Guatemala: Documents show U.S. officials knew the Guatemalan Army was responsible for 1982 massacre

[Judi Lynn]

Saturday, May 08, 2010
Guatemala: Documents show U.S. officials knew the Guatemalan Army was responsible for 1982 massacre
These materials are reproduced from www.nsarchive.org with the permission of the National Security Archive


Following this week's arrest of a former Guatemalan special forces soldier, the National Security Archive is posting a set of declassified documents on one of Guatemala's most shocking and unresolved human rights crimes, the Dos Erres massacre.
On May 5, 2010, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Gilberto Jordan, 54, in Palm Beach County, Florida, based on a criminal complaint charging Jordan with lying to U.S. authorities about his service in the Guatemalan Army and his role in the 1982 Dos Erres massacre. The complaint alleges that Jordan, a naturalized American citizen, was part of the special counterinsurgency Kaibiles unit that carried out the massacre of hundreds of residents of the Dos Erres village located in the northwest Petén region. Jordan allegedly helped kill unarmed villagers with his own hands, including a baby he allegedly threw into the village well.

The massacre was part of the Guatemalan military's "scorched earth campaign" and was carried out by the Kaibiles ranger unit. The Kaibiles were specially trained soldiers who became notorious for their use of torture and brutal killing tactics. According to witness testimony, and corroborated through U.S. declassified archives, the Kaibiles entered the town of Dos Erres on the morning of December 6, 1982, and separated the men from women and children. They started torturing the men and raping the women and by the afternoon they had killed almost the entire community, including the children. Nearly the entire town was murdered, their bodies thrown into a well and left in nearby fields. The U.S. documents reveal that American officials deliberated over theories of how an entire town could just "disappear," and concluded that the Army was the only force capable of such an organized atrocity. More than 250 people are believed to have died in the massacre.

The Global Post news organization conducted an investigative report into the investigation of the Guatemalan soldiers living in the United States and cited declassified documents released to the National Security Archive's Guatemala Documentation Project under the Freedom of Information Act. These documents are part of a collection of files assembled by the Archive and turned over to Guatemala's truth commission investigators, who used the files in the writing of their ground-breaking report, "Guatemala: Memory of Silence."

The documents include U.S. Embassy cables that describe first-hand accounts by U.S. officials who traveled to the area of Dos Erres and witnessed the devastation left behind by the Kaibiles. Based on their observations and information obtained from sources during their trip, the American officials concluded "that the party most likely responsible for this incident is the Guatemalan Army."

More:
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Also posted in Editorials:
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[Peace Patriot]

1. "Nearly the entire town was murdered..."

"Nearly the entire town was murdered, their bodies thrown into a well and left in nearby fields." --from the OP

A similar thing just occurred in La Macarena, Colombia (circa 2003-2009), involving up to 2,000 bodies thrown into a mass grave, by the Colombian army and its death squads, recipients of $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid, and possibly with involvement of the U.S. and U.K. militaries. (The general in charge had been trained by the U.K. military and the massacre took place very nearby to a U.S. military base in Colombia, in a region of Colombia of special interest and activity by the U.S. military and the USAID.) The Colombian military--notorious liars--says the bodies are of FARC guerrilla fighters (as if that justifies throwing bodies into a mass grave!). Local people say they are 'disappeared' local community activists.

Similarly, the Guatemalan army and its death squad divisions were receiving massive funding from the Reagan regime to the PURPOSE of "cleansing" Guatemala of the leftist opposition--whether it be political candidates or office holders, union leaders, human rights workers, teachers and other community activists, and including a reign of terror against non-political, uneducated and very poor peasant farmers and villagers. Again, the PURPOSE of it was terror, as it is today in Colombia, where tens of thousands have been murdered by the U.S.-backed military and its closely tied rightwing paramilitary death squads, and 3 to 4 million peasant farmers have been terrorized off their farmlands--the worst human displacement crisis on earth outside of Sudan. Today. Now.

