From: jd@homxc.att.com (John A Dinardo)
Subject: 5 WBAI: Harvard Harbors the Adolf Eichmann of Guatemala: Heinous Hector
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Keywords: Tell Harvard's Stever Reifenberger how you feel ... (617) 495-2133
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Distribution: na
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1992 20:13:13 GMT

Many thanks to Kerry Miller for transcribing a very special program
by Dennis Bernstein, broadcast by Pacifica Radio Network station
                           WBAI-FM Radio
                           505 Eighth Ave., 19th Fl.
                           New York, NY 10018       (212) 279-0707

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
DENNIS BERNSTEIN:
Hector Gramajo is about to graduate from Harvard University,
the Edwin S. Mason Program in Public Policy and Management at the Kennedy
Center. We've heard a lot about the rape at the Kennedy compound down in
Florida. Here's a mass murderer, rapist, who has been overseeing horror in
Guatemala for many years. In my hands, I'm holding the graduation program;
they list Hector Gramajo, but they don't talk about him as Defense Minister,
as head of the Army, doing the things Allan is talking about. He's Director 
of the Center of Strategic Studies for National Stability. This is Hector
Gramajo, and Allan Nairn is confronting him face to face at Brown University
about his death squad activities.

ALLAN NAIRN [pre-recorded]:
     If the U.S. were a civilized country, and if we respected the rule of law,
Gen. Gramajo and his accomplices would be in jail rather than at Harvard,
rather than at Brown, because Gramajo is one of the main perpetrators of one
of the most intensive holocausts of the late twentieth century. He's done 
this in collaboration with the U.S. and, as much as time permits, I'll try 
to fill you in on the basic facts of these crimes.
     Since 1978, the Guatemalan Government has been responsible for the murder
of more than 100,000 civilians. By their own count, they have wiped out 662
rural villages, they have decapitated several generations of civic leadership,
including 14 priests, more than 300 catechists, more than 150 labor leaders, 
2 of the nation's leading politicians. On two occasions, they abducted the
entire labor leadership, en masse, of Guatemala as they were meeting.
     Just during the past five years, during the Cerezo Administration, there
have been 4,332 documented cases -- most cases do not get documented -- of
assassination. Guatemala, during this recent period, has been worse than Iran
under the Ayatollah. If you look at killings in proportion to the population,
the army has killed more than one percent of the population. Worse than Chile, 
worse than anywhere else in the world. To find accurate comparisons, you have 
to go back to Idi Amin's Uganda, Stalin's Soviet Union, Pol Pot's Cambodia, 
to rival the level of mass murder we're talking about here.
     There is no question. It's not a matter of factual dispute that the
Guatemalan Army, in a disciplined, hierarchical manner, under the leadership
of men such as Gen. Gramajo, has been responsible for what Amnesty
International describes as "a government program of political murder." This is
what every Guatemalan human rights organization says: DGAM, CERJ, Amnesty
International, Americas Watch, the Organization of American States. All
international human rights organizations who have looked at it have come to
the same conclusion. This year even the State Department admitted the army 
was responsible, in its annual human rights report.
     The victims are chosen by the Army high command, and the killings are
coordinated by the G-2, the Guatemalan Military Intelligence Service. Gen.
Gramajo himself said in 1986, "The G-2 watches and investigates enemies of the
state -- anyone who has a record as an opponent of the Guatemalan state in any
realm." One general told me in an interview, that for those who were chosen
from their surveillance files, there were three options, in his words:
"disappear them, eliminate them in public, or simply invite them to leave the
country." Col. Edgar de Halma, a G-2 veteran himself, calls it "an apparatus
dedicated to finding and eliminating people of the left." Gen Benedicto Lucas
Garcia says, "If the G-2 wants to kill you, they kill you. They send out one
of their trucks with a hit squad, and that's it." He was not being critical.
He was simply describing its function.
     During 1982 and 1983, the Army swept through the Northwest Highlands,
destroying 662 villages by their own count. I was there during this period,
and spoke to many of the soldiers involved. Just to give you an example, in 
La Pedala, a base where they had 250 soldiers, Sgt. Jose Angel explained the
procedure. He said, "We go into the village and take people out of their 
homes. You round up the collaborators, question them, interrogate them, 
get them to speak the truth. Beat them, hurt them -- more or less hang them." 
At this point, he took a rope which was coiled around his belt, and put it 
around his own neck to demonstrate. He picked up a stick, and showed how 
you put the stick in the rope to make a tourniquet, and start choking the 
person. And what they're asking them is: "Who in the village is close to 
the local priest?  Who is critical of the Army?  Who is critical of the 
Government?  Who has been giving food to the guerillas?  He continued,
"We tell people to change the road they are on, because the road they are
on is bad. If they don't change, there is nothing else to do but to kill
them."  He explained that they would choke the people, one by one, as they
talked. If they gave the name of a neighbor, that person would be pulled 
out of the crowd and they would be shot. Then the villagers would be told
to dig a mass grave, and their neighbors would be put in the grave.
They would then give a speech to the villagers, saying, in his words:
"If you don't want the good, then there is nothing more to do but bomb
your houses."
     These were not the actions of renegade units. This was official
Guatemalan Government policy. Fransisco Bianci, the government spokesman,
said, "Clearly, you had to kill Indians, because they were collaborating 
with subversion. Then they would say, `You're massacring innocent people,' 
but they weren't innocent. They had sold out to subversion."
     The Catholic bishops, in the midst of this holocaust, issued a pastoral
letter proclaiming, "Never in our history has it come to such grave extremes.
The assassinations now fall into the category of genocide." The conservative
newspaper, El Grafico, wrote in a very courageous editorial, on May 17, 1982,
"Massacres have become the order of the day. There is no respect or mercy
shown to grandparents, children or grandchildren. All were exterminated
equally."  They were referring in particular to a massacre in a small village
called Semejal [?] Dos: "How is it possible to behead an eight or nine year
old child?  How is it possible for a human adult to murder, in cold blood, 
a baby of less than a year and a half?" How *IS* it possible, General?"
"How is it acceptable," El Grafico continued, "to murder pregnant women?
These acts of bestiality only serve to sink the nation deeper into the most
degenerate immorality."
     Now, how did the U.S. respond to this? US Ambassador Chapin said, "The
massacres have stopped. Guatemala has come out of the darkness and into the
light."  This was in the midst of the massacres.  President Reagan went 
down personally, met with Gen. Rios Mont, embraced him, and said:
"Guatemala is getting a bum rap on human rights."
                          (to be continued)
*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

