'The Silent Holocaust' — The Israeli and CIA Sponsored Guatemalan Genocide (w/ Jennifer Harbury) | The Chris Hedges Report

Lawyer Jennifer Harbury discusses the gruesome details of the Guatemalan genocide, and the role that the CIA and Israel played in facilitating this gruesome erasure of the indigenous population.

This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

Known as the “Silent Holocaust,” the genocide in Guatemala is seldom mentioned in modern history. The United States, with support from Israel, backed yet another violent crusade against an indigenous population as well as against communism. The Guatemalan genocide — preceded by a CIA-instigated coup d’état of the Guatemalen government in 1954 and the ensuing civil war — saw hundreds of thousands of the Mayan Indigenous peoples and alleged communists massacred or disappeared.

Jennifer Harbury, an attorney, author and human rights activist, witnessed the horrors of the genocidal campaign waged by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan military. Included in these horrors was the torture and disappearance of her husband, Mayan rebel leader Efraín Bámaca Velásquez (known as Everardo) by CIA-backed Guatemalan military officials.

Harbury joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to dissect the brutal history of the genocide as well as recount her own experiences, including several hunger strikes in Guatemala and Washington, D.C., that ultimately led to the exposure of the CIA’s complicity in the atrocities.

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Thomas Hedges

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

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Transcript

Chris Hedges

When I arrived in Guatemala in 1983 to cover the wars in Central America, which I would do for the next five years, the regime of General Efraín Ríos Montt was carrying out a scorched earth campaign, especially in the highlands of Quiche, Huehuetenango and Baja Verapaz. The campaign was modeled on the kill-anything-that moves tactics employed by the U.S. during the Vietnam War, an effort to eradicate and control the civilian population in areas dominated by the insurgents, who until 1983 were beating back the Guatemalan army.

The Guatemalan military savagely carried out massacre after massacre in the highlands against indigenous, including the wholesale murder of women, children and the elderly, and razed some 600 villages and towns. The number of disappearances and killings averaged 3,000 per month.

President Jimmy Carter had cut most military aid to Guatemala in 1977. Israel, however, filled the void. It equipped the Guatemalan military with Israeli-manufactured Galil automatic rifles and Uzi submachine guns. Israel advisors, estimated to be between 150 and 200, provided surveillance and interrogation training to police and military units. They assisted Ríos Montt in carrying out the 1982 coup that brought him to power. They helped plan Guatemala military sweeps that resembled their own erasure of Palestinian villages and massacres carried out in 1947 and 1948.

Montt was convicted in a Guatemalan court in 2014 for genocide and crimes against humanity, specifically relating to a series of massacres against the indigenous population of the Quiche region between March 1982 and August 1983 that resulted in 1,771 deaths and the forced displacement of 29,000 people. The conviction, however. was later overturned.

General Hector Lopez Fuentes, Ríos Montt’s chief of staff, admitted at the time that “Israel is our principal supplier of arms and the number one friend of Guatemala in the world.”

Guatemalan military commanders, not surprisingly, referred to the genocide as the “Palestinization” of the indigenous Mayan population.

Joining me to discuss the links between the genocide in Gaza and the genocide in Guatemala is Jennifer Harbury, an attorney who did human rights work in Guatemala in 1985 and 1986. She exposed the complicity of the CIA in human rights abuses in Guatemala, complicity she uncovered while seeking to discover the fate of her husband, a Mayan rebel leader, who was “disappeared” in March 1992 by the Guatemala military and murdered.

Harbury is also the author of Bridge to Courage: Life Stories of the Guatemala Compañeros y Compañeras, Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War and the CIA in Guatemala and Truth, Torture, and the American Way.

So let's talk about the parallels between the genocide that took place in Guatemala and the genocide that's taking place in Gaza. Both, of course, are directed against indigenous populations. But I know that you've seen parallels. Perhaps you can explain what they are.

Jennifer Harbury

There are very obvious parallels, right? Both, as you've said, involve genocide against the indigenous population, whether in Guatemala or in Palestine. In both situations, before Zionists arrived in Palestine, for example, in Guatemala, even with the arrival of the conquistadors, the populations were in the great majority.

The indigenous people in Guatemala, that was the Mayans and in Palestine, the Palestinians, of course. In both cases, in order to make room for outsiders to arrive and take over the whole country and to take over all of the minerals, the oil, the fruit, the sources of commerce, et cetera, et cetera, the goal was to basically displace and destroy the indigenous populations.

That really reached a crescendo during the 1980s, as you were just saying, when the government of Guatemala, shocked by the popularity of a number of reform efforts, launched a military campaign of eradication up in the Mayan highlands, also of labor unions, also of church efforts, et cetera, et cetera, but the obliteration of the Mayan population for commercial reasons, for political reasons and because of racism as well, and because they wanted to take the country completely away.