The horror of U.S. policy in Guatemala in the 1980s beggars description. 200,000 Mayan villagers were tortured and slaughtered before their families. Finding out about this horror is one of the things that motivates me to now follow events in Latin America as closely as I can and to comment about them here at DU. The least I can do is be aware of the true nature of U.S. policy in Latin America and help others to be aware of it. It has not changed. The death squad activity so rampant in Colombia over the last decade, unto today--it is on-going--is now starting to occur in Honduras, another U.S. client state, where the democratically elected president was just thrown out, with the help of the Pentagon and the U.S. State Department. Hundreds of anti-coup activists in Honduras have been murdered or 'disappeared.' This is U.S. policy. This is what our tax dollars are being used for, in Latin America--to destroy democracy, to murder its advocates, in the interest of multinational corporate looting and plundering of these countries.

This carefully worded business in U.S. State Department cables during the Reagan reign of terror, about, 'oh, gee, it looks like maybe the army did it,' would be laughable if it were not so blood-soaked. Reagan and his henchmen knew perfectly well what they were doing funding these monsters in Guatemala who approved or perpetrated the massacres. This has been made quite clear in other recently disclosed documents. I am not as convinced that Obama approves what is going on in Colombia and Honduras. With Obama, it may be more a matter of being powerless to do anything about it. I really don't know for sure. But what I do know--because I follow alternative news, and have learned to "read between the lines" of our corpo-fascist 'news'--is that U.S. policy has not changed. We are massively funding the bad guys--the fascists, the militarists, the rich and the corporate and their death squads--and meanwhile reviling and plotting against good, humane, leftist governments like those in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Argentina--countries where U.S.-backed atrocities have been exposed, where U.S. coup plots have been defeated and where the pro-U.S. rightwing has been democratically disempowered. We revile the good and fund the bad. That is the situation. And, as with so many other aspects of our government, we have no say in the matter. All we can do is be aware, put pressure where we can, work as well as we can to restore democracy here, and hope and pray that the people of Latin America have the strength and organization to maintain the democracies that they have fought so hard to achieve, and to establish democracy where it has been ravaged--as in Colombia and Honduras.

[Judi Lynn]

2. They've seen their efforts toward a better world brutally destroyed in the memory of many survivors

who have managed to avoid being slaughtered. That memory is still fresh and raw, still living, still wildly painful.

Hope that memory of what happened most recently to the people of Latin America will be vindicated this time as the survivors and their progeny attempt to create a new, stronger world where the poor will NOT be hacked to death or buried alive because of the ir politics, or simply just because they are not important to the oligarchy and corporate interests.

The people of Colombia and Honduras must surely know by now how many U.S. Americans deplore, and despise what has been done in their countries in our names, and how many real citizens hope daily for their real, continually forming solidarity. May their oppressors finally reap what they have sewn.

[naaman fletcher]

3. Is there a shred of evidence that US or UK military personnel took part?

You keep saying this (albeit that they were "possibly" involved), yet is there any proof? Has a piece of evidence emerged that either US or UK military personnel were involved?

Right now there is a leftist insurgency threatening the leftist government of Paraguay. If I said that the Venezuelan army was "possbily" involved, would you let that go unchallenged?

[Peace Patriot]

4. No, there is no evidence, except proximity, the "pacification" plan written in Washington DC

(so like the murderous "pacification" strategy in Afghanistan), the odd detail that the general in charge was U.K.-military trained, bits I've picked up about Blackwater "training" people in Colombia, and a certain smell to the whole thing--no news about it in the corpo-fascist press, and this secretive signing of a Colombia/U.S. military deal giving all U.S. military personnel and U.S. 'contractors' in Colombia total diplomatic immunity. If I had the wherewithal and power to conduct an investigation, I would begin with the nearby U.S. military base--for instance, find out if there were any sudden or odd transfers of personnel out of the country--that sort of thing. I would closely investigate U.S./Colombian military interaction during the prior five years (main period of the massacres) and so forth. It seems unbelievable that such horrors were occurring and the nearby U.S. military knew nothing, saw nothing, did nothing. Was this the unwritten part of their USAID "plan" for La Macarena? Did they observe and do nothing? Help cover up? Instigate? What the hell was going on that up to 2,000 people, whom local people say were 'disappeared' local community activists, NOT guerrillas, got slaughtered and their bodies thrown into a mass grave, under the nose of the U.S. military?

