"SURVIVING VICTIMS ARE UNEARTHING THE TRUTH: Exhuming Decades of State Terror in Guatemala"

- by Grahame Russell and John Marshall
July 1997

• page 1[this page]
  Intro
  Dealing with the past
  
  
• page 2
  A "Dark Chapter" of the Cold War
  The Strategy of Mass Murder and Terror
  The Exhumation Process
  
  
• page 3
  Justice and Reconciliation
  Conclusion
  Action

"It is like a horror story... The more bodies that are dug up, the harder it is to believe." -- Jorge Mario Garcia LaGuardia, Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman.

INTRO

Since the United States orchestrated the overthrow of the democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, close to 200,000 Guatemalans have been murdered or disappeared by the military. Tens of thousands of these victims were dumped in mass graves, particularly in the heavily Mayan highlands where the Army directed the bulk of its "scorched earth" military campaign.

Now, with the war over, Guatemala's ruling and power-holding sectors are professing respect for human rights. For these elites, the fundamental task now is to "modernize" the country --by further integrating it into the global economy. Dealing with the crimes, loss and destruction of the past two decades is not a priority for the leaders; indeed most are trying to avoid dealing with the past -- forgive and forget.

Since the end of the Cold War, anti-Communist rhetoric has been replaced by the rhetoric of 'human rights'. Adherence to international human rights standards is seen not as a legal responsibility or as an ethical good, but as a means to gain support from international sources of finance and commerce.

With the successful conclusion of the peace negotiations with the armed guerrillas, the Guatemalan government has had significant success on the international public relations front. In early 1997 the international community pledged nearly US$2 billion in aid for the implementation of the various negotiated peace accords.

On April 15, the Geneva based UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) down graded its human rights monitoring of Guatemala; and on May 1 the country was actually named to be a member of the UNHRC for the 1998-2000 session, and will be responsible for monitoring human rights in other countries.

The following day, May 2, Guatemala was rewarded by the United States with the lifting of its trade probation under the General System of Preferences. The probation had been imposed due to worker rights violations.

A further sign of the country's reentry to the good graces of the international community is the open discussion among US officials of reinitiating military aid to Guatemala which was cut off in 1990. And tourism is booming. According to the New York Times, reservations for tour packages have increased by 20 percent over last year and are expected to continue to rise "as word gets out of the country's return to stability and the new opportunities for tourism that come with it."

The Times failed to mention that this "stability" was constructed on a foundation of horror and suffering. Guatemala's Mayan majority -- labeled as "subversive" and a threat to national security just a few years ago --constitutes the main attraction (though certainly not the main beneficiary) of the country's thriving tourist industry; sacred Mayan ruins are prime draws for many tourists who know little or nothing of the extreme repression carried out against Mayan people in the recent past.

Dealing with the past

While human rights monitors agree that the level of political and civil rights violations has declined dramatically since the early 1980s, they are disappointed with the lack of legal punishment of military officers who ordered and carried out some of the worst atrocities, a clear sign that the Army

continues to dominate the civilian institutions of government. While military officials have not received a blanket pardon from the government for the acts of repression, few have been brought to trial, much less convicted for political crimes committed.

Despite State sponsored impunity, since 1992 'surviving victims' (family and community members of massacre victims, many of whom were raped and tortured themselves, many who were eyewitnesses to the massacres) have been at the forefront of the struggle for justice in Guatemala. They will remain victims of the repression until they can find a way to address their loss, suffering and trauma.

These survivors lead the efforts to excavate the hundreds, possibly thousands, of clandestine cemeteries, to properly rebury their dead, to make the truth known, and to initiate legal proceedings against those responsible for these crimes.

But the movement for justice faces a number of obstacles, primarily from the still powerful Army. "We are never going to accept that an official of the Armed Forces be put on trial for having fought against people who wanted to impose a Marxist-Leninist system," said then army spokesperson Colonel Alvaro Rivas in December, 1993. Death threats against people involved with the exhumations, human rights activists, government prosecutors and judges are still common.

The Army is not alone in obstructing justice in Guatemala. The US government, which financed, trained and equipped the Guatemalan military for decades, bears tremendous responsibility for the repression committed. The reluctance of the United States to declassify documents related to human rights violations in Guatemala (information concerning everything from the 'modus operandi' of the State repression, to the names of the guilty parties) serves to withhold crucial evidence from survivors, evidence that could be used in Guatemalan and international courts of law.

It is instructive to note that while the United States supports war crimes tribunals in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the US has adopted the position of forgive and forget in Guatemala, a country where the US is deeply implicated in the repression. "I prefer to focus on the present and future," said Thomas "Mack" McLarty, President Clinton's special envoy to Latin America, after being asked by reporters if the United States regretted having orchestrated the overthrow of Arbenz in 1954.

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Addressing several hundred US and Central American business people attending the "US-Central America Trade and Investment Forum" in Guatemala City on March 13, McLarty said "I don't understand our mania about [responsibility for the coup and civil war]," encouraging the assembled entrepreneurs to forget about "the dark chapters of the Cold War."

Even as McLarty made these remarks, the CIA was preparing to declassify documents related to the 1954 coup, documents which reveal several new aspects of what the United States called "Operation Success." Most details of the US role in the overthrow remain hidden, as the CIA declassified less than 1% of the documents related to the coup, and even those were heavily censored.

What is clear, however, is that the relationship between the CIA and the Guatemalan Army grew closer after the coup and continued throughout the blood-soaked 1980s. The CIA maintained Guatemalan military officials as paid agents at least until 1995 when the revelations in the case of murdered guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, husband of US lawyer Jennifer Harbury, exposed the involvement of CIA assets in serious human rights violations. After initiating legal proceedings against the US government, Harbury has received many documents which, among other things, show that CIA officers in Guatemala, and their supervisors in Washington, DC, had specific knowledge of the locations of secret prisons and clandestine graves.

Forward>

• page 1[this page]
  Intro
  Dealing with the past
  
  
• page 2
  A "Dark Chapter" of the Cold War
  The Strategy of Mass Murder and Terror
  The Exhumation Process
  
  
• page 3
  Justice and Reconciliation Conclusion
  Action