In Search of the Disappeared

GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala On May 29, 1983, Guatemalan security forces abducted Jorge Herrarte, a 29 year-old geological technician, from his parents' living room in Guatemala City. His mother, a housewife in her late fifties, witnessed the abduction:

My husband, Jorge and I were watching TV. The movie ended and I went into the kitchen. I heard a noise, I saw that they were taking Jorge out the door. I tried to grab him but one of his captors told me to get inside and to close the door. One of them pointed a gun at me.

During the next ten months, the Herrarte family sent nearly a dozen telegrams to government officials, trying to find their son. They were contacted by lawyers and extortionists, as well as the U.S. State Department which asked for details of his kidnapping. When Mrs. Herrarte tried to find the National Police detectives who had been assigned to her son's case, she was told their I.D. numbers had been changed and that tracking them would be impossible.

When Fernando Garcia was kidnapped on February 18, 1984, his wife went into shock. "I didn't believe Fernando was missing," Nineth de Garcia recalls. "There I was, screaming in the streets, with my daughter holding on to me." Garcia's husband, a labor leader at the CAVISA glass factory in Guatemala City, was abducted by the BROE, the special operations police, in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses. Following his kidnapping, ten BROE agents occupied the Garcia home for three days. "They were on the roof, in the kitchen, everywhere," Garcia says. "They told me that Fernando was 'okay,' that he just had his legs 'a little bruised.' They said they would let him go; I even accompanied them to the gate."

Days later, Garcia was summoned via telegram to the National Palace by the G-2 army intelligence unit where, in an obscure fourth floor office, she was confronted by a hooded G-2 agent and machine gun-carrying guards in plainclothes, who told her that if her husband was not a communist, they did not have him. In a final outrage, Garcia saw her husband's books and personal items presented at a televised army press conference, along with guns allegedly captured in a raid on a guerilla safehouse.

Garcia and Herrarte are leaders in Guatemala's Mutual Support Group (GAM) for the families of the disappeared. The GAM began in 1984 with three members; today, it numbers 1500. Despite the assassination of two of its leaders last year, the GAM-comprised mostly of Indian women-has become the only visible political opposition to the army in Guatemala today.

To anyone familiar with Guatemala, the cases of Fernando Garcia and Jorge Herrarte are not unusual. Since a CIA-directed coup decimated Guatemala's only democracy 30 years ago, state-directed, institutionalized violence has permeated every sector of Guatemalan society.

Few Guatemalans have been untouched by the disappearance or assassination of a relative, colleague, or friend. During the past 20 years, 38,000 individuals have disappeared and 100,000 others have been killed, almost all at the hands of the Guatemalan security forces. Even the Guatemalan government has, unwittingly, issued statistics to support these figures. A 1985 army booklet on rural counterinsurgency stated that 440 villages had been razed by subversives. Apposing figures from a preliminary Guatemalan Supreme Court study counted between 100,000 to 200,000 highland orphans. Based on these statistics, it is estimated that 36,000 to 72,000 parents had been killed since the late 1970s, when j violence escalated throughout Guatemala.

Systematic terror in Guatemala began more than 20 years ago with the March 1966 abduction of 28 political leaders and unionists from a house in Guatemala City, by military intelligence forces and the judicial Police (judiciales). Three months later, newly-elected President Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro one of two civilian leaders in Guatemala during the past thirty years (the other is the current president, Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arevolo}-signed a nine-point pact with the army before assuming office that relinquished all but nominal power. Under his civilian rule, abductions and "disappearances" became systematic and widespread.

Little is known about the extent of violence in Guatemala in these early years, in large part because prior to GAM's existence every organization in Guatemala which attempted to record and denounce killings was itself repressed, or was dissolved after months of frustrating inefficacy. The Committee of the Relatives of the Disappeared, formed by the University Students' Association (AEU) at the San Carlos National University (USAC), was disbanded in 1974 after plainclothes men walked into the committee's legal center on March 10 and killed its principal adviser, lawyer Edmundo Guerra Theilheimer.

