From: jd@homxc.att.com (John A Dinardo)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: 7 WBAI: Harvard Harbors the Adolf Eichmann of Guatemala: Heinous Hector
Keywords: Tell Harvard's Steve Reifenberg your opinion of holocaust-helpers.
Date: 10 Apr 92 18:05:34 GMT
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Distribution: na
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu


     [Steve Reifenberg's number at Harvard is (617) 495-2133.
      Incidentally, I told Steve Reifenberg that I protest 
      Harvard's assistance to genocidists.    

      All it takes is the angry opposition of enough people 
      of conscience, acting in concert, to stop the next Hitler.
      It's too bad that there weren't enough of us to stop the
      original Hitler, and the most recent one. You know, George Bush.]

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

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
                        ~~ FOREWORD ~~
                      (followed by Part VII)
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.


                              PART VII
ALLAN NAIRN [pre-recorded]:
    This threat, against the DGAM, in an open Army press release, authorized
by the General, was reminiscent of the events of Holy Week, 1985 shortly after
the DGAM was founded, after similar threats from Gen. Mejilo Victores, then the
military ruler of Guatemala. Hector Gomez, one of the DGAM leaders, was
abducted after he left a meeting. His body was found soon afterwards with his
tongue cut out. Gomez had been known as a particularly effective orator.
     At his funeral, Rosaria Godoy, another DGAM, gave a speech blaming the
Army. A few days later, she went shopping with her brother and her infant son,
a little 2 year-old boy. Their bodies turned up in a car at the bottom of a
ravine. She had been raped and mutilated, and her baby's fingernails had been
torn out. At a press conference, I asked Gen. Victores what had happened to the
Godoys, and he said they died in a traffic accident. When I asked him, "If
they died in a traffic accident, how were the baby's fingernails torn out?" he
said that was disinformation and it didn't really happen, although these
events had been witnessed and photographed at the wake.
     AI then wrote to [Under-Secretary of State of the United States] 
Elliot Abrams, asking him about the incident, and he said the same
thing. He said, "There is no evidence indicating that the Godoys died in
anything other than a traffic accident."  So here's a woman, raped and
mutilated, a baby with its fingernails torn out, and Elliot Abrams, speaking
for the U.S. Government, says they died in a traffic accident.
     Anyway, after this threat to DGAM issued in a press release by the
Guatemalan Army, in the following years at least five DGAM members and
relatives were abducted and assassinated. Just to give you a few very brief
examples, on July 24, 1989, when Gen. Gramajo was Minister of Defense, Aurelio
Lorenzo Ixai was abducted. His body turned up with a shattered cranium. On
August 15 of that year, Maria Rumalda Camay was dragged from her home by
three heavily-armed men. Friends took her three children to DGAM headquarters
for protection, and DGAM headquarters was bombed later that day.
     Students who have attempted to organize, to speak and exercise what the
Guatemalan Constitution says are their democratic rights, have met a similar
fate. In the summer of 1989, when students supported a national strike of
schoolteachers, within a three-week period, twelve student leaders were
abducted. Seven of them turned up dead.
     To run through a few of the cases: on September 10, four bodies turned
up. These were Victor Hugo Rodrigues-Aramillo, Silvia Maria Surdia. They had
been taken from their home at seven in the morning, while uniformed police
watched the abduction. When they were found, her left arm was severed and left
beside her body. The third victim found on that day was Carlos Achuta Camay,
who had been abducted as he was walking with his wife who was seven months
pregnant at the time. According to the wife's account, in an Americas Watch
report, "he tried to resist, but decided not to do anything when he saw that
the baby carriage had been hit in the struggle and knocked over. When she hit
the ground, the baby began to cry." They then dragged him away.
     The fourth body found that day was that of Carlos Humberto Cabrera. He
was snatched at 8:30 by two radio cars and a red Blazer pickup. Later, at this
man's funeral, that same pickup showed up. As the victim's son left the
funeral, the truck pursued him through the streets.
     The day after these four bodies appeared -- September 11 -- a note was 
left at the reception desk of the university rector's office, saying that 
the rest of the students who had been abducted were "in the hands of our 
armed forces." They said, if the student association continued to criticize 
the government, "we will toss you gifts from our special commands," 
referring evidently to more bodies.
     Indeed, two months later, on December 9, another student leader, Marco
Tulio Montenegro, came back from Panama where he had fled after receiving
death threats. He came back because he wanted to be present at the birth of
his second child. He made this trip -- and this is a very interesting point --
only after talking on the telephone with Felicio Cerezo, he received Cerezo's
personal assurance that he would be safe if he came back.  Well, his tortured
and bayonetted body was found under El Ascensio Bridge a few days after he
took the President's word for it and returned to Guatemala.
     Gen. Gramajo, speaking about the university students who had been killed
and "disappeared", denounced them as subversives, and said they had died as 
the result of an internal feud among themselves.
     Later that year, a group of peasants marched on the 41st Anniversary of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Their specific demand was for a
minimum wage roughly equal to $4 a day. Two disfigured bodies of people
connected with this march later turned up in Sacatapechas. Their hands and
feet were bound, and police said they had been tortured for many hours. Found
along with their bodies was a note, saying, "This is how the ESA treats
unions." The ESA is the secret anti-communist death-squad name used by the
military.
     Also that fall, an American nun, by the name of Sister Diana Ortiz, was
abducted. Sister Ortiz was attending a religious retreat. She went out on a
patio to pray, and was seized by two armed police officers. She was tortured
for several days, sexually abused, and burned 111 times with a lit cigarette.
When Gen. Gramajo was asked about this abduction and torture and abuse of a
nun, he said that it had never happened; that in fact, she had been involved
in "a lesbian love-tryst." The facial injuries she had suffered were the
result of "a lover's spat which took place in a hotel." He said that the whole
thing simply had not happened, although the doctors' reports, the Archbishop,
and later Pres. Cerezo himself, all confirmed that in fact, Sister Diana had
been tortured.

|{hm           kerry miller   <ASTINGSH@KSUVM.KSU.EDU>

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

    You have to visualize women and children being decapitated
    --babies being strangled and crushed to death, in order to
    sense the terror and the fury felt by these innocent victims.
    Then 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 suffering 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 to 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

    Help to keep hope alive by keeping 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
~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~   ~
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive