The Fromson File

The recent death of Francisco Villagran Kramer in Guatemala was reported in the New York Times on the back page. It was not considered major news outside his country. But to me, as a journalist at the time reporting on the bizarre and bloody politics of his country traceable to the ruling military junta that Villagran served as vice-president, it was.

International human rights organizations thoroughly misunderstood his motive and in 1997, they helped to block an appointment he so wanted as a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. He actually was a distinguished citizen and a lawyer, not a general. He truly was hopeful that his presence inside the government would serve as a brake on those who denied Guatemala the democracy he cherished. He failed though for many years.he served his country with distinction, helping to defend the rights of the working class population.

The atmosphere in his otherwise beautiful country was overshadowed by the violence that characterized the nature of life under most dictatorships in Central America. As a freelance columnist for a political newsletter, I accepted an invitation to visit the country from an organization in Guatemala identified as the Freedom Forum. A public relations agency, representing it in Los Angeles, Deaver and Hannaford, arranged for the press tour. Its major work was in behalf of Governor Ronald Reagan. Believing that Reagan was a likely victor over President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 U.S. election, I wanted to determine the likelihood of American foreign policy toward Guatemala and other military regimes in Latin America.

It did not take long to confirm my suspicion. Our hosts met us in Guatemala City at the airport dining room, all wearing political lapel buttons that read: DOWN WITH JIMMY CASTRO!, an intentional dig at Reagan’s target, President Jimmy Carter. The next evening, four blocks from the hotel, six civilians known to be critics of the military junta were murdered in cold blood. The following morning, a schoolteacher, who was a member of a labor union, was shot down, walking to her automobile. Both of her breasts were cut off. The president of Francisco Marroquin University drove me and a half dozen other American reporters to his campus in an armored vehicle preceded by a sapper squad, checking for potential land mines in its path. Inside the wagon, accompanying us, were four armed men with sub-machine guns.

It did not take long to get the idea of the atmosphere that engulfed us. Paranoia about a threat from Communists was rampant.

Later that afternoon, we were tipped off about a protest rally by the student union at San Carlos University. It was interrupted by what appeared were two policemen who made no secret of their identity. Several students were shot by the armed men who were seized by the angry students. One was lynched, and the other doused with gasoline and set on fire. The wounded students were rushed to a nearby hospital that soon after was torched by a group of soldiers.

That brought me to the home of Vice-President Villagran who had recently taken a leave of absence from his vice-presidency. Coincidentally, he was living under self-imposed house arrest in a home adjoining the hospital, angered as he was by the mounting violence toward critics of the junta. Coincidentally, I was tipped off by a group of students who told me Villagran occupied an adjoining home.

I walked over and rang the doorbell and shortly thereafter, a maid appeared at the door with Villagran, a distinguished man in his late 40s. I identified myself and showed him my passport. I explained that I was an American journalist and would like to interview him. He smiled and said in good English that “this is not the appropriate time.” But he indicated that if he had a telephone number, he would call me some day soon, almost as if he knew a time would come. I gave him a card and left..

Several months later, I received a surprise telephone call in Los Angeles from a woman in suburban Virginia who identified herself as Maria Eugenia Villagran. She said her father had been secreted out of Guatemala by friendly National Guardsmen, that her father had my phone number and would like to talk to me, because he had promised me some day that would happen. Villagran and I had a friendly conversation over the phone. I recalled that since our last brief meeting, Reagan had been elected as the next U.S. president and I wondered how the Guatemalan junta would react with a fellow conservative in the White House. Villagran laughed. “Sr. Fromson, the difference is that in your country, conservatives are reasonable men. In ours, they are cavemen.”

The following afternoon, he held a news conference in Washington D.C. to announce his resignation as vice president.of Guatemala.

Villagran died at the age of 84 last Tuesday. His son was the former Guatemalan ambassador to the United States, and his daughter is the president of the Supreme Electoral College.

(My article, describing some of the central figures likely to emerge in a Reagan Administration, predicted how they might influence a hard line policy in Latin America. Editors of California commissioned my report, but then decided against publishing it and remunerated me with a “kill” fee after an internal debate over how it might be regarded by incoming members of a new leadership.)

Update: Villagran’s grandson, Javier Segura Villagran, responded to this post with a very nice comment:

Dear Mr. Fromson.
I would like to thank you for your response to the ny. times article about my grandfather, your article made more justice than what the research the nytimes did obviously they were limited to google on there research capability, the woman you said called you on the phone from virginia is now my mom, i have always admired my grandfathers convictions and determination he worked until the day he died. he was a true scholar and a man to follow, the family is putting together a publication of papers and articles that were never published and i would like to make sure you receive a copy. i really did enjoy reading your article.
have a great week

Tags:   Francisco Villagran Kramer · guatemala · Jimmy Carter · Ronald ReaganNo Comments.

At the Presidential news conference earlier this week, Barack Obama soberly dismissed his Republican torturers in a way that reminded old White House watchers of President Harry Truman who once took to a campaign train to whistle-stop across the country, ridiculing his “do-nothing” adversaries in the Congress.

Of course, there always will be missing legislators to alibi that their absence from Washington is necessitated by the urgent need to visit their families or otherwise keep in touch with their contributors in an approaching election year. It used to be called milking the cow.

This year, the Republicans, who aren’t running for president, are pre-occupied with finding ways to rail against Medicare and other social programs. That prompted the president to sarcastically challenge the Republicans to stop protecting their fat cats’ tax privileges. He ticked off owners of corporate jets, who pocket an estimated three billion dollars over 10 years, and hedge fund managers whose oil and gas tax credits net $21 billion. More than a week ago when he unveiled plans for a defense budget build-down that’s been on many arms control experts’ minds for more than a year.

Professor Gordon Adams, a veteran scholar who has studied defense budgets and arms control for a generation at American University in Washington D.C., wrote recently in the Washington Post that the President’s proposal is to “reduce the projected U.S. national security budget by $400 billion over the next 12 years.”

As Adams explained it, the reduction “is being driven by concerns over deficits, debt and a declining interest in having the United States act as a global cop.” That’s what Americans want to hear in an era of hard times: halting the outflow of U.S. dollars before more of the U.S. treasury is sucked dry in part by the idealistic notion of subsidizing democracies in parts of the world that clearly demonstrate they do not have the stomach, the experience or the will for it.

Faced with devastating unemployment, saddled with bills to pay, bankruptcies or mortgages to cope with and medical bills or illnesses to confront, it does not take much brain power to realize that the country is being exhausted, demoralized, and its national spirit sapped by deficit spending.

Americans are desperate for change. They hunger for their imagination to be aroused and their can-do energy to find its way back into the country’s bloodstream. If anyone can do that it would seem to be Barack Obama in much the same way as he demonstrated it in Chicago’s Lincoln Park and at the Democratic National Convention Center three years ago when he inspired the nation and accepted the nomination for President.

But he needs to bark or campaign once again, to call the nation to rally to his side, and it can’t be done when so many Americans have been jobless for more than a year, when families are being forced from their homes and unfortunate children are facing the pressures of starvation and homelessness. Is this America? Of course not. At least it’s not the America I remember from my days of growing up in three different foster homes during the Great Depression.

There’s little doubt that the challenge is up to the President. He has it in his will and
capacity to energize the Democrats and independents by demanding that the Republicans abandon their gospel of tax cuts for the rich and hard times for everyone else. The GOP reveres them like the Holy Grail, which has to be put to rest once and for all. Otherwise, it will come down to class warfare which is nothing less than an obscenity.

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A week ago when I described the Emperor and Empress of Japan and their visit to victims of the tragedy that struck their country I received an informative response from a Japanese friend; a widely-published writer.

My initial impression as a GI during the U.S. occupation of Japan was that until the end of World War II, the American public largely believed that Emperor Hirohito, the ruler of Japan, was to be regarded as a war criminal and should have been hanged for the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But the successor to Hirohito, his son Akihito and wife, the Empress Michiko, proceeded to behave themselves, not only as much more modern than his father but more open to democratic ideas. It illustrated Japan as a burgeoning democracy and noted that the royal couple was symbolic of the change.

It turns out that I was somewhat behind the times in my blog. My friend explained that the Emperor and his wife had visited shelters for the victims of other natural calamities more than ten times, first in 1991. The royal couple had been enthroned in 1989. Michiko is a commoner and a college graduate. Japan, I was told, apparently is so susceptible to earthquakes that it does not receive the kind of foreign news coverage that it did in the recent disaster when an earthquake, a tsunami and dangerous radiation leaks emerged from one of the nearby damaged nuclear power plants not far from the ‘quake’s epicenter.