It smells! And I keep raising it because I want people to know about it and ask questions. I want to do everything I can to prompt an investigation. What was the U.S. military at the nearby base DOING while these people were being murdered, in a region in which the U.S. government had designed the "pacification"?

It's not as if the Pentagon has never covered up war crimes! It smells! It smells real bad.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Absolutely absurd anyone would ever attempt to push the preposterous claim

it could have been otherwise, that these things WOULD have been happening, and the U.S. taxpayers would still be involved on paying off the next, the EIGHTH billion of their own hard earned tax dollars upon this pathetic war on the poor of Colombia while the U.S., which has had people all over the country since well BEFORE the Plan Colombia in Bill Clinton's Presidency was created. Long, LONG before that, according to Colombian people who fled the country before 2000, sickened and horrified at what was happening to their country.

You remember the U.S. has people there who helped chase Pablo Escobar down, too, in 1993. They've even had THAT information blaring out of the History channel shows for years. I've seen DU'ers discussing it in other forums.

A great Colombian citizen living in the U.S. has indicated there were TONS of U.S. military personel assigned to Colombia, many connected to the protection of the oil company pipeline lines long ago, not to mention the U.S. military personel involved in various other details, far before Plan Colombia, concocted between 1998 and 1999, was introduced.

Paul Wellstone was the subject of an assassination attempt in Colombia after he had been investigating Colombia and drugs intensively.

Published on Saturday, December 2, 2000 by the Associated Press
Senator Paul Wellstone Takes The Lead Against 'Plan Colombia'
by Andrew Selsky

BARRANCABERMEJA, Colombia (AP) - Hard-eyed men with Uzis stood guard as Sen. Paul Wellstone stepped out of a helicopter and into a bulletproof car and drove to a meeting with human rights activists. Hours earlier, police said they discovered a bomb along the airport road.
U.S. and Colombian authorities Friday downplayed the possibility that Wellstone and U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson, who accompanied the Minnesota Democrat, were the intended targets of the bomb. Their visit marked the first time a U.S. lawmaker or ambassador had come to the deadliest town in all the Americas - a sweltering cluster of cinderblock homes on the banks of the muddy Magdalena River.

There was heavy security for the U.S. officials during their three-hour visit Thursday. But Barrancabermeja's 195,000 residents have no such protection: this year alone, 470 of them have been slain in politically motivated attacks, human rights workers say. Massacres are commonplace, and the killers are rarely caught.

Wellstone said he made the perilous journey to show support for the human rights activists, who face immense risk.

``I don't know whether I was targeted, but I certainly know that the human rights activists are targeted,'' Wellstone told an airport news conference on his return to Minneapolis on Friday.

For Wellstone, a former civil rights activist and college professor, his two-day visit to Colombia also was aimed at making a stand against Plan Colombia, a drug-eradication effort being funded by $1.3 billion from Washington. Under the plan, dozens of U.S.-donated combat helicopters will ferry U.S.-trained Colombian troops into cocaine-producing plantations to seize them from insurgents.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/120200-01.htm

[naaman fletcher]

12. In other words,

there is ZERO evidence. However, because the U.S. has done some bad things, then they probably did this too. Yeah, right.

[Bacchus39]

8. the documents implicate the Guatemalan military, not the US

the unsubstantiated claim of a mass grave in Macarena has nothing to do with the atrocities commited by the Guatemalan military.

the US was certainly well aware of the situation in Guatemala. There is nothing that demonstrates that the US was involved in the actual massacre. there is no US base in Guatemala.

the US did nothing or saw nothing because they were not there. The US document accuses the Guatemalan military.

p.s. Guatemala is not part of Colombia.

[Bacchus39]

7. there is not a shred of evidence. the US implicated the Guatemalan military

there is NO evidence the US took part. the US certainly knew of the army massacres in Guatemala. Reagan supported Rios Montt. the Guatemalan army was more than capable of murdering people without US help. Its the same old crap, nothing bad can ever happen if the US isn't involved.