Palestine, that's exactly what we see happening now with Gaza. Not only are there two campaigns of genocide which involve the complete obliteration of the majority population, which of course is indigenous in both countries, but both Guatemala, the United States, the Guatemalan government, and also the government of Israel were willing to use any methods of barbarity necessary, daily acts of torture, terror, unjust imprisonment, cruelty, destruction of any hope for a fair trial or reasonable liberty from unjust detention or taking away your land, whatever.

They were willing to go down to the very last bit to make sure that everything stayed the way they wanted it to be. And as we've discussed before, I see huge similarities to the way they're dealing with this stage of the war in Gaza, the destruction of Gaza, which is in Guatemala, they were called the development poles, Polos de Desarrollo or model villages, which at the time were very obviously just about identical to the strategic hamlets that we saw in Vietnam, where all of the survivors were sort of rounded up.

And if they wanted any food, any shelter, any safety of any kind, they couldn't look to the rest of the world. They were completely locked in. They had to look only to the Guatemalan military that was holding their village hostage, basically or holding them completely defenseless and with no other sources or means of survival.

That's exactly what I'm looking at right now. You know much more than I do on that. But that's exactly what concerns me now about the fact that the boat with Greta Thunberg on it trying to bring supplies in because the Palestinians are absolutely at a state of starvation thanks to the Zionist government and the United States complicity.

They were like not allowed in. They were in fact dragged off their ship and imprisoned or arrested. But if people do want any source of food for their kids, they have to go, I think it's called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation or whatever, that's providing some places where they're able to get some assistance.

Chris Hedges

Well, let me just interrupt. It's only four distribution points. The UN had 400. It's not even a pretense of providing adequate food supplies. It's exactly what happened in the Highlands because one of the tactics that the Guatemalan military used was destroying crops.

It became impossible for indigenous communities to feed themselves unless they went to these “model villages”, which were just armed, ringed concentration camps. They were controlled not only by the Guatemalan military, but as you remember these civil defense units which I ran into in the Highlands and they had their faces completely covered with hoods. So it's exactly the same that you want to eat then you have to crawl and beg for a paltry bit of food from your killers.

Jennifer Harbury

Yeah, I'd like to describe what I saw in Guatemala at the model villages. I'll just be very direct on this because I stayed quite a bit of time in different model villages, Polos de Desarrollo up in the Ixcán area at the Mexican border. Those had been malarial swamps and church leaders had led landless peasants there and completely rebuilt the area so that it was blossoming.

But they were cooperatives and that was of course communist. So the scorched-earth campaign went right through there. One of the priests, who was an American, was shot down in his airplane when he was trying to bring in supplies with three other Americans. William Woods was the priest. They had burned his church down in Xalbal, but I could still see the edges of the wood frames and so could everybody else.

And what had been the town community center was where the army was now based. There was a football field, the army was well fed and had medical supplies. All medical supplies coming in for the actual villagers there were taken away and kept by the army, same for the food. And I checked that out with many people.

Villagers did talk to me after a while, mostly women, because they could take me down to the river to bathe and the soldiers couldn't go with us and then they could tell me what was happening. And they would say, yeah, if anyone goes to work in the fields with a little bit too much food, you can be shot for taking food to the guerrillas.

If you have a pair of dry pants or an extra shirt because of the heavy rainfall, you can be shot for taking stuff to the guerrillas. If you come back too late, you can be shot for being out with the guerrillas. You have to be at the flag pole in the morning to salute the flag and you better be fervent about it or you can end up in the water pits or you could be shot for being with the guerrillas.

Or the same at night, you have to be there at sundown and you better be there, they'll take a roll call. And if you're not, you can be shot for being with the guerrillas. So the third time I was there, a baby, maybe eight months old, clearly, I'm thinking, had a ruptured appendix. He was screaming on every exhale and was just in, he was dying.

And the mother was hysterical and the other villagers were running back and forth trying to see what to do. It's like you couldn't listen to it without going crazy. So they said, the officers won't give us any medicine. They won't let us go. You have to have a permit to go to the center where there is medical care at the military base, but you have to have a written permit to go there or they'll shoot you.

And I said, well, can we get a helicopter? And it's like, no way. You go ask the military guy if he'll get a helicopter. So I took the baby and went down because they had just given me a big lecture on how they were there to be the brothers of the people and take care of them. And I thought I could cash in on that a little bit. And with this child screaming his last breaths of air, the guy basically said, you've got to be kidding.

The food and medicines here, those are for soldiers. No, we're not getting a helicopter anywhere, and we're not giving you a permit. And at that point, the child vomited blood and died. And that was life in the model villages. And so I don't want to think what's happening in Gaza, because it seems pretty clear to me that we're following the same pattern, the same blueprint basically.

