US tourist hacked to death in Guatemala

[Bacchus39]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080810/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/guatemala_us_tourist_killed;_ylt=AoOP2mR4WohJXAUwSaG9Cee3IxIF


GUATEMALA CITY - Robbers armed with machetes hacked a U.S. tourist to death and seriously wounded his wife in an attack aboard the couple's sailboat in northeastern Guatemala, the woman told The Associated Press on Sunday.


In a telephone interview from her hospital bed, Nancy Dryden, 67, said her husband, Daniel Perry Dryden, 66, was killed by four men who boarded their boat late Saturday while it was anchored in Lake Izabal.

"They poked us and stabbed us with the machetes, and they were asking for money, specifically dollars," said Dryden, who was listed in stable condition at a hospital in the lakeside town of Morales.

The thieves were apparently unhappy with the take. "We had a few quetzales (Guatemala's currency), but we had no dollars with us on the boat," Dryden recounted.

The Drydens, who are retired and live near Anchorage, Alaska, had bought the boat in February. They were equipping the vessel in preparation for a voyage into the Caribbean and eventually to the eastern coast of the United States.

Dryden said the four assailants may have reached the boat by swimming from shore and brandished long machetes that "seemed liked curved swords."

After assaulting the couple, the men demanded she hand over the keys to the vessel, which has an auxiliary motor. When she didn't — she was unable to tell whether they wanted the keys to the boat, or a small dinghy the couple used to get to shore — the men left, also apparently by swimming.

Dryden struggled over to the boat's radio and sent out a distress call. "I said we need help ... I said my husband was not moving," Dryden recalled.

She said she expects her children to arrive in Guatemala Monday and plans to be transferred to the United States for medical care.

Assistant Police Commissioner Luis Say said the attack is being investigated.

Located near Guatemala's Caribbean coast, Lake Izabal is popular among tourists for its jungle scenery and wildlife.

In March, protesting farmers briefly kidnapped four Belgian tourists at Lake Izabal to press for the release of a jailed activist. They were released unharmed.

[subsuelo]

1. Guatemalan shot to death in Oakland

(Dec 27, 2007)

It was 4:41 a.m. on a Saturday and Reyes had been on the sidewalk for about five hours, his body stiffening as rigor mortis set in.

Reyes was shot and killed and his belongings were stolen, but he didn't have much. He had already brought his Friday pay home before he went to the bar.

In February, Guatemalan day laborer Juan Garcia Chales was killed by a knife-wielding thief on a bicycle, police said. He was believed to be walking toward a day labor hiring zone when he was fatally stabbed at San Leandro Street near 37th Avenue. His family sent him home to be buried in his native state of Huehuetenango.

Oakland Tribune - read more

[AlphaCentauri]

2. There are criminals everywhere

[Judi Lynn]

3. Very sad. The man had no choice but to try to work here in order to feed his family.

From your article:

"His intention was to work and return," said Francisca Reyes, the aunt who brought him home. "It was always his idea to return. He was thinking of his family."

What a pity.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Maybe the criminals associate Americans with their own history:

Guatemala

We are survivors of this policy of genocide practiced by Guatemalan officials who were trained and indoctrinated at the SOA to carry out the cowardly extermination of their own sisters and brothers. We lived through this sad history in our own flesh during the 1980’s during the most recent bitter holocaust survived by the Guatemalan indigenous Mayans. That is why we share in your struggle. We urge you to continue your efforts…--Statement from members of a Guatemalan returned refugee community

Two major human rights reports have recently implicated the SOA for its role in training human rights abusers. The 1998 Recovery of Historical Memory Report by the Archdioceses of Guatemala is a chilling catalog of the mechanisms of violence and its impact on Guatemalan society. Among the findings of that report were that SOA graduates were responsible for the assassination of anthropologist Myrna Mack, the cover-up of the murder of U.S. citizen Michael Devine, and the torture and murder of Efrain Bamaca, husband of U.S. citizen Jennifer Harbury.

The report also states that SOA graduate Benedicto Lucas Garcia masterminded the creation of vigilante groups known as PACs that were responsible for some of the most horrific violations of the war. Furthermore, three SOA graduates were top officials in the notorious D-2 intelligence agency, which the report characterizes as having played "a central role in the conduct of military operations, in massacres, extrajudicial executions, forced disappearances, and torture." It is also known that SOA graduates held key cabinet positions under the brutal dictatorships of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt, and Mejia Victores.

The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report, released in 1999, was written by the independent Historical Clarification Commission, which was established as part of the peace accords. Although the report could not name names of those responsible for specific crimes, it does single out the SOA. "Some Guatemalan officers and junior officers attended basic and advanced courses in Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the School of the Americas of the U.S. Army Southern Command. Moreover, in training some officers, manuals from the U.S. schools were used. The Historical Clarification Commission had access to some of these, which were written in Spanish. For example, the manual, ‘Terrorism and the Urban Guerilla’ says that ‘another function of counterintelligence agents is to recommend counterintelligence targets to be neutralized…examples of these targets are government officials and political leaders…’"

In January, 2000 an SOA grad, Col. Byron Disrael Lima Estrada was arrested in Guatemala for the 1998 assassination of Bishop Juan Gerardi. According to a declassified US Defense Intelligence Agency biographic sketch, Lima Estrada took Military Police training at the US Army School of the Americas now located at Ft. Benning, GA. Lima Estrada went on to head the infamous D-2 Military Intelligence agency at the height of the genocide campaign in Guatemala’s civil war.

More:
http://www.soaw.org/article.php?id=343

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

February 26, 1999
GUATEMALAN ARMY WAGED 'GENOCIDE,' NEW REPORT FINDS
By MIREYA NAVARRO
A truth commission report made public today concluded that the United States gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed ''acts of genocide'' against the Mayans during the most brutal armed conflict in Central America, Guatemala's 36-year civil war.