[Peace Patriot]

10. Murdering leftists or poor villagers by proxy is one thing. It's called "deniability."

That's what occurred in Guatemala. Reagan and his henchmen greenlighted and funded the extinction of the leftist insurgency in Guatemala (after the U.S. had toppled the democratic government and installed heinous fascists) by any means necessary, and the Guatemalan army proceeded to wipe out entire villages on SUSPICION that they MIGHT BE SYMPATHETIC to the insurgents, ultimately slaughtering 200,000 innocent Mayan villagers. The U.S. "School of the Americas" was designed to teach Latin American military commanders to lose their consciences and do the U.S. dirty work in their countries. That is what occurred in Guatemala. It has only recently become known that Reagan was well aware of this policy. And what will U.S. taxpayers find out that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld were well aware of, in Colombia, thirty years from now, when courageous and persistent U.S. citizens dig out the secret documents about their relations with Uribe, their larding of the Colombian military with $7 BILLION of our tax dollars in military aid, and uncover the activities of the U.S. military, Blackwater, Dyncorp and other entities, against the objections of people like you who never question anything if it serves rightwing/U.S. corporate and war profiteer purposes.

Direct participation by the U.S. military in killing people in Latin American countries--whether they are native-born armed rebels or non-combatants--is in truth the sort of escalation of U.S. anti-democratic militarism that the Bush Junta would very likely be guilty of. And that is what I SUSPECT occurred in La Macarena, because "pacification" of the area was a U.S.-written plan, because of the close proximity of a U.S. military base, because Uribe and Brownfield (Bushwhack appointed ambassador) SECRETLY negotiated the signing of a document giving all U.S. military personnel AND U.S. 'contractors' total diplomatic immunity in Colombia, and for other smelly and suspicious circumstances.

The similarity between the Guatemala massacres in the 1980s and the on-going massacres in Colombia is lavish U.S. funding of the governments who are doing it and U.S. policy SUPPORTING those governments and militaries, and winking at or helping to cover up their atrocities. The horror of mass killing of non-combatants is also a similarity between Guatemala then, and Colombia now. Where they diverge is that the U.S. military has a large and active presence in Colombia. So, WHAT were the U.S. commanders and other personnel and 'contractors' DOING at the U.S. military base in La Macarena, while up to 2,000 of the citizens of La Macarena were being murdered and their bodies thrown into a mass grave? That's what I want to know.

Members of the British Parliament are investigating this atrocity and traveled to La Macarena and SAW the bodies, and described it as "a sea of bodies" and as "up to 2,000" bodies. They are investigating because of the U.K. military connection (the Colombian general in charge admitted being "trained" by the U.K. military). But it is the U.S. that has a military base close by. So WHO is investigating the possible involvement of the U.S. military? The mass grave was discovered, recently, because local children became sickened by the water that was being polluted by the rotting corpses. It is a stinking "sea" of corpses, with grave dates (but no names) from 2003 through 2009, whom local people say are 'disappeared' local community activists--in a region of special interest and activity by the U.S. military and other U.S. operatives (USAID "planners" and others), in close proximity to a U.S. military base.

You aren't concerned that there is a U.S. military base nearby? How can you not be? Really. I don't understand you at all.

There is "no evidence" of U.S. military involvement BECAUSE THERE HAS BEEN NO INVESTIGATION! Maybe they winked at it. Maybe they didn't even know about it. Maybe they ordered it--on the sly, or directly. Who knows? I don't know. I only have suspicions. Given these circumstances, an investigation should be done. If the U.S. military has been killing Colombians--whether armed fighters in Colombia's 40+ year civil war or innocents--we, as U.S. citizens and taxpayers, have a RIGHT to know it and a RIGHT to object to it. I think the circumstances are suspicious. I want an investigation.

I object in general to U.S. policy in Colombia (and throughout Latin America). But this is a particularly offensive aspect of U.S. policy--the U.S. military occupation of Colombia, the use of 'contractors' like Blackwater in Colombia, "total diplomatic immunity" for U.S. military personnel and 'contractors,' and U.S. instigation of "plans" that end up in mass murder. And if the U.S. military or its 'contractors' did more than this--actually killed Colombian citizens, combatants or non-combatants--I damn well think it is a matter of grave concern to the people of the U.S. When did Congress declare war on Colombian insurgents or innocent villagers? What the hell is the U.S. military DOING in Colombia, with "extra-judicial" murders and mass murders by the Colombian military and its death squads a COMMON occurrence? The U.S. military has been working intimately with the Colombian military all this time. What is their role? Who has been monitoring it? (The Bush Junta! Right.) You don't think there is a rather big chance that the U.S. military and/or its 'contractors' have stepped over the line? Well, you are either naive or blind.

