The Art of Political Murder Read Online Free PDF Page A

referred to as G-2. (The terminology was adopted from the U.S. Army’s classification system: G-1, Personnel; G-2, Intelligence; G-3, Logistics; etc.) The report described the structure and functions of its various units, one of which was devoted to sexual spying (gathering information on cheating husbands or employing prostitute-spies to compromise opponents). Where it had the evidence to do so,
Guatemala: Never Again
identified military units responsible for crimes, and in numerous cases named individuals. The report concluded that the Guatemalan Army and associated paramilitary units, such as the rural civil patrols, were responsible for 80 percent of the killings of civilians, and that the guerrillas had committed a little less than 5 percent of those crimes.
    The authors of the REMHI report attempted to describe and illustrate the logic behind what they called “the inexplicable.” But numbing numerical estimates, analysis of tactics and causes,and even journalistic reconstructions of specific massacres could “explain” only so much. Bishop Gerardi, as he’d once told Edgar Gutiérrez, had wanted a report that would “enter readers through their pores” and move them. Thus there were hundreds and hundreds of pages of direct testimony distributed throughout the text:
    The señora was pregnant. With a knife they cut open her belly to pull out her little baby boy. And they killed them both. And the muchachitas [little girls] playing in the trees near the house, they cut off their little heads with machetes
. Case 0976, Santa María Tzejá, Quiché, 1980.
    They killed them with machetes, they killed them by strangling and with bullets. They picked up the children by their legs and smashed them against a tree, and the tree they smashed the children against, that tree died, because of so many children smashed against that tree so many times, well the tree died
. Case 3336 Río Negro, Rabinal, Baja Verapaz, 1982.
    On the 19th of March 1981 the Army came to the village of Chel, and took from the church the 95 people praying there, and they took them down to the river at the edge of the village, and there they massacred them with knives and bullets. The rest of the people were frightened and they fled into the mountains where they were pursued by helicopters. The responsible ones were the Army and the civil patrols
. Case 4761, Chel, Chajul, Quiché.
    When I looked, they were calling the people to come together and they were ordering them into a church that is there and I stayed hidden where I was, watching everything that was happening, until I saw that no one was left outside, men, women, old people, children, they put them in the church. When I looked, they were closing the doors and then they poured gasoline around and then they set it on
fire. That’s the testimony I’ve come to give
. Case 977, Santa María Tzejá, Quiché. 1982.
    I don’t know if it was a captain or a lieutenant who arrived with the soldiers and said, “We’re going to finish off this village because this village is with the guerrillas.” By one in the afternoon they’d finished killing everyone and only the women and children were left. And then the lieutenant said, “We better kill the women and children so that no one will be left.”
    They killed the women and children with bombs [grenades], because there were so many children; and as they had pretty young women in that town, well then the soldiers separated out those women. They formed into three groups, and got to work killing those poor people, but the soldiers had their way with the young ones, it was the lieutenant who started fucking around with the poor muchachas [young women]. The two-year-olds were all pressed together into a tight ball, and they were set on fire all pressed together, into a ball, all the children were burned
. Case 6070 Petanac, Huehuetenango, 1982.
    Josefa [Acabal] was talking with Eulalia