Guatemalan Army’s Death List Released

At the height of its vicious war against Marxist guerrillas and those suspected of helping them, the Guatemalan military kept detailed records of people its units had captured or killed, according to internal army intelligence documents released Wednesday by four human rights organizations.

The Guatemalan military has long been accused of killing tens of thousands of civilians in the 36-year civil war that ended in December 1996. The internal documents, however, are the first to detail the military’s role in systematically killing rebels and their alleged sympathizers, said Kate Doyle of the National Security Archive, one of the groups releasing the documents.

The United States helped train and equip the Guatemalan military in the 1960s and the CIA maintained close ties to the organization in the early 1980s, when the army was killing thousands of civilians, according to declassified U.S. intelligence documents released by the same group earlier this year.

The new documents consist of what is apparently a military intelligence logbook, noting individual arrests, usually with photographs, of 183 people from August 1983 to March 1985. In most cases, the dates they were killed are also noted.

The release of the documents comes at a time of growing strain in Guatemala’s fragile peace process. On Sunday, voters rejected constitutional reforms aimed at implementing the heart of the accords that ended the civil war, prompting fears of renewed political violence.

The papers were smuggled out of Guatemalan army intelligence files. Doyle said she and representatives of the Washington Office on Latin America, the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science, and Human Rights Watch spent two months reviewing the documents before releasing them.