Report: Maya Indians suffered genocide

By GLENN GARVIN and EDWARD HEGSTROM
Herald Staff Writers

GUATEMALA CITY -- A Guatemalan truth commission investigating the country's vicious 36-year civil war issued a final report Thursday placing the blame for most of the 200,000 deaths on a ''racist'' Guatemalan government that received considerable support from the United States.

Guatemala's Maya Indian population, which suffered ''acts of genocide,'' bore the brunt of the government's repression, the report said. More than 80 percent of the victims of human rights abuses during the war were Indians, the Commission for Historical Clarification concluded.

''The massacres, scorched-earth operations, forced disappearances and executions of Maya authorities, leaders and spiritual guides were not only an attempt to destroy the social base of the guerrillas,'' the report said, ''but above all, to destroy the cultural values that ensured cohesion and collective action in Maya communities.''

Although the report was couched in relatively moderate language when it came to assigning blame to non-Guatemalan participants, Commission Chairman Christian Tomuschat accused the United States of being responsible for much of the bloodshed.

As seething U.S. diplomats looked on, Tomuschat said the Guatemalan army carried out hundreds of massacres of civilians at a time when ''the United States government and U.S. private companies exercised pressure to maintain the country's archaic and unjust socioeconomic structure.''

Tomuschat said the CIA and other U.S. agencies ''lent direct and indirect support to some illegal state operations.'' This encouraged a Guatemalan military government that was committing genocide against the country's Indian population, he added.

Tomuschat spoke at the unveiling of the commission's 3,600-page report on human rights abuses during the civil war that ended in 1996. The report took 18 months to assemble.

Hundreds of spectators -- many of them former Marxist guerrillas who battled the government -- burst into wild applause after Tomuschat, a German law professor, finished his attack on the United States.

A contingent of U.S. diplomats, including Ambassador Donald Planty and Mark Schneider, an assistant administrator of the Agency for International Development (USAID), stared stonily ahead during Tomuschat's speech. Afterward, a clearly furious Planty said the attack was unfair.

''Everyone knows the historical context in which the conflict took place,'' Planty said. ''But that doesn't obscure the fact that the violence was committed by Guatemalans against Guatemalans.''

The surprise of Planty and other U.S. diplomats was compounded by the fact that USAID financed much of the commission's work with a donation of $1.5 million. One of the three members of the commission, bilingual education expert Otila Lux Coti, is a USAID employee who took a leave of absence to work on the report.

Cold War impact cited

The report's 100-page executive summary, while noting that Cold War policies in both the United States and Cuba ''had a bearing'' on the war, said the Guatemalan government used a relatively small Marxist insurgency as an excuse for the ''physical annihilation'' of all its political opponents in a war that claimed 200,000 lives, the vast majority of them civilians.

''The inclusion of all opponents under one banner, democratic or otherwise, pacifist or guerrilla, legal or illegal, communist or noncommunist, served to justify numerous and serious crimes,'' the report said.

Coup attempt sparked war

The Guatemalan civil war began in November 1960, when leftist officers attempted a coup against the country's right-wing military government. When they failed, many of the officers went into the countryside to form guerrilla groups.

Many political analysts, however, say the roots of the war lay in the 1950s, when a coup supported by the CIA toppled the Marxist government of President Jacobo Arbenz and put in place the first of a series of military governments.

Tomuschat's searing comments on the United States clearly delighted many Guatemalan human rights activists.

''Today, Tomuschat spoke the truth about Guatemala as it has never been spoken before,'' said Frank La Rue, who runs a human rights legal foundation.

Others, however, said Guatemalans might be trying to let themselves off the hook, pretending they were merely pawns in the Cold War rather than enthusiastic participants.

''Blaming the U.S. is a national pastime here,'' said David Holiday, an American political consultant based in Guatemala. ''That unjustly exonerates the Guatemala players.''

Offenders not named

The report does not include names of individual human rights offenders. It does single out a handful of senior officials for blame -- like former military strongman Efrain Rios Montt -- who already have been excoriated in numerous other human rights reports.

The last time a highly publicized human rights report was unveiled in Guatemala, it was followed 48 hours later by the murder of its principal author. Bishop Juan Gerardi was beaten to death two days after the Roman Catholic Church's human rights office issued a report similar to the one released Thursday.

Gerardi's killing remains unsolved and it has not been determined that it was related to the bishop's human rights work. Nonetheless, all three members of the Commission for Historical Clarification are reportedly leaving Guatemala for lengthy stays overseas.