NOBODY here is investigating this, that I know of. I want an investigation. That is my only point. I'm paying for all this militarism, including atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and in torture dungeons around the world and right there in Latin America, at Guantanamo Bay, and God knows where else, and, goddammit, I have a right to know what the U.S. military was DOING when up to 2,000 people in La Macarena were being killed and 'disappeared' into a mass grave.

Suspicion of the "authorities" is the bottom-line premise of democracy. We supposedly elect people to supposedly do our will. They are--or should be--subject to close scrutiny. Abuse by the powerful WILL occur. That is the basis on which this country was founded. And the only remedies against it are the right of free speech, the "balance of powers" among the branches of government, respect for the rule of law and free and fair elections. Government secrecy now trumps all of these remedies. (Even our elections are now conducted using 'TRADE SECRET' programming code, owned and controlled by private corporations.) Suspicion is the natural condition for democracy. Secrecy is the natural condition for abuse of power. As a citizen of a supposed democracy, I have a RIGHT and indeed a DUTY to be suspicious. I don't need "evidence" when SECRET negotiations occur, giving people in my pay--the U.S. military--"total diplomatic immunity" to do whatever they damn please in a foreign country without consequences in local law. I don't need "evidence" when there are highly credible reports of mass murder near a U.S. military base. I don't need "evidence" when the matter is being investigated in England and not here.

In a democracy, the "authorities" are guilty until proven innocent. They need to prove to US that they did NOT sanction or participate in this horror in La Macarena, not the other way around. The same with elections. They need to prove to US, by total transparency, that they did NOT fiddle election results--not the other way around. We don't need to prove anything. We have a RIGHT to the information by which government actions--whether by private corporations with lucrative contracts for electronic vote counting, or by the U.S. military--can be scrutinized. And if they won't give us that information--if there is no audit of election results, and there are no ballots by which to check for machine fraud, or there are ballots but nobody counts them (the current election conditions throughout the U.S.), or if crimes by the U.S. military are "classified" to cover them up, or given "immunity" so that local investigators can't get at the perps--we have even more of a right and even more of an obligation to be suspicious.

Defenders of the "authorities" say, "where is the evidence?" They have said it about election fraud. Now I see them saying it about mass murder near a U.S. military base in Colombia.

Yes, indeedy, WHERE is the evidence? Hm. I wonder. Where could it be? How 'bout under the rug in the Oval Office? (Nope, no WMDs there.) How 'bout in the same black hole into which my vote disappeared in 2004? How 'bout in William Brownfield's briefcase? Dunno. But that rat bastard ought to be hauled before a Congressional committee and ASKED--along with every other U.S. "authority" with any possible connection to the La Macarena massacre. The silence on this matter smells to high heaven, as does the secrecy with which the U.S./Colombia military agreement was negotiated and signed.

Silence is not evidence. Secrecy is not evidence. But both are anti-democratic and both are pointers to official crime, in circumstances like these. I SUSPECT official crimes in this case. I do not have "evidence" because, a) there is none to be had--the Pentagon and the Bushwhacks are innocent, or b) it has been covered up. It is anti-democratic, and naive and blind, to presume the first. We have a right and a duty to presume the second, in general, and in these circumstances, until a credible investigation is conducted and all the facts about U.S. military activity in La Macarena are out in the open.

[Judi Lynn]

14. Adding another bit you recall: the agreement for the intensive use of all those bases

and future use of all airports was itself conducted secretly with Uribe, without the involvement of the Colombian legislature which is required legally.

[Peace Patriot]

11. Speaking of "evidence," how about this evidence of an order to shoot at Kent State

that has been hidden for 40 years?

