Guatemalan refugees eye end of 20-year exile

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Reuters

Guatemalan refugees eye end of 20-year exile
30 Mar 2007 21:44:39 GMT
Source: Reuters

By Eduardo Garcia

SANTA CRUZ, Bolivia, March 30 (Reuters) - A group of refugees who fled the massacres and terror of Guatemala's civil war will return home this weekend after 24 years living in grinding poverty in Bolivia and a 13-year battle to go home.

The return of 158 people, including refugees and their offspring, signals the end of Guatemala's long history of exile, since it is the last large group of organized exiles expected to go back to the Central American country.

The group had no luck getting the Bolivian or Guatemalan governments to help them return until they attended the January 2006 swearing in ceremony of Bolivia's first indigenous president, Evo Morales, and his new government pledged to get them home within six months.

"It took much longer than that, but we are very grateful to Evo's government," says Fidel Garcia, who fled Guatemala in 1980, the bloodiest part of the 1960-1996 civil war that killed 200,000, most of them Maya Indians.

Read more: http://mobile.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N30283854.htm

[Judi Lynn]

1. Background on that war, and Reagan involvement, for those who haven't heard, from HRW:

Party To Mass Murder?
By Daniel Wilkinson, Counsel for the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch and author of "Silence on the Mountain: Stories of Terror, Betrayal, and Forgetting in Guatemala."

Published in The Washington Post

November 8, 2003

Now Rios Montt is attempting to return to power, and as part of his campaign has even displayed a picture of himself with Ronald Reagan that was taken in the '80s. The U.S. Embassy has pointed out that this photo was taken in a different context, and indeed it was. The context was the Cold War, and the Reagan administration, concerned about leftist insurgencies in Central America, was seeking congressional approval to restore direct military aid to Guatemala. Reagan posed with Rios Montt, praised him as "a man of great personal integrity" who was "totally dedicated to democracy," and dismissed charges of atrocities in Guatemala as a "bum rap."

As Reagan spoke, Rios Montt's troops were preparing to march on a village called Las Dos Erres for a counterinsurgency operation that was to include the rape of young women, smashing of infants' heads and the interment of more than 160 civilians -- some while still alive -- in the village well.

Now the skeletons have been exhumed from the well in Las Dos Erres, as well as from hundreds of other clandestine cemeteries scattered throughout the countryside. A truth commission has documented tens of thousands of abuses committed by the Guatemalan state, as well as a much smaller number committed by leftist guerrillas. And in 1999 President Clinton issued a public apology in Guatemala for the U.S. role in supporting that country's abusive regimes.
(snip/...)

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2003/11/08/grenad12953.htm

[Peace Patriot]

2. Extraordinary that the reporter would think to ask this 75 year old refugee

about Rigoberta Menchu. (Reporter Eduardo Garcia.) Sometimes Reuters does a good job. They are not nearly as bad as AP and others on Latin American leftists.

----

"Dorotea Hernandez, 75, who left Guatemala with her six children in 1981 'pretty much at gun point,' said she is bittersweet about returning because two of her children and twelve grandchildren will stay in Bolivia.

"Hernandez has lived 25 years without a television, does not know the name of her country's president or that Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu, a champion of indigenous rights in the Central American country, will run for president this year.

"'We're very poor. We sold everything for $200,' says Hernandez, referring to a wooden shack with a thatched roof, ragged pieces of furniture and a small plot of land in Bolivia.

"'All I have is some clothes in a bag, just like when I left Guatemala a long time ago,' she said."

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N30283854.htm

--------------------------

And nobody gave a crap about her or the tens of thousands of other Guatemalans who fled the Reagan-backed slaughter of TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND Mayan villagers in the 1980s--until a LEFTIST government was elected in Bolivia!

Not Bush, oozing "compassion" for "the poor of Latin America," on his failed kneecapping mission to the south. Not Clinton, who saw Latin American peasants as profit-makers for the sweatshop operations of US Corporate "free trade." Not any Democrat that I know of. And certainly not the former government of Bolivia, or the former or present governments of Guatemala.

There she languished, for 20 years, to the near end of her life. I wish her children well in Bolivia. They are privileged to witness and be part of an extraordinary revolution that is transforming Latin America--and, who knows?, may transform us as well. And I hope that Dorotea joins Rigoberta's campaign when she gets back to Guatemala. She would be a good addition to it. Grandmother wisdom.

And hats off to the Germans for funding these returns home! This is what the U.S. should be doing--making amends. Instead, our Bushcons are plotting assassinations of good leaders and violent disruptions. Ah, me.