A second group, the National Commission for Human Rights, was formed in the late 1970s by journalist Irma Flaquer, who soon became disillusioned with the Commission's inertia and resigned, stating that it was "useless and suicidal" to continue. Weeks later, on October 16, 1980, Flaquer and her son were attacked by armed security forces; her son was shot and killed, Flaquer was kidnapped. Her body was never found.

Since 1980, disparate groups have attempted to form similar commissions. After a March, 1982 coup deposed President Romeo Lucas Garcia (1978-1982), installing Brigadier General Efrain Rios Montt in his place, there was brief hope in Guatemala City that the human rights situation would improve. Rios Montt's creation of a "disappearance office" inside the national police headquarters lent plausibility to this hope. The office functioned for several months, ~vith hundreds of families giving the police detailed accounts of the abduction of relatives, proffering license plates, uniform descriptions, even names of the individuals responsible.

But as Rios Montt's popularity waned, so did the lines in front of the office. It closed after several months without having solved a single case. "We eventually had to phase it [the office] out," said then-National Police director Colonel Hernan Ponce Nitsch three years later, in June 1985. "The information we received would have backfired in our face."

During the first three months of Rios Montt's rule, Amnesty International documented 2,186 extrajudicial killings.

More recent attempts to form human rights commissions were also thwarted. Following the August 1983 overthrow of Rios Montt by General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores, a "Peace Commission" with vague, euphemistic goals was formed in March 1984, incorporating church, business, and government sectors. In May of that year, however, two of its most prominent members resigned within days of each other: San Carlos National University (USAC) Rector Meyer Maldonado called Mejia's democratization process "a mockery of the people," and Archbishop Prospero Penados del Barrio stated that "violence has grown at such a rate that human rights are being totally forgotten." Urban violence rose under Mejia to some 40 disappearances and 100 assassinations per month, according to the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group.

With these failures as its precedent, the Mutual Support Group was formed on June 5, 1984. GAM president Nineth de Garcia recalls the GAM's tentative formation:

I began to talk to people-I remember the mother of engineer Sergio Linares, she was the first. She was very scared. Raquelita said, "Look, one little dove by itself doesn't do anything." But finally she came and there were three of us. Afterwards, we met Mrs. Ferrer at the Peace Commission and she gave us her phone number and I gave her mine and we began to talk. We were four, then five-and that's how we grew, and by the first Saturday we met, 25 people came.

In the beginning, during mid-1984, the GAM believed that "if we didn't blame the government at first, if we went about things quietly, we would get results," Garcia recalls. "We were so hopeful in those days. We really thought we would get our husbands back."

Prior to GAM's formation, members had attempted to locate their relatives through normal channels: telegrams to influential government officials, discreet inquiries through opaque military contacts, and for some, bribery and self-denigration. GAM members describe incessant trips to city morgues, hospitals, and government offices seeking news-even tragic news-of their relatives' whereabouts.

Even women who had been raped by soldiers continued visiting the local army detachment for word of their spouses. One such women, an Indian from San Jose Poaquil, Chimaltenango, who had been raped in front of her husband as he was being abducted, recalls her ordeal:

I went to the destacamento three times-the commander came over and said, "Are you sure that I was the one who went and took your husband?" "Yes," I told him. They put me in jail; I was there with my babies until that night... there, the lieutenant took out his pistol-he wanted to kill me.

The GAM's initial series of weekly meetings and fullpage newspaper ads of children asking, "Where Are You, Daddy?" drew little attention inside Guatemala or internationally. After three months, GAM leaders realized that polite petitions were not enough. On October 14, 1984, one hundred and fifty GAM members-a mixture of barefoot Indians and urban housewives in baseball visors-were joined by 800 priests, students, and sympathetic union members in a 150-mile march into Guatemala City. At its culmination in front of the National Palace, GAM members stood in silence and threw carnations on the palace steps in a display of dwindling hope and growing indignation over the government's lack of response to its petitions.

