Fredy Peccerelli
In the past few months, we’ve seen a lot of horrific news coverage of the mass graves of Iraq. New ones continue to be found, bringing both grief and a form of closure to the families of those interred. Almost every report notes that without the U.S. invasion of Iraq, these graves might have remained forever covered. But it’s rarely pointed out that at least some of these burials might not have occurred had U.S. policy been different – both during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and during the Shi’a insurgency in 1991 that the White House first blessed, then abandoned.
Some mass graves that U.S. policy was more directly responsible for rarely make the news. Those are scattered across Guatemala, the ones whose remains Fredy Peccerelli and his forensics team have been digging up to examine bone by bone. This week, Peccerelli, having fled his homeland for refuge in the United Kingdom, got some positive feedback from fellow scientists.
Guatemala rights scientist honoured
Most scientists face nothing more serious in their working lives than a low salary, a major caffeine habit and the spectre of a rival making the grand breakthrough first.
Fredy Peccerelli has faced death threats to himself and his family, and been forced to leave his native Guatemala.
At this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) [in Seattle], Mr Peccerelli and his colleagues at the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) are being honoured for their commitment to using science to promote human rights.
Since 1992, the Foundation has been investigating human rights abuses committed during Guatemala's 36-year civil war, particularly the 18-month period in the early 1980s when General Efrain Rios Montt pursued what has been described as a "scorched earth policy". ...
Altogether, it is estimated about 200,000 people were killed or "disappeared", making the civil war one of Latin America's bloodiest.
Mr Peccerelli and his team investigate each massacre, each atrocity, through the principles of sound science. ...
From the remains, Mr Peccerelli's team tries to construct a picture of what happened at the time of death.
For example, was the victim shot or struck by a machete? Where did the bullet enter and exit the body? What was the victim's posture at the time, and what does that imply about what they were doing?
Evidence is given to the Prosecutor's Office where it can be used as evidence in legal cases. ...
"Unfortunately, we have only just begun this work," he says with a resigned shrug. "In the last 12 years, we have exhumed over 400 graves and recovered over 3,000 human skeletal remains.
"If we continue working at this rate, about 70 investigations per year, we will need another 25 or 30 years to finish the work."
The Commission on Historical Clarification (CEH, in the Spanish acronym)
reported that the government was responsible for more than 93% of the atrocities committed against the indigenous Mayan population during the war against the communist guerrillas. During General Efrain Ríos Montt’s 18-month rule in the early 1980s, there were at least 626 massacres
"and the so-called scorched earth operations, as planned by the State, resulted in the complete extermination of many Mayan communities, along with their homes, cattle, crops and other elements essential to survival."
Happily, just last month, as a result of losing his campaign for the presidency and leaving his seat in Congress, the 77-year-old evangelical minister lost his immunity from lawsuits and prosecution stemming from the slaughter of 20 years ago. Perhaps he won't be so lucky as his comrade-in-arms, Augusto Pinochet.
From the time of the 1954 CIA-engineered coup against Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala’s second freely elected president, the military - much of its notorious officer-corps trained in the U.S. at the School of the Americas – committed atrocities against anyone they deemed the enemy or a friend of the enemy or somebody who might someday be a friend of the enemy. The consequences: 200,000 dead.
Jimmy Carter cut off overt military aid because of the international press around human rights abuses, but military aid was still funneled to the Guatemalan military secretly through the CIA and CIA pals in the Argentine armed forces.
When Ronald Reagan was elected, he pushed hard to get rid of the overt arms embargo. Often personally, frequently through aides, Reagan smeared and otherwise tried to discredit human rights investigators and journalists who exposed various massacres.
During a tour through Latin America, Reagan discounted the ever-growing mountain of reports that hundreds of Maya villages were being eradicated. In December 1982, I was in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, with two colleagues pursuing the latest massacre report when Reagan hailed Rios Montt as "totally dedicated to democracy." Reagan declared that Rios Montt's government had been "getting a bum rap."
No surprise. Remember, this was the same period in which Donald Rumsfeld was making courtesy calls on a fellow by the name of Saddam Hussein.
Documents declassified in 1999 prove that Reagan's praise contradicted U.S. intelligence accounts. The administration knew that the Guatemalan military was engaged in a scorched-earth campaign against the Mayans. While Reagan was praising dictator Rios Montt (and Jeane Kirkpatrick was toasting Argentina’s generals), the CIA was confirming that the Guatemala government was committing scores of massacres. In addition, Rios Montt had given the go-ahead to the “Archivos” intelligence unit to expand death squads that ultimately engaged in hundreds of assassinations
Despite this knowledge and other reports, Reagan allowed Guatemala to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June 1981. To permit the sale, Reagan removed the vehicles from a list of military equipment that was covered by the human rights embargo.
Human rights groups saw the same picture. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for "thousands of illegal executions." [WaPo, Oct. 16, 1981]
Just six weeks later, the Reagan administration issued its own "white paper,” which blamed the violence on Castro-backed leftist "extremist groups" and their "terrorist methods."
In January, 1983, Reagan lifted the ban on military aid to Guatemala and authorized the sale of $6 million in military hardware. Approval covered spare parts for UH-1H helicopters and A-37 aircraft used in counterinsurgency operations.
In February 1983, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in "suspect right-wing violence" with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt's order to the “Archivos” in October to "apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit."
A Defense Intelligence Agency cable reported that the Guatemalan military used an air base in Retalhuleu during the mid-1980s as a center for coordinating the counterinsurgency campaign in southwest Guatemala.
Pits were filled with water to hold captured suspects. "Reportedly there were cages over the pits and the water level was such that the individuals held within them were forced to hold on to the bars in order to keep their heads above water and avoid drowning," the DIA report stated. Later, the pits were filled with concrete to eliminate the evidence.
The Guatemalan military used the Pacific Ocean as another dumping spot for political victims, according to the DIA report. Bodies of insurgents tortured to death and of live prisoners marked for “disappearance” were loaded on planes that flew out over the ocean where the soldiers would shove the victims into the water.
The history of the Retalhuleu death camp was uncovered by accident in the early 1990s, the DIA reported on April 11, 1994. A Guatemalan officer wanted to let soldiers cultivate their own vegetables on a corner of the base.
But the officer was taken aside and told to drop the request "because the locations he had wanted to cultivate were burial sites that had been used by the D-2 [military intelligence] during the mid-eighties."
Thanks to the help of the Reaganistas, Fredy Peccerelli and other Guatemalans will have plenty of work