Pat Robertson's Genocidal God Has Called Him Home
The political preacher who made the religion look bad.
By Jeet Heer Twitter
TODAY 9:47 AM
When General Efraín Ríos Montt assumed dictatorial control over Guatemala after a coup in March 1982, he was able to bolster his murderous rule by calling on a special group of friends, the leaders of the American religious right. Guatemala is a predominately Roman Catholic country, but Ríos Montt converted to evangelical Christianity in 1978, becoming an adherent of the Church of the Word, a California-based sect.
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In his initial prayer for Ríos Montt, Robertson said, “Lord, we thank that your spirit is moving in Guatemala.” If one wanted to use religious language, the truth would be that, far from displaying a divine spirit, Ríos Montt’s rule turned Guatemala into Hell on earth. As The New York Times noted in its obituary for the dictator, Ríos Montt was “determined to crush the Guatemalan insurgency” and
intensified the scorched-earth campaign that had been waged by his predecessor, Gen. Romeo Lucas García. In his first five months in power, according to Amnesty International, soldiers killed more than 10,000 peasants. Thousands more disappeared. Hundreds of thousands fled their homes, many seeking refuge across the border in Mexico. Nearly all victims were indigenous people of Mayan extraction.
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Ríos Montt’s regime was one of the most ferocious violators of human rights the world has seen since World War II. Yet, when the killing fields of Guatemala were at their bloodiest, Ríos Montt had no more vocal supporter in the United States than Pat Robertson. Speaking on The 700 Club in support of Ríos Montt’s counterinsurgency program, Robertson intoned, “He who wields the sword does not wield it in vain.” This is only slightly more elegant than Ríos Montt’s blunt statement of faith: “If you are with us, we’ll feed you. If not, we’ll kill you.”
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In her 2020 book To Bring the Good News to All Nations, Trinity University historian Lauren Frances Turek observes that evangelicals like Robertson had a worldview that led them to credulously accept Ríos Montt’s false claim that leftist guerrilla were committing most of the violence. Turek notes, “Had U.S. evangelicals consulted the Mayan and Catholic refugees who fled across the border into Mexico to escape army violence, they might have heard a different, more realistic perspective on the situation. Instead, they and the Reagan administration backed Ríos Montt, aiding and abetting genocidal state violence in the process.”
More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/pat-robertson-obituary/
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