Transitional Justice Forum

Discoveries in Guatemala, and the value of truth-seeking

Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:11 | TrackBack

I've been meaning for a while to get something up here about last summer's "discovery", in a half-abandoned munitions dump in Guatemala City, of a massive cache of files from the Guatemalan National Police, which is described as, "an agency so inextricably linked to human rights abuses during this country's 36-year civil conflict that it was disbanded as part of the peace accords signed in 1996."

That quote, by the way, comes from an informative article about the document cache that was written by Ginger Thompson and published in the New York Times on November 21. But guess what? I had to pay $3.95 on my credit card today, in order to download the text of the article. (See my earlier comments on TJF about the stultifying and discriminatory nature of current practices in "intellectual property".) I could give you the link to Thompson's article but you'd probably have to pay your own $3.95 to be able to read it.

So I shall now proceed to "fair-use" some chunks out of the article here. Then, I'll raise a couple of quick questions I have about the whole relationship of truth-seeking to post-war political reconstruction, as well as to the precise nature (and possible attendant costs) of the different kinds of truths that different survivors of violence might seek at different times.

These issues are very serious ones. They are also similar in many ways to those raised by the "revelations" from Namibia that Brandon Hamber has just posted about here. I hope that TJF's readers will share any insights or reflections they have on them by joining in the dicussion on the Comments board here, or over at Brandon's post.

Okay, first, what were the most important parts of Ginger Thompson's article:

She wrote that the cache of National Police files was discovered sometime in the summer by officials with the Guatemalan human rights ombudsman's office:

The ombudsman's office said it inadvertently found the archive in the munitions depot, not far from the center of the capital during a safety inspection prompted by complaints from neighbors that explosives were being improperly stored at the site....

The files, in various stages of decay, date back more than a century and contain enough documents to stretch the length of 130 football fields.

The files were left in place at the depot, despite physical conditions there that seem to be highly detrimental to their physical preservation and integrity as an archive:

given the depot's many open, unfinished windows and doorways, the files could be pilfered or destroyed...

Following repeated requests, the ombudsman's office agreed to allow The New York Times to visit the files last week, after a rudimentary security system had been installed and archivists had begun taking samples of documents from the files.

...Documents bundled as thick as bibles stand more than 10 feet tall in bat-infested rooms as dank and dark as caves.

There are buckets in every corner that attendants, dressed in rubber gloves and gas masks to protect against the fumes, have been using to catch leaks from the roof.

But it was evidently worth putting on the gloves and masks and going there for a visit:

Everything seems to be there: from traffic tickets, driver's license applications and personnel files, to spy logs and interrogation records. There are hundreds of rolls of film and videos, along with snapshots of unidentified bodies, detainees and informants. Some of the files seem to have gotten slightly more careful treatment and were tossed into file cabinets marked ''disappeared,'' ''assassins'' and ''special cases.''

H'mm. I wonder who had done that preliminary, apparaently rough culling/reorganization of the records? From the rubrics reported there, it would seem that maybe it had been people from the HR ombudsman's office itself?

Thompson goes on:

There are transcripts of radio communications and stacks of arrest records listing ''Communist'' as the reason for arrest.

Sergio Morales, the head of the ombudsman's office, has previously told Guatemalan reporters that the archive also contains lists of children kidnapped from suspected guerrillas, along with the names of the families who agreed to take them in.

What remains unclear, investigators said, was why officials in Guatemala's prior governments -- particularly the police -- did not destroy the files, even though they appear to hold evidence of egregious abuses. Now that the archive has been found, almost 10 years after the end of the fighting that left at least 200,000 people dead, a new government, struggling to consolidate a fledgling peace, is still grappling with how to proceed.

''This presents a serious challenge for the government because there are going to be a lot of powerful names coming out of the files, and the justice system is very weak,'' Frank LaRue, director of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights, said in an interview. ''But the government remains committed to opening the archive, and prosecuting people responsible for crimes.''

Later he toned down his statement, saying, ''I am not sure everyone in the government would agree with that.''

Thompson notes that this is not the first batch of potentially incriminating documents from that era that have been revealed. She writes that in 1999, "an activities log for a secret military unit responsible for kidnapping and killing government opponents was smuggled out of the military's files."

She also reports that Kate Doyle, director of the Guatemala Project at the Washington, DC-based National Security Archive, pointed out that last year the government quietly opened the files of the former presidential intelligence agency, which had also been accused of systematic human rights abuses and ordered disbanded.

But Thompson notes that the intelligence agency files had been "ransacked" before human rights investigators could get to them. The newly discovered National Police files seem much more intact:

The National Police files -- mildewy and messy, but still intact -- promise the most complete accounting of the government's campaign against people suspected of being leftists, a campaign initiated with money and advice from a succession of United States administrations worried about the spread of Communism.

