President Clinton said Wednesday that U.S. participation in atrocities against tens of thousands of people in Guatemala during the Cold War was a “mistake” and should not be repeated.
He also said that political refugees should be able to find asylum in the United States regardless of what kind of repressive regime they are fleeing but that illegal immigrants must be turned back or expelled.
A UN-sponsored Truth Commission recently issued a report blaming the U.S. government and U.S. corporations for helping fuel a civil war from the early 1960s to 1996 that killed or left missing 200,000 people there, most of them Maya Indians.
The commission concluded that the U.S.-supported military was responsible for the majority of atrocities committed during the leftist insurgency.
“For the United States, it’s important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units that engaged in violence and widespread repression of the kind described in this report was wrong,” Clinton said. “And the United States must not repeat that mistake.”
Clinton made his comments at a roundtable with representatives of Guatemalan society.
The president encountered the first protests of his four-country, four-day Central American tour as Air Force One arrived from El Salvador. He remained on board until order could be restored near the National Palace of Culture, where a welcoming ceremony was scheduled, the U.S. Embassy said.
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Clinton was heckled at the ceremony by protesters standing in a park across the street. National Security Adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger later said he was told that the protest was over a domestic issue, but another source of anger might have been U.S. immigration policy.
“Most illegal immigrants are not by nature lawbreakers. Most are looking for the chance to live in dignity,” Clinton said in a speech to the El Salvador Legislative Assembly in San Salvador on Wednesday morning. “Nevertheless, we must continue to discourage illegal immigration for it undermines control of our borders . . . and even more punishes hard-working people who play by the rules and who wait for their turn to come to the United States.”
During his 1996 re-election campaign, Clinton emphasized how tough his administration was being on illegal immigration and constantly called attention to efforts to stop and return them.
But after Hurricane Mitch, which devastated several Central American countries last fall, Clinton felt it would not be compassionate to return people to countries that were ill-prepared to deal with them.
Sixty-day stays of deportation were granted to more than a thousand Guatemalans and Salvadorans after Mitch. These stays expired March 8, and Clinton refused to extend them, saying that both countries were in good enough shape to absorb the people involved.
Temporary protective status was granted for 18 months to 70,000 Nicaraguans and 90,000 Hondurans who had come to the U.S. before Dec. 31, 1998. That runs out in the summer of 2000. The status was granted because those countries have suffered much more extensive damage from Mitch.
The big issue, however, is over the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act passed by Congress in 1997. It provided automatic amnesty to Cubans and Nicaraguans who sought political refuge in the United States. The 227,000 refugees from El Salvador and 63,000 from Guatemala were not granted such status because they fled from right-wing governments, which often were supported by the U.S., rather than left-wing governments.
Clinton has asked the INS and the Justice Department to see whether the relief act can be extended to cover those from El Salvador and Guatemala, some of whom have been in the United States for nearly 20 years. If the act cannot cover those people, Clinton has said he will work with Congress to enact legislation that would cover all political refugees regardless of what kind of government they fled.
“Our treatment of people from Central America should reflect what they suffered rather than who caused the suffering,” Clinton told the legislative assembly.
The governments of El Salvador and Guatemala say that many of their citizens who are now in America send back considerable amounts of money to their relatives, who would suffer greatly if those funds were to stop.
According to Doris Meissner, director of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, who is traveling with Clinton, there are 600,000 illegal immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua in the United States, while legal immigration from those four countries numbered 40,000 last year.
Clinton was on the third day of a four-day trip to focus attention on rebuilding Central America after Mitch.
But he used the opportunity to focus attention on a different kind of suffering.
“No one can forget that just a few years ago the people of Central America were suffering from a legion of manmade disasters far more cruel than anything nature can bestow on us,” Clinton said.
Clinton only obliquely mentioned the U.S. role in propping up a variety of right-wing dictators. He said it was “a time which provoked in the United States bitter divisions about our role in your region.”
He did not apologize but he did say: “I hope the people of Central America now see the United States in a new way–as a partner, a friend, a colleague in the process of strengthening democracy and reconstruction and reclaiming your rightful future.”