The report, by the independent Historical Clarification Commission, contradicts years of official denials of the torture, kidnapping and execution of thousands of civilians in a war that the commission estimated killed more than 200,000 people.

Although the outlines of American support for Guatemala's military have been well known, the nine-volume report confirms that the Central Intelligence Agency aided Guatemalan forces.

The commission listed the American training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques as a key factor that ''had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation.''

Christian Tomuschat, the German jurist who headed the panel, said, ''The United States Government, through its constituent structures, including the Central Intelligence Agency, lent direct and indirect support to illegal state operations.''

That support helped Guatemalan military and paramilitary units engage in kidnapping, torture and executions, a staff member of the commission said. The aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the panel also found evidence that the United States had knowledge of genocide and still supported the Guatemalan military.

The commission, set up as a part of a United Nations-supervised peace accord that ended the war in 1996, concluded that either the Government or allied paramilitary groups were to blame for more than 90 percent of the 42,000 humans rights violations, 29,000 of which resulted in deaths or disappearances. That attributes a somewhat higher percentage of deaths to the Government and its allies than did a report last year by the Roman Catholic Church.

The commission, which conducted an 18-month investigation, specifically named military intelligence as the organizer of illegal detentions, torture, disappearances and executions, but it stopped short of identifying individuals responsible.

As the conclusions were read at a solemn ceremony at the National Theater, rights workers, relatives of victims and others among the 2,000 people broke into standing ovations, sobs, shouts and chants of ''Justice! Justice!''

The outbursts repeatedly interrupted the presentation as President Alvaro Arzu Irigoyen and Cabinet members sat silently in the first row.

While the scope of the bloodshed had been generally known, the report today is the first by an internationally supported panel to blame the Government and its military allies. In unexpectedly strong language, it describes the policy of the Government and military at the height of the war as genocide.

The report's estimate of more than 200,000 deaths is slightly higher than previous figures, and the number of documented massacres substantially exceeds previous figures.

The war, which began in 1960, pitted a rightist military-controlled Government against a classic Latin American left-wing insurgency. In waging a war largely in the hinterlands where Mayans lived, the military assumed that the Mayans sympathized with the insurgents and provided them with supplies, information and shelter.

As a consequence, entire Mayan villages were attacked and burned and their inhabitants were slaughtered in an effort to deny the guerrillas protection. The report said the Mayans paid the highest price when the military identified them as natural allies of the guerrillas.

The result, the report said today, was an ''aggressive, racist and extremely cruel nature of violations that resulted in the massive extermination of defenseless Mayan communities.''

More:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A05E3D9173CF935A15751C0A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

[Bacchus39]

5. doubtful, once again it was a robbery and murder not a political assassination

I imagine though that Americans are associated with money and that is why they were targeted.

[Judi Lynn]

6. Maybe there are so many people living as criminals become someone trashed their country.

It's been destroyed since Eisenhower butted in on behalf of United Fruit, and overthrew their democratically elected President Arbenz, then succeeding Presidents kept on butting in, and doing it all up royally with a grand flourish in the immolation by hatred by Ronald Reagan in his diseased assault on Guatemala's poor.

Very likely these people might have escaped this unworthy situation if American policy had been other than what has played out in Latin America and the Caribbean, and people had a far different image of Americans, one not associated with rapacious, murderous exploitation and racism.

The two should have spent some time trying to research how safe they could expect to be there first, and maybe they would have considered stopping somewhere else overnight. It could have saved their lives.

[Bacchus39]

7. extremely doubtful

but first of all, Lake Izabel is a well known destination for sail boaters. the lake can be navigated directly from the Caribbean Sea and is a well known mooring and storm refuge area for boaters. Guatemala has long been poor so I doubt the criminality that exists would be much different regardless of political history. street crime was actually more under control during the dictatorship of Rios Montt due to the harsh penalties a criminal would endure.


that being said, at this point I think Colombia or Venezuela (except Caracas maybe) would be safer destinations for tourists than Guatemala.

[Vogon_Glory]

8. I Doubt It, Too

As pretty as it is to believe that Guatemala would have been a happy, prosperous country had Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers hadn't overthrown the Arbenz government, I find it unlikely that boaters on Lake Izbal would have been safe from thugs.

Bacchus had a point. Criminals associate Americans with money, and that couple was a tempting target those four thugs took advantage of.

For that matter, hijacking and yacht piracy occurs in some island nations on the Leeward and Windward Islands on the far side of the Caribbean. The United Fruit Company didn't do much over there, yet some places are plagued with inshore piracy, so much so that yachtsmen avoid tarrying long in those countries' waters. The islands that have anchoring yachtsmen are the ones that cracked down on the criminals.

Guatemala's present-day curse is that there has been little effort or success in binding the wounds inflicted during its long, bloody civil war. The post-war Guatemalan governments have failed to inculcate either accountability or responsibility among its law enforcement agencies or among its criminal justice systems. The reasons WHY there is little responsibility or accountability is less important than the fact that such conditions allow criminals to operate freely with little chance of capture or punishment.

Any sort of government that wants to raise living standards or grow the economy needs to crack down on street thugs, whether that government is black-dy ed reactionary, neo-liberal, Chavezista, or flat-out Marxist-Leninist. Street crime crimps economic growth just as does poverty, decayed infrastructure, institutionalized or extra-legal corruption. Street criminals are not the "comrades" of anybody.

[Bacchus39]

9. good post, and to be more accurate on my previous post

I surmise it would be much more likely the couple was targeted as they were somewhat older, on a sail boat, just the two of them, and they could have been recognized as foreigners. those factors are more likely to make them a target than their nationality.