Market town

Music

Starts:

01.00.00.00

Holmes:  Market days in Chichicastenuango, in the highlands of north-west Guatemala, are becoming a bit of a tourist attraction.

00.11

The locals here are Mayan Indians.  They've been living in these parts since long before the Spaniards came. 

The women still wear their traditional shawls and head dresses; the people are very poor, so their exotic handicrafts come cheap.

00.21

Soldier

You do see armed soldiers, here and there - but after thirty-six years of guerrilla insurgency, the country is now at peace.

It's a beautiful country, too.

Yet back in 1982, the tourists never came to Quiche Province. 

What came rumbling up instead from Guatemala City was death.

00.40

File story

McMullen:  On behalf of the rich oligarchy backed by the fiercest army in the region, the Indians are being massacred - they're being cut to pieces - as if the army had come to see them as animals.

01.09

Holmes:  One of the few contemporary television accounts of the Western Hemisphere's most terrible 20th century atrocity.

01.23

Super over program:

GENOCIDE IN GUATEMALA

Holmes:  At the time, the Reagan Administration dismissed such talk as wild exaggeration.

01.30

Snow at airport

But this American knows that "genocide" is just what happened.

01.41

He's flown in from Oklahoma City to meet me at Dallas International Airport.  This has been his jumping off point for more than twenty years - to Argentina, and Chile, and Bolivia, to Bosnia and Kurdistan.

01.52

He's not a tourist, or a businessman, or, despite appearances, an old, retired spy. 

Dr Clyde Snow, forensic anthropologist, is an expert on bones. And just two and a half hours flight away, there are bone yards in plenty.

02.07

Landrover

Snow:  You can hardly throw a rock around out here without hitting a mass grave.  There are a lot of them unfortunately, and

02.34

Snow in car

we've only really in all the years the team's been working down here scratched the surface.

02.45

Holmes:  We're on our way to visit the team of young forensic anthropologists that Clyde Snow's been training since he first came to Guatemala, ten years ago.

They were students then.  But they've had so much practice in these hills, that now they're among the world's foremost exponents of the art of exhuming a mass grave.

02.54

Snow and Holmes in car

Snow:  It was totally crazy, you know.  These people that we're gonna be digging up in this little village in the middle of nowhere were not a threat to world peace - especially not the children, not the women.

03.14

Holmes:  The army first moved into Quiche province in late 1981. It was determined to eliminate the last stronghold of a 3000-man guerrilla force which had been challenging its rule of Guatemala ever since the early 1960's.

03.30

Music

03.47

Misty countryside

Holmes:  Soon terrible rumours began to leak out from these secret hills - of civilians massacred, women raped and tortured, villages burnt.

03.51

A church report said the army's operations had resulted in  "a horrendous human tragedy".

Amnesty International published verbatim accounts of widespread massacres.

04.04

Yet the US government did its best to shift the blame from the army to the leftwing guerillas.

04.14

Voice over reading over graphic:

U.S. Department of State

Human Rights In Guatemala 1983

Jim:  It has been established that some of the alleged atrocities never occurred. In most cases known to have occurred, it has not been possible to determine whether the guerrillas or the army was responsible. It appears more likely that in the majority of cases the insurgents have been guilty.

04.20

Holmes on donkey, Holmes walks beside

Holmes:  But slowly, in recent years, the lush, well-watered hills of Quiche have given up their secrets. The team that Clyde Snow trained have played their part - and they're still doing it today. A half hour's trek above the settlement of Xolcuay, we're told, we'll find them in a cornfield. And so indeed we do.

04.39

Snow greets Fredy

Snow: How you been, partner?

Fredy: Great, nice to have you.

Snow: Yeah, great.  How many graves have you got?

Fredy: We've got five open right now.

Snow: Yesterday I thought it was four.

Fredy: Oh no we've got another one.

05.01

Mass grave

Holmes:  So far the team has uncovered fourteen skeletons - almost all of them old men, women, and young children.

05.26

Somewhere in the cornfield are another fifty bodies, give or take.  The team knows this for sure, because some of the men who buried their families -- their wives and children, parents and in-laws -- are here to help dig them up again.

05.38

Balthazar at grave site

Holmes:  Men like Balthazar, who's been digging trenches for two days, trying to find the grave where he buried his sister.

06.03

That was on March 2^nd, 1982. Now, seventeen years later, the rich volcanic soil is brushed away from shattered skulls and bones.

Each body will be photographed in situ, each bone meticulously bagged and labelled, to be taken back to the laboratory in Guatemala City.

