Records on Guatemala Killing Released

The Clinton administration released secret documents Monday suggesting that senior Guatemalan army officers ordered the detention and interrogation of American innkeeper Michael DeVine in Guatemala in 1990 but were not involved in his killing, despite allegations to the contrary.

Secret State Department documents declassified Monday also suggest that Guatemalan Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, who has been widely cited as a possible instigator of the murder, was not in on the decision to kill DeVine but was instrumental in covering it up.

The administration’s conclusions were the latest twist in a 14-month investigation of the death. The killing spawned a scandal that damaged U.S. relations with Guatemala, embarrassed the CIA and prompted President Clinton to order an investigation.

But a senior administration official cautioned that the documents made public Monday represent only part of the cables and reports connected with the events in Guatemala and could be contradicted by additional documents that the State Department is expected to make public between now and June. The administration “released what we could right now,” the official said.

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The New York Times reported in today’s editions that classified documents, which were not released, strongly suggest that Alpirez may be guilty of DeVine’s murder. The newspaper said a U.S. official who insisted on anonymity read from the classified documents in a telephone interview. There was no confirmation of the report, however.

The documents relating to the murders of DeVine and 17 other U.S. citizens in Guatemala since 1984 were made public by the State Department under the Freedom of Information Act.

The disclosures came as an American nun, who has said that she was tortured and gang-raped in a clandestine prison in Guatemala, on Monday released composite sketches of four men she charges were involved; she filed suit against the U.S. government for full disclosure in the case.

The nun, Dianna Ortiz, said she was dissatisfied with the scope of documents given to her voluntarily by the State Department. She said they did not reveal the identity of her alleged attackers or those of others who tortured her.

Ortiz, who had been teaching Mayan children to read, says she was abducted at gunpoint in November 1989 and taken to a prison in Guatemala City. There, she says, she was repeatedly raped, burned with cigarettes and lowered into a pit packed with human remains and rats.

Michele Arington, one of Ortiz’s lawyers, said she was filing suit against the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the departments of State and Defense to obtain more documents about the case.

Ortiz has charged that an American citizen who may have been involved with the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala was present when she was raped and abused.

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The records made public Monday included about 5,847 separate cables and reports out of 6,350 retrieved from agency files. But some contain nothing more than newspaper clippings and add nothing to what is already known.

The president’s Intelligence Oversight Board, which is conducting the inquiry ordered by the White House, still has not made its final report. It is expected to determine whether American officials mishandled the U.S. effort to investigate DeVine’s killing.

DeVine, a U.S. citizen, was abducted in Guatemala in June 1990 by a group of Guatemalan soldiers.

The incident took on new importance after it was disclosed that the soldiers who allegedly killed DeVine had been members of an elite ranger unit that once had received some training and equipment from the CIA to fight leftist guerrillas.

The document on the DeVine murder, dated March 1995, said U.S. officials believe that “senior officials of the Guatemalan army ordered the detention and interrogation of DeVine” in connection with a stealing incident.

It said that despite months of investigation, both by the U.S. government and by investigators working for DeVine’s family, the United States has “no evidence” that the army officers either ordered him killed or knew in advance that he would be murdered.

But it added that it still is not clear whether the execution order, apparently issued by an army captain, “was an impromptu decision” or “directed from above.” And it said that it was “virtually certain” that Alpirez and two other colonels were involved in the cover-up.