[Peace Patriot]

3. I should credit Clinton with that apology. That was the right thing to do.

It remains true, though, that the global corporate predator "free trade" that he promoted meant decimation to Latin American countries, and the dire improverishment of millions.

I want to say also that, while I concluded on a despairing note, above, there is every sign that the leftist trend in Latin America is unstoppable, and that dinosaur regimes like Colombia, and remnant rightwing regimes like Guatemala's, are in disgrace, and headed for defeat. I feel very optimistic about positive change in Latin America.

[Judi Lynn]

4. It WAS surprising to read Germany stepped in to help these people return to their homeland.

It was a startlingly compassionate thing to do, and apparently without profit motive. Almost completely unheard of currently.

We are the ones whose pResident funded their death squads, executioners, torturers who made it impossible to physically remain in their own country. There's enough written about the Reagan years in Guatemala to cause nightmares.

Here's a 5:50 clip on a refugee's return to Guatemala to look for her relatives, from Amnesty International:
http://web.amnesty.org/web/content.nsf/pages/gbrguatemala_video

Guatemala: the lethal legacy of impunity

Businessman Edgar Ordóñez Porta, "disappeared" in May 1999. His mutilated body was found shortly afterwards. In-depth inquiries carried out by his brother Hugo suggest that responsibility for the murder may lay with military personnel whose economic interests were threatened by the small oil refining business recently started by the brothers. Hugo Ordóñez was offered help by the military to find his "disappeared" brother, on the tacit condition that the newspaper he directed would stop criticising the government. Investigations by the military led nowhere and Hugo Ordóñez became convinced that the "help" from the military was actually intended to divert the inquiry. He and his family subsequently had to flee the country in fear for their security.

The case of Edgar Ordóñez is illustrative of human rights violations committed in modern-day Guatemala in the context of the so-called "corporate mafia state" in which certain economic actors, including subsidiaries of some multinational corporations, collude with sectors of the police and military and common criminals to pursue their mutual economic interests and then conspire with these same forces to intimidate and eliminate those who get in their way, know too much or try to investigate their activities.
(snip)

http://web.amnesty.org/web/content.nsf/pages/gbrguatemala_index



Carrying remains of their murdered loved ones to be reburied.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Human Rights Victory
By Stephen Blythe

In December, 1990, the town of Santiago Atitlan, Guatemala, serenely nestled between volcanoes on the shores of Lake Atitlan, declared its independence from the Guatemalan Army.

It has prospered in peace since, and is either a shining example of peaceful democratic struggle or an embarrassment, depending upon whom you ask...

The Guatemalan Army, controlled by the powerful, and a power unto itself (owning businesses, large tracts of land, communications, and banks - the "Bank of the Army" being one of the biggest in the country), insinuates itself into the daily life of most villages in this country. The army is blamed for disappearances through forced conscription (many boys are picked up at local soccer matches) or more surreptitiously through middle-of-the-night abductions. Those "desaparecidos" (disappeared) are either never seen again or are found tortured and killed. It is a widely understood truth that "there are no political prisoners in Guatemala" - this said as black humor by potential victims of the government. The army created civilian patrols and sent them after anyone deemed an "enemy of the people" or a communist. This list often includes church workers, health workers, community leaders, priests, and those who refuse to join or cooperate with the civilian patrol. For this reason hundreds of thousands fled into neighboring Mexico in the early 1980's, and approximately one million (out of six million) are "internal refugees" within their own country.

Santiago Atitlan suffered its share of hardship - hundreds killed or disappeared. Estimates range up to about 800, and photos in the town hall attest to at least 300 disappeared. A favorite priest, father Stan Rother, from Oklahoma, was gunned down by soldiers in his study next to the church in 1981. His study remains a shrine to this day.
(snip)

On a cool evening of December 1, 1990, several soldiers from the nearby garrison were in town drinking and becoming out of control. After harassing some local women, some villagers threw stones at them. The soldiers pulled their weapons and fired, killing one. The townspeople, outraged, gathered in the town square, ringing the church bells to assemble the town. They marched, thousands strong, in the early morning hours, to the garrison, to demand an end to harassment by soldiers stationed there. When they arrived at the gates of the garrison - men, women, and children, they were met with gunfire, and 11 were killed and 40 injured.
(snip/...)

http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~gpasch/tesis/pages/guatemala/otr04/hmnrts.htm

Valuable sites, information connected to these thumbnails:
http://images.google.com/images?q=Guatemala+massacre&ndsp=20&svnum=10&hl=en&start=140&sa=N