06.13

Fredy leads Snow into grave site

But even before the skeletons are removed, Fredy Peccerelli and his team from the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology can tell much of the story from the bones.

06.38

Fredy:  That is a male skeleton, this is a female skeleton that happens to be his wife according to testimony, and this is her sister and the lady sitting on the corner of the grave which I don't want to point to over there is the daughter.

06.48

Snow: Possibly now three gun shot wounds to the head.

07.03

Skeleton

Fredy: It basically corresponds with testimony that says that these victims were either shot or macheted.  So we have both a machete wounds... and a gunshot would to the head.

07.09

Snow:  Well when I see gunshot wounds to the head we're talking about execution, it's not just -- not as random as you'd get if you just sprayed people, somebody was in pretty close and pretty methodical.

07.23

Snow, Fredy and others in grave

Holmes:  Later, when the bones are moved, they'll find bullets from Israel assault rifles, used exclusively by the Guatemalan army.

07.39

That comes as no surprise to Andres, Miguel and Salvador.  They remember all too clearly the day the army arrived in Xolcuay - Sunday, 28th February 1982.

07.48

Andres

Andres:   I said to my wife, we must get out... because we could see that the soldiers didn't see us as human beings but as animals.

08.01

When one of them saw some people walking away he just shot and killed them.

But my wife, who was expecting in two weeks, didn't want to go... So she said I should go alone because the soldiers were after the men.

She said,  "I'm a woman, they won't do anything to me. Better you go!"

So then I left my wife and my family in the house -- and I went up into those hills.

Ruined church

Holmes:  Today, only the ruins of the church, and an abandoned schoolhouse, show where the village once stood.

08.47

From the hill behind the village, Andres watched the soldiers going from house to house.  They rounded up everyone they could find, including his wife and children, and took them up the path towards the cornfield, out of sight.

08.57

Holmes with Miguel and Andres

Also hiding in the hills that day was Miguel and his three children. His wife had gone to the nearby market town that morning.  He never saw her again.

09.12

Miguel

Miguel:  At about two or three in the afternoon, we heard a big noise over there.

09.22

It was the poor people being killed, who were screaming... screaming.

We heard shooting and screaming, but I didn't see anything because I was on the other side of the hill.

So I stayed there with my three kids... with no mother, with nothing..

Grave site

Holmes:  It was two days before Andres and the other survivors emerged from the hills to bury the dead.

09.49

Andres covered his family with a blue plastic sheet before filling in their grave -- it's preserved their shoes and clothes, as well as their bones.  

His wife, his two children, aged four and five, and his father-in-law -- four victims of one unremarkable massacre.

10.03

The Guatemalan Truth Commission, which reported earlier this year, collected detailed accounts of more than four hundred separate massacres in the Western Highlands in those years. There were about a hundred thousand individual victims.

10.34

Commission hearing/Tomeschat at microphone

Super:

Dr. CHRISTIAN TOMESCHAT

Guatemalan Clarification Comm.

Around 95 percent of those deaths, the Commission said, were attributable to the Guatemalan army and the vigilante groups it armed and controlled.  The commission's chairman, a German lawyer, was unequivocal.

10.52

Tomeschat:   We concluded that in the counter-insurgency launched between 1981 and 1983 in certain parts of the country, agents of the government of Guatemala committed acts of genocide, against the Mayan people.

FX:  Applause

11.05

Holmes:  The use of the word "genocide" drew wild applause from victims' relatives.  It did not amuse the generals.  But they are safe enough, at least for now.

11.27

The Guatemalan Government agreed to the setting up of a Truth Commission on condition that it did not attempt to name the perpetrators of the crimes that it described.

11.37

Bishop of Quiche

The Catholic Church was not so squeamish.  In April last year, the former Bishop of Quiche, Juan Gerardi, masterminded a detailed account of the thirty years war: it did name names: generals, colonels, captains.

Gerardi:  Unless we know the truth the wounds of the past will stay open and cannot be healed.

11.48

Bishop's funeral

Holmes:  Three days later, the outspoken Bishop was dead - bashed to death in his own garage with a concrete block.

12.17

In the fifteen months since, the priest who shared the bishop's house has been arrested and then released. But only now is a new prosecutor daring to focus his attention on the evidence that points to the involvement of military intelligence.

12.25

If a Bishop could be murdered with impunity a year ago, what chance of justice have the Mayan Indians, whose relatives are seventeen-year old skeletons?

12.41

Grave site/ Fredy

Holmes:  Fredy, what do you think in the current climate here, the chances that the perpetrators of this particular massacre will ever be prosecuted and found guilty of their crimes?

