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By Root 2652 0

—who the victims were, the details of the violence, who did it, why, and the institutional structures and roots of organized murder of which these are an obvious part. With Popieluszko, these were the issues. Kinzer has little or nothing on the details of the GAM murders and very little on the victims and the experiences that brought them to GAM, and the question of who did it and what was being done (or not done) to bring the murderers to justice he hardly considers. Kinzer takes it for granted that the murders were committed by agents of the state, but he doesn’t say this explicitly, or discuss the background, or provide a framework for evaluating the case. He looks “objectively” at the scene, quoting some of the GAM survivors in brief and rhetorical statements that are offset by quotes from the generals: they approved the formation of GAM (an ambiguous half-truth); they appointed an investigating committee that “found no evidence of secret detention centers in Guatemala” (no mention of the composition of the committee, no counter-evidence, and no mention of issues they may have overlooked—like disappeared who are murdered); and they deny any responsibility for the murder of Godoy, her brother, and her son, who they claim to have been victims of an auto accident. If Kinzer had given the details of the victims’ injuries, this lie would have been exposed as such, and further questions would have suggested themselves.

In article after article, Kinzer repeats that the Mejía Víctores government has pledged to return to civilian rule shortly, which helps deflect attention from the ongoing killing and its causes, and from the GAM murders under discussion; he also does not tell us just what “civilian rule” would mean in a terrorist state in which, as he knows, the effective rulers would be the same military forces.110 In the Popieluszko case, once it was established that the police had committed the murder, the media spent a great deal of space discussing the police apparatus and police methods, as well as attending to the responsibility of the people at higher levels for the murder. Kinzer doesn’t discuss these questions at all. The structure of the Guatemalan murder machine and how it works would make a good story, and numerous details of its operations were available, but this did not fit the government agenda and the Times format. Similarly, the role of Mejía Víctores in the murder of the GAM leaders—recall his warnings just prior to the murders, and consider his virtually unlimited discretionary power to murder or protect the citizenry—is ignored. But once again, the links to the top in the case of unworthy victims do not fit the propaganda format. Kinzer does a nice job of making the GAM murders seem to be part of the natural background—regrettable but inevitable, part of the complex inheritance of a troubled country, and possibly, it is hoped, to be rectified when the new civilian government takes power.

In an attempt to gain support abroad, two of the remaining leaders of GAM, Nineth de García and Herlindo Hideo de Aquino, traveled to Europe in March and April 1986, after the inauguration of the elected civilian president, Christian Democrat Vinicio Cerezo. One of their most important messages was that killings and disappearances had not abated at all during the first three months of Cerezo’s presidency, and that the death squads had actually reappeared and were active in Guatemala City. Because of ill health, Nineth de García canceled her visits in Washington, D.C., and flew directly from Europe to Chicago, where she was scheduled to receive the key to the city from Mayor Harold Washington. As she went through customs in Chicago, however, the officials of the Immigration and Naturalization Service searched, interrogated, and harassed her for two hours, one of the customs officials calling her a subversive and a Communist. They also seized literature she carried and threatened to deport her, despite her intended brief stopover and valid visa. This intimidation had its effect, and Nineth de García flew directly to Guatemala.