During my early years as a journalist, I knew that I had to visit Guatemala. It is a country that is astonishingly beautiful, and it can be a place of unbelievable horror. Americans should understand that Guatemala, in addition to grinding poverty, is plagued by a culture of violence. Criminal gangs and security forces have made life untennable.
During its civil war in the 1970s and 1980s, being American did not keep you safe. Security forces could detain, torture and then murder you and suffer no consequences. About the author and his book
In late spring 1984, I arrived in Guatemala City. I was a Time correspondent on assignment. Here is an excerpt from my book:
Minutes after landing, I got in line at Guatemala City’s La Aurora Airport to clear immigration. A man and a woman in civilian clothes grabbed each of my arms and ordered me to go with them.
“What’s this about?” I asked nervously. “It’s just a routine matter,” the woman said.
They led me to a small room with a table, where my suitcase lay. I was asked to sit on one of three chairs, and the man, who identified himself and his companion as “security agents,” asked why I had come to Guatemala. I replied that I was a correspondent on assignment for Time magazine.
The woman pulled copies of Sandinista publications from the suitcase and asked why I had them.
“Because they helped me understand Nicaragua, where I have been recently.”
“Okay,” said the man. “Now, I want you to tell us why you are really here.”
This “routine matter” was becoming a threatening interrogation.
“Please let me call my embassy. I have an appointment there, and I need to tell them I will be late,” I said. I did not have an appointment but decided a strategic lie was called for.
“There’s no need for any phone calls,” said the female agent.
“But I’m being held, and I want the people at my embassy to know,” I said.
“Oh, you are not being detained,” she assured me. “All you have to do is tell us the truth, and you can go.”
I started to fear the worst. Suddenly, the man closed my suitcase, picked it up, and he and the woman left. Several minutes elapsed. I feared security goons would soon take control of my interrogation. Instead, the couple returned and asked me to follow them. We walked to the sidewalk in front of the terminal. There was my suitcase. The man handed me my passport, which was stamped, and he told me I was free to go and hoped I enjoyed my stay.
My nerves were on edge for the several days I was in the country. I was on the security radar and concerned that authorities would pick me up for more questioning at some point. My fear was well-founded. At least 342 journalists had been murdered, and 126 disappeared between 1960 and 1996 during Guatemala’s civil war. My boss, Dick Duncan, had told me he had received written death threats while reporting there.
Nicholas Blake, an American freelance journalist I knew, disappeared in March 1985 while in Guatemala. Blake and I had breakfast a few months before he disappeared. He told
He told me he planned to hike through El Quiché Department to report on the war, and Blake invited me to come along.
“Nick, that’s a crazy idea,” I told him. “It’s way too dangerous. No way am I going there. You shouldn’t go either.”
He chided me for being overly cautious. Intending to interview the head of the insurgent EGP, Blake hiked into Quiché with fellow American Griffith Davis.
After they had disappeared, Blake’s family, wealthy Republicans from Philadelphia, sought to learn his fate. Guatemalan and American government authorities knowingly and falsely blamed the guerrillas for murdering Blake and Davis.
Private investigators determined that a self-defense patrol captured the men near the village of Santa María Nebaj, shot them to death, and burned their bodies. No one was punished for the crimes.
Guatemala was by far the most dangerous Central American nation for Americans. Reports in the 1980s documented the torture and killing of various American journalists and even religious by the Guatemalan military. The US State Department’s response was usually timid or non-existent.
The day after my arrival, I interviewed General Manuel Benedicto Lucas García, brother of late Guatemalan President Fernando Romeo Lucas García, and himself, the ex-head of the army’s general staff. Manuel Benedicto was the embodiment of the government’s savage repression.
He achieved notoriety during his brother’s rule from 1978 to 1982, overseeing “Military Zone 21,” a clandestine location used for the detention, torture, rape, and execution of civilians. In 2012, the remains of hundreds of indigenous people were unearthed there.
As were many Guatemalan officers, Manuel Benedicto was a graduate of the US School of the Americas, which in the 1970s and 1980s had trained many future dictators in the repressive techniques that have been universally censured. While Manuel Bendicto enjoyed impunity for many years, finally, in 2016, at the age of 83, he was charged with the crimes of illegal capture, detention, rape, and torture of 19-year-old Emma Guadalupe Molina Theissen and for the crime against humanity of enforced disappearance of her 14-year-old brother, Marco Antonio Molina Theissen.
On May 23, 2018, Benedicto Lucas and several other ex-officers were found guilty and sentenced to fifty-eight years.
When I interviewed Manuel Benedicto, he suggested we meet at a Guatemala City restaurant over lunch. When I arrived, I walked to the booth where he sat with three other men. He smiled and motioned for me to sit next to him.
“Not too close,” he warned, pointing out a Uzi machine gun at his side. “You know a lot of people would like to kill me.” Several friends sat at nearby tables as security for him. He started by chatting at length about his farm in Alta Verapaz Department. In recent weeks, he said, his security team had captured and killed a guerrilla assassination team.
He then bantered with his friends in the restaurant. The Lucas García family were wealthy landowners and rabidly anti-communist. Curiously, Lucas and his friends conversed in K’iche, one of twenty-four Mayan languages spoken in Guatemala. Lucas said even non-Mayans, such as himself, were fluent in K’iche because so many Mayans did not speak Spanish.
I asked him about accusations that he had violated human rights.
He did not deny the allegations and instead relished his savage legacy. “I make no apologies for killing the communists who wanted to take over my country. The EGP were tough killers themselves, who wanted to create another Cuba.” (The EGP was one of four armed guerrilla organizations collectively called the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity.)
Lucas García breezily justified human rights abuses as unavoidable. “See, the communists are following the Vietnam model. They mix civilians with combatants, thinking we won’t act to avoid killing civilians. But they have been mistaken.”
It was a disturbing interview. Seated next to me was a mass assassin who felt no qualms about taking innocent lives.
At the time, the war was concentrated in the far northern Quiché Department. The military had a significant presence in the mountain village of Santa María Nebaj in what is known as the Ixil Triangle. The Ixil Maya have lived in the region for hundreds of years. I visited the village twice to understand the conflict better. By 1983, the EGP had been weakened, the result of relentless genocide of Indigenous supporters, scorched earth policies, and forced recruitment of “civilian defense forces.”
The Ixil had borne the brunt of the savage counterinsurgency campaigns begun under the rule of Gen. Efrain Ríos Montt. His government determined that many Ixiil were EGP supporters.
In response, starting July 8, 1982, the government launched “Operation Sofía,” in which the 1st Battalion of the Guatemalan Airborne Troops was ordered to exterminate so-called subversive elements in El Quiché. There was no apparent effort to murder civilians selectively; it was ethnic cleansing.
Even before Operation Sofía, the genocide was underway. In April of 1982—close to the time I reported on the Guatemalan refugees in the Chiapas jungle—there were 3,300 civilians killed, according to the Guatemala-based International Human Rights Center. During the Ríos Montt period, which spanned 1982 and 1983, government troops had already killed as many as 75,000, mainly within the first eight months between April and November 1982.
President Reagan admired the dictator whom he met in 1982. Complaining that Ríos Montt was “getting a bum rap on human rights,” Reagan called him “a man of great personal integrity,” adding that Ríos Montt advocated for social justice. “My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts.”
Ricardo Chavira Chicano 