27 Peasants Killed or Missing During ‘Black September’ : San Marcos Province--Guatemala’s Killing Ground

Shaking and short of breath, Milhen Chavez explains he has just been tailed by unidentified men in a blue car with darkly tinted windows. They followed the human rights worker home, waited outside for 20 minutes, then left. “I’m not afraid to die,” he says apologetically. “But I am afraid of being tortured.”

A priest in this misty highland province opens his front door to journalists and leaves it open. Speaking behind closed doors is too suspicious, too dangerous. He no longer trusts anyone, not even the other priests, he says, not even in confession.

In the town of Malacatan, Mayor Bernardo Chavez welcomes foreigners into his office. There’s no violence here, he says. You can come and go freely. Well, there was a kidnaping two months ago--the administrator of a coffee plantation taken away by gunmen. No sign of his body, yet. And three cadavers were found in the Cabuz River the other day. They hadn’t died of drowning.

This is San Marcos province, a paradise of terraced mountain farmland and tropical forest that is the site of the worst killing in Guatemala today. At least 27 peasants have been kidnaped and killed or have disappeared recently, nearly all of them during what Milhen Chavez calls “Black September.”

Chavez’s fear of torture is well founded. Many of the bodies dumped in rivers and by roadsides have eyes gouged out, an ear or finger cut off. In one case, the corpse was so mutilated that viewers were uncertain whether it was a man or woman.

“It’s all so diabolical,” said the Roman Catholic bishop of San Marcos, Alvaro Ramazzini. “No one is safe. At any time, they could come, grab you, assassinate you, ‘disappear’ you. What’s so frightening is that the victims are just normal people.”

The killing in San Marcos coincides with an upsurge in political violence throughout Guatemala, the worst since the early 1980s, when the army reportedly murdered tens of thousands of Indian peasants in a brutal counterinsurgency campaign.

Again, the primary motive appears to be political. Church and human rights workers and the relatives of three victims charge that members of the army in civilian clothes are eliminating peasants who they suspect of being guerrillas or of selling food to the leftist rebels.

“My hypothesis is that the armed forces believe that these people were supporting revolutionary groups in this country,” Chavez said.

“They want to make it difficult for the guerrillas to have contact with civilians,” said another source.

Guerrilla Landscape

San Marcos is a poor but fertile province on Guatemala’s northwestern border with Mexico. Its lush mountains shrouded in fog are an ideal landscape for guerrilla warfare--and also for the clandestine harvest of opium poppies, the raw material for heroin.

The impoverished Indians who live here farm beets, potatoes, corn and coffee, then migrate north each year to pick Mexican coffee for minimum wages. They, too, are ripe for the lure of a higher-paid poppy crop.

Some officials say that the recent rise in violence is a result of the rapid growth in drug production and trafficking in Guatemala and of the profitable business of smuggling Central Americans to the United States. One unidentified body found in the Malacatan marketplace Sept. 12 bore the note, “This is what we will keep doing to coyotes (smugglers of illegal aliens) and drug addicts.”

But church and human rights workers believe such messages are simply a cover for old-style political killings. None of the victims were known to be involved with drugs or engaged in the smuggling of people, sources said.

Rightists Blamed

Mayor Chavez blames civilian ultra-rightists for the killings, a charge that President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo has made about the ongoing violence in Guatemala City.

“The ultra-right could be causing the violence to harass the government before elections next year,” Chavez said.

The rebels may be responsible for some of the killings. A military commissioner was slain in El Tumbador, and a bus driver gunned down on his route from Malacatan to Finca Argentina was found with a note asserting that he was an army informer.

Rarely are there witnesses to the violence who are willing to speak. “Nadie sabe nada”-- “No one knows anything”--is the refrain commonly heard here.

“I can’t tell people to denounce this or they’ll eliminate them too,” said a church worker whose shoulders sagged in defeat. “If the family sees anything, it’s better they say nothing.”

