Well, Rios Montt did have the beans (for those toeing the government line) or bullets (for everyone else) thing. The civil war might have been shortened if he had been as dedicated to keeping the first part of the promise as he was to keeping the second.
It seems to me that history is telling us that the absolutely ruthless ways that the Guatemalan and Sri Lankan governments took to counterinsurgency are more likely to be successful than any post-9/11 COIN 2.0. And both of those still took decades!
One of the things an Estonian friend of mine and I share in common is time spent in Guatemala. He once told me, "You know how much I love Reagan and how much I appreciate what he did for my country, but he was dead wrong on Central America."
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