Chris Hedges

Before we get into the resistance, let's talk about the role of the Israelis. They were very important, as I highlighted in the introduction, in consolidating the power of Ríos Montt, a brutal dictatorship, but also in terms of directing many of the tactics that were used to crush, especially urban resistance. Can you talk about that?

Jennifer Harbury

Yes, President [Jimmy] Carter had, as you mentioned, gotten a lot passed with the great work of Senator [Patrick] Leahy that we could not give military aid to any government that was systematically violating human rights.

Well, Guatemala at that point was known as the worst human rights violator in the Western Hemisphere. So Carter had the decency to cut off military aid. As I found out later, there were all kinds of ways for military aid to still keep coming in directly from the US and which did, under the guise of professionalizing and educating the forces there or assisting humanitarian projects, but most directly through the CIA. They didn't have to say who they gave it to or what. And we had a system of paid informants, spies that were in military intelligence.

We paid them, they tortured people and got the information and gave it to us. Tortured by proxy. We were a marriage made in heaven. But they still wanted to get back a lot more money than they were getting for arms and tanks and everything else. They were starting to fall into hard times. And at that point, the United States government, without Carter's approval, I hope, went to Israel and got them to send the weapons, the rifles, the Aravas, some of the tanks, I believe, that went directly to Guatemala to take care of the military.

And that, when I was there, the national weapon for the army was the Galil. And as the daughter of a Holocaust escapee, my dad got out of Holland just in time before the Nazis showed up when he was 11. It gives me real pain to hear that the national rifle, the Galil, how great that is. It's like, what shame.

But anyway, that's neither here nor there. The most horrible thing that they did, the Israelis doubtless on request of the CIA and the US government, because that's how our relationship works. That's also how our relationship with Guatemala works in other things. But what they also did was they arrived in Guatemala and set up an intelligence system that annihilated the urban underground and was very important in carrying on death squad activities for the next many decades everywhere.

One of the most important things was to develop the computer system used by G2, or the intelligence division, so that everybody was in the computer with all kinds of notations and everything else. And that's in the National Palace or was in the tower there. I don't know where it is nowadays. But they also brought these really frightening techniques for keeping track of everybody in the city and other places so that they could be grabbed, tortured, and then other places would go down.

There were many safe houses, for example, in the capital city where different groups of the guerilla movement were hiding out and doing what they could. And at that point, the intelligence division learned from the Israelis how they could monitor the electricity and water supply in every single house. And if it was a house that was probably meant or designed for a family of five and was using enough water and electricity for a family of 20, they would go in there and massacre everyone in there.

They got a little bit more adept later on and would drag out one or two survivors and torture them to get to the other houses. So of course the urban underground got extremely closed, but even then it was nearly impossible, even with the highest security measures that they took to escape the annihilation by the G2.

Another thing that the army did, thanks to Mossad assistance, was they would monitor all of the phone calls. So if telephone A called telephone B, it might be a two second thing where they would say, sorry, wrong number. But if the computer showed that within 10 minutes, telephone C would call telephone D, and those would be public phones, not houses, then those two would have a lengthy talk. So very shortly, they'd have that area surrounded. And if A made another call to B and said, sorry, it's the wrong number, they would grab everybody at the next, C and D telephones and torture them.

And of course, they learn very early on if you take people's children, they'll break really fast and give you more information. I know one witness in one of my cases had already lost his father, his mother, his wife, his sister, and his younger sibling to being disappeared by the military in a sweep.

He had two children left, although not his wife. And when he was caught and severely tortured, he didn't talk for quite a while. But then they knocked down a church wall and dragged out his in-laws with the two children and brought them back to the base where he was being tortured and said, okay, now we're tying the two-year-old to the back of a truck, talk, or we're gonna drag him to death.

So he talked, he said where a clinic was and they came back and said, wow, we wiped everybody out in the clinic. You're the most important prisoner we've ever had.

Chris Hedges

I want to talk about armed resistance. So I knew one of the founders of Hamas, and then after he was assassinated, Dr. Abdul Aziz Rantisi with his son. I knew his successor, Nizar Rayan. I spent a lot of time with Hamas. I have big differences with Hamas. But nevertheless, it's always the oppressor who determines the nature of resistance to oppression.

Guatemala, starting with the 1954 coup that overthrew [Jacobo] Árbenz, really shut down any route towards peaceful democratic reform and I think you would agree, I don't like violence whoever wheels it I've been around a lot of it, but I think you would agree there really wasn't any other choice that those who sought to build an open society or fair society in Guatemala had.

Jennifer Harbury

I agree with that. I'd give two examples because I'm from the Vietnam generation. I was very seriously pacifist until I reached Guatemala, and then I wasn't. But the indigenous movement for equal rights had become stronger and stronger in Guatemala since they're 80% or 85% of the total population, and they've carefully safeguarded their own culture.

