By Paul Tuthill
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wamc/local-wamc-986133.mp3
Springfield, MA – A human rights activist, speaking in western Massachusetts urged people to learn more about the history of Guatemala. Jennifer Harbury says there are strong parallels between US involvement in Central America and Iraq and Afghanistan. WAMC's Pioneer Valley Bureau Chief Paul Tuthill reports.
Harbury says Guatemala is at another cross roads in its history. She believes the country of 13 point 8 million people will either see war criminals brought to justice in a Nueremburg style court, or their will be a repeat of the bloodbaths that have occurred in each generation for decades.
Harbury, a Texas lawyer, has decades of personal experience in Gautemala, where her husband, a Mayan resistance leader, Efrain Velasquez was captured by the Guatemalan military in 1992, tortured and then executed.
Harbury, who spoke Tuesday, at the Western New England University School of Law, has been fighting in the Guatemala court system to bring charges against her husband's killers. She says prosecutors, her lawyers, and potential witnesses have been killed, or threatened.
In three books, Harbury has disclosed the close working relationship between the United States C-I-A and the Guatemalan military. She said that relationship, which can be traced to a 1954 coup , continues to this day.
And she claims the interogation techniques, such as water-bordering ,that were the subject of ferocious debate over the appropriatness of its use in the war on terror, were common place in Guatemala.
Harbury is also spreading the alarm about Guatemala's presidential election, where retired General Otto Perez Molina is favored to win a run off vote in November.
Its believed that at least 200 thousand people died in Guatemala's 36 year civil war that ended in 1996. Amnesty International called Guatemala a silent Holocaust. Why was so little attention paid?
Since a peace agreement in 1996, Guatemala has been anything but peaceful. Violence has been pervasive, as gangs battle for control of the drug trade.