In late 1984, the GAM's restrained inquiries had become direct denunciations of army responsibility for disappearances-the first time since 1980 that the army and its intelligence units had been publicly denounced. By November, the GAM had 250 members. At the same time, it was beginning to attract international press attention and sporadic, if grudging, responses from the local media.

GAM leaders met with Mejia three times in November and December, 1984; at one meeting, when one member told Mejia she knew the location of a secret jail, Mejia responded that she "knew too much."

At the third session, Mejia announced the creation of a Tripartite Commission of government officials to deal with GAM denunciations. The Commission rendered its three-page finding seven months later, offering no information on the disappeared and recommending that the next commission be "outside government jurisdiction." Today, GAM leaders call the Commission "a brilliant smoke screen on the part of Mejia to get us off his back."

Even non-military sectors were, at best, unresponsive to GAM petitions. When 248 GAM members occupied the National Congress building on November 14 to protest congressional apathy in aiding the GAM, a Christian Democrat congressman told them that, "The Congress does not have the means nor the capacity for avoiding violence."

In early 1985, with over 350 members, the GAM changed its tactics. In addition to weekly meetings, at which new members were enrolled, the group began weekly pots-and-pans protests in front of the Public Ministry offices to protest the Tripartite Commission's silence. In March, the Guatemalan Congress rejected the CAM's petition for a law granting certain rights to political prisoners. "Here, the ones who rule are the ones with the guns," observed one member of Congress.

Adding to GAM's indignation was the appointment of Britain's Lord Colville of Culross to Guatemala as the United Nation's Special Rapporteur for Human Rights. Despite several brief ~risits to Guatemala, Colville made no attempt to contact the GAM, although it was the only organization in Guatemala with a human rights function. "Unless you're in favor of a communist victory, how do you persuade a military government to give up its power and go back to the barracks?" Colville asked at the time. "You don't do that by writing a 100-page report of pure condemnation."

Colville agreed to speak with the GAM only after they occupied the plenary session of Congress which he was addressing.

March of 1985 was a watershed for the GAM. Its weekly pots-and-pans protests in downtown Guatemala City, two blocks from the National Palace, were rerouting traffic and attracting the attention of hundreds. That same month, in a televised interview, a reporter asked General Mejia his opinion on the latest GAM protests. "You'll know it when you see it," was the terse reply. GAM leaders who had been receiving anonymous threats for months, were not surprised.

Isabel de Castanbn recalls:

We would get anonymous phone calls as far back as August 1984 when they would call and turn on a tape which said, "Tell her to go and get the body," and then they would hang up. Then they would call again and I would hear terrible peals of laughter.

Another GAM member received ominous queries about signing up for a plot in Las Rosas cemetery. Peasants coming in from the countryside were especially vulnerable. In some areas, public buses carrying women in for weekly meetings were stopped by military commissioners carrying lists of GAM members from local communities. The women were told by the army to stop attending the meetings because they were "against the government" and "subversive."

On March 14, Mejia announced on television that the GAM was "a pressure group which is being used by subversives and one which is making problems for the peaceful Guatemalan population." The next day, government spokesperson Ramon Zelada Carrillo stated that the GAM was being manipulated, since the group refused to cooperate with the government. On March 22, a banner headline, "Government Warns Mutual Support," predicted that if the GAM kept "interrupting the social calm, they will be overextending the authorities' patience." At the same time, GAM leaders were receiving calls telling them not to go to upcoming demonstrations and threatening them with violence in their homes.

On March 30, one of the GAM's leaders, Hector G6mez, was murdered. Four days later, Rosario Godoy, another GAM leader, was killed. Gomez, a baker from Amatitlan, was kidnapped after leaving a GAM meeting. His body was dumped the following morning on a highway turn-off less than a mile from his home, his tongue cut out, his skin seared with a blowtorch. At G6mez's funeral, Rosario Godoy grabbed a megaphone and promised Hector that his terrible death would not be in vain. Three days later, Godoy, her brother and her two year-old son were found dead at the bottom of a ditch. At the wake, mourners noticed that the baby's fingernails were missing.