They speak 32 of their own languages, use their own clothing, the weaving patterns, identify their ethnic group and so on and so forth. But they had been reasonably pacifist in organizing and demanding equal rights and land reform and no more military excursions and no more massacres like Panzós and others, which seemed pretty reasonable.

And they organized a federation called the CUC, the Campesino Unity Commission. And in 1980, they marched peacefully to the capital, went to the Spanish embassy, since Spain has been the ones that came with the colonialists, right? And met peacefully with the Spanish ambassador, but they were occupying the embassy. The ambassador wisely radioed out and said, everything's fine in here. There's nothing going on. Security forces stay out. We're having a conversation.

So instead, the security forces stormed the building and as now known, the people were all gathered into one room and then they opened fire with white phosphorus and people burned to death. All 48 Campesino indigenous leaders burned to death but one. And everyone in the Spanish embassy that worked there burned to death but the ambassador, and those two people jumped through a plate glass window and were rushed badly burned and injured to a hospital.

That night someone from the U.S. Embassy came and grabbed the ambassador and said, they're coming for you, and took off, but they left the Mayan indigenous leader in his bed. He was found dead and mutilated in a cornfield later. The ambassador is in Spain still horribly traumatized. The other is, when I first arrived in 1985, the group of women looking for the disappeared, very much like the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, were peacefully going every Friday to the National Plaza and screaming for their husbands and uncles and parents to be returned.

And they had their kids with them. And it grew really big and really popular because the leadership, the founders were extraordinary. And that, of course, got military anger against them going. The first person to be killed was just before Easter week. It was one of the few men who was one of the founders, Héctor Gómez. And he was a unionist looking for his brother and he was killed with a blowtorch, among other injuries.

And when all the women came in, including the indigenous women out of the mountains with their kids on their back, going through multiple military checkpoints that were extremely dangerous, but they all came to the funeral and put flowers there and gave moving speeches. And then everyone went home and started calling each other. It was almost Easter day.

And they were trying to just keep track of each other as best they could. We never will know how many indigenous women were detained after that. There were no phones. There was no way to reach them. But Rosario Godoy de Cuevas, her husband had been the president of the student council at the National University.

And he and almost everyone else in the student council had vanished together with numerous people who were in the unions. She had a two-year-old son named Augustine. I think he wasn't quite two. She was one of the people that spoke the most eloquently at Hector's funeral. And just before Easter Sunday, she and her 19-year-old brother and her child drove to the drugstore for medicine for the baby who was sick.

And they found them hours later at the base of a shallow hill, all three with broken necks. And everyone in the army, everyone in the government, and also everyone in the U.S. Embassy said it was a tragic car crash, nothing else. Except the women from the GAM [Mutual Support Group], like Ninette, for example, they went into the morgue and they weren't allowed in until intelligence had left. But they went in and they saw bite marks and cigarette burns all over Rosario's breasts and her clothing.

Her pants and underwear were covered in blood. An elderly nun then told us about going to the funeral for the three of them because she taught school with Rosario and was just freaked out about it. And she said, Rosario and her brother were buried with their arms crossed like good Christians, but the baby was buried palms up like this. And she said, what's going on? Why didn't you cross the child's arms?

And they said, the phone's ringing off the hook with death threats against the surviving young person in the family. Don't say anything. Just go look at the hands. So she went over and she turned the hands over and the child's fingernails had been pulled out. They pulled the baby's fingernails out in front of his mother so that the rest of the women in the group would understand. Look for your husband, we'll take your child. And I thought, no way they'll ever demonstrate again. I mean, who would even think of it?

But more people than I've ever seen came out of the mountains after that, more with their children out of the hills, indigenous women, Latinos, people from the marketplace that were outraged, and they're still there, they're still fighting. So that's the one mistake the Guatemalan government and the CIA and everybody else also made, always at that time period. If you push people too far, then nothing works with them and they pushed people too far in Guatemala.

Chris Hedges

Let's talk about the rebel movement, in particular your relationship with it. I just, as a caveat, as someone who covered it as a reporter, it was extremely difficult for an outsider such as myself to make contact with any, I think there were four major rebel movements in Guatemala, unlike El Salvador, where we traveled with any of the groups of the FMLN [Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front] almost weekly.

That was not possible in Guatemala unless you went to Mexico and tried to set it up, but it took weeks if not months. But you managed to get to, at least once, into were you in Atitlán? I can't remember.

Jennifer Harbury

No, I was in Tajumulco.

Chris Hedges

Okay, I want you to talk a little bit about that and then talk a little bit about your husband.

Jennifer Harbury

Okay, you want me to tell you what it was like up in the front?

Chris Hedges

I want you to talk about it because not many outsiders got up there, as I remember. And I think it took you quite a while.

