Guatemalan minister's kin threatened over archives

[Judi Lynn]

Guatemalan minister's kin threatened over archives
Tue Mar 3, 2009 11:21pm EST


GUATEMALA CITY, March 3 (Reuters) - The family of Guatemala's defense minister received death threats after the government promised to open long-sealed military archives that could reveal army abuses during the country's civil war, President Alvaro Colom said on Tuesday.

Colom vowed last year to open the archives to allow investigators to scour them for evidence of army-backed massacres during the 1960-1996 conflict between the government and leftist guerrillas.

"We have information that the defense minister's family members received death threats from a group of ex-army officials upset about the de-classification of potentially compromising archives," Colom said at a news conference.

Almost a quarter of a million people were killed or disappeared during the war, with the bulk of the victims Mayan civilians, and a United Nations-backed truth commission found 85 percent of the murders were committed by the army.

Despite the threats, Defense Minister Abraham Valenzuela still intends to make public thousands of army documents from as far back as the 1954 U.S.-supported military coup against the social democratic government of Jacobo Arbenz, said Colom.

More:
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN03512664

[Judi Lynn]

1. Panel to Search for Missing Army Files in Guatemala

Panel to Search for Missing Army Files in Guatemala

GUATEMALA CITY – Guatemala’s defense minister on Monday announced the creation of a commission to investigate the whereabouts of two military files missing from documents the armed forces were ordered to hand over to a court probing the bloodiest phase of the Central American country’s 36-year-long civil war.

~snip~
Last Wednesday, the defense minister delivered a set of documents to a court hearing a case involving senior officers accused of torture and mass murder.

But upon noting that the files on two offensives were missing, the judges refuses to accept the package.

Valenzuela on that day told President Alvaro Colom that the plans for Operations Sofia and Ixil had disappeared and might have been destroyed.

Because the minister did not comply with the order of the Constitutional Court to turn over the complete files, activists and victims of the war filed a criminal complaint against him.

The files sought by the judiciary cover a series of campaigns in the late 1970s and early ‘80s against the leftist rebels who battled a succession of mostly military regimes for more than three decades.

Human rights organizations say the plans for those offensives expressly contemplated the annihilation of the civilian population in areas perceived as sympathetic to the guerrillas.

Defendants in the current court case include former strongmen Efrain Rios Montt and Oscar Mejia Victores, who have also been indicted in Spain for mass murder and state terrorism.

~snip~
The U.N.-sponsored panel concluded the Guatemalan security forces were responsible for 93 percent of the human rights violations that occurred during the conflict, which claimed more than 200,000 lives.

Most of the dead were Indian peasants. EFE

More:
http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=328850&CategoryId=23558

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People who intend to grasp what has been happening will recognize there has been a TOTALLY CONSISTANT PATTERN throughout the Americas with these actions. NO EXCEPTIONS. Anyone who attempts to misinform others about it is LYING to you. You only have to do your research to find this out for yourself.