October 2, 2006

GUATEMALA: Still digging after all these years

Rights Action re-circulates this Washington Post article about the
exhumation process in Guatemala.

OF NOTE: this article predictably makes NO mention of the extensive
complicity of the United States, and other ‘western’ nations, with the
repression and genocide in Guatemala.

The extraordinary exhumation process in Guatemala is about much more than
digging up the dead and giving them a dignified re-burial. It is about
breaking the silence concerning the repression and genocide; about
overcoming fear and trauma; about re-building individual and community life;
about justice and the rule of law.

Since 1995, Rights Action has been providing funding, technical assistance
and human rights support to dozens of communities across Guatemala so that
they can dig up the past and re-build for the future. We also provide
funding to the FAFG, the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation.

Please re-distribute this article, properly citing author and source. If
you want on-off this elist: info@rightsaction.org. FOR MORE INFO: see
below.

===

EXHUMING THE PAST IN A PAINFUL QUEST: GUATEMALAN VICTIMS' FAMILIES SEEK
CLOSURE, JUSTICE, By N.C. Aizenman, Washington Post, September 28, 2006

NEBAJ, Guatemala -- A decade after the conclusion of the long civil war that
ravaged this Central American nation, Guatemalans are literally trying to
dig up their past. Spurred by a surge of requests from victims' families
this year, dozens of forensic anthropologists have been fanning out across
the countryside to search for remains of the 200,000 people -- most of them
Mayan Indian civilians -- who were killed or abducted during the 36-year
conflict.

Many were massacred by military forces and dumped into mass graves. Others
were buried hurriedly in unmarked, secret locations by relatives anxious to
avoid rampaging troops. About 40,000 victims simply disappeared after being
seized by government operatives.

Nearly every day brings another grisly discovery: skulls of toddlers
executed with gunshots to the head; corpses of young men whose necks are
still looped with the garrotes used to strangle them. Nearly every week
brings another funeral packed with weeping relatives: once-youthful widows
now wrinkled and gray, children long since grown to adulthood.

SECRET POLICE ARCHIVE
Meanwhile, in a cavernous, damp warehouse in Guatemala's capital,
investigators wearing protective masks and surgical gloves are combing
through piles upon piles of mildewed documents from a recently discovered
secret police archive, hunting for clues to the fate of the disappeared.

The current effort is hardly the first probe of wartime atrocities since
peace accords ended the conflict in 1996. But its scope and pace are
unprecedented in a country where those responsible have enjoyed near
impunity. Only two military officials have been imprisoned for war crimes,
according to human rights activists, despite findings by a U.N. commission
that government and allied paramilitary forces committed nearly all of the
atrocities.

Much of the bloodletting occurred in the late 1970s, when the
military-backed dictatorship that had been battling leftist guerrillas
expanded its targets to include anyone critical of the government --
including students, priests and union members. But the slaughter reached its
peak in the early 1980s, when the military launched a scorched-earth
campaign through the countryside to eliminate any potential support for the
guerrillas from the long-oppressed Mayan Indians. Hundreds of villages were
burned, livestock destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.

The remains of fewer than 5,000 victims have been returned to their
families.

The anguish of those still searching was palpable among the two dozen Mayan
Indians who attended a recent Exhumation near this town in the central
Guatemalan department of Quiche. Most were subsistence farmers and manual
laborers who could speak only their native Mayan language and could ill
afford to take time off from work. Yet day after day they hiked to the
grave site atop a mist-shrouded mountain -- the women bearing small children
strapped to their backs with colorful blankets, the men shouldering shovels
to help the forensic team dig for bodies.

'I DON'T THINK IT'S HER'

Jacinto Bernal, a 56-year-old with weathered skin, blinked back tears as he
watched an anthropologist brush away dirt from the skeleton of a woman who
appeared to be in her thirties and may or may not have been his wife, Maria
Perez. She was gunned down by a military helicopter in 1985, he said,
leaving him to raise their four young children on his own. "I don't think
it's her," Bernal muttered miserably. "She was struck in the back of the
head, but it looks like this skull has a hole in the front." There was
little else to go on.

Like others who used the spot as a secret burial ground during the 1980s,
Bernal had been forced to sneak there after dark and could no longer
remember exactly where he had buried his wife's body.

A few feet away, in a different group of peasants, Petrona Bernal, 45,
squatted by a grave containing the tiny bones of a young child whom she
hoped would prove to be her baby boy. He was born in 1982, shortly after
Bernal's village was destroyed. "We lived on the run," she recalled. "All
we had to eat was herbs and flowers." Malnourished and weak, she had given
birth to her son in the forest, only to watch the infant die of hunger days
later. Ever since, Bernal said, she has ached to recover the boy's body and
give him a proper Christian burial.

