GUATEMALA-HUMAN RIGHTS: U.N., OAS Push on key Cases

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, May 28 1997 (IPS) - The United Nations and the Organisation of American States (OAS) have both stepped up pressure on Guatemala, with reports from both bodies criticising the Central American state’s human rights record.

At issue are charges that President Alvaro Arzu’s government has yet to provide information on key human rights cases, most notably the 1996 disappearance of leftist activist Juan Jose Cabrera Rodas and the 1989 rape and torture of U.S. nun Sister Dianna Ortiz.

“The government of Guatemala is very much on the defensive,” says Hugh Byrne, a Guatemalan specialist at the Washington Office on Latin America, a U.S. non-profit group. Although it is credited with implementing the early phases of a peace process with leftist rebels, Byrne says, the new U.N. and OAS charges are just the latest sign that “their willingness to be open needs to change.”

In both the Cabrera and Ortiz cases, human rights monitors for the United Nations and the OAS accuse Guatemala of providing conflicting information about what happened.

The disappearance last Oct. 19 of Cabrera — a member of the leftist Revolutionary Organisation of the People in Arms (ORPA) known as ‘Comandante Mincho’ — has also prompted accusations in some quarters in Guatemala that the U.N. human rights mission to Guatemala, called MINUGUA, has covered up crucial data.

Those accusations, voiced in the Guatemalan press over the past week, were rebuffed Wednesday by U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard, who said, “We consider these press reports to be without foundation.” Nevertheless, he added, the United Nations will send a fact-finding mission to Guatemala to investigate the handling of the Mincho case.

MINUGUA claims it has information that Cabrera disappeared on Oct. 19, when he and an ORPA colleague, Augusto Rafael Baldizon Nunez, were seized by agents of the Presidential Chief of Staff’s Office in connection with the kidnapping of Olga de Novella, a member of a wealthy family.

“The mission has received various versions of events that coincide in indicating that Mr. Cabrera died at the time of his capture,” Denise Cook of MINUGUA said last week. (An exchange involving Baldizon and de Novella took place Oct. 20.)

But the Guatemalan government countered that, although it was aware of an accomplice of Baldizon during his capture, that accomplice was never apprehended. “The government has denied and denies that this other person was captured or killed,” a Guatemalan spokesman argued. Guatemalan media have cited comments from government sources that MINUGUA knew that Baldizon’s companion was not captured but that it withheld that information.

One U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS that those reports are themselves based on contradictory information. The Guatemalan government, he noted, only recently told MINUGUA that they were aware of a second person who was not captured alongside Baldizon.

For several months, the Arzu government denied the existence of any other person present when Baldizon was seized, but they are now accusing MINUGUA of having known that information all along, the official said.

The United Nations is hoping that its current fact-finding mission will determine the facts behind the allegations and “will consolidate the confidence placed in MINUGUA,” Eckhard said. But other U.N. officials say they are worried that the dispute with the government represents a retreat from the increasing openness that followed last year’s peace accords with National Guatemalan Revolutionary Unit (URNG) rebels.

“It seems that the breach between the United Nations and the government of Guatemala is the largest it has been in three years,” Byrne said. “It’s a very serious problem, since MINUGUA is a guarantor of the peace process.”

The OAS is similarly worried about Guatemala’s follow-up on human rights charges, with its Inter-American Human Rights Commission naming Guatemala, along with Colombia and Peru, for violations of human rights in its latest annual report.

The commission, in its report, supported Ortiz’s charges that she was abducted, raped, and tortured by government forces on Nov. 2, 1989. “Sister Ortiz was placed under surveillance and threatened, then kidnapped and tortured” by government agents, the commission said.

The commission added that “Sister Ortiz is a credible witness,” a position that contradicts that of the Guatemalan government, which has alleged that Ortiz is not mentally sound.

The commission recommended that Guatemala investigate Ortiz’s case impartially and promptly and that it compensate her for the harm she suffered.

Ortiz praised the commission’s ruling, saying that she hoped that the Guatemalan government “finally accepts responsibility for the suffering it has caused to so many and for so long.” Ortiz dropped plans to take the case to the Inter-American Court last September, citing the emotional toll of testifying. The U.S. Department of Justice dropped its own investigation into her case shortly afterward.

But the impact of the OAS verdict is debatable, says Patricia Davis, a board member of the Washington-based Guatemala Human Rights Commission-USA. “The Guatemalan government doesn’t have a good record following the OAS’s recommendations on any case,” she said. “And the Guatemalan government has consistently denied that Dianna Ortiz was abducted.”

Nevertheless, Davis says, the recent OAS and U.N. charges lay bare a disparity in which there is both “a greater climate of openness” following the peace process and also an atmosphere in which human rights abuses still occur. From January until November 1996, the Guatemala Human Rights Commission reported 143 cases of extra-judicial execution, 31 cases of torture and 23 ‘disappearances’.

“The government in Guatemala is broadly committed to carrying out the peace accords,” Byrne says. “At the same time, they’re very interested in doing things their way.” But the current criticisms, he argues, may convince the government that the peace process will require further steps to investigate and punish atrocities, and not just compliance with the peace accords.