As a precondition for opening the files to viewing by The Times last week, the lead investigator for the ombudsman's office, Gustavo Meoño, asked that specific details from documents describing extrajudicial kidnappings and killings, including names of victims and police officers, not be published.

''We have to act very carefully with this archive,'' Mr. Meoño said. ''We do not want to unduly raise the expectations of the victims. And, for our safety, and for the safety of the files, we don't want to unduly frighten the people who are identified as perpetrators.''

Good, prudential points.

On the other hand, given the importance of this archive-in-the-raw, I would imagine it should be very possible to get a coalition of well-meaning international actors of unimpeachable integrity to agree to do whatever is necessary to assure the security and integrity of this archive... Even if that means sending in a whole batch of air-conditioned trailers to transfer the documents into, and helping to provide a security perimeter around them? Perhaps the Government of Canada, on its own, could do this?

More, from Ginger Thompson:

Mr. Meoño said there were files that referred to well-known cases, including the 1990 assassination of Myrna Mack, an anthropologist. He said a team of Belgian lawyers investigating the 1980 assassination of Walter Voordeckers, a Belgian priest, and the 1982 disappearance of Serge Berten, another Belgian citizen, found files on those cases during a visit to Guatemala in September, and had the government subpoena the former chief of the national police, Germán Chupina, for the first time since the end of the war.

''I show you these,'' Mr. Meoño said, referring to documents from the archives, ''to make clear to you that we have great hopes that this archive is going to clear up mysteries that have tormented this country for decades.''

That seemed to be clear to the directors of archival projects around the world, including those of Iraq, Cambodia, and Serbia, who also visited the police files here last week. The question that ran through many of their minds here, they said, was the same one that ran through their minds when they first examined damning files kept by governments led by dictators like Saddam Hussein and organizations like the Khmer Rouge: Why didn't the government destroy the files when it had the chance?

But Hassan Mneimneh, of the Iraq Memory Foundation, was not surprised that the files had been left alone. ''Ultimately these files are the institutional memory of the bureaucracy,'' he said. ''To expect a bureaucracy to destroy its files is to expect it to commit suicide.''

Thomson cited another explanation, that came from Heriberto Cifuentes, a Guatemalan historian who "was among the first outsiders to lay eyes on the files." She described him as saying that the fact that the government did not destroy them reflected a simple fact of Guatemalan life.

''Impunity reigns in Guatemala,'' he said. ''So whether there are documents or not, people responsible for crimes do not expect to pay for them. They have always enjoyed blanket immunity.''

I should note here that I am not at all an expert on the affairs of Guatemala. The most I learned about it was when I was preparing a chapter of my 2000 book The Moral Architecture of World Peace that dealt with the struggle, achievements, and broader sociopolitical significance of Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum.

Then last summer, I had the opportunity to spend some time Myrna Mack's sister, Helen Mack. She told many harrowing stories about her family's search for the truth about Myrna's killing, and also about her (Helen's) extremely disillusioning experience with the men who had confessed to the killing, and had then arrogantly flaunted their impunity in her face.

"Seeking" and "establishing" the truth (are these distrinct processes? I think so) regarding Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war have historically been undertakings fraught with lethal danger for Guatemalans. In the late 1990s, the Guatemalan Catholic church undertook an important project called the "Recovery of Historical Memory"-- REMHI-- "with the vision of seeking reconciliation and healing for the victims of atrocities during the 36 year civil conflict which took the lives of 200,000 people and displaced 1,000.000 individuals."

The REMHI report, titled "Guatemala: Never Again", was released by Bishop Juan Gerardi in April 1998. It attributed over 90% of the atrocities and over 400 massacres to the Guatemalan army. Two days after the report was released, Bishop Gerardi was murdered in his garage.

Meanwhile, under the terms of the Oslo Peace Accord of 1994 that had set the terms for ending the country's civil war, the parties to the accord-- who included the government of Guatemala and the main opposition party-- established a more "official" "Commission for Historical Clarification", in Spanish "CEH". The commission was chaired by German law professor Christian Tomuschatof Berlin's Humboldt University, and included two Guatemalans: lawyer Edgar Balsells, and Otilia Lux Coti, a Mayan woman and university professor of pedagogy.

In a public ceremony held in Guatemala City in February 1999, the CEH handed over its final report, titled in English "Guatemala: Memory of Silence", to representatives of the Guatemalan government and the main former opposition group, and the U.N. secretary general, who was charged with its public release. (Links to the English and Spanish texts of the report can be found here.)

The CEH report examined acts of violence committed both by government and pro-government forces, and by opposition forces. Its analysis included the following somber assessment concluded (paras 122 and 123 here):

the CEH concludes that agents of the State of Guatemala, within the framework of counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, committed acts of genocide against groups of Mayan people which lived in the four regions analysed. This conclusion is based on the evidence that, in light of Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the killing of members of Mayan groups occurred (Article II.a), serious bodily or mental harm was inflicted (Article II.b) and the group was deliberately subjected to living conditions calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part (Article II.c). The conclusion is also based on the evidence that all these acts were committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part” groups identified by their common ethnicity, by reason thereof, whatever the cause, motive or final objective of these acts may have been (Article II, first paragraph).

