GUATEMALA : Political Violence Finds a New Cover

As Guatemala prepares for a postwar runoff election between two law-and-order presidential candidates bent on leading the country into the next millennium, the death squads carry on business-as-usual, but with a twist: As violence spirals out of control, political and common crime are becoming indistinguishable, allowing the police and military security forces to dispose of their enemies with a cold disregard for the consequences.

Consider the case of Lucina Cardenas. On Nov. 27, the Mexican textile-design consultant was driven off the road and abducted in her own pickup soon after she had entered Guatemala. Her passenger reportedly got away by rolling down a ravine and hiding in the underbrush. He didn’t report the abduction until the following day, and only after a colleague of Cardenas insisted that he do so.

Cardenas’ body was found Dec. 2, half buried on the side of a road. The police autopsy found three bullet perforations on her back and lungs, evidence of sexual violation and multiple cigarette burns on her legs and arms.

As the story unfolded, Cardenas’ colleagues revealed that she and two Guatemalan co-workers had received death threats from a group calling itself the Urban Commando. Cardenas had worked closely with peasant groups in Mexico and Guatemala for more than a quarter century. Temporarily employed by the Dutch government as a consultant in Guatemalan native crafts, Cardenas had planned only a brief stay in Guatemala, where she was to audit the books of Trama, an indigenous weavers’ cooperative, after $60,000 of the organization’s funds were reported missing.

For all the ghastly familiarity of Cardenas’ abduction, torture and execution, her case diverges from previous death-squad killings in some important respects. The fact that the surviving witness was persuaded to report the abduction to the national police is remarkable in itself. Police or army secret-service agents are believed responsible for most death-squad killings.

President Ramiro de Leon Carpio has conceded political motives behind Cardenas’ execution and other recent death-squad killings, which qualifies them for investigation by the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission. A U.N. “verification mission” was assigned to gather evidence of human rights abuses in Guatemala as a complement to ongoing peace negotiations between government representatives and four guerrilla groups assembled under the rubric Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity.

In the Guatemalan press, two alternative scenarios have dominated the investigation of Cardenas’ murder. In one version, she is depicted as the random victim of a ring of car thieves composed of off-duty police officers and army security agents. A second scenario involves a conspiracy between the car thieves and Trama personnel who took part in the embezzlement of the organization’s fund. A Guatemalan judge gave credence to the second scenario by detaining Cardenas’ passenger, Oto Leonel Hernandez, as a suspect in her murder, after he presented contradictory testimony to the police.

The blurring of the line separating political violence from delinquent crime in Cardenas’ murder is compounded by the widespread involvement of plainclothes military and police in criminal profiteering. Army officers below the rank of colonel are notoriously underpaid. A growing number of them are taking out their resentment on innocent civilians. Active and retired sergeants, lieutenants and captains, along with greedy upper-echelon officers, are known to take part in the illicit trafficking of drugs as well as of precious hardwoods and Mayan artifacts, the abduction of children for illegal adoption abroad, homicidal car thievery and lesser delinquencies.

The fissures among lower-ranking officers are reflected in the sharpening divisions within the military high command, whose generals fear losing their privileges if the peace talks succeed. (One of the proposals would halve the 40,000-man army before the year 2000.) The younger officers known as “institutionalists” are more sensitive to the military’s reputation as the worst human rights abuser in the Western Hemisphere. They give lip service to complying with the constitution and recognize human rights violations as a major issue--if not in moral terms, certainly as a public-relations problem.

The press has had a field day with the disclosure that the Defense Department has paid half a million dollars to a U.S. public-relations agency, Robert Thompson, to clean up the military’s abysmal international image. Newspapers have published scores of ads showing a new, kinder and gentler Guatemalan army concerned with its indigenous citizens’ poverty index--the worst in Latin America outside of Haiti--and with preserving the northern rain forests, currently under assault by loggers and contrabandists in league with some military officers.

The continuing cutbacks in U.S. military and economic aid to Guatemala have apparently registered with the generals, who for two years have hamstrung De Leon Carpio and prevented him from carrying out his reform program. The president was a conscientious and forthright human rights ombudsman before he was elected by congress to finish out the curtailed presidential term of Jorge Serrano, who tried and failed to carry out a self-coup and rule the country by decree. Shortly after De Leon Carpio took office, his first cousin, Jorge Carpio Nicole, a publisher and presidential candidate, was assassinated in the Highlands.

The military stalled De Leon Carpio’s efforts to investigate his cousin’s murder after evidence pointed to civil defense patrollers under army control as the likely assassins. Military spokesmen have steadfastly insisted Carpio was killed by common criminals. This standoff between De Leon Carpio and the military is at the heart of the powerlessness and paralysis pervading the presidency. If you can’t get to the bottom of the assassination of the president’s cousin, what hope is there of resolving the murders of the thousands of lesser victims of the military?

Part of the legacy of Guatemala’s 35-year war is that torture and other methods of army training are now routinely used on victims of common crime. Only this fact can explain the gratuitous torture and execution of Cardenas if, in fact, her assassins’ main motive was the theft of her pickup. And this also lends credibility to the otherwise farfetched possibility that Cardenas’ co-workers may have collaborated with her murderers to cover up their embezzlement of Trama’s funds. Uncontrolled crime is a major symptom of the disintegration in a postwar Guatemala whose warring parties have yet to ratify the U.N.-sponsored peace agreement.

The motives behind Cardenas’ murder may turn out to be a combination of the two versions presented in the press, or they may have nothing to do with either of them. The full truth is not likely to be known any time soon, nor are the murderers ever likely to be apprehended and brought to justice. The wall of impunity that protects the generals who order most political assassinations still extends, with rare exceptions, to lower-ranking officers who took part in the killing and disappearance of 500 Guatemalans and foreign nationals over the past six months.

The death squadrons in Guatemala will continue to operate regardless of who is elected president next month. And because of the military’s continuing success in obfuscating the distinction between political and common crimes, the death squads’ ties to the military and its murderous security apparatus are becoming more difficult to trace than ever before.