Report Slams Guatemalan Army on Child Thefts
August 9, 2000 - 0:0
GUATEMALA CITY Guatemala's first report on forced disappearances of children during the country's brutal 36-year civil war has blamed the Central American nation's armed forces for 92 percent of abductions.
The 200-page document, released on Monday by the archdiocese of Guatemala's Human Rights Office (ODHA), was based on information from interviews with parents and relatives of 86 children.
Most went missing in Guatemala's western highlands in the early 1980s, when intensive guerrilla activity and army repression plagued the mostly Maya Indian area.
"This report aims to prevent such instances of pain and suffering from occurring again in Guatemala," the office's coordinator, Bishop Mario Rios Montt, told reporters.
Rios Montt's brother, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, now the president of Congress, was the military dictator of Guatemala during 16 months in 1982 and 1983, when human rights groups have documented thousands of deaths and disappearances blamed on the army.
Bishop Rios Montt's predecessor, Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, was bludgeoned to death in 1998, the day after the same office released a report blaming the army for the majority of wartime atrocities during a conflict in which some 200,000 people died, many of them women and children.
The latest report attributed 86 percent of child disappearances to abductions, almost exclusively by the army, but in a few cases by pro-government paramilitary groups or leftist guerrillas.
The remaining 14 percent were not taken by force, according to the report.
Many children were separated from their parents while on the run from aggressors, it said.
Four years after the government and guerrillas signed a 1996 peace agreement ending the war, many cases remain shrouded in mystery.
"He disappeared and nobody knows how; nobody can give us any information. There's no trace," read the testimony of one Indian woman, whose toddler son vanished following a skirmish in her village.
Three children have so far been reunited with their relatives, ODHA said.
The report said 444 cases of disappeared children had so far come to light in Guatemala, a number it expects will rise dramatically as research continues.
An earlier investigation project in neighboring El Salvador documented 520 cases of children who went missing during that country's 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992.
(Reuter)
The 200-page document, released on Monday by the archdiocese of Guatemala's Human Rights Office (ODHA), was based on information from interviews with parents and relatives of 86 children.
Most went missing in Guatemala's western highlands in the early 1980s, when intensive guerrilla activity and army repression plagued the mostly Maya Indian area.
"This report aims to prevent such instances of pain and suffering from occurring again in Guatemala," the office's coordinator, Bishop Mario Rios Montt, told reporters.
Rios Montt's brother, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, now the president of Congress, was the military dictator of Guatemala during 16 months in 1982 and 1983, when human rights groups have documented thousands of deaths and disappearances blamed on the army.
Bishop Rios Montt's predecessor, Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, was bludgeoned to death in 1998, the day after the same office released a report blaming the army for the majority of wartime atrocities during a conflict in which some 200,000 people died, many of them women and children.
The latest report attributed 86 percent of child disappearances to abductions, almost exclusively by the army, but in a few cases by pro-government paramilitary groups or leftist guerrillas.
The remaining 14 percent were not taken by force, according to the report.
Many children were separated from their parents while on the run from aggressors, it said.
Four years after the government and guerrillas signed a 1996 peace agreement ending the war, many cases remain shrouded in mystery.
"He disappeared and nobody knows how; nobody can give us any information. There's no trace," read the testimony of one Indian woman, whose toddler son vanished following a skirmish in her village.
Three children have so far been reunited with their relatives, ODHA said.
The report said 444 cases of disappeared children had so far come to light in Guatemala, a number it expects will rise dramatically as research continues.
An earlier investigation project in neighboring El Salvador documented 520 cases of children who went missing during that country's 12-year civil war, which ended in 1992.
(Reuter)