123. The CEH has information that similar acts occurred and were repeated in other regions inhabited by Mayan people...

Despite its "finding" that genocide had been committed by the government forces, the report notably did not name any names of those-- military commanders, or political leaders-- who were responsible for those acts of genocide. (As indeed, it did not name the names of any of the perpetrators, from either side, who carried out any of the other abuses that it described.)

Without naming names, however, it did note this (para 126):

The Chiefs of Staff for National Defence (Estado Mayor de la Defensa Nacional) was, within the Army, the highest authority responsible for these violations. Nevertheless, regardless of who occupied positions within this body, political responsibility rests with the successive governments. For this reason, the President of the Republic, as Commander in Chief of the Army and Minister of Defence, should be subject to the same criteria of responsibility, given that national objectives were prepared at the highest level of Government in accordance with the National Security Doctrine. Furthermore, it should also be taken into account that until 1986, nearly all the presidents were high level members of the military, with specific knowledge of military structures and their procedures.

... From the little I know about Guatemala, I gather there are many differences among people there regarding the value they ascribe to truth-finding efforts. And also, crucially, that these differences do not break down simply along "political lines"-- i.e., that all the supporters of previous governments oppose truth-finding while all their opponents support it.

In addition, people who support fairly aggressive truth-seeking seem to do so for a variety of reasons. There are still many who seek knowledge about the whereabouts of the mortal remains of their loved ones-- or even, some confirmation that they have indeed died-- in order that the "normal" rhythms of their personal and spiritual lives can be resumed, and with no further goal than that. There are those who seek actual punishment for the perpetrators. There are those who, short of such punishment, seek the installation of political safeguards that can be effective in ensuring both that such egregious abuses are not rpeated in the future and that the economic and socio-political bases for a worthwhile life going forward can be put in place. And there are probably others, who seeks other personal or social goals through the truth-seeking.

This spectrum of different (and only partially overlapping) goals regarding truth-seeking efforts is not, of course, peculiar to Guatemala, but can be found in any society in which, in the aftermath of atrocious conflict, communities make some commitment to seeking "the truth" about what had previously happened. But rigorous truth-seeking also imposes some costs of its own on a society that undertakes it; and on many occasions the communities concerned just decide not to go down that whole complicated path. Spain in the late 1970s was one example of that. So was Mozambique in 1992.

And so, too, in fact, were just about all the "newly independent" countries that emerged from colonial rule in Africa and Asia, in the period 1947 through 1990.

That brings us right back to the example of Namibia referred to by Brandon. From the article he linked to there, it seems as if the leaderships of three of the main parties involved in that notable April 1989 massacre-- SWAPO, which lost up to 1,000 of its fighters in those clashes; the apartheid-backed "South West Africa Police", which did most of that killing and lost around 25 people of its own in the battles; and the UN Transition Assistance Group, which was very present there overseeing implementation of the peace accord the UN had previously brokered between the fighting parties-- had all sort of conspired in intentionally "forgetting" about that massacre, soon after it occurred.

Indeed, regarding the SWAPO leaders, in deciding not to make any continuing issue at all out of the 1989 massacres they were following in the footsteps of a whole parade of anti-colonial leaders who judged that if foregoing their claims to pursue the many. many injustices of the colonial "past" was the price to be paid for gaining independence, then this was indeed a price worth paying.

(The role of the UN in what looks a little like a cover-up there in namibia might well bear more examination. Especially since Finaland's Martti Ahtisaari , who was the UN's special representative there at the time, has just recently taken over as the new chief administrator in Kosovo.)

South Africa's own transition of the 1990s provides another, fairly good example of the new, post-colonial government deciding not to push its claims regarding the injustices of the past too far. There, the "victorious" ANC did win out of the transition negotiations an agreement to establish a truth-seeking exercise regarding the misdeeds of the apartheid regime. But the "price" they paid for that was that they also had to have their own (considerably less serious) misdeeds subjected to equal scrutiny. Plus, crucially, they had to forego any possibility that prosecutions of apartheid-era miscreants would flow out of this truth-seeking exercise.

(In this post over at my own blog, I also referred to the position that Kenya's iconic independence leader, Jomo Kenyatta, took with regard to his country's Mau Mau movement, after the extraodrinary courage and endurance of Mau Mau's people had succeeded in catapulting him into the presidential palace in Nairobi.)

Well, I guess I've thrown out a lot of ideas here. I'd love it if people could jump in with (a) some much more informed commentary than I'm capable of, regarding the prospects for and debate over current truth-seeking efforts in Guatemala, or (b) any thoughts about the goals, values, and/or costs of truth-seeking efforts, in general.