Open the Book on U.S. Intelligence : Guatemala: Oversight and reform must begin with CIA connections to ‘assets’ implicated in death-squad activity.

Allegations of CIA-related murder and cover-up in Guatemala have raised serious questions about U.S. involvement in military repression in that country. Two answers are immediately apparent: Reform of the U.S. intelligence apparatus is overdue. And the United States should be aiding efforts to bring human-rights crimes to light and supporting the fragile peace process in Guatemala, rather than protecting Guatemalan military personnel responsible for those crimes.

Rep. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.), a ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, has charged that the Central Intelligence Agency had on its payroll a Guatemalan military officer, Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, who is implicated in the brutal murders of a U.S. citizen and a Guatemalan guerrilla leader married to an American. The CIA had concealed the suspected involvement of their “asset” in these unsolved crimes, even as the Bush and Clinton Administrations held up military aid to Guatemala to leverage progress on one of the cases. The CIA’s support of Guatemala’s brutal intelligence apparatus continued, however. And now there are questions about the involvement of U.S. Army special operations personnel.

There is no conceivable justification for agencies of the U.S. government to conceal or abet human-rights violations committed by the Guatemalan military. The government should immediately review for declassification all intelligence it holds on outstanding rights cases in Guatemala and release this information to the civilian fact-finding commission being set up in Guatemala.

The so-called Clarification Commission to look into past rights abuses is part of an accord signed in March, 1994, between the Guatemalan government and the rebels. An estimated 140,000 Guatemalan civilians have died in political violence over the past 30 years. Church groups and victims associations representing widows, displaced persons and families of the disappeared have long insisted that a truth commission is a vital step in a process of national healing.

Some sectors of the army rejected the signing of the accords, and their violent reaction was not long in coming: In 1994, the Catholic Church reported 356 political assassinations and 40 cases of forced disappearance, most occurring after the rights agreement was signed.

In November, the United Nations installed a 300-person human-rights verification mission in Guatemala. Its first report, released last month, documents the involvement of security forces in scores of specific violations.

The uncontrolled operations of military intelligence lie at the heart of human-rights abuse in Guatemala. In contrast to the indiscriminate violence of the scorched-earth campaign of the early 1980s, the return to civilian government has brought political violence of a more selective nature. Particularly troubling is the targeting of human-rights workers, police, prosecutors and judges attempting to investigate and prosecute military officers--not just for human-rights violations, but also for criminal activities such as drug trafficking. Threats, intimidation and murder--often, the corpses bear the death squads’ signature marks of torture--create a wall of impunity that shields the military from accountability before the law.

Col. Alpirez headed the archivo, a clandestine intelligence unit in the Presidential General Staff, before training at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas in 1989.

The archivo maintains an enormous spy and surveillance network and has been implicated in cases of targeted assassination. In 1990, an archivo “specialist” stabbed to death Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack as she left her office. In 1993, a secret archivo office was discovered operating inside the country’s central post office. Last August, despite announcements that the archivo had been disbanded, it was implicated in the murder of a judge who had dared to sentence a soldier to prison.

Until these clandestine structures are exposed, their files handed over to the proper authorities and their agents subjected to prosecution, human-rights abuses will continue.

A broad-based Assembly of Civil Sectors, providing citizen input to the peace talks, has offered specific proposals for intelligence reform: the removal of the military from domestic security functions, the creation of strictly civilian intelligence files and the establishment of safeguards against future abuses. The U.S. government should support serious discussion of these proposals and press for concrete agreements.

U.S. complicity in past crimes cannot be undone. But by cooperating with democratic sectors in Guatemala in the search for truth, and by supporting the demilitarization and reform of Guatemalan intelligence structures, the United States can provide vital support to the struggle to ensure that such abuses are not repeated.