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New Document Reveals Executions by Guatemalan Army On Thursday, May 20, Human Rights Watch and three other human rights organizations released a document that was smuggled out of Guatemalan military files. The document reveals the fate of more than 180 individuals "disappeared" by Guatemalan security forces between August 1983 and March 1985. The document was given to international human rights advocates in late February, the week the United Nations-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission released its report on the country's thirty-five year civil war. The secret Guatemalan military document we are releasing today is the first specific evidence of individual crimes to come out from the military's own files. It confirms that more than 180 victims of "disappearance" between 1983-85 were indeed, as human rights groups alleged, secretly abducted by the military. Most of them subsequently murdered. For many of the victims' relatives in Guatemala, release of this document provides the first news they've had of the fate of their loved ones. Both the Clinton administration and the government of Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzú must use this occasion to renew efforts to establish accountability for terrible crimes committed in the context of the Cold War in Guatemala. In March, President Clinton closed a shameful chapter of denial in U.S. policy regarding Guatemala. In the first presidential visit to Guatemala in three decades, Clinton acknowledged that Washington's support for repressive military intelligence units had been "wrong," adding that "the United States must not repeat that mistake." Public policy during the Reagan and Bush administrations, however, involved covering up gross violations of human rights and continuously boasting of purported improvements in military comportment. Producing misleading information was key to those administrations' efforts to provide military aid to a nation long deemed an international pariah because of its record of atrocities. The Clinton administration has already declassified important documents related to human rights violations in Guatemala. But the United States owes Guatemala more. This administration should work with the Congress to thoroughly account for Washington's role in Guatemala's decades of terror. A "truth commission" examining these issues should establish, at a minimum, who was responsible for the misrepresentations contained in State Department Country Reports on Guatemala in the 1980s and why these distortions were advanced. It should also closely analyze U.S. relations with Guatemalan military intelligence agencies—where repression was directed and targets chosen—throughout the last three decades. President Arzú should use this document to redouble efforts begun early in his administration to confront military impunity for gross violations of human rights. Those efforts have flagged in the face of military intransigence. The president has been unwilling to embrace the definitive report of the United Nations' sponsored truth commission in Guatemala, issued in February of this year. And his government has bungled the investigation into last year's assassination of human rights leader Bishop Juan José Gerardi. Specifically, the government should use this document as the basis to launch a serious investigation with two purposes: to prosecute and punish those responsible for the crimes described in the document; and to determine with certainty the fate of the more than 180 disappearance victims whose names and photographs are included. All efforts should be made to inform family members of the victims' fate and whereabouts if they are alive; or, in the case of death, to deliver to the relatives their remains. Relatives of each of the disappeared should also receive meaningful financial reparations. Only by establishing accountability for these terrible crimes can we ensure they will not be repeated. |
Related Material Raid on Rights Defender's Home Condemned HRW Press Release, April 16, 1999 HRW Reports Clandestine Detention in Guatemala March 1993 The testimonies presented in this document — of abductions, clandestine detentions and physical or psychological mistreatment and torture — comprise just a few examples of a larger problem. These detentions appear to have been carried out as part of a military effort to gather information on activities of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity guerrillas, although the government has denied responsibility for the practice.Order Online Human Rights Watch Reports on Guatemala |