Mennonite Weekly Review

I met Jennifer Harbury in 1994 when we were living in a Washington, D.C., religious community. I was doing the background research for Christian Peacemaker Teams’ Washington project between stints with CPT in Haiti, and Harbury was trying to locate her husband, Efrain Bamaca, whom the Guatemalan government had “disappeared.”

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

In the 1980s, Harbury, a Harvard-educated lawyer, began assisting Central American refugees with asylum requests. Their stories of atrocities in Guatemala were so shocking that she visited the country to see for herself what was happening. She fell in love with and married Efrain Bamaca, known as Commander Everardo among the resistance movement.

Shortly their 1991 marriage, he was captured by the Guatemalan military. I remember her telling me that she almost hoped he was dead, because the thought of him being subjected to months or years of torture was too much to bear.

Since the mid-1990s, Harbury has continued fighting to hold the Guatemalan military accountable for the torture and death of her husband and hundreds of thousands of other Guatemalans. Through hunger strikes and constant lobbying, Harbury, with the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission, forced the U.S. Congress and State Department to declassify thousands of documents. They proved a covert CIA operation had sent millions of dollars to the Guatemalan military despite the 1990 congressional ban on military aid.

In 2001 the Inter-American Court on Human Rights in San Jose, Costa Rica, held the Guatemalan government responsible for the disappearance and torture of Harbury’s husband and ordered it to begin a proper criminal investigation into the matter.

In 2009, after the Guatemalan government refused to do so, the court once again ordered it to comply, this time specifying time limits. In December 2009, the Guatemalan Supreme Court decreed that Guatemala must follow international law and proceed with the prosecution of those involved with Bamaca’s death.

Last month, Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom appointed Conrado Reyes to prosecute Bamaca’s case and 10 other paradigmatic cases from Guatemala’s genocide era. Reyes promptly fired all of the human rights lawyers in the prosecutor’s office.

In response, Carlos Castresana, head of the U.N.-sponsored International Commission against Impunity, resigned. In a subsequent press conference he outlined official evidence showing that Reyes was not only a military sympathizer but linked to military corruption and narcotrafficking.

In a letter to her supporters, Harbury wrote: “Castresana said he was resigning because the Reyes appointment would shut down any chance of ending the impunity in Guatemala. Human heads immediately appeared in the streets of the Capital, one on the doorstep of the national Congress. Despite the obvious message, the human rights leaders here flocked to the president’s office demanding that Reyes be fired or forced to resign. The president remained disturbingly silent, making me think that he is under very serious threats of some kind. Reyes was nevertheless forced out of office.”

Those involved with the case against the government for Bamaca’s death have faced serious consequences. In 1995 the FBI told Harbury the Guatemalan army had hired a hit man to kill her. Her lawyer’s office in Washington was firebombed. Prosecutors, witnesses and family members of witnesses have been murdered.

Harbury closed a June 25 letter to her supporters with: “The war crimes cases are still moving forward. I am worried sick about the safety of the lawyers and witnesses in all of the cases, but all of them are determined to continue.”

A petition urging the Guatemalan government to follow through on prosecuting the 10 paradigmatic cases from the genocide era is available to sign.

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.