The GAM assassinations were widely interpreted as the organization's final chapter. A scheduled protest march on April 13 turned into a symbolic funeral dirge for its two slain leaders; one human rights observer voiced the sentiments of many when, just prior to the march, he pronounced it the GAM's "swan song." Instead, one thousand marchers and observers attended, many of them poor peasants who had heard of Rosario's death on their radios the day before and had spent the previous night sleeping on park benches near the starting point of the next day's march.

On the day of the march itself, 35 new members joined the GAM, bringing its enrollment to 670.

In November 1985, the GAM again took to the streets, 150 members, including children, occupied the Metropolitan Cathedral for five days prior to the country's presidential elections in an attempt to elicit a promise of investigations from outgoing authorities.

With the December 8 election of Vinicio Cerezo, the country's first civilian president in 20 years, many Guatemalans held some hope, albeit a last hope, there would be major changes in Guatemala's infamous security apparatus and that the human rights situation would improve.

Although Cerezo's intentions may be sincere, his relations with the GAM have been no better than those of his predecessors. Direct threats from government quarters are, for the most part, absent, but Cerezo, forfeiting his usual political savvy, has accused the GAM of being "masochistic,' telling them to "forget the past," and justifying his remarks by reminding them that he was elected by "a majority of the people," while the GAM was not.

Cerezo's relations with the GAM were tense during his three initial meetings with GAM leaders in March. In early June when he rescinded his agreement to form an international commission to investigate disappearances, relations between the two were all but severed. In protest, a thousand GAM members marched through downtown Guatemala City in August with a petition signed by 15,000 citizens demanding the creation of the Investigatory Commission.

Disappearances continue under the civilian Cerezo government. Since February 1986, Americas Watch, a human rights organization, has documented over 100 disappearances and kidnappings in Guatemala, while GAM leaders cite 250 such abductions since Cerezo took office.

Although the GAM has not accused Cerezo of consorting with assassins, GAM leaders are outraged by his quiet acquiescence to the military's demands: his cancellation of the investigatory commission, his refusal to prosecute or dismiss military personnel and his promotion of officers notorious for past repression to positions within his own civilian government.

Cerezo justifies his inertia by saying that he must be realistic about what he can accomplish. In late 1985 he defined the limits of his five-year term of office: "Even if I were elected the door to democracy would hardly open in Guatemala. My government does not plan social reforms because the army would oppose it. It would be a government of transition to true democracy. Only [my] successor could begin to implement the social changes that Guatemala so urgentlv needs."

In mid-September, 1986, Cerezo told the GAM that "your disappeared are dead." Cerezo is right and many GAM members know it. But now, the issue of finding their loved ones is secondary. They want to see the security forces responsible for Guatemala's dead and disappeared brought to trial. Justice for human rights abuses, along with elimination of arbitrary army control in the countryside, agrarian reform, and the diminution of unemployment and inflation have yet to be grappled with by the Cerezo government.

Before he came to office, Cerezo told Time magazine that he would have no more than 50 percent of the power in his first year of office and "70 percent by the end of my five years." Unfortunately, if Cerezo does not begin to act soon, many fear his percentages will be inverted and instead of inheriting a"true democracy," his legacy will be nothing more than the resentment and bitterness of GAM members and thousands like them. So far, Cerezo's only real step in the human rights arena was the February 4 elimination of the Department of Technical Investigations (DIT). It is the third time the DIT has been reshuffled and renamed in the past 20 years; in June, the government announced the creation of the DIC: the Department of Criminal Investigations.

In early 1986, 22 members of the British Parliament nominated the GAM for the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. Weeks after news of the nominations reached Guatemala, government judiciales passed out leaflets at a weekly GAM meeting suggesting that the "$250,000 Nobel prize money" would be diverted to personal coffers.

"It's obvious that this was the army," commented one GAM member. "They always use the same cartoonist."

Reminiscent of the days before the Gomez and Godoy assassinations, the army's propaganda against the GAM took a more serious turn in mid-September. On September 15, Guatemalan Independence Day, some 150 GAM members marched behind the army parading through downtown Guatemala City, carrying posters of their disappeared and a photo of a soldier torturing a peasant. Two days later, the army's public relations office issued a communique directed against the GAM which stated that the GAM's "dangerous attitude" on Independence Day might "create conditions which would make a martyr of Mrs. Garcia." The statement also noted that "the army holds Mrs. Garcia and those who are behind her responsible for anything that may happen which her intransigence and obstinacy may provoke." The army's threat was not ignored by human rights groups. By late Friday afternoon, Amnesty International had sent 300 urgent telegrams to President Cerezo, expressing concern for the safety of GAM members.

On September 21, the army issued a second, perfunctory clarification of its earlier communique, stating that the GAM had "misinterpreted" the statement. The Defense Ministry explained that "it's not a matter of army threats but one of protecting the GAM and its President after she made herself a`target for communists.'"

Nineth de Garcia finds nothing ambiguous about the situation. The same day the army issued its warning, Garcia received three anonymous phone calls at home, describing exactly what she was doing at the moment of the calls. The next day, a caller announced that "in three days either you will have a car accident or your daughter will die"-an ominous reminder of Godoy's own death eighteen months earlier.

In a place like Guatemala, there is no argument, no reason for ambiguity. In the 1,500 fact sheets filled out by the relatives of the GAM disappeared, not one has inculpated the guerrillas for these abductions. And the most crucial point is this: the army's public communique in an eight month-old democracy hungry for international aid and acceptance, is a clear indication of who still holds the reins of power in Guatemala.

Jean-Marie Simon is a freelance writer who has covered Guatemala for six years. W.W. Norton will publish her photography book on Guatemala in September 1987.

