Ramiro remembers: Key witness in Guatemala massacre

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Global Post

Ramiro remembers: Key witness in Guatemala massacre
Ramiro Cristales was raised by one of the soldiers who allegedly helped slaughter Cristales' entire family.
By Matt McAllester - GlobalPost
Published: May 5, 2010 17:19 ET

NEW YORK — Ramiro Cristales remembers the two palm trees behind his house and the watering hole where his older brother would toss him in when the rains came to their village in the Guatemalan jungle. He remembers his mother’s kindness and his father’s hard work.

And, unfortunately for the former soldiers accused of killing Cristales’ family, Cristales also remembers the massacre that took place 28 years ago in Las Dos Erres, when 251 men, women and children were murdered. He remembers how the Guatemalan soldiers held babies by their legs and smashed their heads. He remembers the moment a soldier plunged a knife into his mother’s neck before throwing her into a well that was filling up with the bodies of villagers. He remembers seeing his father and brother hanging from a tree.

And he remembers when he first saw Santos Alonzo, one of the soldiers guarding the church full of women and children before they were led to the well to be killed. Cristales recalls how Alonzo took him away from the horrors of that day and adopted him, only to treat him like a slave. For the next 15 years, Cristales was forced to address as "father" the man who had helped kill his family.

And now Ramiro is hoping to testify against these soldiers, including Alonzo, who is being held in the U.S. on an immigration violation, in a human rights case in Guatemala.


Read more: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/the-americas/100504/survivor-las-dos-erres

[bertman]

1. How easily we forget the methods used to secure our corporate interests abroad.

I was going to say what a compassionate man Santos Alonzo was for taking the boy and adopting him--until I read that he treated him like a slave.

What's very sad about things like this is that the soldiers who participate are often doing it only because they fear for their lives if they object or try to stop the slaughter.

thank you for the reminder, Judi Lynn.

Rec.

[truedelphi]

2. We had some groups of people from Guatamela come & speak to us

At a local Social Justice center. Men who lived in the north would enlist to fight the "terrorists" in the south, and of course, men in the south would join to fight the "terrorists" in the north.

Often their main concern for doing this was that for the first time in their lives, they would be given shoes for their feet. And also they would be able to buy shoes for their families.

How is it different from when American people encourage their kids to join the military and kill others in foreign places like Iraq and Afghanistan so they can earn credits towards college tuition?

[demoleft]

3. Guatemala massacre suspect arrested in Florida

A former Guatemalan soldier accused of involvement in a notorious massacre in the 1980s has been arrested in the United States.

Gilberto Jordan, 54, was detained on Wednesday in South Florida.

Prosecutors say he failed to disclose his Guatemalan military record when he applied for US citizenship.

He is accused of taking part in the massacre of at least 250 civilians in 1982, during a conflict between the troops and left-wing rebels.

bbc, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8664987.stm

[Judi Lynn]

4. Very good news for the people of Guatemala. He needs to go home and face the music.

So many people who have martyred Latin American citizens have found haven in the U.S., and they all seem to head for Florida, both soldiers and their officers, as well as dirty presidents and their cabinets.

Sitting alone with their memories might just drive them all crazy, once they get their sentences, a much kinder deal than they gave helpless farmers and villagers and their families.

[demoleft]

5. agreed. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

6. Guatemalans accused of war crimes rounded up in U.S.

May 5, 2010 11:39 AM
Guatemalans accused of war crimes rounded up in U.S.

One works as a cook. Another as a karate teacher. They are accused of war crimes in Guatemala -- yet they've been living in the U.S. for years. Matt McAllester of GlobalPost writes about the 28-year struggle to bring the accused Guatamalan soldiers to court. What follows is an excerpt from the exclusive GlobalPost investigation.

WASHINGTON -- U.S. federal agents are today closing in on four former Guatemalan soldiers accused of taking part in a 1982 massacre, which one law enforcement official called "the most shocking modern-day war crime American authorities have ever investigated."

One former soldier alleged to have taken part in the massacre of 251 villagers in the rural Guatemalan hamlet of Las Dos Erres is already in custody in Texas. Another former soldier in Florida and two more in California are under active investigation.

Law enforcement officials close to the case acknowledged the four men are part of a probe by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency into immigration violations aimed at rounding up suspects named in a recently revived, landmark human rights case in Guatemala. If found in violation of U.S. immigration laws, the men would likely face deportation to Guatemala and a possible prosecution there for war crimes.

For years these men, who are all accused of serving in a notoriously brutal Guatemalan military unit, have lived in America, blending in to communities in Florida, California and Texas. One is a popular karate teacher. One is a cook. The man in custody is a day laborer who had allegedly abducted and then adopted a boy who was orphaned in the slaughter 28 years ago.

That boy, Ramiro Cristales, who was 5 years old at the time, is now a key witness in the case in Guatemala against the former soldiers and against the man who raised him.

