Blue Polyester
Pants & a Yellow Lacron Shirt
Unearthing Guatemala’s
Disappeared
By Grahame Russell
ABOUT 20 YEARS AGO (she doesn’t remember exactly when) Doña Gloria de Leon Garcia came here to the Peten department in northern Guatemala. From south of Lake Izabal, she and her family came looking for a piece of land, a life. They found it, for a while.
Then, "some time ago" Gloria’s husband died of natural causes, por muerte de Dios. But there was no "death by God" for her son. Today, she is looking for his body in a mass grave, a clandestine cemetery being dug up by the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team 15 years after he was "disappeared" by 10 masked soldiers.
Tomas Leon, her eldest, was born in the village of El Monaco, township of Los Amates, Izabal, on September 18, 1960, as proven by his identity card that Doña Gloria still keeps,the only photo she has of him. His identity card says he was a labrador (dayworker). It reads "¿Sabe Leer?" ("Know how to read?"), and, typed in the space provided, "No." "Know how to write?" "No."
Over the past three years the Forensic Anthropology Team has been digging up mass graves all across Guatemala, uncovering the horrors and atrocities of the repression of the 1980s. Confronted with this explicit evidence, the army and government have argued that the bodies being unearthed probably were murdered by the armed Guatemalan rebel movement. A neighbor of Doña Gloria’s comments: "I don’t know how the government is going to blame the guerrillas this time; all of our loved ones were killed and buried here inside the military outpost. Are they going to try and convince us that the guerrillas did it, and then snuck in here at night to bury our dead under the noses of the army?"
Doña Gloria explains how on the night of Sept. 10, 1981, "five soldiers kicked in the door of our home and barged in; there were many more soldiers outside." I ask how she knew they were soldiers. Taken back by this apparently obvious or stupid question, she answers, "They were in army fatigues, though their faces were covered with scarves. Anyway, there were no guerrilla fighters in these parts of the country. Everyone knows it was the army that did these things."
It is hot and humid in the Peten; I sweat in the shade, seated with Doña Gloria by the barbed-wire fence that de-limits the former military outpost where the Forensic Anthropology Team is digging. We hear the sounds of picks and shovels digging and scraping away mud and rock. The now gaping pit is surrounded by more than 100 somber townspeople looking for missing loved ones. A silent, sad solidarity binds them.
"They aggressively grabbed my husband and Tomas, my eldest son, and took them outside. ... For whatever reason they let my husband go. We never knew why they let my husband go, or why they took my son. They put Tomas in the truck. In all, they grabbed six people that night from our neighborhood." After a pause, Doña Gloria names the other five: "Tavo Lopez and Victor Hernandez were young men. Don Amao was really quite old. Oscar Hernandez and Roman, him, I don’t know his last name, they were middle-aged."
Doña Gloria then undertook the fruitless steps that family members of the disappeared take in Guatemala. "The next morning at 7:00 a.m. I came here to the outpost with Don Amao’s wife. We asked to see my son and her husband. It didn’t matter how much we begged, they said we couldn’t come in; that they didn’t have them there. They told us that they probably went with the guerrillas, or that my son probably ran off with a woman."
After that, Doña Gloria went to the regional military base in the town of Poptun, four hours to the south. All told, she visited the local outpost three times and the Poptun base twice; she even went to Guatemala City "to speak with the President’s office." All the visits were futile; no one ever attended to her.
About seven days after the six had been illegally detained and disappeared into the military outpost, Don Amao came home, no one knows why. It was Don Amao who told Doña Gloria and the neighbors where he and the others had been detained and how they had been tortured. Two months later, Don Amao was detained at a military roadblock and never seen again. Says Doña Gloria, "Solo Dios sabe donde esta",only God knows where he is.