Jennifer Harbury

No, not many got up there. It took me a really long time. They knew me because if someone had been tortured and had black rings around their wrists and people knew they could go to my hotel room and we'd figure something out, I'd find some way to get them into the Canadian embassy and out they go. No questions asked.

I figured if they're in danger of torture or they've already been tortured, that's enough for me. And I didn't blab their secrets. And when I got back to the United States, after two years down there, it was impossible to just not think about it anymore. And it was still called the silent Holocaust because as you know, it was impossible for journalists to really get stuff published.

I had many people ask us for notes and everything and they'd get told no one's interested, story denied. But that's how I ended up getting up there. After many years, I'd been working on Bridge of Courage, which is just short vignettes about different people I knew who I found out were in the guerilla movement and people would tell me their stories and one would just stay with me and I started writing all those down.

And those are in the book, but I wanted to interview women indigenous combatants, not in some clinic in Mexico or Spain. I wanted to see what it was like up there in actual real time, in action. So they thought about it for a really long time. And then they said, OK, it's been quiet up where the radio is, the Vos Popular up in the...

Chris Hedges

This is the clandestine rebel radio station.

Jennifer Harbury

Yeah, there'd been nonstop combat for quite a while, that had got combat going into that volcano. They decided it couldn't be worth it, right?

Chris Hedges

But I just want to, as in El Salvador, the rebel radio station, which was called Radio Venceremos, it drove the military crazy, as it did in Guatemala. They were constantly trying to search for it. I don't think they ever got it in Guatemala. And they didn't get it in El Salvador.

In fact, the FMLN set up a fake radio station, and this famous General [Domingo] Monterrosa went up on his helicopter and gleefully loaded what he thought was all the radio equipment onto his helicopter, but it was a bomb and they all blew up and he was killed. But we listened to it religiously in El Salvador, especially the radio dramas, which were hilarious. But these are important elements. Anyway, it's a digression, but Guatemala also had a radio station, rebel radio station.

Jennifer Harbury

And it had a whole lot of good public education stuff in there too, plus real news. So people did tune in and they bombed all over the place, but they stopped actually going up, if they could avoid it, with foot soldiers. So they said, all right, it's quieter. You may be in a bombing, but you can go. We'll give you 30 days to interview people and then that's it. Down you go.

So I did get dumped off at the foot of the volcano at an agreed upon spot. And I remember, it was like a very light pack and stuff. And I remember someone saying, OK, 10 minutes, put on your black sweater. So I did. And then it was like five minutes, take off your shoes. And then it's like two minutes, lace your boots. And it's like it's making me kind of nervous.

But then it was like we're here and a campesino that I would not for the world have thought twice of lugging bags of oranges like, pulled my car door open and said the code word and I said mine back and he hauled me right out of the car and took off into the bushes with me, pulled the rifle out and hauled me onto the trail and we ran most of the night. We reunited with a group of four just straight up the volcano.

And they were so professional. They knew exactly how to do it. It was all arranged. Needless to say, I don't exactly look like a villager from the San Marcos area, but they took me right straight up. And they knew it was safer. They wouldn't have let me up. And so it was. They told me to get physically prepared, and I had done that. So it was an all-night kind of trot, and I was pretty freaked out by the time we got there.

Chris Hedges

Let me just interrupt you, Jennifer. I also had that experience of having to walk during the night and sleep during the day. It's because of the helicopters. So that's why oftentimes when I moved with rebel units in El Salvador, we walked at night.

Jennifer Harbury

It just, there was no other way. We did, in fact, go right through a village and everybody was coming to talk to us and, I mean, it was friendly. But after a certain line, there were no more villages for a very long way. And I'm only comfortable talking about that village because it's been so long now. It's been 30 years, more than 30 years. But once I got there, I just started going around meeting with different people.

The commander of that, Luis Ixmata frente was Everardo, who eventually became my husband, as you know. He was the commander of that whole region and was very busy going from post to post checking in on everything, came up, talked to me briefly, sure that I had what I needed, and then introduced me to the first person who became a very close friend, Emma.

And I started taking histories and that was like I'd go spend time with the people husking corn and then I'd go spend time with the people at the cauldrons or chopping wood and I tried to help chop wood and do what I could do. I spent some time with a physician. But you know just I stopped and listened but it was almost all indigenous and it was really striking at nightfall because everybody would come in from their duties, not the post, of course, guard duty had to stay out there.

But they would all come in from their duties and they'd all sit around the campfire and they just loved each other, right? I mean, that was, that's what kept everybody going. Everybody was indigenous brothers and sisters. There were Ladinos that had come up, like a friend of mine that I mentioned to you earlier. I mean, if they couldn't stay in the city, up they went, or they could go to Mexico, you know, was their choice, or go to the United States but the great majority of the combatants were indigenous.

