To All Living Things
Last Week's Column

Amnesty Action:
Massacre of Returned Guatemalan Refugees in Guatemala
Kathy Gay

his week’s action from Amnesty International concerns the brutal October 1995 massacre of eleven Guatemalan refugees, including a 7-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy, by members of a Guatemalan military patrol. It is one of the cases included in Amnesty’s current Refugee Campaign, "Human Rights Have No Borders."

Having been driven from their homeland by the fierce army counter-insurgency campaign of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the families of these two children finally returned to Guatemala from Mexico in 1994. Along with two hundred other families, they settled on a farm in Chisec in the department of Alta Verapaz. One year later, a military patrol entered the farm and opened fire indiscriminately. Eleven people died, including the two children. The young boy was shot in the wrist, then chased by a soldier who fired fatal shots into his head and chest. The little girl was shot in the back in circumstances that are still unclear. Thirty other people, three of them soldiers, were wounded by military gunfire.

Amnesty International believes that the attack by members of the armed forces was a deliberate act of intimidation against the returnees and that some of the victims died in circumstances suggesting they were extrajudicially executed. Inquiries conducted by national and international organizations, including the United Nations Mission for the Verification of Human Rights in Guatemala (MINUGUA), are unanimous in holding the soldiers responsible for this massacre. They discount claims that the soldiers were provoked, that community members started the shooting or that community members were armed.

Amnesty International is concerned that the internal judicial investigations into this incident have been hampered by threats against witnesses and lawyers representing the victims, and by alleged tampering with the evidence. Despite the transfer of this case from a military to a civilian court, a year and a half has passed and no one has yet been brought to justice for the massacre, nor have any of the victims or their relatives received any compensation.

Background Information

The civil war that ended last year after 36 years of intense fighting between Guatemalan government forces and armed opposition groups took a very heavy toll on the Guatemalan people. Brutal counter-insurgency operations conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s by military and paramilitary units frequently targeted indigenous non-combatant peasants, even very young children. These operations claimed the lives of tens of thousands of the Mayan people and wiped out hundreds of their highland villages. To escape the serious human rights violations being perpetrated against them, many peasant families fled Guatemala and sought protection in the refugee camps in Mexico where they could raise their families.

In 1992, the Guatemalan government and refugee representatives reached an agreement on a plan for the return of refugees living in U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) camps in Mexico. In June 1994, in the context of the peace negotiations, the government, opposition and U.N. representatives signed an additional accord that recognized returnees’ rights, guaranteed their physical safety and promised them access to land. And so, after more than a decade in exile, the families began returning to Guatemala. However, in spite of the signed agreements, there have been numerous reports of threats, attacks and harassment against returnee communities.

The UNHCR reported that 4,185 refugees returned to Guatemala last year, bringing the total to over 25,000 since initiation of the program.

How you can help

Please send a letter to Guatemala’s Minister of the Interior as soon as possible, but no later than August 6, 1997. You may use the sample letter linked below or use it as a model to write your own letter. If you choose to use the sample letter, please cut off or delete all website information at the very top of the letter. If you choose to write your own letter, make sure that it is politely worded and non-partisan (i.e., not used as a vehicle for political expression). Care must be taken to ensure that nothing is written that will cause harm to the relatives and surviving victims of the this massacre. Be sure to include both your name and address, as well as the date, on your letter.

U.S. airmail postage to Guatemala is 60 cents.

Questions?

If you have any questions, just post a message to me (Kathy Gay) on the Pub, and I will respond as soon as I can. I greatly appreciate your interest and support.

To see the sample letter for this action, click here.

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Kathy Gay is a vegan, and has been a member of Amnesty International for nearly 10 years, where she has worked on numerous campaigns. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a business analyst for a leading California bank.

Kathy's column, To All Living Things, is a regular feature of VegSource On-Line Magazine.