Killing Fields of Guatemala Persist Despite U.S. Effort

Every day, virtually as certain as the sunrise, someone in Guatemala is killed or kidnaped in incidents blamed on death squads. The U.S. ambassador has been called home in protest, and American aid has been reduced, but no matter, the killing goes on.

Guatemala has had an elected government since 1986 and an army chief of staff who publicly denounces political violence and human rights violations, but the killing continues at a numbing rate.

According to figures supplied by the human rights office of the Guatemalan Congress, 54 people were killed in politically related incidents in the first two months of the year; 52 others were kidnaped. No figures are available yet for March, but government and private human rights groups indicate that the rate of killing and kidnaping has increased.

A spokesman for the human rights office said that in 1989 a total of 522 people were killed in political violence. Their deaths were in addition to the toll taken by the guerrilla war here between the army and radical leftist rebels. A total of 200 people disappeared in the course of the year; presumably, they were abducted.

Every day, bodies turn up, some in the so-called body dumps near Guatemala City, others in roadside ditches in rural areas. Many are left where they fell, often in full view of passers-by.

No one knows exactly how many people have been killed in political violence here in recent decades, but human rights groups estimate that since 1954, when the military overthrew the government, there have been 100,000 deaths and 40,000 disappearances. These numbers far exceed the totals in Argentina and El Salvador, where political violence has been more widely publicized.

Sometimes the victims here are prominent political, business or social figures. More often, though, they are ordinary citizens engaged in ordinary activities that elsewhere would be considered harmless. Victims include teachers, student leaders, union members, physicians treating poor children, a Roman Catholic nun.

“The victims,” one European diplomat said, “are almost always people whose views or activities are aimed at helping others to free themselves of restraints placed by those who hold political or economic power. Even a doctor who tries to improve the health of babies is seen as attacking the established order.”

As striking as the death rate is the impunity with which the killers operate. According to diplomats and independent human rights observers, most of the crimes were committed by death squads, which operate with no interference from military and government security forces, or by the military and government security forces themselves. Yet in the last 10 years the government has never prosecuted a case of human rights abuse involving a military officer.

As indicated by the statistics for 1989 and the first weeks of this year, the killings did not end with the end of military rule; they have continued under the democratically elected government of President Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo.

The death squads are believed to be largely the responsibility of the military and the radical right, but not exclusively. Sources say that the Christian Democratic Party, which won the 1986 elections as representing the political middle, has deployed death squads led by men who oversee security for the party and its leaders.

The situation is expected to get worse. Diplomats and human rights figures say that both the radical right and the military, trying to take advantage of uncertainty brought on by elections later this year, will seek to create such instability that the army will be forced to take over.

Already, the situation has deteriorated so far that even the normally right-wing press is expressing concern. It is giving unusually prominent coverage to human rights cases and demanding, in editorials, that the government act.

Meanwhile, the government seems indifferent to the bloodshed, and some sources charge that the indifference amounts to complicity.

They cite as an example the case of Hector Oqueli Colindres, a leader of El Salvador’s moderate National Revolutionary Movement, and Gilda Flores, a local political activist, who were killed in early January.

Diplomats say that while the right wing probably sought Oqueli’s murder, both deaths were carried out by Guatemalan allies with the probable participation of government security forces, including the Ministry of Government, which is responsible for internal security.

These diplomats say that an American FBI agent sent to investigate the killings reported that enough evidence was uncovered by Guatemalan police to identify the killers but that “they don’t want to.”

“The government policy is the same under elected civilians as it was under the military,” a European diplomat said. “It doesn’t have the will or the ability to do anything about human rights.”

President Cerezo’s failure to act in the Oqueli case was one of the factors involved in the U.S. decision in mid-March to recall Ambassador Thomas Stroock to Washington for consultations. Embassy officials said the decision was meant to show Cerezo that Washington would no longer tolerate his indifference on human rights.

In Washington on Friday, Richard Boucher, the State Department’s deputy spokesman, said that Stroock returned with a message from President Bush making clear to Cerezo that the United States is alarmed over renewed political violence but pleased at recent steps taken to counter it.

“The ambassador and members of our embassy staff have made clear to the government of Guatemala at all levels our concerns,” Boucher said.

In recent weeks, the Guatemalan government has “taken a number of steps and pledged to take additional measures to investigate outstanding cases of human rights abuse and to strengthen the rule of law,” Boucher said.

A special police investigative unit has been set up and the government plans to submit to the Guatemalan Congress proposals for reforming the penal code, he said.

But in the meantime, he said, “there continue to be reports of violence.”

Indeed, even when an American citizen is the victim of right-wing abuse, the Guatemalan government, which will receive more than $130 million in U.S. aid this year, has refused to move.

Last Nov. 2, Diana Ortiz, an American nun of the Kentucky-based Ursuline Order, was abducted by a group of men, some of them in police uniform, while attending a meeting in Antigua, about 30 minutes from the capital. She was tortured and sexually abused before she was released. There have been no arrests, even though she provided descriptions of her abductors and their vehicles.

The Ortiz case is an example of the confusing role played by the United States in dealing with Guatemala’s human rights record. Officials at the U.S. Embassy here expressed doubt about the nun’s story, but other diplomats and church officials, including Archbishop Prospero Penados del Barrios, say they are convinced that she told the truth.

The embassy position is typical of the attitude American diplomats have taken in recent years as Washington has sought to support the Cerezo government--even if it meant trying to minimize the extent of human rights violations. This attitude was responsible in part for the Ronald Reagan Administration’s decision to do away with the policy of conditioning aid on the observance of human rights.

Now, that may be changing. Stroock, a personal friend of President Bush, became the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala late last year. He says that one of his principal goals is to persuade Guatemala to eliminate human rights abuses, and he has already made an impact on embassy personnel.

One embassy official, who in the past has dismissed most human rights complaints as either exaggerated or inspired by the left wing, now says the situation is so bad that he could not certify Guatemala as deserving of U.S. aid if that were still a requirement.

Yet despite Stroock’s position--and although the embassy has sent the State Department a critical message on the Guatemalan government’s failure to enforce human rights--the final State Department report was toned down, sources say, because the Bush Administration does not want to undercut Cerezo altogether as elections approach.

It is not only the government that stands by as the killing and kidnaping continue, sources say. The Roman Catholic Church, which has led the struggle against political violence in El Salvador and Panama, has done little in recent years to promote human rights in Guatemala.

The church has been intimidated: Early in the 1980s, 14 priests and hundreds of church workers were killed in a military campaign to destroy church support for social gains such as higher wages and an end to the exploitation of Indians.

The campaign was effective. The church virtually fell silent, and the physical intimidation eased. Now, Archbishop Penados del Barrios said, “There is much less repression than before, and there is no direct persecution of priests and workers.”

The improved conditions have inspired some church officials to start taking part again in the promotion of human rights, but just barely.