Chris Hedges

I just want to stop you. This was known as the ORPA [Organization of People in Arms]. It was 90% indigenous. It was founded by the son of Guatemala's only Nobel Prize winning author.

Jennifer Harbury

Miguel Ángel Asturias.

Chris Hedges

And I just throw that out, having spent so many years in Latin America. And I think that's a really key point about the ORPA is that they did not buy into the “foco theory” peddled by Che Guevara, which was a myth. That's not how, that a small band of armed radicals that begin to carry out actions, and that is the nucleus of a revolution.

They spent years and years organizing among indigenous communities to build a base. And the foco theory, of course, was what got Che killed in Bolivia. But they quite astutely realized that that didn't work. And that's why they were so powerful. And that's why the genocidal campaign waged against them was primarily waged against their civilian support. Is that correct?

Jennifer Harbury

Certainly, I mean, the scorched-earth campaign was horrible. And it was against their base of support. I mean, if you ever got caught with a can of soup, you shouldn't have, God help you. I'll get back to Everardo in a minute because his story is exactly that story of the seven years of organizing in secret in the son of the Nobel Prize winner and all of that.

I don't know the full statistics of exactly how many in Luis Ixmata were indigenous. All I can say is there's definitely no Russian being spoken at the campfire. And I didn't hear any Cuban accents either. It was Kaqchikel, Tzʼutujil, Kʼicheʼ and Mam that I heard the most. Everardo spoke Mam, the leading official, but also other languages, and he spoke Spanish, spoke and understood Spanish.

Most people had enough Spanish that they could go back and forth with each other, because a Tzʼutujil person maybe couldn't talk to a Mam person, right? So there had to be a common denominator. What I really liked is the way the women combatants were treated. They were young and they had come up, they knew exactly what they were in the mountains for and why they were there and what they needed to do.

They were disciplined. They knew everything they were doing. They could tell you what the doctrines were, et cetera, et cetera. But then you'd talk to them just sort of in private, just hanging out, and it would be a very personal story. And you'd realize this person is really a very young woman, right? She'd be anxious about having a baby later or what her mother was doing.

And those were some of the stories that ended up in Bridge of Courage. But I saw a group of the women go out on an all-woman mission in the middle of the night, and there was no joking around. No one was talking personal stuff. They knew exactly what they were doing.

Chris Hedges

We had, I don't know if you did in Guatemala, we had commandantes in the rebel movement in El Salvador, women. Nidia Díaz in particular.

Jennifer Harbury

I don't think that happened. They were working, and I'll get back to this later, they were working very hard to have high level indigenous leaders like my husband, Everardo. But the fatality rate, let's just say, was extremely high.

Chris Hedges

Right. Let's just, people are going to have to read your book, which I have here, Searching for Everardo. But he comes to Mexico, you eventually get married, and then he's 17 years [active], which is amazing that he lasted that long, as a senior comandante, and he's eventually captured.

And it's a horrible story. Let's talk about that capture and what happened because it's indicative of what happened to anybody who was picked up. In his case, it was probably worse actually, but people who were picked up who were part of the insurgency.

Jennifer Harbury

As you said, he had survived 17 years in the mountains in combat conditions and had taken quite a few bullets and quite a bit of shrapnel, which people would ask me later, what were the identifying scars? And it's like, well, let me make a list. He, just by way of background, he was a campesino. He grew up starving on a plantation. He was indigenous. His first language was Mam.

Gaspar Ilom was Rodrigo Asturias. His father was Miguel Ángel Asturias, the Nobel Prize winner. Gaspar wanted to form his own revolutionary group, which eventually became ORPA, and he wanted to make sure he had a large number of campesino and indigenous leadership and members, or it couldn't really be a valid revolution by his standards. Everardo had run away from the finca [estate] one day because he didn't like being treated like a donkey and found or came across this small encampment.

Gaspar realizing this young man has super intelligence, taught him to read and write and gave him books. So they were like that forever. They were incredibly close. And Everardo stayed in the mountains. He refused to come down. Given how long he'd been up there, he could have come down and had an apartment and lived a little bit of an easier life, but he wouldn't do it. I mean, he knew exactly why he was up there fighting and he stayed.

On March the 12th, ‘92, he was captured alive by the Guatemalan army in a brief skirmish. By coincidence, that's the same day that at Santa Ana Berlin military base, all of the different military intelligence units had been called for a meeting to share information about what the Luis Ixmata frente, his frente, were doing. He was captured the same day and flown directly over to the intelligence meeting.

No one could see exactly what happened because it was such a quick clash. Everybody took cover. The person who was next to him trying to pull him to safety was himself shot through the throat and woke up later. Planes were overhead, helicopters, but no one chased after them, and they couldn't find out what happened.