12.51

Super:

FREDY PECCERELLI

Forensic Anthropology Foundation

Fredy:  Slim to none, I would say. According to testimony the people responsible belong to the Guatemalan military.  It will be very difficult for the prosecutors that belongs to the state and is part of the judicial system of the state would go after another sector of the state at this moment in time.

13.03

Holmes:  And yet the work -- hard, and hot, and gruesome, and seemingly without an end in sight -- goes on. 

13.26

Fredy

Fredy:  What keeps me going personally is the opportunity to be able to help one person at a time to identify maybe his children, her mother. Also the fact to be able to contribute to tell the real story of Guatemala, and so people -- not only Guatemalans, not only my children but everyone -- will know what really happened here.

13.33

Member of forensic team

Snow:   At least we are putting the evidence of these massacres on the scientific record

14.02

Snow

and it is good, hard solid forensic evidence and that makes it difficult for the revisionists to come in 20 or 30 years from now to say "Oh this stuff didn't happen".

14.09

And so it is hard to argue against a skull with a gun shot wound in the back of the head.

14.23

Abrams

Super:

ELIOT ABRAMS

U.S. Asst. Sec. of State

1981-88

Abrams:   It is impossible sitting in Washington to determine what is going on in the highlands of Guatemala. All you can do is rely on the professionals who do the reporting which is precisely what we did.

14.29

Holmes:  As Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights under President Reagan, Eliot Abrams was responsible for the State Department reports which consistently down played allegations of mass killings by the Guatemalan army.

14.40

Abrams:  The embassy should not be saying that the Government committed these acts unless it can really prove that the Government did commit them.  And presumably at that moment the embassy felt that it did not have the adequate evidence to say that.

14.51

Holmes:  But what was the Embassy in Guatemala telling Washington?   Last year, on President Clinton's orders, around a thousand classified documents were released to the Guatemalan Clarification Commission.  They've been collected and analysed by the National Security Archive, a non-profit pressure group in Washington, DC.

15.12

Doyle looks at files at archive

The documents represent no more than a tiny fraction of the full secret archive.  Nevertheless, they are revealing.

15.35

Doyle:  There are CIA reports, there are Defense Intelligence Agency reports, there are embassy cables.

15.41

Doyle

Super:

KATE DOYLE

National Security Archive

We have in fact one CIA document from 1982 that was produced by the station in Guatemala City that specifically describes one of the massacres that were taking place in the Ixil triangle at the time and the reporting officer is quite clear about what's happening up there.

15.47

It says " the well-documented belief that all Ixil Indian population is pro-guerrilla has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."

16.07

We do have material indicating that the United States was certainly aware of the kind of violence that was going on in the highlands at the time.

16.20

And so my opinion of the human rights reporting that was going on at the time is that it was profoundly politically driven and that they did not want to know or report on what was happening.

16.25

Rally

16.36

Holmes:  Veterans of the Reagan Administration make no apology for their political agenda. These were the years when America was obsessed with ousting the Sandinista Government in Nicaragua. Guatemala was even closer to home.

16.43

Abrams

Abrams:  It seemed clear to us that if you had a Nicaragua in Guatemala, what you've got is a Nicaragua, that is to say, a Soviet style government armed by the Soviet Union, lousy with Soviet and East German and Czech and other secret police agents on the border of Mexico. We would have certainly been more alarmed about Guatemala had it happened there, than we were about Nicaragua.

16.59

File footage Nicaragua

Holmes:   The priority was defeating communism. The Reagan Administration was funding the contras in Nicaragua and the army in El Salvador. But there was a Carter era ban on military aid to Guatemala.

17.20

The Guatemalans were supplied instead by Israel and Argentina.  But only America could supply the helicopters they needed to take the war to the highlands.  The Reagan Administration wanted Congress to lift the arms embargo.

17.38

Funeral at Church

As the Guatemalan Truth Commission pointed out, the lives - and deaths - of Guatemalan peasants have never weighed much in the scales against the commercial and strategic interests of the United Sates.

17.56

Tomeschat at commission

Tomeschat:  The investigation of the Commission demonstrate  that up until the 1980's there was great pressure from the U.S.A. and from North American business  to maintain the archaic and unjust social and economic system of the country.

18.09

Abrams

Holmes:   That simple truth is still denied by many North American cold warriors.

18.32

Super:

ELIOT ABRAMS

U.S. Asst. Sec. of State

1981-88

Abrams:  You can't explain away Latin history and Latin culture and say that everything that happens in Latin America is America's doing.

