The Real America: Guatemalan Bones Tell it All Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit source - jclancy@peg.apc.org DEAD MEN DO TELL TALES Bones at atrocity sites help reveal Guatemalan history, writes Molly Moore in Belen. Skull by cracked skull, rib by splintered rib, the bones of Guatemala's dead are exposing a past the living long feared to bare. In a dusty pit behind a former military post in this southern Guatemalan farm settlement, the dirt-encrusted remains of a man who disappeared two decades ago recently revealed his story for the first time to a team of forensic anthropologists excavating history with shovels and brushes. Hands trussed behind his back, the man was shot and stuffed into a hole with three other victims. Assailants then sprayed the bodies with the 5.56mm bullets used in the M-16 rifles that are standard issue for the Guatemalan army. "Let the evidence - let the bones - talk," said Fredy A. Peccerelli, 27, of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, which is chronicling 36 years of civil war atrocities using the crushed skulls, bullet fragments and machete severed spinal columns exhumed from dozens of clandestine graves across Guatemala. "We're only translating what the bones are saying." The tales the bones tell are rewriting modern Guatemalan history and propelling the nation into its first public discussion of an era of such savage persecution and terror - largely at the hands of government forces - that an entire generation of Guatemalans considered the events almost unspeakable, even within their own families. . At dozens of massacre sites, and in thousands of interviews with war survivors willing for the first time to describe the murders and disappearances they witnessed, Guatemala is confronting its brutal past. Many Guatemalans view the painful public airing as the first step toward healing the wounds inflicted by a war in which human rights organisations estimate 100,000 people were killed and 40,000 more disappeared. Most of those killed were non-combatants. "The book of Guatemalan history has blank pages," said Edmond Mulet, an opposition politician who served as Guatemala's ambassador to the United States during the final years of the war, which ended with the signing of peace accords 19 months ago. "It's important to fill the pages, to know what happened so we can try to avoid it ever happening again." While limited exhumations of mass graves and burial pits began in 1991, the scope and intensity of the operations has surged since the government and leftist guerrillas agreed to a formal peace that included the formation of a Commission for Historical Clarification to catalogue war abuses. As it is, three teams of forensic anthropologist's medical examiners of the long dead - lack the manpower and money to respond to more than a fraction of the requests they receive to unearth potential sites. "If graves were mines, we would be afraid to, walk in Guatemala," said Peccerelli, whose team has excavated 37 gravesites among the hundreds of clandestine cemeteries he and others believed to exist throughout the country. As a child, Peccerelli was one of the tens of thousands of Guatemalans who fled during the war. Raised in the Bronx, he had graduated from college with a degree in anthropology when he happened upon a seminar about the excavations. In 1995 - 15 years after he left home - Peccerelli returned to help uncover the past. The exhumations and their scientific confirmations of war atrocities have been politically explosive in a nation where many of those responsible for wartime abuses remain in powerful government or military positions. Although government military and paramilitary forces are blamed for most of the civilian murders and massacres, anthropology teams have uncovered the graves of victims of guerrillas as well. When anthropologists began their exhumations, army officials declared the skeletons the victims of earthquakes. Guatemalan newspapers published no stories about their work. But, as the crowds swelled at the excavation sites and more villagers told their horrific stories, the nation took notice. When you've hidden secrets for years, the truth is going to heal wounds," said Karen Fisher of Guatemala's leading human rights activists. The Guatemalan army, still refuses to discuss the findings and has been criticised for not turning over larger and more significant volumes of documents to the truth commission, which is compiling a report scheduled to be completed later this year. Hector Mauricio Lopez Bonilla, a retired lieutenant colonel who is now working as a private business consultant and newspaper columnist, is one of the few military officials who has been willing to address the atrocities, blaming them on individual field commanders and units fighting a war in which "the entire populations of villages were involved" in protecting or supporting rebels. He added, however, that while the circumstances of the war may "explain why events occurred, that does not justify them." Today, with each grave that is unearthing another sliver of history unmasked. On March 13, 1982, in the central Guatemalan village of Rio Negro, army troops and members of paramilitary civil patrols rounded up 77 women and 100 children, raped many of the women, grabbed the children by their arms and feet and smashed their heads against the rocks, then dumped 159 corpses into a rocky ravine, according to testimony provided during investigations and forensic examinations that backed up the statements. In some villages where massacres occurred, graves have been easy to locate because surviving relatives have been sneaking to the sites for more than two decades, secretly leaving flowers, crosses and burning candles, to memorialise the dead. But the clandestine burial sites behind the once-isolated military post in the southern village of Belen were more difficult to find. Villagers told anthropologists that in the early 1980s - during the worst years of the civil war - soldiers at the encampment frequently nabbed men from public buses that passed nearby. In addition, men throughout the area allegedly were abducted from their homes by soldiers and never seen again. One villager mentioned that when the base closed after two years, he spotted empty trenches in the cow pasture behind the prefabricated building deserted by the military. With those vague directions, Peccerelli's team began digging. And, as with every other exhumation site, the crowds appeared: Guatemalans, most of them of Mayan descent, coming to confront their past, to search for missing loved ones, or simply to be a part of the