Victims of Guatemalas Civil War Are Laid to Rest, 3 Decades Later
Victims of Guatemala’s Civil War Are Laid to Rest, 3 Decades Later
Photographs and Text by DANIELE VOLPE DEC. 21, 2017
SANTA AVELINA, Guatemala — Juana García Gómez, 75, wept over two coffins placed side by side in the sports hall of the Santa Avelina school in the western highlands of Guatemala.
Inside one lay the remains of her brother Juan, who had been abducted at age 50 more than three decades earlier. He had been found days after on the side of a rural highway, killed by a firearm.
The second coffin bore the name of her mother, María, who, at 90, had demanded the release of her son from a nearby military detachment. Instead, the soldiers beat her.
Her most serious injury was a broken femur; she died shortly after learning the fate of Juan, with gangrene in her leg.
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/world/americas/guatemala-civil-war-burials.html
(Very moving images within this article.)
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https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016198615
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Trial on Guatemalan Civil War Carnage Leaves Out U.S. Role
By ELISABETH MALKIN MAY 16, 2013
MEXICO CITY — In 1999, President Bill Clinton went to Guatemala and apologized. Just two weeks earlier, a United Nations truth commission found Guatemalan security forces responsible for more than 90 percent of the human rights violations committed during the country’s long civil war.
Mr. Clinton’s apology was an admission that the Guatemalan military had not acted alone. American support for Guatemalan security forces that had engaged in “violent and widespread repression,” the president said, “was wrong.”
But that long history of United States support for Guatemala’s military, which began with a coup engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1954, went unacknowledged during the genocide trial and conviction of the man most closely identified with the war’s brutality, the former dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt.
During a month of testimony before the three-judge panel that found General Ríos Montt guilty last Friday, the prosecution never raised the issue of American military backing in the army’s war against leftist guerrillas. The 86-year-old former dictator barely mentioned the United States when he argued in his own defense that he had no operational command over the troops that massacred and terrorized the Maya-Ixil population during his rule in 1982 and 1983.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/world/americas/trial-on-guatemalan-civil-war-carnage-leaves-out-us-role.html