Guatemalan Army Keeps Execution Logbook Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit source - Colombian Labor Monitor [NOTE: The conflict in Colombia today is closely related to the Guatemalan conflict of yesterday; both are part of a bigger picture of social control and hegemony in the western hemisphere. And in both, the United States has been directly or indirectly implicated: in Guatemala to fight the communist menace, in Colombia to fight the "war on drugs". Will we see articles like this about Colombia's security forces 10-20 years from now? There is plenty of evidence today of the role of those security forces and their paramilitary allies in the "social cleansing" of unionists, human rights workers and "suspect" peasants. Colombians cannot afford another 10-20 years of this dirty war. -DG] FOR MORE ON THE GUATEMALA CASE SEE: www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/052099guatemala-death-squads.html ========================================================= Investigators of these agencies, who have been studying the document for two months, said they have concluded it describes the activities of a secret Guatemalan military unit that kidnapped, tortured, and executed Guatemalan men and women during the early 1980s as part of a violent army campaign against leftists suspected of subversion in Guatemala City. ______________ ========================================================= NEW YORK TIMES Thursday, 20 May 1999 Rights Groups Say Logbook Lists Executions by Guatemalan Army ------------------------------- By Ginger Thompson and Mireya Navarro GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala -- Lucrecia Vasquez wavers from one day to the next about whether her brother is dead or alive. The last time she saw him was in April 1984, a few months before he was to finish medical school. The phone rang, she recalled, and a moment later Omar Dario Vasquez rushed out the door. He yelled something about a medical emergency and said he would be back soon. But, Omar Vasquez, then 23, was never seen again. And this week, his sister received what may be the first real evidence about his fate. A document that human rights officials said was taken from secret Guatemalan military files explains that Vasquez was "captured on 7th Avenue, in front of the Hotel Dorado Americana" in Guatemala City. Nine days later, on May 6, the document said, Vasquez was killed. His death, human rights investigators said, is noted on the document in military code: "06-05-84: 300." The document was scheduled to be released Thursday by the National Security Archives, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Washington Office on Latin America and Human Rights Watch. Investigators of these agencies, who have been studying the document for two months, said they have concluded it describes the activities of a secret Guatemalan military unit that kidnapped, tortured, and executed Guatemalan men and women during the early 1980s as part of a violent army campaign against leftists suspected of subversion in Guatemala City. The deaths and disappearances occurred while Guatemala, a country of 11 million people, was being ravaged by civil war between a right-wing military government, supported by the United States, and leftist guerrillas. The civil war, which ended three years ago, was the longest and bloodiest in Central American history. Some 200,000 people were killed. Human rights advocates in Guatemala and the United States said the new document -- a log book of detainees that came bound in a tattered spiral binder-- is the most detailed document about military abuses ever obtained from Guatemalan army sources. Human rights investigators who were members of an independent truth commission, formally known as the Historical Clarification Commission, had unsuccessfully appealed to the Guatemalan military for these kinds of documents during its 16-month investigation of human rights abuses. Government officials who reviewed the document said that while it could be a genuine military intelligence document, it is not something that could be found in the military's official archives. Human rights officials disagree, saying that the document proves that more like it must exist. "It is about the best evidence we have ever gotten about the cold-blooded, deliberate, calculated strategy that the military used to pick people up one by one," said Kate Doyle, a Guatemala expert for the National Security Archives who led an investigation of the document. "There must be more documents like this. And now we can press harder for the Guatemalan government to release them." Ms. Doyle refused to reveal the source of the document, and she would only say that human rights agencies purchased it for $2,000 from a former "low-ranking" military officer. Although almost all of the document is typed in dry shorthand, with no signatures or military seals, the human rights investigators said they are confident it is genuine. Dozens of those listed in the log book had been reported missing in human rights records and press accounts from the period, Ms. Doyle said, and the dates and detention details about many prisoners in the log book also match human rights reports from the period. After briefly reviewing the document, government officials in Guatemala said they could not dispute that claim without conducting their own investigation. A spokesman for Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu Irigoyen suggested that the document be turned over to Guatemalan courts that have been established to investigate charges of abuse by the military. He said that the government had never tried to keep documents about military abuses hidden. But, he said that such documents are not a part of the official military archive. "I would not say that these kind of documents do not exist," he said. "But they would not be found in an official military archive. It is unfair to accuse the government of trying to hide documents that it does not control." Former members of the Historical Clarification Commission said the document confirmed their suspicions that the Guatemalan military kept detailed records of people who were detained, tortured and executed outside the law. The commission found the Guatemalan military was responsible for 93 percent of all documented human rights violations committed during the war. "We asked them for reports on specific cases of people who had disappeared or who were killed on the street and they told us that such documents did not exist," said Otilia Lucs de Oti, a former commissioner and a leading spokeswoman for the nation's indigenous communities. "That was always their argument. But we knew that an institution like the military, that takes such pride in its history, had to have more than what they were giving to us." She scanned the document and frowned. "We asked them if they had lists of people who disappeared and they told us, 'no,"' she said, referring to the military. "This shows that they did not tell us the truth." Separated into four main parts, the document contains surveillance studies on reportedly subversive organizations, lists of