reconstruction of history. Many arrive clutching tattered photographs of relatives. "We've suspected what went on here for years," said Cecilia Ramos, who stood in the sweltering heat of the cow pasture with dozens of other villagers. "But nobody could say anything bad against the army." "My husband was kidnapped on May 5, 1981," said Cruce Morales, 1.. "I never saw him again. Even today, I can remember exactly what he was wearing - his shirt, his tan pants, the handkerchief the soldiers put over his eyes." Some of the hundreds of bodies uncovered in mass graves vidual sites have been identified by relatives who said they the shreds of faded clothing that still cling to the skeletal parts. Forensic anthropologists -many of whom have been asked to assist in exhumations in Bosnia, Croatia, Rwanda and other locales because of the experience they have gained here - are attempting to identify others by matching DNA found in the pulp of corpses' teeth with samples taken from villagers. "We believe our work has helped to change Guatemala," said Peccerelli. "These people were dealt a double injustice. Their people were killed, and they were never allowed the chance to give them a proper burial." **************** CLINTON SORRY FOR US HAND IN ATROCITIES By MARTIN KETTLE in Washington and JEREMY LENNARD in Bogota Bill Clinton has made a dramatic break with the policy of US presidents by expressing regret for the role the United States played in backing a brutal counter-terrorism campaign that caused the deaths of thousands of civilians in Guatemala's civil war. Mr Clinton, on a four-nation visit to Central America, made the apology in Guatemala City on Thursday. It followed the publication last month of the findings of the independent Historical Clarification Commission which concluded that the US was responsible for most of the human rights abuses committed during the 36-year war in which 200,000 people died. "It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong," Mr Clinton said. "And the United States must not repeat that mistake. We must and we will instead continue to support the peace and reconciliation process in Guatemala." The remarks came as the US declassified thousands of documents made available to the commission which tell how the US initiated and sustained a murderous war conducted by Guatemalan security forces against civilians suspected of aiding left-wing guerilla movements. "I have never seen anything like it," said Ms Kate Doyle, the Guatemala project director at the National Security Archive, a private research body which has obtained the US documents. Ms Doyle said the documents tell the fullest story so far of "our intimacy with the Guatemalan security forces". A 1966 document reveals that US security forces set up a safe house inside the presidential palace in Guatemala City for use by Guatemalan security agents and their US contacts. It became the headquarters for the so-called "dirty war". Another document reveals security forces arrested 32 people suspected of aiding the guerillas. A CIA cable a year later identified some of the missing as people on a list of "Guatemalan communists and terrorists" who were "executed secretly by Guatemalan authorities". In October 1967, a secret State Department cable said covert Guatemalan security operations included "kidnapping, torture and summary executions". It said: "In the past year approximately 500 to 600 persons have been killed. With the addition of the 'missing' persons this figure might double to 1,000 to 2,000." The same memo talks of a special commando unit, which carried out 44 abductions, bombings, street assassinations and executions of real or alleged communists". More than 25 years later, a CIA cable confirmed that civilian villages were targeted because of the army's belief that their Maya Indian inhabitants were aiding guerillas. "Several villages have been burned to the ground," the cable tells Washington. A report released this month by the Guatemala Truth Commission confirmed that entire communities were massacred. It said children were killed, abducted, forcibly recruited as soldiers, illegally adopted and sexually abused. Foetuses were cut from wombs and young children were smashed against walls or thrown alive into pits. As late as April 1998, Bishop Juan Gerardi, who coordinated the Catholic Church's report on atrocities, was murdered." ********** Clancy Comments: Can you imagine any white occupant of the WhiteHouse or any other section of US Administrations believing the old US adage that the American people have free speech, freedom of expression and of information and religion: that no man can be murdered for his beliefs? One Joe McCarthy was able to destroy the lives of thousands of US workers, poor unemployed and non-workers, in 'proof' of this. Hundreds of US women were beat-up in the streets for marching in support of their rights to vote, to own property and rights against brutal husbands. Communism as such, is a system of thought. Like religion, it cannot be destroyed by murder. It certainly can never be tainted by the US Administrations, presidents or corporations as a cover to have what they call a "cold war" in which they have proceeded to attempt to kill all communists on the earth. The Mayan, Aztec, Inca, Indians were subsistence, peace-loving farmers -the Vietnamese the same. In that case, the US paid out $11,000 for each body or 'set of ears' (wives and children included) that the South Korean brigades brought to CIA HQ in South Vietnam, while operating under the CIA pseudonym "Phoenix program". To live, most starved people have to demand a form of socialism, communism. Capitalist greed is their nemesis. In Latin America and Africa and now Indonesia/Timor, etc, the US corrupted leader was/is allowed to keep the dollar-share of all the nations' gold, oil, diamond etc for his reward. There was/is no "trickle down effect" for the repressed people. Think of Nigeria or Ecuador? Shell, Mobil, Chevron etc take the resources. The politicians take their hefty share. The people die poor, uneducated with inadequate health care. Their rich farmlands and rivers are awash with oil. The thousands of dissidents, like Ken SaroWiwa, are given an army trial and a quick death by murder. One wonders when the US will first become civilised and then advance to be a true "Democracy" instead of its "Gangster-Democracy" methods. When will it begin to repay the vast sums of money in justice to the victims of its genocides?) --JClancy ================================================================= 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-06.13.99-04:24:39-611