Guatemala Aid Package Boosts Bell Helicopter Sales

Last month's lifting of the U.S. embargo on military sales to Guatemala was good news to Bell Helicopter Company of Fort Worth, Texas. The bulk of a new aid package of $6.36 million requested by the Reagan Administration will be used to obtain spare parts for Huey helicopters made by Bell.

Bell Helicopter is a division of Textron, Inc., a leading defense contractor. Textron ranked 21st in foreign military sales in 1980 with $8.2 million.

The Huey helicopter is a popular war machine. It was widely used in Vietnam as a scout vehicle and gunner, and is capable of transporting 15 troops or 5,000 pounds of external ordnance - rockets, machine guns or grenade launchers. Its slim fuselage makes it hard to hit from the ground; military experts consider it the most effective counter-insurgency weapon in Central America.

Bell has sold 20 to El Salvador's junta, and an equal amount to the government of Honduras. El Salvador is in the midst of a violent civil war, while Honduras has become the base of operations for U.S. efforts to destabilize the government of Nicaragua.

But recent studies of Bell sales to Guatemala over the last few years suggest that the company may have skirted the arms embargo by selling Guatemala "commercial" helicopters easily converted to military use.

In 1977, when the Carter Administration initiated the embargo because of alleged human rights abuses by the Guatemalan government, Bell had sold the military government 9 Huey helicopters and 10 additional Bell 212 and 412 "civilian" models. According to a recent report by London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, over the last two years Bell sold the Guatemalan government 23 civilian helicopters, worth approximately $25 million, in spite of the embargo.

The spare parts which the Reagan Administration wants to send to General Efrain Rios Montt's government can easily be mounted onto these "civilian" helicopters and used by the Guatemalan government in its fight against leftist guerrillas.

But Bell has done more than sell Guatemala the copters. In 1981 and 1982 the company also trained Guatemalan pilots to fly - frequently in the U.S.

Multinational Monitor has obtained copies of flight training records indicating that at least 20 Guatemalan pilots took part in training exercises at Flight Safety International, a Bell facility in Fort Worth. The forms indicate that individual pilots have passed their ground-school and cockpit procedures and are eligible for flight training.

Bell trainers deny they are involved in Guatemala's internal politics. "We only sell them commercial helicopters and that's it," Pete Flores, a Bell employee told a Texas reporter. "They do have a war going on, but I had nothing to do with it." Flores recently spent two months in Guatemala doing maintenance work for Bell.

According to the training documents, the last pilots to train at the Bell facility completed their training on March 20 of last year, a week after Rios Montt took office in a coup.

In announcing last month's sales of military equipment to Guatemala, State Department spokesman John Hughes said a "dramatic decline" in political killings and human rights abuses had taken place in Guatemala since Rios Montt took power. After meeting with the dictator in Honduras last month President Reagan declared that the general is "totally dedicated to democracy" and has simply gotten a "bum rap" from his critics.

Tom Harkin (D. Iowa) and Rep. Michael Barnes (D.MD), chairman of the House Inter-American Affairs Committee, oppose the sale and may try to reduce the amount. But it's not likely that there is enough opposition on Capitol Hill to completely block the sale.

Allan Ebert-Miner is a free-lance journalist living in Washington. He writes for Interpress Service, Guardian.