subversive safe houses that had been raided and the contents of each house, and lists of organizations described as "facades for the service of subversion," including the Association of University Students, the Democratic Front Against Repression and Amnesty International. The most chilling section is the chronological log book of detainees. Numbered one through 183, each entry lists the prisoner's name and alleged pseudonyms; the date and location of capture; the prisoner's affiliations with suspected subversive groups and any suspicious activities --including travel to Cuba, meetings held in homes, participation in demonstrations. Glued beside each entry is a wallet-sized photograph of the detainee, which looks a lot like the mug shots used on government-issued identification cards. And at the end of each entry is a line that describes the prisoner's fate. A few dozen of those on the list were released, some of them on the condition that they serve as informants for the military and help turn in their associates. More than 100 people on the list were executed, the investigators said. Their deaths were described by the code "300," or the phrase, "He was taken away by Pancho." Although codified and at times ungrammatical, the book is suspenseful reading. Its entries, some a few lines long and others a half-page each, tell of doctors and shoemakers, labor leaders and students, mechanics and economists who were suspected of participating in efforts to overthrow the military government of Brig. Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores, according to the investigators. They were abducted in shopping areas, restaurants, movie theaters, on the way to work or in their houses. Sometimes they resisted, the document said, they were shot, and "300." One entry tells about an attempt to capture Edwin Rogelio Rivas Rivas here. "When they wanted to take " the book said, "he tried to flee on a motorcycle, which made the necessity to shoot, falling gravely wounded. It was tried to revive him on the H.M., but it was impossible. 300. And he was left on the side of the road." Many of those detained, the book said, were members or supporters of suspected subversive groups like the Guatemalan Workers Party, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor and the Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms. The book does not record the charges. It listed suspicious activities. Prisoner No. 1, Teresa Graciela Samayoa Morales, the book said, "traveled to Cuba." No. 17, Orencio Sosa Calderon "is in charge of taking foreign journalists to film different guerrilla fronts," another listing said. And No. 52, Prudencio de Jesus Carrera Camey, 15, an entry said, was a member of the Guatemalan Workers Party "apparatus responsible for painting cars." For the families of "the disappeared," the dry shorthand provides information denied over 15 or more years. In interviews with relatives of two men and a woman listed as dead, family members said they had ached to know what happened to their children and siblings and, if killed, to be told where to look for the remains. Only when they are able to mourn and bury their dead, the family members agreed, would prosecutions of those responsible for the killings be a concern. "First I want to know if he died and where to find him," Ms. Vasquz, 36, a lawyer, said. "Then I want to know who did this? Why?" She broke down in sobs as she talked in the office of the Group of Mutual Support, an organization of families of the disappeared that has more than 25,000 cases in its files. "There's no worse thing than uncertainty," she said. "You imagine that he went through the worst. My father thinks he is in another country. He always talks in the present. 'Omar must have kids by now,' he says. My mom is more realistic. She sometimes thinks he was killed." The relatives confirmed dates of disappearances and other information in the book. Ms. Vasquez confirmed that her brother had belonged to both the Revolutionary Movement of the People and the Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms, a main guerrilla group. The information appeared on the log sheet next to his name, along with "doctor and surgeon." "He'd tell me: 'Let's fix the world,' Ms. Vasquez recalled. "I'd reply, 'Let's fix it.' " Shown a page that read "06-05-84: 300" under a photograph of Lesbia Lucrecia Garcia Escobar, her father, Efrain Garcia, 66, made a quick calculation. If she disappeared on April 17, 1984, Garcia said, that meant that she had been kept alive for 20 days. "During that time they were torturing her and getting stuff from her," he said without a trace of doubt. The book said Ms. Garcia Escobar had shared a house with a guerrilla where weapons, grenades and "propaganda" were found. Garcia, a retired doorman at the Health Ministry, said his daughter, then 29, had been abducted after a man walked into the restaurant where she was dining with a girlfriend and told her that her boyfriend was waiting outside. When she walked out, the girlfriend later told Garcia, two men pushed her into a waiting car. A witness gave Garcia the number of the license plate of a motorcycle that he was told escorted the car, a number that he continues to carry on a scrap of paper. He said he went to the police with it, but was told that the plate did not exist. After that, he recounted, two men began following him, leading him to abandon his search, stay indoors for three months and eventually move. Ms. Vasquez said she started searching for her brother only after the peace accords of 1996 because family feared that if she pressed for information she would risk danger. But others, like Jesus Palencia, 70, who is looking for the oldest of her 10 children, have pressed and pushed the whole time. Ms. Palencia said that for 15 years she has sent telegrams to the National Palace, looked at hundreds of bodies in morgues and joined in protests, occupations of public buildings and other demonstrations by human rights groups. Since the disappearance of the son, Alfonso Alvarado Palencia, a former labor leader shown in the logbook as dead by March 1984, she has also asked the Roman Catholic priest at her parish several times to hold a Mass for her son's return. "I told the priest to pray for my son's reappearance, but he always says Mass as if my son were dead," Ms. Palencia said. "It gets worse and worse as the years go by," she said of the government's silence. "Just a few months ago, I dreamed that someone had knocked on the door, and it was him, dressed in a white shirt. I ran to tell the others, 'Look, children, here is your brother.' And then I woke up. "If my son is dead, I want at least his little bones." Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company ****************************************************************** * COLOMBIAN LABOR MONITOR: To subscribe to CSN-L send request to * * listserv@postoffice.cso.uiuc.edu SUB CSN-L Firstname Lastname * * http://www.prairienet.org/clm clm@prairienet.org * ****************************************************************** ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytcamer-05.22.99-04:58:09-16155