Silencing Workers: Guatemalan Army Decimates Unions. GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala-Together with university professionals, Guatemala's unions were the sector hardest hit by repression in the past six years. Days before his assassination in March 1979, Presidential candidate Manuel Col6m Argueta of the United Revolutionary Front (FUR) explained the government's criteria for selecting its victims: [T]he current strategy of power is selective... you'll see that every single murder is of a key person. They are not all of the same ideological orientation, they are simply the people in each sector or movement who have the capacity to organize the population around a cause. Until the overthrow of General Jorge Ubico in 1944, union organizing in Guatemala was largely outlawed. In 1947, however, democratically-elected President Juan Jos6 Ar6valo passed a Labor Code which established the legal framework for large-scale union organizing. By February 1950, a total of 96 peasant labor unions were registered; under the Arbenz government (1950-1954), 249 more were recognized. Within months after the June, 1954, CIA-sponsored coup, however, 319 of the 345 unions had been eliminated under the Castillo Armas government. Union organizing slowly took form again in the late 1960s and 1970s, especially following large-scale peasant migration to coastal plantations and the advent of the cooperative movement, which enjoyed the protection of the conservative Catholic hierarchy. In 1967 there were 145 registered cooperatives; by 1976 there were 510. By 1975, 85,000 union members belonged to one of three coalitions: the FASGUA (Autonomous Federation of Guatemalan Unions); the CNUS (National Coalition for Union Unity); and the CNT (National Workers' Confederation). Repression against union leaders began just prior to the inauguration of civilian President Julio Cesar Mendez Montenegro (1966-1970), when army security forces raided a meeting of union and Communist Party leaders in March 1966. Twenty-eight leaders were taken-they never reappeared. Systematic repression of union leaders, however, did not begin until the late 1970s, after a series of strikes on coastal plantations and in the highlands. The first took place on May 18, 1976, when workers launched a strike at the Pantalebn factory, Guatemala's largest sugar refinery. In December 1977, hundreds of miners from Ixtahuacdn, Huehuetenango, organized the Miners' March, 300 kilometers into Guatemala City, to protest wages and working conditions. A strike in early 1980 paralyzed work on 79 coastal plantations. As a result, the minimum daily wage almost tripled, to its present equivalent of one dollar per day. Between late 1978 and early 1979, the governmentdirected death squad, "ESA" (Secret Anti-Communist Army) issued three death lists, naming 32 top union leaders and academics. On July 20, 1978, a labor lawyer, Mario Mujia, who had helped to organize the Miners' March, was killed as he entered his law office in Huehuetenango. During this period, government hit squads began targeting urban labor leaders; in a two-year period, the Coca-Cola union, EGSA, lost at least eight. It was only after the IUF (International Union of Food and Allied Workers' Associations) organized an international boycott against Coca-Cola, that Coca-Cola's management in Atlanta agreed to remove EGSA president John Trotter, a Houston-based attorney who was held directly responsible for ordering the assassinations of the EGSA union leaders. (See Multinational Monitor, Vol. 1, No. 6, July 1980.) Massive detentions and disappearances of union leaders began in mid-1980, under Lucas. On the afternoon following the May Day workers' march, at least three dozen marchers, including several union leaders, were illegally detained or disappeared. Two of their bodies were recovered-they had been tortured and raped. Six weeks later, on June 21, 27 union leaders were arrested by army intelligence agents from CNT headquarters as uniformed police looked on. And on August 24, 1980, 17 union leaders meeting at the Ematis Roman Catholic retreat center in Palin Escuintla were similarly disappeared by military forces who returned several hours later to kidnap the watchman who had witnessed their abduction. The watchman's tortured body appeared nearby shortly after. The 44 union leaders have not reappeared. Following the elimination or exile of the union leadership and the abolition of the Constitution and civil liberties under Brigadier General Efain Rios Montt (March 1982-August 1983), unions were effectively decimated for several years. What little organizing did occur was done clandestinely. In 1984 alone, the British Parliamentary Human Rights Group estimated that 24 trade unionists were disappeared or assassinated. One of the few who lived to tell about his capture was Alvaro Sosa Ramos, ex-general secretary of the Diana candy factory union, who was captured on March 11, 1984 and tortured by kaibil (army special forces similar to the U.S. Green Berets) troops in a, Guatemala City secret jail. Sosa saw two other union ' leaders, Samuel Amancio Villatoro, former secretary general of the Adams factory union, and Silvio Matricardi Saliim, tortured inside the prison. On March 14, one day after Sosa miraculously escaped his captors by jumping over the fence of the Belgian embassy, Matricardi was found dead. Disappearances continued into 1985. On April 12, Celia Floridalma Lucero, a union leader from the Adam-Chiclet factory, was seized by government forces in Guatemala City and has not reappeared. And on September 11, Julio Celso de Leon, head of the CLAT (Latin American Workers Confederation)-sponsored IGEFOS union coalition, was kidnapped in downtown Guatemala City and tortured for two days before international pressure procured his release. At present, there are two major union coalitions in Guatemala. One-the Confederation for Guatemalan Trade Union Unity (CUSG}-was created by Ribs Montt back in 1983. It is supported by the AFL-CIO and claims to have 200,000 members. Between 1982 and 1986, the U.S. Agency for International Development gave the American Institute for Free Labor Development an average of $266,000 per year to use in Guatemala. Reliable sources state that most of these funds were given to CUSG. The other coalition, UNSITRAGUA-the Guatemalan Workers Union Unity-is composed of the remnants of the decimated CNT and FASGUA unions. It was formed in mid-1985 and includes some 30 unions with 30,000 members. It is independent. In June 1986, President Marco Vinicio Cerezo Ar6valo--Guatemala's first civilian president in twenty years-announced that proof of nascent Christian Democrat democracy was evidenced by the fact that not a single union leader had been persecuted or harmed since he took office on January 14, 1986. Five days later, Justo Rufino Reyes Alvarado, a leader in the Municipal Workers' Union, was shot in broad daylight, less than a mile from the National Palace. Two men were captured and charged with his assassination, one of whom was subsequently murdered and the other released for lack of evidence. - Jean-Marie Simon