Hardly anyone in Guatemala has gotten any closer to finding out what happened to their loved ones among the 200,000 who were murdered, massacred or disappeared. Only now, since the exhumation process began in 1992, is the truth being uncovered for all to see and read about. Over the past four years the forensic team has carried out more than ten exhumations, El Chal being their most recent stop in a long and painful process. As one member of the team says, "Not even with 30 years and 30 forensic teams will we be able to dig up all the mass graves in Guatemala."
I ask four women standing in the shade of the building that formerly housed the outpost soldiers, How many bodies do you think are here? "We don’t know," they answer, but then they talk quietly together for a while. Finally, one says, "Between 1981 and 1987 close to 200 people from our town were killed or disappeared."
"Why do you want to dig up these graves and try to find your son?" I ask Doña Gloria after we wander back from the pit. Members of the forensic team have already dug down to,and then cleared away the dirt and mud from,the skulls, bones and remains of four overlapping, intertwined skeletons. Clearly they had been haphazardly thrown one on top of the other; rope still binds their wrist and ankle bones. "There could be many more packed under here; we can’t tell yet," a team member tells us.
"It has been so long and we have never been able to do anything about our pain and suffering; about the fact that our family members lay in here in these pits where their murderers had dumped them," Doña Gloria replies. "Now, finally, we are less afraid about speaking out about the past, even though the new army outpost is just over there," she says, pointing to the highest hill in the vicinity, on top of which I spy the encampment.
When we arrived this morning, we drove slowly by a patrol of 25 heavily armed soldiers who walked by the dig site. Across Guatemala, the surviving victims of atrocities live right beside the men,soldiers and civil defense patrols,who raped, tortured and murdered their loved ones.
I ask Doña Gloria again how she felt about the exhumation process. "I feel happy and sad at the same time," she says. After a long pause, she continues, "To see the bones dug up of one’s murdered family member is no small thing."
Then, as she gazes across the pasture, as she looks intently into the past, she remembers: "That night they took him, he was wearing blue, striped polyester pants with pockets on the sides. His shirt was one of those Lacron sleeveless shirts, made of some fine material. It was yellow with blue trim. ... Perhaps they will dig him up today and then I will finally be able to bury him. I would like to bury him in the cemetery."
Contact Guatemala Partners, 1830 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20009; (202)783-1123, fax (202)483-8863. e-mail: manos@igc.org.
Sidebar: Guatemala’s Amnesty
The Guatemalan Congress has ratified an amnesty law providing legal protection to persons who committed political crimes and human rights violations in Guatemala. The passage of the law has stirred up a furor among human rights and victims’ groups in Guatemala and internationally.--G.R.Some of that anger is misdirected. First of all, most of the worst atrocities committed by the army and oligarchy-linked death squads are already "amnestied" under previous laws. Secondly, little or no legal justice has been done anywhere in the Americas,in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador or Haiti,where recent military regimes cultivated death-squad repression. That it has not is less a question of amnesty laws (which exist in all those countries), and more a question of political will. Arguably, the most crucial contribution to the failure to prosecute such crimes has been the absence of a demand for justice from the United States, which has played an extensive and complicit role in supporting repressive military regimes across the Americas, particularly in Central America.
Even as the United States takes a lead role in demanding that war crimes tribunals be set up in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, its silence with respect to Central America speaks volumes. Over the next decades, U.S. progressives will have to continue to demand that the United States declassify all information concerning war crimes and human rights violations in Central and South America, and that the U.S. government itself be held accountable to the victims in Guatemala,and elsewhere,for whatever portion of responsibility it bears for the repression, pain and suffering caused by those crimes.
Grahame Russell is Director of Guatemala Partners, a Washington-based human rights organization "working for reconciliation, justice and re-building in Guatemala."[War Resisters League Website] [Nonviolent Activist Index]
January-February 1997: [Unearthing Guatemala’s Disappeared] [Serbia "Will Never be the Same"] [International YouthPeace Week] [Activist News] [Review: Religion & Struggle]The Nonviolent Activist is published bi-monthly by:
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