--

Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer

New analysis of 40-year-old recording of Kent State shootings reveals that Ohio Guard was given an order to prepare to fire
By John Mangels, The Plain Dealer
May 08, 2010, 11:56AM

The previously undetected command could begin to explain the central mystery of the Kent State tragedy - why 28 Guardsmen pivoted in unison atop Blanket Hill, raised their rifles and pistols and fired 67 times, killing four students and wounding nine others in an act that galvanized sentiment against the Vietnam War.
The order indicates that the gunshots were not spontaneous, or in response to sniper fire, as some have suggested over the years.

"I think this is a major development," said Alan Canfora, one of the wounded, who located a copy of the tape in a library archive in 2007 and has urged that it be professionally reviewed. "There's been a grave injustice for 40 years because we lacked sufficient evidence to prove what we've known all along - that the Ohio National Guard was commanded to kill at Kent State on May 4, 1970."

(MORE)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4373461

--------------------------

Officials, "authorities," police and military who commit crimes ALSO have the wherewithal to deep-six the evidence. Demanding "the evidence" regarding suspicious circumstances that point to official crime is anti-democratic and lacking in common sense. This has been proven time and time and time again--with regard to numerous official crimes including many war crimes. Maybe my suspicions about the U.S. military in La Macarena are unfounded. Why shouldn't I raise such suspicions, and repeat them, until an investigation is conducted?

In fact, there have been so many cover-ups of official crimes that it is ludicrous NOT to be suspicious about a cover-up in the La Macarena case. Among those official perps of cover-ups, the Bush Junta STANDS OUT as the most secretive of all and the most criminal of all U.S. administrations of the last half century. The circumstances warrant an investigation. We shouldn't have to wait 40 years to find out what the U.S. military was DOING in La Macarena while its people were being massacred.

[Judi Lynn]

13. Every National Guard soldier who was there that day and shot at his fellow Americans knew

what had happened and they kept that information absolutely under their collars to this day.

They got "immunity" in murdering their brothers/sisters from the U.S. Government. Just like in Colombia.

Now we've GOTTEN the evidence which everyone already knew.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Reagan and Guatemala's Death Files

Reagan and Guatemala's Death Files

By Robert Parry
http://www.consortiumnews.com/052699a1.html

Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems. The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for the optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.

The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala. The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan's White House.

Yet, as the world community moves to punish war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, no substantive discussion has occurred in the United States about facing up to this horrendous record of the 1980s. Rather than a debate about Reagan as a potential war criminal, the ailing ex-president is honored as a conservative icon with his name attached to Washington National Airport and with an active legislative push to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore. When the national news media does briefly acknowledge the barbarities of the 1980s in Central America, it is in the context of one-day stories about the little countries bravely facing up to their violent pasts. At times, the CIA is fingered abstractly as a bad supporting actor in the violent dramas. But never does the national press lay blame on individual American officials.

The grisly reality of Central America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war. The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.

The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages...are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's history," the commission concluded. The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the north, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide."

Besides carrying out murder and "disappearances," the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found. The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.

More:
http://www.converge.org.nz/lac/articles/news990610b.htm

[Judi Lynn]

9. Americans Who Tell the Truth: Jennifer Harbury

Americans Who Tell the Truth
Jennifer Harbury

Jennifer Harbury Biography
Writer, Lawyer, Human Rights Activist 1951–
“The problem, of course, lies with the realities concealed from us. This has always been the case. While the American public has slowly grappled with ongoing injustices visible within our own borders, it has long failed to discover and correct our government's abuses abroad. In the end, however, this is our government, and torture is being utilized in our names and supported by our tax dollars. We are responsible.”

By the time Jennifer Harbury entered Harvard Law School she already knew that she wanted to study civil rights law. After growing up in Connecticut and graduating from Cornell University she traveled widely in Asia and Africa witnessing first hand brutal injustice and repression in many cultures. After law school she began work in a small legal aid bureau on the Texas-Mexican border. In the early 1980s thousands of Mayans were escaping to Texas from death squads and massacres in Guatemala. U.S. immigration was sending these refugees back. Harbury decided to go to Guatemala to see for herself what was going on. Her life was changed.

