassified by President Bill Clinton. On Feb. 25, 1999, the Historical Clarification Commission estimated that the 34-year civil war had claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. The panel estimated that the army was responsible for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.

The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. “The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages … are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala’s history,” the commission concluded. The army “completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops,” the report said. In the northern highlands, the report termed the slaughter “genocide.” [Washington Post, Feb. 26, 1999]
Besides carrying out murder and “disappearances,” the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. “The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice” by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found. The report added that the “government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations.” The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed “acts of genocide” against the Mayans. [NYT, Feb. 26, 1999]
 
During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala dating back to 1954. “For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake,” Clinton said.

Despite the damning documentary evidence and now the shocking judgment of genocide against Rios Montt, there has been no interest in Washington to hold any U.S. official accountable, not even a thought that the cornucopia of honors bestowed on Ronald Reagan should cease or be rescinded.

It remains unlikely that the genocide conviction of Rios Montt will change the warm and fuzzy glow that surrounds Ronald Reagan in the eyes of many Americans. The story of the Guatemalan butchery and the Reagan administration’s complicity has long since been relegated to the great American memory hole.

But Americans of conscience will have to reconcile what it means when a country sees nothing wrong in honoring a man who made genocide happen."

© 2013 Consortiumnews.com

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat. His two previous books are Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'.

Powerful stuff that. The APR feels that this is one of the most important under-reported stories from the past several years, reverberating as it does from actions/policies undertaken by parts of the US government in previous decades, through current times. We'll be sure and keep you updated on future developments. Cheers.