There is such a thing as Guatemala, there is a culture, there is a people. The fact that we have had a democracy since 1789 and they haven't is not because we imposed military dictatorship on them.

18.35

Holmes outside church

Music

Holmes:  In fact, that's exactly what did happen when Guatemala attempted to escape its past. That past began when Spain set up its Central American capital in Guatemala in the 1540's; ever since, the country has been ruled by a tiny land-owning elite, and the Mayan peasants have been ruthlessly exploited.

18.55

Soldiers

Holmes: Though civilian Presidents have sometimes come and always gone, Guatemala was effectively ruled by the most ruthless and efficient army in Latin America.

19.27

And in the 1950's and ‘60's, that army, and its ferocious intelligence branch, was created, armed and trained in counter-insurgency doctrine by the freedom-loving agents of the USA.

19.42

Doyle:  The United States created the killing machine that went on to murder and torture hundreds of thousands of people.

19.57

Doyle

And perhaps most importantly the United States poured millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars into training. They trained the Guatemalan military to raid houses, they trained them in surveillance, they trained them in interrogation techniques, and we have now, years later, the declassified CIA and Defense Department manuals to prove it. I have something from, for example, as early as 1954, which is called a study of assassination.

20.06

And it describes, in the most chilling and bureaucratic terms, how to murder an individual or individuals. It even goes on to show in graphic terms how to enter a room with ten people sitting round a table and murder them one by one.

20.35

So these documents give us a very rare glimpse into the workings of a counter-insurgency strategy and tactics that we were very much on the ground helping to design.

20.52

Rally for the disappeared

Holmes:   One of those tactics was the deniable disappearance.

21.09

Every 19^th of June, the few remaining stalwarts of Guatemala's labour movement mark the day in 1980 when 25 trade union leaders were snatched by armed men, never to be seen again.

Music

21.15

21.27

Holmes:  Over the years, 45,000 Guatemalans -- guerrilla leaders to be sure, but also students and professors, priests and social workers and peasant leaders - have simply disappeared.

21.30

Interior of church

The tactic has been used from Argentina to El Salvador.  But the very first mass disappearance in Latin America took place in Guatemala, in 1966.

21.43

Doyle:  The kidnapping of some 30 communist leaders and their associates and their secret execution was

21.52

Doyle

the product of an operation designed by the United States, by the CIA and the Agency for International Development at the time.

21.58

Holmes:  Last March, President Clinton made an official visit to Guatemala.  In a first for a US President, he openly acknowledged that America's support for repressive regimes, here and elsewhere in Latin America, had been wrong.

22.09

Clinton speech

Clinton: I will re-affirm America's commitment to shed light on the dark events of the past, so that they are never repeated.

22.23

Holmes:  But for those, like the young team at the Foundation for Forensic Anthropology, who are presented every day with the gruesome consequences of their country's past, a mere acknowledgment of responsibility is not enough.

22.34

Fredy

Super:

FREDY PECCERELLI

Forensic Anthropology Foundation

Fredy:  I don't think you can change the responsibility or the involvement the United States government had in just one speech.  I haven't seen any difference, before or after the speech. I think if the United States government really wants to contribute they're going to have to do it in a more direct fashion with projects, with - some other way -- speeches only go so far.

22.48

Snow with forensic team members

Holmes:  Clyde Snow has made his contribution - to Guatemala, as to so many other traumatised countries in the world

23.21

Snow:  I used to be the Yankee expert, but over the years that I've worked with the team they have turned themselves into true professionals.

23.28

Super:

Dr. CLYDE SNOW

Forensic Anthropologist

What I want the teams to do is to develop a sense of independence and the self-confidence that they need to operate on their own.

23.40

Snow and Holmes

Holmes:  The tragic irony is that that's exactly what the US secret agencies achieved in Guatemala.  They created a monster, which later they were powerless to control.

23.52

Misty countryside/Rainy village

FX:  Rain

24.03

Holmes:  On the way back from Xolcuay, we were passing  through the village of Xix when the heavens opened.

FX:  Rain

Holmes:  The people said the village school is on the other side of a river.  When the rains come like this, the children have to risk their lives to ford it, but there's no money for a bridge. After thirty years of war and massacre, these Mayan communities are still desperately poor.

24.08

24.19

Last week in Washington, the Congress voted to return one and a half trillion dollars to the American taxpayer over the next ten years.  And then it slashed a couple of billion from the budget for foreign aid.

24.41

I've heard no one talk about Guatemala.  Why would they?  The Cold War's over, and this tin-pot little country really doesn't matter, any more.

24.54

Ends 25.12