In Guatemala she met Efrain Bamaca Velasquez ( known as Commandante Everardo) a leader of the Mayan resistance to the Guatemalan oligarchy’s brutal repression of its indigenous people. ( Mayan’s were 80% of the population.) She and Everardo fell in love and were married. He was subsequently captured, tortured for two and one half years then murdered without trial. Harbury conducted hunger strikes in Guatemala and in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. to try to force officials in both countries to tell her the truth about what had happened to her husband. The U.S. denied any knowledge of the situation. Finally an official in the U.S. State Department leaked the truth that the U.S. had known all along what had happened to Everardo, and that men on the payroll of the CIA had participated in his torture and murder. Harbury’s book Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala ( 1997) is a classic work of courage and truth telling, uncovering the U.S. complicity in right wing torture and violent, anti-democratic suppression of poor people’s rights.

In 2005, Harbury published another book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way, which documents the long time use of torture by the CIA. This book demonstrates that the use of torture by American interrogators at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is nothing new. She also stresses that torture is counter-productive. It does not elicit accurate information from its victims. By using torture, “We are reacting out of fear instead of thinking our way through the difficult process of conflict resolution. In the end, our use of violence and repression can only sow seeds of hatred and trauma, which in the end will produce only greater violence against us.” And, she says, “We must accept the fact that we are indeed our brothers’ and sisters’ collective keepers. If we are indifferent to the basic human needs of others, then peace will always elude us. Suffering, when too long ignored, inevitably leads to conflagration.”

Jennifer Harbury is also the author of Bridge to Courage: Life Stories of Guatemalan Companeros & Companeras (1995). In 1995 she received a Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, and in 1997 the Cavallo Award for Moral Courage. She shared this award with Richard Nuccio, the U.S. State Department official who leaked the information about the CIA’s cover-up of and complicity in the torture and murder of her husband Everardo. For this act, Nuccio was denied his federal security clearance.

http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Jennifer_Harbury.php

http://www.utexas.edu.nyud.net:8090/law/academics/centers/humanrights/img/photos/harbury_sm.jpg http://www.wcl.american.edu.nyud.net:8090/hrbrief/images/093p04.jpg http://img.fkcdn.com.nyud.net:8090/img/077/9780807003077.jpg http://news.bbc.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/olmedia/1685000/images/_1689472_harburybones_315.jpg

[Judi Lynn]

15. Alleged Guatemalan torturer lived quietly in Delray Beach

Alleged Guatemalan torturer lived quietly in Delray Beach
BY ALFONSO CHARDY
[e-mail]

DELRAY BEACH -- The one-story stucco home where Gilberto Jordán lives west of this south Palm Beach County community does not stand out in the leafy neighborhood near Interstate 95.

Jordán, born in Guatemala, blends easily into the neighborhood of immigrants who hail from such countries as Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala and Honduras. But Jordán, 54, is no ordinary immigrant. He is a former soldier in a Guatemalan army unit known as Kaibiles, a group of highly trained and highly feared fighters who in the 1980s formed special commando teams to track down and kill Cuban-backed leftist guerrillas operating in the Central American country.

But the Kaibiles also were implicated in massacres of innocent villagers. And this week federal agents swooped down onto Jordán's driveway along the 5000 block of Palm Ridge Boulevard near Military Trail and arrested him on charges related to a December 1982 massacre that left 251 men, women and children dead. The massacre at Dos Erres (two Rs) was one of the worst in Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war.

When questioned by authorities, Jordán ``readily admitted'' participating in the massacre, throwing a live baby into a well and taking other people to the well where they were later executed by other soldiers, according to an arrest affidavit filed in West Palm Beach federal court.

When an El Nuevo Herald reporter and photographer approached Jordán's house Thursday, a young man identified himself as Jordán's son but refused to give his name. He said his father was not home. ``I know why you are here and we're not giving interviews,'' he said. ``All I can tell you is that my father is a decent man, a hard working man and we know that talking to the press would do more harm than good.''

He did confirm that his father worked as a chef specializing in Italian food. ``He even learned Italian while doing his work,'' the son said. He refused to say where his father worked, but people familiar with the case said Jordán had prepared dishes at some of Palm Beach's ``country clubs.''

More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/09/1621107/alleged-guatemalan-torturer-lived.html#ixzz0nbfbWUbz