Guatemala digs up graves in search for disappeared

[Judi Lynn]

Feb 26, 4:54 PM EST
Guatemala digs up graves in search for disappeared

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) -- Guatemalan authorities have begun digging up mass graves at a cemetery where hundreds of people who disappeared during the Central American country's civil war are believed buried.

An official from the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation says 889 people could be buried at the Verbena Cemetery. Jose Suasnavar says investigators hope DNA testing will identify them.

Some 240,000 people, mostly Mayan Indians, vanished or died during Guatemala's 36-year civil war that ended in 1996. Some of the victims were buried in the Verbena Cemetery's mass graves when no relative came forward to claim their bodies.

Suasnavar says the exhumations and testing could take up to a year. He spoke Friday after the exhumations began.

More:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LT_GUATEMALA_CIVIL_WAR?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2010-02-26-16-54-44

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May 26, 1999
Reagan & Guatemala’s Death Files
By Robert Parry
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.

More:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/052699a1.html

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Reagan administration's links to Guatemala's terrorist government
By Allan Nairn, Covert Action Quarterly, Summer 1989

~snip~

Guatemala and the Carter Administration
To the Lucas regime and the businessmen who support it, President Carter's human rights policy was an anathema. Lucas called Carter "Jimmy Castro." Feeling increasingly isolated and betrayed by Carter State Department policy in Guatemala, officials there chose to ignore Washington's urging that human rights violations be corrected.

Businessman Roberto Alejos complained: "Most of the elements in the State Department are probably pro-communist-they're using human rights as an argument to promote the socialization of these areas. We've gotten to the point now where we fear the State Department more than we fear communist infiltration. Either Mr. Carter is a totally incapable president or he is definitely a pro-communist element."

Milton Molina is a wealthy plantation owner who is reputed within Guatemala to have funded and ordered death squad attacks on dozens of peasants and workers. When asked about the squads in a transcribed interview, Molina replied, "Well, we have to do something, don't you think so?" Molina says he and his friends back Reagan "one hundred percent."

The death squads' defenders base their faith in Reagan on direct conversations with him and his top military and foreign policy advisors. According to a Reagan fundraiser, Reagan told ambassador-to-be Carrette, "Hang in 'til we get there. We'll get in and then we'll give you help. Don't give up. Stay there and fight. I'll help you as soon as I get in."

More:
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/47/160.html