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NISGUA Articles and Interviews

Pacific Currents: Paramilitary threat still looms large in Guatemala
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
by LARRY JOHNSON
May 12, 2003

The news out of Guatemala last week was a grim reminder that the troubled nation still has a long way to go to achieve true peace, nearly seven years after an agreement putting an end to a 36-year civil war that killed 200,000 Guatemalans.

Former paramilitary fighters released the mayor of the San Miguel Panan, late Tuesday, a day after they took him hostage to demand payment for fighting alongside the army in the civil war.

The United Nations Mission to Guatemala estimates that as many as 630,000 paramilitaries helped the government fight the guerrillas during the war. Only 250,000 people are listed in government files as having worked with the army.

President Alfonso Portillo had agreed to pay the former civilian fighters $660 each in three installments -- one this year and two next year.

Human rights activists have said Portillo's payment plan is barbaric because it rewards civilians who helped carry out many of the thousands of human rights abuses committed during the war.
Wednesday, an appeals court, citing insufficient evidence, freed an army colonel who was the only military officer found guilty of ordering the 1990 killing of human rights activist Myrna Mack.

The 39-year-old anthropologist was stabbed 27 times in daylight outside her downtown Guatemala City office Sept. 11, 1990.

Human rights groups claimed she angered the military by publishing a groundbreaking 1990 report blaming government anti-insurgency campaigns for killing hundreds of Mayan Indians during the country's 1960-1996 civil war.

"After the peace accord in 1996, there was an opening toward democ- racy," said Goyo Myers of Seattle. "But it closed about a year ago; the level of human rights abuses against human rights workers just shot up."

Myers and Kim Bush of Bainbridge don't need any reminders of the grim situation in Guatemala. Both have experienced them firsthand as "accompaniers" for witnesses involved in human rights trials and human rights workers. They returned to Seattle last month.

Accompaniment, the men said, is designed to create a non-violent response to the threats, harassment and violence suffered by Guatemalan communities and grass-roots workers and organizations. To accomplish that, the Guatemala Accompaniment Project, a program of the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guate- mala (NISGUA), places U.S. volunteers side by side with people and commu- nities working for human rights.

"We hope by our presence with the various groups that the violence will stop," said Myers, 31, who spent almost a year working in Guatemala, much of that time accompanying rights workers at the Myrna Mack murder trial.

"The truth is that the paramilitary, the secret groups that have been responsible for a lot of the disappearances and the human rights abuses before the peace accords were never disbanded," said Bush, 62, a schoolteacher who spent eight months with a community that is getting ready to provide witnesses for a war crimes trial, the first in Guatemala.

The war-crime case, scheduled for late this month, is against former military dictator Jose Rios Montt, and his 1982 military command, who are charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes resulting from Montt's scorched-earth campaign against the indigenous communities of the central highlands. It could be a high point in the struggle for peace and justice, Bush said.

He said the former combatants (guerrillas of the united front) are still part of the political process that began after the peace accords of 1996, but the problem is that they've never found a way to work well together, "so there is no political party of the left that speaks with one voice."

"They don't have much political clout," Bush said.

"There is an election at the end of this year, and it's essentially between two conservative parties," Myers added. Bush said a recent survey of voters found that 90 percent said they don't trust politicians, and 60 percent said they wouldn't vote.

Bush and Myers said that despite Guatemala's problems, they take hope from their personal experiences as accompaniers. "It gives people a sense of solidarity," Bush said, "of someone else being there, giving them support."

"The human connection is equally powerful for both sides," Myers said.

On the Web:
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/
The Guatemala Accompaniment Project:
www.nisgua.org

Pacific Currents is a weekly look at issues and personalities along the Pacific Rim.

This report includes information from The Associated Press.