Return of CIA’s Shadow Threatens to Stifle a Fledgling Democracy

Revelations of CIA involvement in the torture-execution of U.S. citizen Michael DeVine and the Mayan guerrilla husband of Jennifer Harbury have cast a shadow over Guatemala as it struggles to emerge from its brutal 30-year-old civil war. Fifty-one years after it engineered the overthrow of Guatemala’s leftist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, the Central Intelligence Agency’s interventions continue to polarize Guatemalans and to sabotage the prospects for democratic reform.

Harbury was in the 12th day of her protest fast when Rep. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.) revealed what the State Department and National Security Council had evidently known for three years: Her husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, known as Comandante Everardo, had been tortured and executed in 1992 under the supervision of a Guatemalan colonel who had been on the CIA’s payroll. Two years earlier, this same colonel, Julio Roberto Alpirez, had overseen the murder of DeVine, who ran a lodge in the province of Peten and whose body was found nearly decapitated.

The ongoing investigation by Torricelli, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, has uncovered evidence that the United States continued to finance criminal activities by the Guatemalan army even after President George Bush cut off military aid to that country in retaliation for DeVine’s murder.

The activities of the CIA in Guatemala remain the keystone of a schizophrenicU.S. policy that has promoted human-rights observance at the same time it has undercut attempts to steer Guatemala toward a durable democracy.

In the mid-’70s, when President Jimmy Carter denied military credits to Guatemala because of its horrendous record of human-rights abuses, the CIA helped to train and finance the dreaded G-2 military intelligence specialists, who were responsible for the assassination of dozens of leftist opposition leaders. And as often as not, the executions of government opponents were ordered by military officers trained by die-hard anti-communists at Ft. Benning’s School of the Americas, where many Guatemalan military officers--including Alpirez--received counterinsurgency training. The CIA, in its obsession with containing a three-decade-old leftist insurgency, may also have become implicated with Guatemalan military officers believed to be enriching themselves in the transshipment of Colombian cocaine to the United States from bases inside Guatemala. It is this multimillion-dollar drug traffic, or the army-controlled contraband of hard woods to Mexico, that DeVine may have stumbled upon before his murder.

The recent disclosures will adversely affect the ongoing peace negotiations between the Guatemalan government and the guerrillas of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Union. After nearly six years of talks mandated by the 1987 Esquipulas accords, the two sides remain deadlocked on the issue of assigning responsibility for the killings and disappearances of as many as 120,000 Guatemalans since 1966.

After the government and the guerrillas signed a preliminary accord in 1992, a U.N.-sponsored verification commission was formed to monitor human-rights violations in Guatemala. Two hundred monitors have undertaken investigations in army garrisons and guerrilla enclaves throughout the country. Forensic teams have dug up hundreds of bodies from clandestine burial sites in Rabinal’s Rio Negro, the Peten and other provinces affected by the war. According to the commission’s initial report, the military and police are responsible for the large majority of the killings. But the commission, which is supported by President Bill Clinton, the U.S. Embassy and the State Department, is threatening to pull out of Guatemala if a comprehensive peace agreement is not signed by August. All these efforts will now hang in the balance until U.S. government involvement in the Guatemalan army’s crimes against U.S. citizens is fully investigated.

Another key in Guatemala’s democratic transition are the presidential and congressional elections scheduled for November. In January, Efrain Rios Montt, the former general who was president for 17 months following a palace coup in March, 1982, was elected president of the new congress, which is dominated by his party and its Christian Democratic allies. Rios Montt, an authoritarian evangelical preacher with the U.S.-inspired Church of the Word, is now positioned to override the constitutional clause that prevents coup leaders from seeking a second presidential term. He is opposed by a broad front that unites the Catholic Church with the labor union and indigenous movements that are the cutting edge of Guatemala’s democratic aperture.

Law-and-order candidate Rios Montt is likely to be one of the chief beneficiaries of the nationalist backlash provoked by renewed U.S. interference in Guatemala’s internal affairs. What moral authority can U.S. leadership bring to bear on the authoritarian general to prevent him from altering the constitution to suit his own ambitions?

As the FBI enters the investigation into a possible cover-up of criminal CIA activities in Guatemala, Alpirez steadfastly denies any complicity in the murders of DeVine and Bamaca. President Ramiro de Leon Carpio, the former human-rights ombudsman who has been hamstrung by the army since the assassination of his cousin, the centrist publisher and presidential candidate Jorge Carpio Nicole, has counseled Alpirez to file a character-defamation suit against Torricelli. This is evidently an attempt to head off an expected U.S. suit against Alpirez and any CIA agents who may have conspired in the murder of DeVine. According to a recently enacted U.S. law, foreign agents implicated in the murder of a U.S. citizen abroad can now be extradited and tried in the United States.

But the investigation into CIA abuses, which has almost miraculously been brought about by a savvy 43-year-old widow fasting in front of the White House, may yet have a salutary effect on the agonizing birth pangs of Guatemala’s indigenous democracy. The only way to restore confidence in Carter’s and Clinton’s human-rights priorities in Guatemala--and throughout the Western Hemisphere--is to build pressure for more investigations of possible criminal activity by U.S. agencies during Guatemala’s war of counterinsurgency. The investigation by the Intelligence Oversight Board will have to go beyond the DeVine and Bamaca cases to the unresolved killings of Guatemalan social science investigator Myrna Mack Chang and U.S. citizens Nicholas Blake and Griffith Davis, and include the abduction and torture of Ursuline Sister Diana Ortiz.