In an exclusive interview with GlobalPost, Cristales, one of only two known survivors of the massacre, saw his entire family murdered. He said he was frustrated it has taken so long for the men to be brought to justice. But he said he hoped U.S. and Guatemalan officials might work together to make that happen.

"They have to do something... The only thing I ask is justice," said Cristales, who is now hiding in an undisclosed location.

More:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503543_162-20004196-503543.html

http://i.huffpost.com.nyud.net:8090/gen/164238/thumbs/s-GUATEMALA-large.jpg

Ramiro Cristales, as a child.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Guatemala: Documents show U.S. officials knew the Guatemalan Army was responsible for 1982 massacre

Saturday, May 08, 2010
Guatemala: Documents show U.S. officials knew the Guatemalan Army was responsible for 1982 massacre
These materials are reproduced from www.nsarchive.org with the permission of the National Security Archive


Following this week's arrest of a former Guatemalan special forces soldier, the National Security Archive is posting a set of declassified documents on one of Guatemala's most shocking and unresolved human rights crimes, the Dos Erres massacre.
On May 5, 2010, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Gilberto Jordan, 54, in Palm Beach County, Florida, based on a criminal complaint charging Jordan with lying to U.S. authorities about his service in the Guatemalan Army and his role in the 1982 Dos Erres massacre. The complaint alleges that Jordan, a naturalized American citizen, was part of the special counterinsurgency Kaibiles unit that carried out the massacre of hundreds of residents of the Dos Erres village located in the northwest Petén region. Jordan allegedly helped kill unarmed villagers with his own hands, including a baby he allegedly threw into the village well.

The massacre was part of the Guatemalan military's "scorched earth campaign" and was carried out by the Kaibiles ranger unit. The Kaibiles were specially trained soldiers who became notorious for their use of torture and brutal killing tactics. According to witness testimony, and corroborated through U.S. declassified archives, the Kaibiles entered the town of Dos Erres on the morning of December 6, 1982, and separated the men from women and children. They started torturing the men and raping the women and by the afternoon they had killed almost the entire community, including the children. Nearly the entire town was murdered, their bodies thrown into a well and left in nearby fields. The U.S. documents reveal that American officials deliberated over theories of how an entire town could just "disappear," and concluded that the Army was the only force capable of such an organized atrocity. More than 250 people are believed to have died in the massacre.

The Global Post news organization conducted an investigative report into the investigation of the Guatemalan soldiers living in the United States and cited declassified documents released to the National Security Archive's Guatemala Documentation Project under the Freedom of Information Act. These documents are part of a collection of files assembled by the Archive and turned over to Guatemala's truth commission investigators, who used the files in the writing of their ground-breaking report, "Guatemala: Memory of Silence."

The documents include U.S. Embassy cables that describe first-hand accounts by U.S. officials who traveled to the area of Dos Erres and witnessed the devastation left behind by the Kaibiles. Based on their observations and information obtained from sources during their trip, the American officials concluded "that the party most likely responsible for this incident is the Guatemalan Army."

More:
http://ionglobaltrends.blogspot.com/2010/05/guatemala-documents-show-us-officials.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FzqKG+%28i+On+Global+Trends%29

[Judi Lynn]

8. Reagan and Guatemala's Death Files

Reagan and Guatemala's Death Files

By Robert Parry
http://www.consortiumnews.com/052699a1.html

Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems. The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for the optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.

The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala. The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan's White House.

Yet, as the world community moves to punish war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, no substantive discussion has occurred in the United States about facing up to this horrendous record of the 1980s. Rather than a debate about Reagan as a potential war criminal, the ailing ex-president is honored as a conservative icon with his name attached to Washington National Airport and with an active legislative push to have his face carved into Mount Rushmore. When the national news media does briefly acknowledge the barbarities of the 1980s in Central America, it is in the context of one-day stories about the little countries bravely facing up to their violent pasts. At times, the CIA is fingered abstractly as a bad supporting actor in the violent dramas. But never does the national press lay blame on individual American officials.

The grisly reality of Central America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war. The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.

The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages...are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's history," the commission concluded. The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the north, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide."

Besides carrying out murder and "disappearances," the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found. The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.

More:
http://www.converge.org.nz/lac/articles/news990610b.htm

[Judi Lynn]

9. Have you heard of US American Jennifer Harbury whose husband was tortured & killed in Guatemala?

Americans Who Tell the Truth
Jennifer Harbury

Jennifer Harbury Biography
Writer, Lawyer, Human Rights Activist 1951–
“The problem, of course, lies with the realities concealed from us. This has always been the case. While the American public has slowly grappled with ongoing injustices visible within our own borders, it has long failed to discover and correct our government's abuses abroad. In the end, however, this is our government, and torture is being utilized in our names and supported by our tax dollars. We are responsible.”

