missions. (Passed in 1974, the Hughes-Ryan Act requires the president of the United States to report all covert operations of the CIA to at least one Congressional committee. The Boland Amendment was a triad to amendments enacted between 1982 and 1984 aimed at limiting U.S. assistance to the CIA-financed Contras in Nicaragua.)
“After World War II,” Roman Catholic writer Penny Lernoux writes in her People of God,
“the Vatican, the OSS, elements of the SS, and various branches of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta joined … to help Nazi war criminals escape….”
Documents reveal that New York Cardinal Francis Spellman, head of the Knights in the U.S. from the 1940s to the 1960s was directly involved in the 1954 right-wing military coup in Guatemala during which at least 200,000 indigenous Maya were massacred and in which the CIA has acknowledged complicity. [Spellman was also linked to organized crime by his long involvement with Archbishop Paul Macinkus of Chicago, former head of the Vatican Bank, and a suspect in the highly suspicious death of Pope John Paul I a month after his
Guatemala’s reputation as a habitual human rights violator, with “disappearances,” torture and wholesale murder topping the list of crimes, is well earned. Although civilian regimes have been in place since 1986, development of a civil society and democratic institutions continues to limp along, stunted by the legacy of a brutal past and further obstructed by a corrupt and apathetic judicial system disinclined to prosecute human rights violators. Gone amok, trained by the U.S. Army School of the Americas (antiseptically rechristened the “Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” in 2001) the Guatemalan military, the national police and urban constabularies have repeatedly stained the “Land of Eternal Spring” red with blood.
Who helped bankroll the “Dirty War” in Central America? Benefactors include an oddball assortment of powerful confederates. Among them is Robert Macauley, founder and chairman of AmeriCares, the New Canaan, Connecticut-based disaster relief agency… and the Knights of Malta, the Vatican’s mouthpiece, a patron of the CIA and a regular conduit into the Isthmus. Sympathizers and cheerleaders include the once-presidential hopeful, Pat Buchanan, and W. R. Grace Company head, the late J. Peter Grace, a devout Catholic associated with CIA-assisted coups and known to have tried to scuttle progressive international labor movements. Grace, who once referred to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo as a “homo” and former New York Mayor David Dinkins as a “pinkins,” also had a fondness for Nazis. In 1958, he interceded to facilitate the immigration of Dr. Otto Ambros, one of the developers of Zyklon-B gas, used with deadly efficiency in Nazi extermination camps. Convicted at the Nuremberg trials for mass murder and for supplying slave labor, Ambros was later hired by Grace as a consultant. Other leading players in a scenario scripted by the religious right, U.S. spydom and the military, lay bare the magnitude of their collective agenda. They were all eventually identified and exposed in the press, all the eager instruments of a strategy aimed at destabilizing fledgling democratic regimes and replacing them with docile plutocratic minions willing to underwrite America’s politico-economic objectives while endorsing the Vatican’s unfinished crusade.
What special bonds do Robert Macauley, J. Peter Grace and the Knights of Malta share? They all have close ties to the CIA and profess a strong penchant for ultra-right-wing causes. AmeriCares, whose declared mission is to offer relief worldwide “regardless of race, religion or political persuasion,” became active in Central America in the early 1980s, ferrying donations to U.S.-backed military regimes. It also contributed to and took sides in U.S.-engineered armed conflicts and routinely flew its armada into ideological battlefields directly linked to U.S. strategic interests.
Macauley had a long and intimate relationship with George Herbert Walker Bush -- they were childhood chums –- and he was a frequent guest at the U.S. intelligence apparatus Bush was to head as CIA director. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the former president’s deftly marketed “Thousand Points of Light” which, like all capitalistic solutions to severe socio-economic problems, did nothing to relieve misery in Central America and everything to further bolster the ruling pro-U.S. kleptocrats.
In 1985, disgraced Lt. Col. Oliver North got Unification Church head, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, to fund $350,000 worth of supplies to the Contras. Three years earlier, the U.S. had withheld assistance to Sandinista Nicaragua, which had been devastated by a hurricane. It couldn’t get its planes in fast enough when Violetta Chamorro, whose presidential campaign had been sponsored by the U.S. to the tune of $9 million, defeated the Sandinistas. On 28 February, 1990, barely three days after the election, AmeriCares’ first shipment brought in 23 tons of medical supplies “with love, from the people of the United States to the people of Nicaragua.” Nicaraguan diehard Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo took possession of the first shipment and turned it over to the well-connected Knights of Malta for distribution to a select list of recipients. President H. W. Bush’s youngest son, Marvin, was aboard the next AmeriCares flight that landed days after Chamorro’s inauguration. He was met by a Knights of Malta ambassador -- none other that Roberto Alejos Arzú, whose plantation had served as a CIA training ground for the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, and a man known for his long association with some of Guatemala’s most reactionary elements, including high-ranking clergy and military officers implicated in heinous human rights abuses.
Other prominent figures romped in this large incestuous bed: former CIA chief of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton; General (and later Secretary of State) Alexander Haig; former Nixon-Ford treasury secretary, William Simon; Reagan’s envoy to the Vatican, William Wilson; and U.S. Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, a “consultant” to Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, who sponsored a bill allowing U.S. Air Force transports to ship goods for AmeriCares, a privilege accorded no other relief organization.
Pope John Paul II first clashed with supporters of Liberation Theology during his 1983 visit to Central America. In Managua, he publicly humiliated the Rev. Ernesto Cardenal, a prominent human rights advocate whom he suspended from the priesthood. He paid a courtesy call on Salvadoran President Armando Calderon Sol, a member of the same political party that engineered activist Archbishop Romero’s assassination and masterminded the massacre of 900 men, women and children at El Mozote. He then cavorted with barrel-chested colonels and generals, and granted audiences to high society women sporting low-cut dresses and dripping with diamonds -- instead of kneeling at the grave of six Jesuits slain by U.S.-trained death squads. The Pontiff then “retired” scores of vocal Latin American liberal clerics.
Hastened by papal nepotism strongly biased in favor of diehard bishops, the purge of progressive clergy gained new momentum in Latin America. Tragically, in the most Catholic domain on earth, the “Golden Rule” was subverted by martial attitudes that view the faithful, at best as unruly sheep, at worst as the very enemies of the state. Astute and opportunistic, the Church tapped into the reactionary power base to maintain both doctrinal monopoly and political custody over the masses.
There is a precedent -- and a disquieting parallel. A thousand years ago, bloodhounds of orthodoxy sniffed heresy and the carnage began. People who held unacceptable views were flung into dungeons. Accused of harboring heterodox opinions, they were tortured with inventive cruelty, then killed. Often, before dying, they were forced to confess that they worshipped the devil (translation: they toyed with free thought); indulged in hostile beliefs (translation: they hungered for knowledge); and conspired against the established order (translation: they spoke out against corruption and intellectual turpitude).
This obscene quest, inspired and abetted by successive papal dynasties, was prelude to six “Crusades” during which hundreds of thousands of “infidels” -- Moslems and Jews -- were slaughtered. Religious fervor later fanned nearly four centuries of inquisitorial frenzy that devoured Europe and sent another half a million innocent people to the stake while their possessions, confiscated as “evidence,” fattened the Church’s coffers.
Like Karl Marx, who despised