    You have to visualize women and children being decapitated --
    babies being strangled and crushed to death, in order to
    sense the terror and fury that these innocent victims feel.
    Then you have to ask yourself: If it was my wife, my sister,
    my baby who was being so heinously murdered, would I lift a 
    finger to protect them? And if you would, then conscience
    dictates that you protect these thousands upon thousands of
    agonized peasants.

    All we have to do is galvanize our sovereign individual
    political power, endowed to us at birth under the Constitution.
    All we have to do is focus that galvanized political power upon
    those scoundrels who occupy The People's Congress of the United 
    States, so that the tortured people of Guatemala can, at last, 
    celebrate their rescue from their national mortuary.

    There are organizations already formed, waiting for our help.
    One of these organizations is the Christic Institute which combats
    these U.S. Government atrocities by wielding the most powerful
    societal instrument that we have: the law under the Constitution.

    What laws is the U.S Government desecrating?
    ... The Nuremburg Principles
    ... The International Treaty Outlawing Genocide, signed by President
           Reagan on November 4, 1988
    ... The Fourth Geneva Convention
    ... Our state laws prohibiting murder

    When somebody violates the law, you get an attorney to prosecute them.
    You'll find no more courageous an attorney than Daniel Sheehan.
    Please write him just a brief note stating that you want to
    stop the genocide in Guatemala.

            Daniel Sheehan, Lead Attorney
            The Christic Institute
            1324 North Capitol St., N.W.
            Washington, D.C. 20002

    You can keep hope alive by helping to keep the Christic Institute alive.

    What's in it for us?  The most valuable possession you could have,
    besides your health: A renewed sense of pride and self-esteem;
    and it only costs a 29-cent stamp and about ten minutes of writing.

John DiNardo
~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~
If we seriously listen to this "God within us" ["conscience",
if you will], we usually find ourselves being urged to take the
more difficult path, the path of more effort rather than less.
.... Each and every one of us, more or less frequently, will hold
back from this work. .... Like every one of our ancestors before
us, we are all lazy. So original sin does exist; it is our laziness.

                                        M. Scott Peck
                                   THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED
~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~


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