In a rare departure, the brother of a man kidnaped from Tejutla did report the case to Milhen Chavez, who runs a branch office of the Guatemala City-based Center for Research, Study and Investigation of Human Rights.

Felipe Flores Robles told Chavez that his brother, Genaro Angel, 42, two nephews and a friend of the family were abducted by six armed men at midday Sept. 12 as they loaded rocks into their truck from a river bed.

According to the complaint, the gunmen were “members of the G-2” (army intelligence). They abducted the men in a maroon Toyota pickup truck, which was later seen leaving an army base. The victims’ truck was never found.

Chavez said he took the complaint from Flores Robles on Sept. 14 and was phoning it into the office of the government attorney general for human rights in Guatemala City the next day when relatives of the victims arrived.

“They said it was too late, that the bodies had already been found,” Chavez said.

He said that Genaro Angel Robles had not been tortured but that the other three--Gustavo Amilcar Robles Barrios, 22, Gregorio Leonel Robles Chavez, 19, and Juan Bautista Ovalle Lopez, 23--had had their eyes gouged out.

No one seems to have all the information on the dead and disappeared. In interviews with government officials, church and rights workers over two days, journalists were able to compile a list of 27 victims and another four probable cases. But there may be more.

Among the known cases:

* On Sept. 1, Justiniano Rolaman and his brother-in-law disappeared after leaving Malacatan for San Marcos. Their tortured bodies were found near the town of Ocos.

* On Sept. 10, Fidel Ovidio Rodriguez de Leon, 39, was kidnaped from San Agustin Tonala by six armed men, while his relative, Carlos Agusto Rodriguez, was abducted the same day from Santa Lucia Ixcamal. Their bodies were found together in San Pedro Sacatepequez with their eyes cut out.

* Of the three naked bodies found in the Cabuz River during the week of Sept. 11, at least one had been shot in the head and heart, Malacatan Mayor Chavez said. Another source said that three more bodies were found in the river two weeks earlier. All six had been tortured.

* In the village of Tocache during the week of Sept. 11, a 41-year-old coffee merchant was kidnaped in front of his five children. His body was found with a finger and an ear missing.

* In the town of Ocos, a woman and her two teen-age daughters were killed Sept. 13.

* On Sept. 20, six gunmen kidnaped Catarino Enrique Juarez Perez, 23, from El Naranjo village, according to a complaint his 60-year-old mother filed with the National Police in Malacatan. He still has not been found.

The list goes on. Two months ago, Rafael Velasquez, president of the local Mormon Church, was kidnaped from the coffee farm he runs near San Rafael Pie de la Cuesta; two men were killed in San Miguel Ixtahuacan.

Days after Milhen Chavez spoke to journalists, armed men appeared at his office looking for him. He escaped and has gone into hiding.

Although no proof links the army to the violence, the upsurge coincides with an increase in military activity. Sources said the army beefed up its checkpoint at Serchil a month before four men were kidnaped from nearby Tejutla; the army revamped civil defense patrols in the zone several months before six bodies appeared in the Cabuz River, and soldiers recently raided hotels and businesses in Malacatan, arresting anyone without proper identification.

“The civil patrols are used to finger people. They are creating a climate of fear. But it’s not their fault. The men are forced to patrol,” said a Catholic Church source.

“I tell people that if you are in the sea, swim, if you are at a dance, dance. If you have to join the civil patrols, do it, but don’t make false accusations. Do not take reprisals,” he said.

The army also allegedly is trying to exploit divisions between Catholic and Protestant churches. According to one source, a Protestant church in one town last year broadcast over a public loudspeaker an army colonel’s accusations that the Catholic Church is communist and that a former priest joined the guerrillas.

“They want people to see the army as their salvation,” said the source.

As a result of the violence, the cobblestone streets of these towns are empty at night. Fear hangs thick as the afternoon fog, and helplessness abounds.

After only six months in the province, even Bishop Ramazzini sounds desperate:

“I feel impotent. I ask what I can do. How can I protect the lives of these people?”