Until now, she had not dared to return to the secret grave site. Many
members of civil defense patrols, who carried out atrocities at the
military's behest, still live among the communities they once terrorized.
Many military leaders who directed the war remain powerful -- including Gen.
Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator who today heads one of the largest
parties in the legislature. Ríos Montt has repeatedly denied ordering the
hundreds of massacres documented during his 1982-83 tenure and has even
questioned whether they took place. Forensic workers, lawyers and activists
seeking to uncover war crimes have also faced repeated threats. Several
have been killed.

But thanks in part to an infusion of foreign funds, private forensic teams
and grass-roots organizations dedicated to helping indigenous peoples have
expanded their efforts to file claims with the state to authorize
exhumations. The campaign also received a boost in 2004 when the newly
elected president, Óscar Berger, publicly apologized to the victims of
wartime atrocities on behalf of the government. He has established a
commission to compensate them as well as help fund some of the forensic work
this year.

Back in the late 1990s, noted Fredy Peccerelli, head of the Guatemalan
Forensic Anthropology Foundation, his organization was a tiny outfit able to
conduct only about 10 exhumations a year. This year his staff of 80 has
already reached 120 sites. They expect to recover about 450 bodies by the
end of this year, and about 1,000 per year in the near future. Even so, at
that rate it will take decades to recover even a fraction of the total
number of victims.

Finding and identifying the 40,000 who went missing is an even greater
challenge. Many were pulled off buses or back roads and taken to military
bases far from their home provinces to be tortured by interrogators. Of the
650 bodies Peccerelli's group has recovered from exhumations at military
bases, only 220 have been identified. The rest are being stored in stacks
of cardboard boxes at the foundation's headquarters, awaiting a new
initiative to collect and compare DNA samples from victims and their
relatives that Peccerelli hopes to begin soon.

A MASSIVE POLICE ARCHIVE

Another potential source of leads is the recently discovered secret police
archive. Deputies of Guatemala's human rights ombudsman stumbled upon it
accidentally in July 2005 when they were investigating complaints that
explosives were being unsafely stored in the area.

The documents number more than 80 million pages and date as far back as the
1880s. Stacked from floor to ceiling in room after room, they have been
badly damaged by water, rats and insects, and do not include records from
precincts in several regions where the worst atrocities occurred. However,
buried in the mountains of paper are priceless finds like death certificates
for unidentified bodies found by police. By comparing the fingerprints on
the certificates with those on the national identity cards of missing
victims, said Peccerelli, "you can find if there's a match and then search
for the body at a specific cemetery."

Alberto Fuentes, who is overseeing the preservation and analysis of the
archives, said investigators have also come across a few arrest warrants for
people detained for "political crimes" who later turned up dead -- including
grandmothers and babies. But he cautioned that it would take time to find
enough documents in the archives to mount a legal case against their
killers. "This is a project of 20 years," he said.

The evidence generated by the recent exhumations has also failed so far to
spur a rise in prosecutions. "We still have a weak state that is scared of
the military," said Frank LaRue, one of Guatemala's leading human rights
advocates. "Local prosecutors are authorizing the exhumations. But when the
results come in, they don't initiate criminal proceedings. So we're having
all these exhumations but no trials."

Even if prosecutors were to open cases, convictions could be hard to
achieve. While Guatemalan judges have sentenced some members of the civil
defense patrols, suits against those who issued their orders have been tied
up in legal wrangling or languished in the attorney general's office for
years.

Efforts by Guatemalans to obtain justice from foreign courts have also met
with obstacles. In July, Judge Santiago Pedraz of the Spanish National Court
issued arrest warrants for eight former military officials, including Ríos
Montt, on charges of genocide, torture, terrorism and illegal detention.
Guatemalan authorities have not acted on the warrants, and Guatemalan courts
blocked Pedraz from deposing the accused during a fact-finding trip in June.

Nonetheless, Peccerelli remains hopeful, pointing out that it took years of
activism and hundreds of exhumations just to get the government to admit
that civilians had been killed. "Now it is accepted that those massacres
occurred," he said. "We're just waiting for the next step, and we know that
the work we're doing will contribute."

===

WHAT TO DO:

* The #1 line of work in favour of global justice and equality is to fund
and support local organizations so that they can lead their own struggles in
defense and promotion of development, the environment and human rights.
Rights Action channels your donations to dozens of community-based
organizations in Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Chiapas, El Salvador;
* Get involved in education and activism work in your home community
concerning the negative impacts of North American economic and military
policies on community-controlled development, the environment and the human
rights of local populations in Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Chiapas, El
Salvador;
* Consider coming to these counties on an educational-activist delegation;
* Invite us to give educational presentations in your home community;
* Get on our e-mail and snail-mail lists.

TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATIONS: Make check payable to "Rights Action" and mail
to: United States: Box 50887, Washington DC, 20091-0887. Canada: 509 St.
Clair Ave W, box73527, Toronto ON, M6C-1C0. Credit-card donations:
www.rightsaction.org.

QUESTIONS, SUGGESTIONS: info@rightsaction.org; 860-352-2152,
www.rightsaction.org.