Strategies of Discourse Comprehension - Teun A. …

1 Strategies of Discourse ComprehensionTeun A. van DijkWalter Kintsch1983 New York: Academic PressGUATEMALA: NO CHOICES*Compared with the relative shades ofgray in El Salvador, Guatemala is a,study in blackand white. On the left is acollection of extreme Marxist-Len inistgroups led by what one diplomat calls a pretty faceless bunch of people. Onthe right is an entrenched elite that has dominated Central America smostpopulous country since a CIA-ba cked coup deposed the reformist governmentof Col. Jacobo Arbenz Guzm n in 1954. Moderates of the political but alive in E1 Salvador, have virtually disappeared in Guatemala-joining more than victims of terror over the last tifteen vears.

2 Thesituation in Guatemala is much more serious than in EI Salvador, declares oneLatin American diplomat. The oligarchy is that muchmore reactionary. and thechoices are far fewer. Zero :The Guatemalan oligarchs hated Jimmy Carter for cutting off in 1977 to protest human-rights abuses-and the right-wingers hiredmarimba bands and set off firecrackers on the nightRonald Reagan was considered Reagan an ideological kinsman and believed they had a specialfriend inWhite House aide Michael Deaver, whose former PR firm hadrepresented a Guatemalan businessmen s group, Los Amigos del Pa s (Friendsof theCountry).

3 But after a year of Reagan, the Guatemalans have beendisappointed. If Reagan s team has proved friendlier than Carter s, the demands for political moderation continue to grate on the Guatemalans. Asone diplomat in the Guatemalancapital puts it. leverage on the regime is zero. Cold Shoulder:The Guatemalans have snubbed visiting some of them communists. They have even given the cold shoulder toReagan s special emissary, Gen. Vernon Walters, who visited Guatemala twicelast year. On the first trip Guatemala s President Romeo Lucas Garcia finallyagreed to receive Walters at the last minute.

4 On the second visit the President splane was preparing for takeoff just as Walters s landed. They feelthey arewaging our war in Central America, and we re not helping them. says oneAmerican in Guatemala. They say, We d rather do it with you-but with you orwithout you-we ll do it . The government is certainly making every effort to do it. Guatemala hasacquired Brazilian armored vehicles and an array of arms and equipment fromFrance, Yugoslavia, South Korea and Romania. But the principal ,ourre ofweapons for the Lucas Garcia government appears tobe Israel.

5 The GuatemalanArmyis equipped with everything from Israeli-made cartridge belts and helmetsto Galil assault rifles, Uzi submachine guns and araw transport planes. TheIsraelis are also reported to be training radio*Copyright 1982 by Newsweek,Inc. All rights reserved, Reprinted by permissionfromNewsweekMarch 1, 1982, p. at a recently opened military-communications school in now that the Reagan Administration has loosened Jimmy Carter s militaryembargo, the Guatemalan Army patrols the countryside inAmerican-madetrucks, jeeps and , Reagan can hardly mend relations with a Guatemalan Government thatseems to have made murder an official policy.

6 More than 13,000 people havebeen killed since 1978, and the State Department estimates that 300 more aremurdered each month. The morning papers are full of reported killings bydesconocidos (unknowns). Most murders seem to be the work of right-wingdeath squads like the Secret Anti-Communist Army, widely assumed to becovert agents of the government. A missionary, John Arnold Miller, waskilled two weeks ago, the seventh cleric murdered in fourteen months. And inthe village of Uspantan last week 53 peasants were rounded up and government blamed guerrillas, but the evidence was skimpy.

7 There are nopolitical prisoners in Guatemala, former Vice President Francisco VillagranKramer once remarked. Only political murders. Hydra :The wholesale killing has not yet daunted the regime s guerrillaopponents. Earlier this month the four principal guerrilla groups announced theyhad joined in a Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity. Within hours ofthe declaration Guatemala City was almost blacked out by a series of bombblasts-evidence that unification may work to the advantage of the estimated3,000 to 5,000 guerrillas.

8 They may also be bolstered by assistance and trainingfrom Communist-bloc countries. Last summer the government discovered morethan 25 guerrilla safe houses stocked with Chinese and Soviet-bloc weapons,including a cache of M-16 rifles whose serial numbers matched those leftbehind in Vietnam. In 1981 there were 383 reported clashes with guerrillas-almost four times as many as the year before. We have been able to pacifysome regions, says Col. Jaime Rabanales Reyes. But the guerrillas are like ahydra-their heads always show up in some other place.

9 The choices facing the United States in Guatemala are few and can hardly hope for a centrist political solution: the same ChristianDemocrats the United States supports in El Salvador continue to be decimatedin Guatemala. In the last eighteen months 238 Christian Democratic leadershave disappeared. Some diplomats think the extreme right is destroying themoderate center precisely to preclude the sort of reformist so lution that theUnited States advocates in El Salvador. Ultimately the polarization serves thecause of the leftist revolutionaries.

10 The growing strength of the left conceivablycould persuade the United Statesto back yet another Central Americandictatorship-this one, in Guatemala, the most brutal of them ROHTERin Guatemala CityStrategies of DiscourseComprehesionStrategies ofDiscourse ComprehensionTeun A. van DijkDepartment of General Literary StudiesSectionof Discourse StudiesUniversityofAmsterdamAmsterdam,Th e NetherlandsWalter KihtschDepartment ofPsychologyUnivcrsityof ColoradoBoulder,Colorado1983 ACADEMICPRESSA Subsidiaryof Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, PublishersNew YorkLondonParis San Diego San Francisco Sao Paulo Svdnev TokyoTorontoCOPYRIGHT 1983, BY ACADEMIC PRESS, INC.