To a lay person, economics can be mystifying; mixed with politics, it can defeat reason completely. As for George W. Bush economics, they are as incoherent as any explanation he is forced to make without cue cards.

Now he wants to restore funding to the Guatemalan military. Where will he get the money?

As everyone knows, Bush started with a budgetary surplus of over $200 billion. He pushed his tax cuts through, reducing our budgetary cushion. 9/11 hit and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq plunged us into a sea of red ink: We now have a deficit of $7.7 trillion. He pushed his pharmaceutical bill through by misleading Congress as to its actual cost. Now he seeks to destroy Social Security as we know it. The bottom line is that if W has his way, the cost of his adventures in the Persian Gulf will burden our children with a crippling debt, particularly since the trade deficit is out of control, and will leave Americans under 55 without the social safety net that Franklin D. Roosevelt bequeathed to us. And now, as if his two wars weren't draining our resources sufficiently, he wants to send money to the Guatemalan military.

According to the New York Times, in 2005, the United States sent Guatemala $350,000 for tightly-controlled purposes, in part to provide peacekeepers for Haiti. In 2006, Bush wants to allocate $900,000 to bolster the Guatemalan military and lift sanctions that have held back millions of dollars from it. While $1,200,000 is a drop in the bucket when seen in light of our $7.7 trillion deficit, it can pay for a lot in a country where the per capita income is $4100. 75% of the population falls below the poverty line, that is, they have a daily income of about U.S.$1 per day.

Guatemala is not post-World War II Japan or Germany. The renegade powers that ravaged the twentieth century were defeated and subjugated by the Allied Powers led by the United States. The terms imposed by the Allies constrained the development of armies in both Germany and Japan. Today, sixty years after the end of the war, Germany participates in NATO which protects all of Europes member nations under the direction of the United States; Japan has a police force but no military. Moreover, both Japan and Germany had substantial foreign aid to rebuild their economies.

Guatemala's civil war ended after the state-sponsored terrorism and murder of over 200,000 Guatemalans, most of whom were killed by the army. The economics of daily life for poor Guatemalans did not improve after the war and the sharp rise in street crime and drug-related crime has left the people reeling. In part, prolonged civil wars leave impoverishment in their wakes: Infrastructure, agriculture, foreign investment and tourism all suffer.

Furthermore, the vast numbers of Guatemalans who fled to the United States and were deported and repatriated have brought an unexpected set of problems to Guatemala and El Salvador especially: Central American youth who grew up in the poor exile communities in Los Angeles and other large American cities, brought drug and gang violence with them when they were returned to their countries. The result is an unprecedented level of street crime in both of those countries.

The United States is implicated in the civil wars slaughter. We need not go back as far as the CIA's coup of the democratically-elected president Jacobo Arbenz in the 1954. During the civil war, the CIA poured millions into Guatemala to suppress the insurgency. Time after time, when mass graves are exhumed, the bullets in the remains of the slaughtered are American. What did the rebels want? To live in peace, a voice in their own government; a share in the wealth of their country. What did the CIA and the U.S. government want? Stability at any cost. If that meant supporting vicious dictators like Efraim Rios Montt, the president of Guatemala who is responsible for the genocide in Guatemala, then we did it.

What would Central America look like today if the United States had used the millions of dollars to help build industry, shore up its educational institutions, and helped to build their infrastructure? While it is true that the Somozas in Nicaragua and other regional dictators gave the world the term kleptocracy, meaning a ruling group that robbed its people blind, the United States could have given the money for tightly-controlled purposes that were humanitarian rather than military. We have a record of helping Central American countries oppress their own people. Has something changed?

Bush has rehabilitated a number of figures whose hands were bloody from their participation in the Iran-Contra affair; he has appointed John Negroponte, Elliott Abrams, Otto Juan Reich to important policy-making posts. Negroponte is now U.S Ambassador to the United Nations. Abrams has been appointed to be senior director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations at the National Security Council. Reich is Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere. It is hard to understand how a president who talks about freedom at nauseam can make such appointments. The cynicism of these appointments makes one wonder if his allocation of these funds to the Guatemalan military are his way of demonstrating that life in Central American will once again be like the bad old days under his father, Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon. If you see Oliver North on his dance card, run for cover!

Neither Guatemala nor any of the other Central American states face external threats that would require armed forces. In the nearly two hundred years since Guatemala gained its independence from Spain, there have been a few skirmishes over borders but nothing that would be regarded as a major war with its neighbors. Most of Central America's armed forces have been used to oppress their own people, usually with the connivance of the United States. To his credit, President Oscar Berger of Guatemala has cut the size of the military almost in half, but the questions still arise; Has Guatemala demonstrated its ability to maintain a peace-time military that will not be used against its own citizens in the long run? Can the United States, especially under this scofflaw president, be trusted to support a Guatemalan government that rules with a light hand?

Less than 15 years ago, Guatemala was considered by human rights organizations to have the worst human rights record in the world. In the past, Getting Congress to rescind allocations to Guatemala has been very difficult; last time, the CIA continued to fund the Guatemalan military until 1995, years after Congress had stopped the flow. Is it truly ready to strengthen an army with an ugly past? Has the army truly reformed? And can we afford to subsidize a foreign military when we are having trouble supporting our own troops and funding the non-military needs at home? We need answers to these troubling questions before we give away almost a million dollars.

Dr. Rosa Maria Pegueros is an associate professor of Latin American History and Women's Studies at the University of Rhode Island. To reach her, write to pegueros@uri.edu