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TITLE: Search Continues After Guatemala War |
AUTHOR: Will Weissert |
PUB: Associated Press Writer |
DATE: February 24, 2001 |
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For years, nights here were filled with he sounds of screams and gunshots coming from the military base atop a lush illside. In the mornings, locals watched smoke pour down onto the villages the soldiers burned corpses. "It was too horrible to sleep,'' said Maria Chuy, founder of the local chapter of a group for families of the victims of Guatemala's 36-year civil war, which ended in December 1996. "But it was also too awful to stay awake and listen to.'' All that's left of the makeshift killing factory today is a peaceful tangle of sun-scorched corn stalks and sprawling avocado trees, which have grown up next to the remains of an army barracks Guatemalan soldiers torched before abandoning. But this week, forensic scientists found more: a shallow grave containing the bones and skeletons of 26 people. "We know that they burned a lot of bodies; for that reason we found very few victims,'' said Chuy, who helped coordinate the dig. "We know there are hundreds of victims here, not only a few dozen.'' Sunday marks what Guatemalan rights groups call "National Victims Day,'' an unofficial commemoration of the anniversary of a U.N.-sponsored report that blamed Guatemala's military for 94 percent of the 200,000 deaths during the war. But two years after the report, four years after peace accords and almost 20 years after the height of fighting between leftist guerrillas and state forces, as many as 50,000 victims remain unaccounted for. The Guatemalan army is accused of kidnapping hundreds of men, women and children from this corn-growing hamlet of about 1,000 inhabitants and snatching thousands of others from towns all over Guatemala. In late 1981, a convoy of military trucks accompanied by helicopters rumbled down the dusty dirt road into San Jose Poaquil. After three days of fierce fighting with guerrillas in the nearby mountains, military patrols began a 15-day kidnapping spree which stretched through New Year's Day. Over the next six years, state-sponsored, broad-daylight abductions and midnight arrests became chillingly commonplace. Marta Chacax was just 11 when a local informer lead soldiers to her house, on Dec. 2, 1981. ``The informer had a mask on and he told them to find my father. When they couldn't find him he pointed to my sister,'' said Chacax, whose father's work as a doctor touched off suspicion that he could be treating injured guerrillas. The soldiers put 17-year-old Maria del Carmen Chacax and seven other townspeople onto military trucks and sped them off to a military prison in a nearby city. The family never saw the teen again and her body did not appear this week. "Now we just have more doubt,'' said Chacax, now 31. ``My sister did nothing to anybody and she still died a terrible death. She may not ever even have a proper burial.'' The excavation also failed to turn up the body of Juan Lucas Quina, a 25-year-old carpenter and guerrilla sympathizer who turned himself in during a government-proclaimed amnesty period. "They took him up the hill (to the military base) the same day he came out of the woods,'' said Quina's neighbor, Pedro Chucj, who said soldiers eventually hauled away seven of the 14 people who had lived along his small street. "Everyone knew that as soon as they took you up there, that was it. You would never be seen again.'' Just one of the 26 sets of remains pulled from the ground by excavators has been identified. Scientists were planning a public showing of clothing recovered from the site on Monday in hopes that a few tatters of colored cloth would help people recognize missing family members. "The disappeared are reappearing,'' said Chuy, who added that scientists will mount another excavation at another former military base in the coming months. ``With each excavation more and more families will reach closure.'' But to Maria del Carmen's 67-year-old mother, it feels like closure may never come. "We will never know where my daughter is,'' said Maria del Carmen, who shares a name with her disappeared daughter. "Now all we know is the one place where her remains are not buried.'' END |