December 7 is the anniversary of The Dos Erres Massacre in 1982. This was one of the worst atrocities of the Guatemalan genocide.

This day saw a US supported elite team within the Guatemalan military enter a village of nearly 400 people suspected of supporting leftist guerillas. Males were locked in a school, and the females were locked in a church. After a search of the village produced no communist or guerilla literature, they got to work on the people. Babies were killed first. They cracked their skulls, they threw them against trees, or down wells. They interrogated the villagers, torturing then killing them one by one. Women and girls were raped, then thrown into the well. They filled in the well with the survivors still crying.

This was not an isolated incident. Over the course of the genocide of the Mayan people, they would wipe out over 600 villages, totalling more than 200,000 people. Eventually, the war ended, and much like My Lai, a few select men were chosen to take the fall. Of the 58 men present on that day alone, 4 men received lengthy prison terms. The US and Canada made a big show of extraditing them and declared that justice had prevailed.

But the truth of the matter is much more akin to another famous individual who received US aid. The truth is that the US knowingly provided training and funding for the Guatemalan military, through the 80s. The implication is clear that the US regime did NOT care about the ongoing genocide, but more on optics:

The point is the rather obvious one that only in time will we and the Guatemalans know whether President Lucas is correct in his conviction that repression will work once again in Guatemala. If he is right and the policy of repression is succeedinq and will result in the extermination of the guerillas, their supporters, and their sympathizers there is no need for the US to implicate itself in the repression by supplying the GOG with security assistance.

and how they would spin things after the war:

If the repression does work and the guerillas, their supporters and sympathizers are neutralized, we can in the aftermath of the repression work to restore normal relations with the successors to President Lucas.

Which appears to be exactly what they did. They upped the funding from 11 million in 1980 to 104 million to 1986, but they figured that so long as they weren’t actively participating in the massacres, they could either enjoy the destruction of communism in Guatemala, or show their morality after the war by saying that they didn’t support any genocide. Perhaps by offering up a few of the soldiers as scapegoats and making a big show of their extradition.