So there was all kinds of uproar, and the army said that they had found a body there at the Río Xococ River where the conflict had taken place, and that they buried that person at Retalhuleu XX in the graveyard there. And don't come looking for him. Meanwhile, they had all gotten together. Otto Pérez Molina, former president of Guatemala who wants to come back as another presidential term, he was the head of intelligence and they together all decided to place Everardo, given his tremendous intelligence treasure trove, into this secret intelligence program that only G2 had access to or knew about.

It was for people like him who had special knowledge and were very valuable. They were tortured long term with doctors standing by to make sure they could not be accidentally killed during the torture session. They wanted to hurt them long term enough that they broke completely and gave all their information. Father [inaudible] did exactly that. You know, by the time he was released, all they could say is that the army were the brothers of the people and wonderful, except he was missing a lot of his teeth.

Anyway, so Everardo was not killed in combat. He was sent directly to that meeting of all the intelligence divisions and then taken top secret after, to a wing of Santa Ana Berlin where he was immediately tortured. Several of the people from ORPA that were also prisoners saw him there. He was then taken to the capital to a place called the Commando Unit, which is right next to the Policía Militar Ambulante, and where they've always said there were torture cells there. Well, there were.

The Commando was the official, but very secret, death squad of G2. So he was tortured there for a very long time. And then I know he was taken back to San Marcos because the Army wanted him to lead them up to the radio station and help them take it down. And what I'll do now is just tell you what the CIA files show, because after a whole lot of hunger strikes, at least can tell you what happened.

Chris Hedges

Yeah, let's just stop there. Just quickly, you staged a hunger strike in Guatemala City. Was it for 30 days on only water? Is that right?

Jennifer Harbury

The first one was in front of the Politécnica, seven days, water only. The second one was 32 days, water only, with half a bottle of Pedialyte in the morning. And I stopped. It was to the death, but I stopped because the White House, after seeing the 60 Minutes bulletin with the CIA…

Chris Hedges

Right, they, 60 Minutes, did a program on your hunger strike.

Jennifer Harbury

Yes, and at the very end, they showed a bulletin that the CIA had sent to the embassy and also to the White House six days after he was captured. This was three years later. And everybody had said they had no information, but it says right there, we're informing you that Commander Everardo was captured alive on the 12th of March. It's dated the 18th of March, 1992.

He's lightly but not seriously wounded. And they're going to fake his death in order to better take advantage of his intelligence without international uproar.

Chris Hedges

And it's because of that hunger strike that you were able to obtain the information about what happened to Everardo. Is that correct?

Jennifer Harbury

Yes, I came back to [Washington] D.C. and had to do one more hunger strike in D.C. But then there was an explosion of declassifications. And I can tell you what I know happened to him because it's typical. The documents all confirm that that program for secret treatment of special prisoners existed. Other soldiers didn't know they were prisoners. They were dressed in uniforms like any other soldier. They had weapons, but no bullets.

And they weren't allowed to talk to anybody else, and they were kept, always, and transported by, always, other members of the G2. And their family members were always very vulnerable. You escape, we kill your family. That was very effective. We know that Everardo was tortured at Santa Ana Berlin. We know that the Commando death squad did take him back to the capital where he was tortured for longer.

We know that then the people at the San Marcos base wanted him to come there and be tortured so that he'd lead them up to the radio station. So he was very badly tortured there. That was Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez who led that torture session. He was one of several high-level military intelligence officers who were also working for the CIA as paid informants.

And he, right during that time period when they were trying to go up into the volcanoes with Everardo, he got $40,000 driven from the Capitol by a CIA agent way out to the remote army base where he was. The witnesses that I've talked to saw Everardo strapped down, stripped of his clothes, raving. There was an unidentified gas tank next to the bed.

He'd been injected with an unknown substance that had caused his entire body to swell tremendously so that his face was very hard to recognize. But the witness was one of Everardo’s combatants. He knew him very well. His voice was hoarse. One arm and leg were heavily bandaged as if they'd ruptured. We know that he survived that session because he was seen a few days later in a regular soldier's uniform and they were trying to make him explain a tape recording.

The files also say they then set up a special unit to go up to the volcanoes and tried to drag him with them. But according to some of those reports, he dragged them into an ambush and some people got badly hurt in the military unit. And then he tried to escape and almost did. And the files start saying that guy is like a really smart Indian but a terrible prisoner. So we have to take special precautions with him. That would have been ‘93 or in spring of ‘93 he was still alive.

Chris Hedges

So we're talking about that they held him for what, about a year?

Jennifer Harbury

Maybe three, it's possible. The end of ‘93, that would have been a year and a half, is when they gave up on him in San Marcos. You know, it just wasn't working. And then three lines of stories evolved, depending which one you find credible. The first one, people assume that because he was blown out of San Marcos with everybody really mad at him in an intelligence helicopter that he's probably buried together with 2,000 other people at the San Las Cabañas military base, which is just a little outpost.