According to Fumiko Mori Halloran, the Emperor and Empress visited shelters on March 30 and April 8th and the Imperial Household Agency announced that the royal couple plans to visit as many shelters as possible without hindering relief efforts. Not only has the couple been briefed in detail, but their children, Crown Prince Naruhito and his wife, Masako and his younger brother, Prince Akishino and his wife Kiko have also begun to visit shelters.

At the height of the crisis, the Emperor and Empress opened their hospital to those in need in need of medical emergency. They also opened their hot bath facilities in their summer palace to a nearby shelter and they sent food “such as thousands of eggs, butter, cheese, other meats and vegetables to nearby shelters. To save electricity, they ordered electricity at the palace be turned off for a few hours every day. They sometimes had dinner under flashlights or candles.”

I could go on with details Ms. Halloran said has come from the newspaper, Sankei Shimbun’s daily online homepage in Japanese that also reports the imperial family’s daily schedule in English. On March 16, the emperor broadcast a video message to appeal to the nation to be united and overcome the national crisis. The newspaper reported that during their visits to shelters the current Crown Prince dressed informally, sat on mats on the floor and talked informally to make the victims feel comfotable.

This remarkable humanitarian effort is a contrast to the image of confusion and indifference by the Japanese government that has permeated some of the foreign reporting throughout
the current crisis.”

Tags:   Akihito · dai-ichi · Emperor Hirohito · Japan · Japan earthquake · japanese emperor · media · MichikoNo Comments.

Only those of us who served in the U.S./ Occupation of Japan in the 1950s might have shaken our heads after Thursday’s frontpage photos in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times that showed Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko consoling evacuees from the debacle that struck Japan last month.

Prior to the ascendancy to the Royal throne after the death of Akihito’s father, Emperor Hirohito, the notion that commoners would ever have had a view of the Japanese ruler, let alone sit with him and his wife 60 years later and have a conversation with the God-like figure would have been unthinkable. Throughout the Second World War, Hirohito was regarded by millions of Americans as a war criminal, responsible for the conflict that followed the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. His image appeared in photographs and editorial cartoons that mocked him. There even were demands in America for Hirohito to be hanged.

But times began to change once the U.S. Occupation took hold and General Douglas MacArthur served as commander in chief of American governance of the defeated Japanese. He decided to treat Hirohito with a peaceful reverence. Hirohito was allowed to retain his position as Emperor and he and his wife lived in isolated Imperial splendor in their palace across the moat, directly in front of the Dai Ichi bank building which had become MacArthur’s headquarters. No question was left about who was in charge. It was no longer the Japanese military or the Emperor.

In 1951, I was a GI in Tokyo for the Armed Forces newspaper, Pacific Stars and Stripes, when Hirohito’s son, Akihito, then a teenager, passed me and lines of Japanese on the street, enroute to the Imperial Palace where he would formally be invested as Crown Prince and immediate heir to the throne in the event of his father’s death. Having been introduced to a wealthy commoner named Michiko Shoda at a tennis match, Akihito was reportedly smitten immediately. According to published reports later, the Crown Prince said that he had hit the ball to Michiko and she hit it back repeatedly. He “immediately lost to her persistence.”

Nonetheless, no one ever took their friendship seriously because it would have been unthinkable to have a commoner placed on or near the throne. In fact, the Imperial Household Agency had submitted a list of more than 800 suitable ladies of Imperial nobility who could be considered as the future Empress of Japan and Michiko Shoda was not on the list.

Nonetheless, she was a woman of considerable means and more than that, she was college-educated in Japan who also enrolled in classes at Harvard and Oxford. She understood what it meant to surrender her independence. But in November 1958, she accepted Akihito’s marriage proposal and to the chagrin of his parents and the Imperial household, Michiko was ordained as Crown Princess. Her influence on Akihito was striking. She insisted on raising their own children and she gave birth to three of them. The independent streak had gradually invaded the home of Imperial rule and it was symptomatic of democratic ideas that eventually began to take hold in all of Japan.

That’s what made Thursday’s photograph of the Emperor and Empress so striking to me. But the history behind that picture was totally ignored by American newspapers that published it, probably because most of the editors were either too young or just totally oblivious to the changes that gradually were underway in all of Japan more than a half century ago.

Tags:   Akihito · dai-ichi · Douglas MacArthur · Emperor Hirohito · Japan · Japan earthquake · MichikoNo Comments.