Guatemala: Unearthing a Massacre

April 29th, 2010

Via: Global Post:

Archeologists this month meticulously unearthed the brittle, bare bones of what are thought to be at least 162 men, women and children killed by the Guatemalan army in 1982.

Stoic old folks watched intently for signs of brothers and sisters; kids asked about the heaps of femurs and broken craniums. There were gasps as the muddy clothing was extracted and documented — a boy’s athletic jersey, a girl’s yellow dress, an infant’s blouse.

Twenty-eight years ago, survivors couldn’t risk funerals or even discuss the crime. They couldn’t return to the frontier village of Las Dos Erres, which they had hacked out of the forest, planting crops and fruit trees in a back-breaking, doomed bid to rise from the peasantry. Entire families had been buried — some alive — in a dry well, mothers raped and hurled onto their wounded children below in about 18 hours of systematic savagery.

Now, after 16 years of investigation hindered by stonewalling in the courts, prosecutors, activists and victims are mounting a reinvigorated effort to bring to justice those who carried out the murders. It would be a landmark case in a country where hundreds of wartime massacres have gone unpunished. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a branch of the Organization of American States, in November ordered Guatemala to perform the exhumation and restart a long-stalled prosecution. Two members of the notorious Guatemalan special forces, the Kaibiles, are in jail, another is out on bail and 14 more are wanted.

Horribly representative of Guatemala’s civil war, the case offers unusually precise evidence supported by eyewitnesses. Two former Kaibiles, now in hiding for their own protection, have named their comrades in the attack. And a man who was orphaned in the rampage as a small boy then abducted and adopted by one of the attackers is ready to testify. He now lives outside the country, waiting for what he hopes will be his day in court.

The United States backed the regime in those Cold War years, but Americans were largely unaware of the carnage a country away from their southern border. Victoria Sanford, who has written extensively on Guatemalan war crimes, says victims there lacked the influential lobbying groups that brought U.S. attention to atrocities in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The Catholic Church had been intimidated and U.S. aid to the regime was often covert or through proxy countries.

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