There's nothing there but barbed wire and a couple of shocks. But the villagers say there's about 2,000 people buried there. So they assume he was taken there, beaten to death, and buried, but no proof, maybe.

Then another one assumes because it was also very common, they took him farther down, put him into an — thank you Israel — Arava [aircraft], and like all the other people who had been tortured long term or short term and needed to be disappeared, they threw him into the ocean. That's another version, but no proof.

The third one, there is a witness. I don't know how credible but a witness and another person who claims he was there, later had a nervous breakdown and now can't talk. But that's that he got sent back to the Capitol, to the Commando Death Squad unit, and was there and tortured for a very long time, still trying to break him. And he didn't break.

I mean, he kept saying, yes, there's all these arsenals in all these different places, and they'd go storming out there and find out a rusty rifle or something. And he made up all these stories about where the guns were coming from. So they finally decided to kill him. It may have been late ‘93, it's possible even later, that they would have taken him down to Santa Lucia, Comas de Comasagua.

And again, even the witnesses that talked to me about that, it's like, was it late ‘93? Might have been early ‘94, you know, somewhere in there. And that he was taken to a sugar cane field where they did a lot of executions. And that he was hacked into pieces so that he could never be identified. And that the pieces were scattered across the sugar cane field and sugar cane is harvested by burning. They do that down where I live in Weslaco [Texas].

And obviously, it's a very useful place to disappear cadavers. And that place would have been a sugar cane field owned by a military sympathizer. So take your pick. I have a terrible feeling it was the last version, and I'd rather not think about that. But I think that's where he was.

Chris Hedges

Let me ask, so what do we have from the 30,000 desaparecidos, people we don't know what happened to them or maybe it's more I don't know what figure you know you use.

Jennifer Harbury

It's more than 200,000, either dead or disappeared. Same result.

Chris Hedges

Okay, let's just close by the effect of that, the psychological effect. You endure it, but many friends of mine from Guatemala and El Salvador endure it. They just don't know what happened.

Jennifer Harbury

They don't know what happened, so in our minds, that person is still out there screaming. You can hear them every night. A very close older woman friend of mine that was in the GAM got up every night at four in the morning and started ironing her son's shirts. Twenty years had come and gone, but she still ironed his shirts. So it's recognized as the UN as one of the worst forms of psychological torture.

I certainly have it pretty easy compared to my Guatemalan friends. My closest and first friend in Guatemala, Eva, had 17 people missing in her family, and they didn't come back. She was 17 when I met her. The reason she wasn't disappeared or dead is because when she was 12, the army stormed the house and put her and her 80-year-old grandmother and her four-year-old brother in prison for running a bomb factory.

And while they were in there, a tank rolled up on the front lawn and blew the house off the block and everyone else was disappeared. How'd they survive? I don't know, but they do. They get up and they fight and they go look for people and they're in front of the National Palace and they're just amazing.

One woman was nine months pregnant and her husband had been from an area similar to my husband and she was stabbed through the belly at nine months. Got out of the hospital and came to the National Square where I was on my hunger strike and stood watching over me all day every day in the heat. And it's like, where does that come from?

Chris Hedges

I just want to say that Israel does not allow any... It's one of my dogs, sorry. Israel does not allow any foreign press into Gaza because, of course, it's about not allowing and the murderous campaign against Palestinian journalists, it's about erasure.

It's about not only just denying the genocide, but erasing the actual physical evidence of the genocide. Just to close, that has also happened in Guatemala where they have exhumed these mass graves in an attempt to hide the atrocities that they committed.

Jennifer Harbury

There are, in the CIA files that were declassified after the three hunger strikes, there are several reports by the Minister of Defense giving an order to go through and check every single file you've got. There should be nothing left in the files that applies to the [Everardo] Bámaca case or any of these other cases that were part of the genocide.

And also giving a general order to wipe out all of the water pits where people were held with water so deep they'd have to hang onto overhead bars to keep from drowning while they were waiting for their torture session. It's like fill this up with cement. The torture cells, you know, knock them down with bulldozers, erase them. And the mass cemeteries were supposed to be bulldozed open, burned, and the ashes carried away.

That has been really hard for some of us who have gone to where we've heard that our loved one is buried and you open it up and maybe there's a tiny bit of fabric left or a little bit of ash, but that's it. For Everardo, I get it. That's my punishment, right? It's like I exposed the Guatemalan military to not be the glorious patriots saving the country from communism. It turned out they were paid lackeys of the CIA getting money right and it's like my penalty is I don't get a body back. I got it but doesn't mean I won't keep trying.

Chris Hedges

Thanks, Jennifer. And I want to thank Diego [Ramos], Victor [Padilla], Sofia [Menemenlis], Thomas [Hedges], and Max [Jones], who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.Substack.com.

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Photos

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