By the time Jennifer Harbury entered Harvard Law School she already knew that she wanted to study civil rights law. After growing up in Connecticut and graduating from Cornell University she traveled widely in Asia and Africa witnessing first hand brutal injustice and repression in many cultures. After law school she began work in a small legal aid bureau on the Texas-Mexican border. In the early 1980s thousands of Mayans were escaping to Texas from death squads and massacres in Guatemala. U.S. immigration was sending these refugees back. Harbury decided to go to Guatemala to see for herself what was going on. Her life was changed.

In Guatemala she met Efrain Bamaca Velasquez ( known as Commandante Everardo) a leader of the Mayan resistance to the Guatemalan oligarchy’s brutal repression of its indigenous people. ( Mayan’s were 80% of the population.) She and Everardo fell in love and were married. He was subsequently captured, tortured for two and one half years then murdered without trial. Harbury conducted hunger strikes in Guatemala and in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. to try to force officials in both countries to tell her the truth about what had happened to her husband. The U.S. denied any knowledge of the situation. Finally an official in the U.S. State Department leaked the truth that the U.S. had known all along what had happened to Everardo, and that men on the payroll of the CIA had participated in his torture and murder. Harbury’s book Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala ( 1997) is a classic work of courage and truth telling, uncovering the U.S. complicity in right wing torture and violent, anti-democratic suppression of poor people’s rights.

In 2005, Harbury published another book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way, which documents the long time use of torture by the CIA. This book demonstrates that the use of torture by American interrogators at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is nothing new. She also stresses that torture is counter-productive. It does not elicit accurate information from its victims. By using torture, “We are reacting out of fear instead of thinking our way through the difficult process of conflict resolution. In the end, our use of violence and repression can only sow seeds of hatred and trauma, which in the end will produce only greater violence against us.” And, she says, “We must accept the fact that we are indeed our brothers’ and sisters’ collective keepers. If we are indifferent to the basic human needs of others, then peace will always elude us. Suffering, when too long ignored, inevitably leads to conflagration.”

Jennifer Harbury is also the author of Bridge to Courage: Life Stories of Guatemalan Companeros & Companeras (1995). In 1995 she received a Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, and in 1997 the Cavallo Award for Moral Courage. She shared this award with Richard Nuccio, the U.S. State Department official who leaked the information about the CIA’s cover-up of and complicity in the torture and murder of her husband Everardo. For this act, Nuccio was denied his federal security clearance.

http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Jennifer_Harbury.php

http://www.utexas.edu.nyud.net:8090/law/academics/centers/humanrights/img/photos/harbury_sm.jpg http://www.wcl.american.edu.nyud.net:8090/hrbrief/images/093p04.jpg http://img.fkcdn.com.nyud.net:8090/img/077/9780807003077.jpg http://news.bbc.co.uk.nyud.net:8090/olmedia/1685000/images/_1689472_harburybones_315.jpg

[Judi Lynn]

10. Alleged Guatemalan torturer lived quietly in Delray Beach

Alleged Guatemalan torturer lived quietly in Delray Beach
BY ALFONSO CHARDY
[e-mail]

DELRAY BEACH -- The one-story stucco home where Gilberto Jordán lives west of this south Palm Beach County community does not stand out in the leafy neighborhood near Interstate 95.

Jordán, born in Guatemala, blends easily into the neighborhood of immigrants who hail from such countries as Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala and Honduras. But Jordán, 54, is no ordinary immigrant. He is a former soldier in a Guatemalan army unit known as Kaibiles, a group of highly trained and highly feared fighters who in the 1980s formed special commando teams to track down and kill Cuban-backed leftist guerrillas operating in the Central American country.

But the Kaibiles also were implicated in massacres of innocent villagers. And this week federal agents swooped down onto Jordán's driveway along the 5000 block of Palm Ridge Boulevard near Military Trail and arrested him on charges related to a December 1982 massacre that left 251 men, women and children dead. The massacre at Dos Erres (two Rs) was one of the worst in Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war.

When questioned by authorities, Jordán ``readily admitted'' participating in the massacre, throwing a live baby into a well and taking other people to the well where they were later executed by other soldiers, according to an arrest affidavit filed in West Palm Beach federal court.

When an El Nuevo Herald reporter and photographer approached Jordán's house Thursday, a young man identified himself as Jordán's son but refused to give his name. He said his father was not home. ``I know why you are here and we're not giving interviews,'' he said. ``All I can tell you is that my father is a decent man, a hard working man and we know that talking to the press would do more harm than good.''

He did confirm that his father worked as a chef specializing in Italian food. ``He even learned Italian while doing his work,'' the son said. He refused to say where his father worked, but people familiar with the case said Jordán had prepared dishes at some of Palm Beach's ``country clubs.''

More:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/09/1621107/alleged-guatemalan-torturer-lived.html#ixzz0nbfbWUbz