8B
Monday, April 10, 1995
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Guatemalans still suffering
The Associated Press
GUATEMALA CITY — Lilies droop amid the weeds and dying grass around a dirty slab of concrete at Verbena Cemetery. A grim chapter of Guatemala's bloody past is buried underneath.
"There are about 15,000 people" in the grave, said Luis Humberto Rivas, the cemetery director.
They were poor or forgotten, their bodies never claimed. Some were among the "disappeared" — people kidnapped and killed by security forces and "death squads" in attempts to stamp out a leftist revolt.
For the past four decades, the United States — and especially the CIA — stood beside the Guatemalan government as it fought leftist insurgents in a ruthless struggle. The war killed perhaps 120,000 people, most of them civilians, and drove at least 40,000 into exile.
Florencio Morales Rojas, a 75-year-old cemetery worker, said many of the unclaimed bodies arrived at Verbena during the rule of Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia in 1978-82. "There were 12 to 15 a day," he said
The bloodshed was thrust back into the news in the United States last week after a U.S. congressman claimed a Guatemalan colonel on the CIA payroll was involved in killing an American citizen, Michael Devine, in 1990 and Efrain Bamaca, a captured guerrilla married to an American lawyer, in 1992.
He said he did not know how many were political killings, but the rate of nameless coffins arriving at the cemetery doubled. "There were stacks and stacks of them," he said, giggling slightly.
"We are surprised by the unexpected interest of the government of the United States in the participation of the CIA ... because it has always been known," said Nineth Montenegro, coordinator of the Mutual Support Group, which claims a membership of 10,000 relatives of the disappeared.
Army rule and CIA influence have long been taken for granted in Guatemala, Central America's most
populous nation. Army officers, many retired, have occupied the presidency for most of the past 120 years. Some have been elected freely, some through fraud. Some have taken power in coups. Generals have been heroes of the left, champions of the right.
In 1954, the CIA organized and ran a coup that toppled the elected leftist government of Gen. Jacobo Arbenz. In 1960, it set up camps to train Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba.
The rebel movement, now mostly comprised of highlands Indians, grew out of a failed 1960 coup by leftist army officers angry about the Cuban camps.
Once a viable military movement, the rebels now number perhaps 1,000 in four groups and are seen as more of a misance than a threat.
Social activists, religious workers and union leaders were murdered in the cities. Paramilitary death squads operated in the 1960s and 1970s.
Officials in both countries openly say the CIA aided Guatemala's intelligence services despite a human rights record that led Presidents Carter and Bush to suspend U.S. military aid.
The United States wanted "strong government, tough government, anti-Communist government. That was the plan of the 60s and '70s, said retired Gen. Efrain Rios Mont, president in 1982-1983 and now head of Guatemala's Congress.
"In the '80s they began with human rights. And the policy changed there. It appears today as the great defender of human rights," he added. "Who? The one who was paving to violate human rights."
The levels of payments admitted by officials is not high.
Acting CIA Director William Studeman told a Senate committee Wednesday that financing to Guatemalan intelligence agencies peaked in 1989 at about $3.5 million a year. A White House official indicated an additional $1 million a year went to the CIA's own activities in Guatemala.
Financing had fallen to about $1 million a year, Studeman said, before President Clinton on
Wednesday cut off training and liaison funds for Guatemala's military intelligence unit, G-2.
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G-2 and a branch of the general staff known as "Archivo" have long been accused of routinely using torture and murder — the sorts of deaths allegedly suffered by Michael Devine and Efrain Bamaca.
The colonel named in the Devine and Bamaca cases, Julio Roberto Alpirez, has denied working for the CIA or being involved in the deaths.
In a videotaped interview, which he later recanted, Sgt. Noel Beteta of Archivo claimed murders were common among low-ranking agents.
"Eliminating people, your hands get stained with blood. It is important to secure one's loyalty," said Beteta, who was convicted of killing anthropologist Myrna Mack in September 1990, five months after the Devine murder.
Mack's sister, Helen Mack,
charges that the military's habit of
protecting fellow officers corrupted
the whole军力.
"They dig themselves in to avoid that anyone is implicated," she said. "When one of them is sentenced, he begins to talk, and when one of them begins to talk, it is difficult to maintain the whole chain" of protection.
Ms. Mack works with a human rights group named for her sister, who had been collecting data about peasants driven from their homes by the army'.
President Ramiro de Leon Carpio, Guatemala's third consecutive civilian president, gained a reputation for courage as the country's human rights prosecutor before taking office in 1993.
He has shaken up the congress, reformed the courts, pushed forward with peace talks and abolished the president's huge, private "discretionary fund," effectively giving up the chance to easily and legally become a millionaire.
But he has failed to clearly control the army, and observers from the United Nations to Amnesty International say political crime in Guatemala still often goes unpunished.
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