The land where terror won

But the U.N. truth commission documented tens of thousands of violations and it found that 93 percent of them had been committed by the state, either by the army or security forces.

Where are the guerrillas now? Have they formed political parties?

There is a political party of the guerrillas that signed the peace accords. It's a pretty weak party. Many of the former combatants put down their guns at the end of war and got a little bit of help reestablishing themselves. I don't think they're doing very well.

I wanted to ask you about the role of human rights organizations. You implied that during the '90s there was a growing general awareness of human rights violations. In the current climate, do you think that something like what happened in Guatemala could happen again? And how much of a role do human rights organizations have in bringing these tragedies to light?

It would be more difficult for this sort of thing to happen but that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. One of the few positive things that came out of the Central American experience was that it helped to galvanize an international human rights movement as people struggled to respond to what was going on in countries like Guatemala, El Salvador, Argentina and Chile. At the time, the human rights movement was still made up of fledgling organizations and a lot of the obstacles were daunting.

Chief among them in Guatemala was that you had the U.S. government presenting a very rosy picture of what was taking place there. The U.S. actually defended the Guatemalan government. There's a moment in the book when Ronald Reagan meets with [former president] General Rios Montt. Reagan described Montt as this man of great personal integrity at the same moment that Montt's elite group of soldiers was marching off to kill an entire village. Most of the people were buried alive in the village well. Children were killed by being grabbed by their ankles and slammed against walls, women were raped over the course of three days.

Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan told the press that Rios Montt was committed to democracy and was receiving a bum rap. This is something else that continued during the Reagan administration: You had human rights organizations trying to tell the world what was happening and their accounts were being refuted. We now know that the U.S. government knew full well the extent of the violence and who was responsible for it.

Despite the fact that the CIA sanitized a lot of the documents?

We don't know everything. We don't know everything they know or everything they did. It's like one document I include in the book. The whole text has been blacked out except for two words: "entire population." You flip to the page before it and you see that [it says] there was a massacre. The massacre wasn't crossed out. And you think, "OK, if they left the massacre in, what is it that they're covering up?"

Just a humorous but sad side note -- wasn't that also the time when Reagan also said that he was surprised to find that they had separate countries in Central America?

Reagan said something like, "You'd be amazed. They're all separate countries in Central America." And then there was some scrambling about whether he meant that he actually didn't know whether they were individual countries. Reagan did it in his wonderful, affable way and he had this vision of the Cold War that appealed to a lot of people.

Did every administration's support for Guatemala continue at pretty much the same level until President Clinton?

It varied a little bit. With the end of the Cold War things started to change under Bush. There were cases of U.S. citizens who had been killed and there was some response. Basically what we're talking about here is what happened during the Cold War.

But things have changed. The U.S. government actually helped finance that truth commission and the U.S. government recently, under the leadership of [former] Ambassador Prudence Bushnell, supported the local human rights groups who have been working to press charges against people who have committed these atrocities. The U.S. Agency for International Development has been helping to support excavation teams that are digging up clandestine cemeteries. So there has been very important support coming from the U.S. government in Guatemala in recent years.

But it's only a fraction of the resources that were poured into that 1954 coup and into supporting and sustaining the military regime over the years.

You say that terror won in Guatemala. I'm wondering if now they're just starting to deal with those effects and fight terrorism on that psychological level.

For the last 10 years, the local human rights movement has been struggling to roll back the victory to the extent it can but it's been very difficult. It's been done at some cost. Just in the last few months there's been this wave of acts of violence against human rights groups -- people being killed, receiving death threats, being assaulted because they're working on efforts to prosecute people who carried out those abuses 20 years ago.

There was an unofficial truth commission sponsored by the Catholic Church that paved the way for the official one sponsored by the U.N. I was going around with local leaders trying to help convince people that it was safe to talk now. We really believed it. Then we started receiving threats. Two months after that, the Catholic Church published its report for its truth commission entitled "Never Again." Two days after the bishop presented it in the National Cathedral he was bludgeoned to death with a cement block.

But both those truth commissions were very important as processes of helping thousands of families denounce what had taken place for the first time. And now there are these efforts under way to press charges in the courts.

When these high-ranking military officers are on trial, do they point fingers at the U.S.? You mentioned General Hector Gramajo in your book. [Sister Diana Ortiz, an American nun who was raped and tortured in Guatemala, won a judgment for civil damages against him.]

There was a suit against Gramajo in a federal court in Massachusetts. He was ordered to pay $47 million in damages. After that, he was disinvited by the U.S. to this annual conference that's held for people from militaries throughout the region in the U.S. He was irate. He said, "They're going to make me pay $47 million for what I did in my country, but how much are they going to make McNamara pay for what his troops did in Vietnam or Cheney for what his troops did in Panama?"

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