Guatemala to Expose Army Torture Files
February 26th, 2008Somehow, the Reuters article below doesn’t mention the CIA even once…
As usual, the reader needs to look elsewhere for the basic, contextual facts:
Jennifer K. Harbury Knows American Torture Starts at the Top, and It Has for Decades:
…my husband had indeed been captured alive, had been held for two and a half years and severely tortured, then extra-judiciously executed or assassinated by military intelligence officials in Guatemala, who were also on the CIA payroll as paid informants.
In other words, the CIA had been paying the very people that were torturing and who eventually killed my husband without trial. The documents from the U.S. government also showed that both the CIA and the United States Embassy had known where my husband was, and the fact that he was being tortured in the hands of U.S.-paid informants, from the first week of his capture.
C.I.A. Death Squads by Allan Nairn
History of Guatemala’s ‘Death Squads’ by Robert Parry
Relevant Declassified U.S. Documents from the National Security Archive’s Guatemala Collection
Nope… Not one word about CIA.
Via: Reuters / Sydney Morning Herald:
Guatemala’s new President Alvaro Colom said yesterday he would open army files for the first time to make public details of massacres and torture by soldiers during the country’s 36-year civil war.
“We are going to make all of the army’s archives public so we can know the truth, to start building on a foundation of truth and justice,” said Mr Colom, who beat a right-wing former general to take office in January.
Almost a quarter of a million people were killed or “disappeared” during the 1960-1996 conflict between leftist guerrillas and the government. More than 80 per cent of the murders were committed by the army, according to a United Nations-backed truth commission.
The commission, which compiled thousands of interviews with victims after the 1996 peace accords, named no officials, in part because the army files were not open to the public.
Mr Colom’s uncle, Manuel Colom Argueta, a leftist politician with presidential ambitions, was killed by the army in 1979 in a well-coordinated ambush.
Rights groups say the new army files will help solve war crimes when matched with information in the police archive discovered in June 2005, as police collaborated with the army.
Mr Colom said all the information from the military will be turned over to the human rights ombudsman, also in charge of cleaning and categorising the thousands of police documents left to go mouldy in an old warehouse behind a dump for rusted cars.
The massive paper trail gives hope to family members who are looking for answers about their long-disappeared relatives.
Eighty-year-old Emilia Garcia hopes the army files will contain clues about her son Fernando Garcia, a union leader shot by police in 1984, taken to a military hospital and never heard from again.
“We have been waiting 24 years for the state to give us some answers. All I want is to find my son’s remains, he is not a lost dog,” she said.
when evil is done at it’s most baldly blatent is it most an affront to humanity. EOM