The Emerging Secrets of Guatemala's Disappeared

[AlphaCentauri]

For years the national police dumped millions of old files in a onetime munitions depot inhabited by bats.
About two weeks ago, authorities opened the door to the warehouse, stacked floor to ceiling with musty papers. Now Guatemalans are using the documents to search for information about loved ones murdered or disappeared in the long dirty war against critics of security forces.

"For 25 years we knew absolutely nothing," said Alejandra García Montenegro, 26, who was a baby when her father, labor leader Fernando García, left for a meeting in February 1984 -- when Guatemala was under military rule -- and never came home.

"It was as if the earth had swallowed up my father and he had never existed," she said. "Then a paper turns up that confirms our suspicion that he had been captured by state security."

The files were hidden by the national police and their protectors until 2005, when civil authorities accidentally discovered the warehouse. Some of the logs date to the 1880s, but the most significant archives were amassed during Guatemala's civil war, when an estimated 200,000 people died and 40,000 disappeared between 1960 and 1996.

Guatemalan human rights advocates describe the files as the largest such archive ever released in Latin America. Archivists believe there are more than 80 million documents. Many pages are in chaotic, unsorted piles, green and yellow with mold. Others are stacked neatly.

About 7.5 million documents have been catalogued and digitized so far. The files give detailed accounts of the shadowy world of police disappearances of activists, with photographs of students and labor leaders arrested by police and explicit instructions on how to spy on military critics who were later clandestinely seized and murdered.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/10/AR2009041003530.html?hpid=moreheadlines

[Judi Lynn]

1. According to this article, we have another new President whose life was altered by US-supported

murderous tyrants:

The archives have yielded revelations about Colom's family. Files contain details of 20 years of police surveillance of the president's uncle, Manuel Colom Argueta, a popular former mayor who was assassinated in 1979 in an operation that employed military helicopters.

That must be remembered from now on when we recall the fact that Nestor Kirchner, former Argentinian President, the husband of Christina Fernandez de Kirchner, was imprisoned and tortured by their military dictatorship, that Chile's President Michelle Bachelet was imprisoned and tortured, along with her mother, and that her father, a military official loyal to his President was imprisoned and tortured and suffered a violent heart attack and died there, and that her own fiance was taken by the government and never seen again, and that Brazil's Luis Inacio Lula da Silva's own brother was imprisoned and tortured for his political believes, that Lula himself fought against the Brazilian military dictatorship and was awarded a high honor for his self-sacrifice, and that Paraguay's new President Fernando Lugo's own father was imprisoned 20 different times before he was exiled, along with Lugo's two brothers, by the Nazi-supporting U.S.-supported genocidal 35 year dictator, Alfredo Stroessner, Lugo, who became a liberation thological Roman Catholic priest was also exiled for his work trying to assist the poor of Paraguay.

So now we learn Colom is one of their kindred spirits. It's a triumph for humanity that he was elected, finally, as Guatemala's President.

Thank god for Ana Corado, the one Guatemalans needed for this breakthrough:

~snip~
The police archives might have been destroyed before their discovery in July 2005 had it not been for Ana Corado, an unassuming, bespectacled police officer.

Corado said she had been assigned to the archive six months earlier as punishment by a police supervisor she refused to date.

She found a filthy, depressingly dark concrete-block building strewn with papers soiled with rat and bird droppings.

Police brought truckloads of new files, mixed with used condoms, toilet paper and underwear, dumping them "like trash" in the parking lot, she said.

Corado began to bundle the papers. One day the supervisor ordered her to burn them. She told him that unauthorized destruction would be a crime.

When a police munitions depot blew up nearby, worried residents demanded a search of the mysterious facility. One investigator, historian Heriberto Cifuentes, spotted the papers through a window and asked to take a look. Morales, the human rights ombudsman, secured the facility while workers sorted through photos of bodies, traffic tickets, surveillance transcripts and records of people arrested on the charge of "communist."

"If this had happened 20 years ago, I wouldn't be alive," Corado said. "I would be disappeared."

~~~~~~~~
~snip~
Colom said his government is bracing for the declassification of military archives of the scorched-earth campaigns against leftist guerrillas, in which entire villages were destroyed and their inhabitants massacred.

If it had not been for Ana Corado's courage, and sense of duty to the human race itself, to life, this urgent, vital information would have remained hidden, and buried to the rest of the world.

Hope the people in our own country will take the time for soul-searching, asking themselves if they really want their future Presidents involved in genocidal like the ones Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan supported with our money, with our military advisors, equipment, materials, and covert ops in Guatemala.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Information I had not heard on how Clinton's apology to Guatemala happened.

I always guessed it just bubbled up, out of the goodness of his heart. Guess again!

America, Torture and Hypocrisy

By Robert Parry
April 9, 2009

~snip~
Nazi-Like Practices

Indeed, that record of extraordinary cruelty is the largely unwritten history of the Cold War, the U.S. government letting its fear of international communism lead to both tolerance and encouragement of Nazi-like practices: torture, assassination, mass slaughters and political repression.

Even after the Cold War ended, the United States refused to examine this ugly history in any systematic way. Though Democrat Bill Clinton was the first President elected after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he ignored calls for serious examinations of that historical era – until late in his presidency when he did declassify some documents relating to U.S. policy in Guatemala.

Then, after a Guatemalan truth commission based its investigation partly on the declassified U.S. record, Clinton issued an apology to the people of Guatemala for Washington's role in decades of atrocities that killed an estimated 200,000 people, including what was deemed genocide against Mayan Indians in the country’s highlands during the Reagan administration.

While the Guatemalan records are starkly illustrative of how successive U.S. administrations enabled torture and mass murder, it represents only a sliver of the sordid Cold War history, with similar policies replicated in countries around the world for nearly half a century.

More:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/040909.html