BuzzFlash: You came to this topic through the torture of your husband and his murder. Could you summarize for our readers what happened to your husband, the circumstances, and the U.S. involvement?
Jennifer K. Harbury: I'm an attorney, and I had been doing human rights work in South Texas with a number of different groups for a number of years and became familiar with the refugee community, especially the Guatemalans. After doing human rights work in Guatemala from 1985 on, I ended up marrying Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a Mayan resistance leader. As I'm sure you know, the socioeconomic situation in Guatemala is very similar to the old South Africa, in that the indigenous people there, the Mayans, are the majority – they're 80%. But they are completely disenfranchised, suffer from an extremely high malnutrition level, 80% illiteracy, and the second-highest rate of infant mortality in the hemisphere, second only to Haiti, by way of background.
My husband was picked up by the Guatemalan military. He was captured alive in 1992. Then they falsely stated that he had been killed in combat. I found out six months later that he was, in fact, still alive, that they had faked his death in order to torture him long term, with medical assistance to avoid accidentally killing him, so that he would break psychologically and reveal all of his information to them. I then went on a series of hunger strikes to try to obtain his release to the courts of law for a fair trial, as opposed to his torture and extra-judicial execution. I was going back to the United Nations, the State Department, the OAS, and, of course, Capitol Hill. Congress was trying very hard to assist me. The Ambassador and high-level State Department officials kept responding to me and to Congress that they had no information whatsoever about him.
After two and a half years, after my longest hunger strike, which lasted 32 days in Guatemala and then another 14-day hunger strike in front of the White House in '95, it was revealed by U.S. Rep. Robert Torricelli, who was then on the Intelligence Committee in the House, that my husband had indeed been captured alive, had been held for two and a half years and severely tortured, then extra-judiciously executed or assassinated by military intelligence officials in Guatemala, who were also on the CIA payroll as paid informants.
In other words, the CIA had been paying the very people that were torturing and who eventually killed my husband without trial. The documents from the U.S. government also showed that both the CIA and the United States Embassy had known where my husband was, and the fact that he was being tortured in the hands of U.S.-paid informants, from the first week of his capture. We could have saved him.
CONTINUED...
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/08/int05036.html
PS: You never forget, MinM.
= new reply since forum marked as read
