NEW YORK TIMES LOGBOOK LISTS

[gh...@igc.org]

>New York Times
>
>
>May 20, 1999
>
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>Rights Groups Say Logbook Lists Executions by Guatemalan Army
>
>By GINGER THOMPSON and MIREYA NAVARRO
>
>UATEMALA 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.
>
>GUATEMALA COMMISSION REPORT
>Slide Show
>
>
>Report Estimates Over 200,000 Deaths (Feb. 26)
>Text
>
>The Atrocity Findings: 'The Historic Facts Must Be Recognized' (Feb. 26)
>Related Articles
>
>Pain of War for Guatemalans Isn't Over (March 1)
>Guatemalan Army Waged 'Genocide,' New Report Finds (Feb. 26)
>Buried on a Hillside, Clues to Terror (Feb. 23)
>Guatemala Digs Up Army's Secret Cemeteries (June 7, 1997)
>Guatemala and Guerrillas Sign Accord to End 35-Year Conflict (Sept. 20, 1996)
>C.I.A. Director Admits to Failure In Disclosing Links to Guatemala (April 6,
>1995)
>Special Report: In Guatemala's Dark Heart, C.I.A. Lent Succor to Death (April
>2, 1995)
>Tale of Evasion of Ban on Aid for Guatemala (March 30, 1995)
>In Startling Shift, Guatemala Makes Rights Aide President (June 7, 1993)
>Repression in Guatemala Increases as U.S. Is Seeking to Improve Ties (May 3,
>1991)
>Guatemala's Campaign Trail: Murder Shadows Candidates (Oct. 9, 1990)
>Army's Hold in Guatemala Stirs Fear for Democracy (Sept. 4, 1988)
>After 30 Years, Guatemala Tests Democracy (Dec. 18, 1985)
>Guatemalans, After Years of Delay, Organize to Find Missing Kin (July 21,
>1984)
>A Death in Guatemala Strains Ties With U.S. (Sept. 11, 1983)
>U.S. Military Aid for Guatemala Continuing Despite Official Curbs (Dec. 19,
>1982)
>Behind the Guatemala Coup: A General Takes Over and Changes Its Course (March
>29, 1982)
>Guatemala Junta Suspends Charter and Bars Politics (March 25, 1982)
>
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>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."
>
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>Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
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