Army Kept Log of Its Abuses in Guatemala

[gh...@igc.org]

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>Army Kept Log of Its Abuses in Guatemala
>Records Include Photos of Victims
>By Douglas Farah
>Washington Post Foreign Service
>Thursday, May 20, 1999; Page A19
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>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 yesterday 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.
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>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.
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>The new documents include 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 also are
>noted.
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>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.
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>The papers were smuggled out of Guatemalan army intelligence files to
>international human rights workers in February, just as a truth commission,
>formed as part of the peace process, released a report concluding that the
>vast majority of the war's human rights violations were carried out by the
>military.
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>Doyle said she and representatives of the Washington Office on Latin America,
>the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Human Rights
>Watch spent two months reviewing the documents before releasing them and were
>"fully confident" of their authenticity. The groups have asked Guatemalan
>President Alvaro Arzu to investigate the deaths based on the documents.
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>Doyle said the names of the victims and locations where they were killed
>matched records kept by human rights groups.
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>"What is different about this is that we have never had actual documents from
>the perpetrators," Doyle said. "The vast majority of the human rights
>denunciations came from victims or family members, but we have never had this
>type of hard evidence, essentially criminal evidence, of the killing and
>abductions of individual human beings."
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>The logbook entries, pictures often torn from a passport or driver's license,
>have the arrested people's names and alleged guerrilla aliases; where they
>were captured; what they were suspected of; and when they were killed. Often
>there is simply a date and the notation, in Spanish, that "Pancho took him"
>-- military code for execution.
>
>In addition, the documents, typed on plain paper with no official markings,
>contain lists of human rights and media organizations considered to be fronts
>for the guerrillas, including Amnesty International.
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>© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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