The 40-Year Quest
Names of the disappeared during Guatemala’s bloody civil war are engraved on the church pillars of the Catedral Metropolitana de Santiago de Guatemala. June 16, 2021. Photo by Abraham Marquez for palabra
His parents were assassinated in the darkest days of Guatemala’s modern history. Four decades later, he’s finally finding answers to questions about his parents’ deaths. He’s still concerned for the safety of his family, and now wonders if it’s too late for justice
Editors note: This is the second of two articles looking at the lasting legacy of the civil war in Guatemala; how it continues to affect lives in two countries. This story looks at one man's quest for details about the crime that left him an orphan in Guatemala. The first story, "A Clash Of Two Lives," looked at crime, punishment and the persistence of two women, separated by ideology and thousands of miles.
Words by Gabbriel Schivone, @GSchivone.
On a blazing afternoon in the Sonoran Desert, Jaime surveys the activity at the migrant shelter he manages in Tucson, Arizona. The place is abuzz. People are always arriving from government detention centers, and volunteers are trying to help them settle into what will be a difficult first few weeks and months in the United States.
The shelter was overrun during the Trump years. There was a lot of work to do and among colleagues Jaime had the reputation of being a bit brusque. He knows that, and says it’s just part of the stressful jobs he does on behalf of migrants and refugees.
Jaime remembers passing through a hallway in a hurry one day when a well-meaning volunteer who hadn’t met him yet approached, and in a fussy manner asked in broken Spanish: Did he have everything he needed? Had he showered? Eaten? How was he feeling?
Of course, Jaime recalls, the presumptuous questions annoyed him. He waited patiently for her to finish, and replied in English, “You think I’m one of the migrants?”
“You speak English?”
“Yes, I speak four languages, actually.” As he recalls, there was an emergency with some of the arrivals at that moment, so he curtly added: “I don’t have time to chit-chat right now.”
In a way, Jaime says, he understands why the volunteer would make that mistake. He shares the dark skin and features of many of the recent arrivals at the shelter.
Jaime grew up in Guatemala, in an upper-middle class family. He arrived in the United States in 2010. While the migrants he helps are largely displaced by poverty and violence, Jaime moved to the United States by choice and married a woman from Tucson, a long-time friend with whom he’d maintained a long-distance relationship.
Jaime has worked as a professional translator in various capacities, including ones that require high government security clearance, but he regards his activism, as he calls it, to be the most fulfilling part of his professional life.
It’s also helped him cope: He’s in his 40s, but there is much about the tragedy that marred his early years that’s still a mystery. And in his time managing the Tucson shelter, he’s been able to align so many dots on a vast personal map that includes the U.S., Guatemala, and other Latin American countries.
“It’s all (now) connected for me,” Jaime said in one of many interviews for this story over the last year.
(Jaime is a pseudonym. To protect him and his family in Guatemala, palabra agreed to withhold his real name.)
The connections “gave me more depth and understanding (about) why people come here…. (Because) I am not Anglo…I can move swiftly between both cultures.”
Like a Cubist painter, Jaime has the multidimensional gift of seeing the immigration system from all sides at once: as translator, volunteer, and an immigrant himself.
In telling his story publicly, for the first time, Jaime talks about the impact of the past, and all that he’s done to help immigrants, juxtaposed against the violence that changed his life, early on. He’s clarifying his present in the context of a murky past he’s only recently come to fully understand.
A chance meeting with the past
One day, that past came crashing down on him.
A colleague excitedly called him over to meet a recent arrival to the shelter. The man, Victor, had just been released from immigration detention and was with his teenage son. The pair had covered the length of Mexico from Guatemala and were seeking asylum. Jaime’s colleague was buoyant because she knew Victor. The last time she saw him was in Guatemala, during the worst of a 36-year war between the Guatemalan government and armed guerilla fighters. Victor had been one of the insurgents.
That day in Tucson, Jaime learned that Victor had been a member of the Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas, ORPA, — the Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms, one of the main revolutionary groups fighting against the successive regimes of mainly unelected Guatemalan dictators between the 1960s and 1990s.
Jaime’s eyes widened.
A crime that marked the start of his life came roaring into Jaime’s thoughts. Standing before him was a guerrilla fighter from a time when the violence reached genocidal levels in the early 1980s.
It was precisely when Jaime’s parents were murdered.
In 1980, in Guatemala City, when he was a one-year-old, his parents were assassinated after being tracked and hunted by government forces as dangerous political dissidents, particularly his father. They were members of underground leftist movements that included ORPA.
In the late-1990s, the United Nations released a Truth Commission report filled with careful forensic investigations of massacre sites and oral testimony by survivors. The U.N. documented that, during the hostilities, some 200,000 people died, mainly indigenous Maya. The report blamed the Guatemalan state for more than 90% of the killings, including for “acts of genocide” perpetrated against the Maya.
The report implicated the United States as a crucial enabler of the butchery. Publication of the report was timed for a visit to Guatemala City by then U.S. President Bill Clinton, who was quoted acknowledging that decades of critical U.S. assistance to the killers “was wrong” – although he gave no formal apology.
Jaime had heard and read anecdotal accounts about his own history – how he was orphaned as a toddler and could not remember his parents. What was left were accounts passed onto him from family members who knew them.
The stories left a hole in his psyche that, ever since, he’s tried to fill with a search for the facts that changed his life early on.
But being conscious of his past didn’t prepare him for the pain he felt after finally reading blunt documentation about his parents’ deaths.
“He wasn’t a nobody”
According to a trove of recently discovered documents from the time, the Guatemalan government had long viewed Jaime’s father as a high-level enemy of the state.
Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes, the former Guatemalan head of state whose regime covered the opening years of hostilities documented by the U.N. report in the 1990s, admitted in his memoirs that he’d ordered surveillance on Jaime’s father when he was a college student involved in Communist party organizing – nearly 20 years before Jaime was born. Documents found and reviewed by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, National Security Archive, confirm that Guatemalan officials, after stalking Jaime’s father for nearly twenty years, finally moved to eliminate him, along with his wife, Jaime’s mother.
When journalists Allan Nairn and Jean-Marie Simon interviewed a veteran of the Guatemalan Army high command in the 1980s, the officer took them step-by-step through the chilling bureaucratic protocol of how decisions were made to keep watch on, and ultimately kill, people like Jaime’s father by cross-referencing detailed computer files and archives housed in the Presidential Palace.
Opening an eerie window into the government’s animosity against people like Jaime’s father, the officer described the process like this:
“The file will say where the person was born, what party he belongs to, and the most important incidents of his life. One, for example, will say: '1957, participated in such and such a worker's movement; 1960, went into exile for the following reason; 1972, returned to Guatemala; 1975, participated in demonstration in the university. And finally, died on such and such a date.' It never says who was responsible."
On the day palabra spoke with Kate Doyle, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, she happened to have a declassified document on her laptop that mentioned Jaime’s father. “He was in it,” she said, “because he was kidnapped during the time that the (U.S) embassy was producing ‘Violence in Human Rights’ reports, as required by Congress.”
“He shows up in that,” she added. “He was a professor, you know; he wasn’t a nobody.”
Kate Doyle. Photo courtesy Doyle
There were many “nobodies” who were killed, too, often from non-political disputes between neighbors where one betrays the other to authorities under false pretenses. But the selection of high-status targets like Jaime’s father – along with other educators, businesspeople, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and priests – were handed down by high-ranking officials in the Ministries of Defense and Interior, and the Army General Staff, all consulting with each other in weekly meetings.
In 1980, according to Amnesty International, the nation was on fire, amid an expansion of targeted killings and kidnappings of those like Jaime’s parents.
Starting in spring, government forces began targeting affiliates of the University of San Carlos, where Jaime’s parents worked. By the fall of 1980, according to documented human rights research by Amnesty International, “12 members of the law faculty and 15 other teachers and administrators had been killed.” By the end of the year the death toll reached 125 students, administrators, and professors, according to the book, This City Belongs to You: A History of Student Activism in Guatemala, 1944-1996.
Jaime often finds himself wondering what his parents must have been thinking during this terrifying period. They would’ve noticed their colleagues being picked off, one by one. Perhaps they wondered if they’d be next. Should they attempt to leave the country? Could they make it out? Should they stay and fight?
Jaime is convinced his parents would’ve known the risks.
In a book covering the Guatemalan civil war, titled Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America, scholar Jane Hunter cites an interview with Father Ronald Burke, a priest and a U.S. citizen – and himself targeted for execution – in which he remembers printouts of lists of names at border crossings and airports.
The lists had been generated by a state-of-the-art computer system provided by one of Guatemala’s chief allies. “Once you get on that (computer list) – then it’s like bounty hunters,” he said.
Father Burke, who had been working in Guatemala for more than a decade, added that “the computerized hit lists at that time were all coordinated at the annex at the Presidential Palace. And when I checked it out with the (U.S.) Embassy people, they let me know indirectly that I was on that particular national hit list, and I was advised to get out of the country, quickly.”
Few exit options
But Guatemalans like Jaime’s parents were trapped, with very few options to consider, even if they had wanted to flee. Although some leftists managed to slip away clandestinely to havens like Nicaragua and Mexico, others, like University of San Carlos architecture professor Horacio Flores, weren’t so lucky.
The same week he started receiving death threats, in April 1980, Flores decided to go into immediate exile but was detained at the Immigration Office of the Ministry of the Interior, while trying to renew his passport. The next day, Flores’ body was found alongside the body of an engineering student, just outside Guatemala City.
Then came a bleak November day when Jaime’s parents dropped him off at 7:45 AM at his grandmother’s house, before setting out for the University of San Carlos. (Jaime’s father was a professor there, and his mother had just finished grad school.)
A landmark report produced by Amnesty International, “Guatemala: A Government Program of Political Murder,” details how people abducted by the military were taken to certain locations to be interrogated under torture.
As they were driving, a van blocked their path. Armed men poured out of the vehicle. They apprehended Jaime’s father and killed his mother on the spot with a volley of submachine gun fire, after she tried to distract the gunmen so that her husband could run away.
“My mother was shot 38 times,” Jaime recounts in a cool, matter-of-fact way, “and then one of (the shooters) walked up and shot her once in the head to finish the job.”
He knows all of this because he spent years reading press accounts from the time. He’s researched archives when he’s been able. And he’s tracked down press accounts of people who said they witnessed the shooting of his mother and the abduction of his father. This includes a street vendor who said he’d seen the incident. (The vendor had been quoted in media stories, and has not been heard from since.)
Unlike some who struggle with PTSD and are triggered into panic, shock, or silence by recalling a trauma, Jaime says the only way he’s ever been able to process it is by talking about it to trusted friends and family.
Over the course of several conversations, Jaime conveyed grisly facts with little visible emotion: There’s the description of how his father’s body was recovered two weeks later. He’d been strangled with barbed wire; both arms had been broken and he was missing an eye.
Amnesty International notes in its landmark 1981 report, “Guatemala: A Program of Political Murder,” that abductees were typically taken to the Brigada Militar Mariscal Zavala, a military base on the outskirts of Guatemala City for interrogation under torture.
The fate of Jaime’s parents is a representative sample of the wider counterinsurgency war waged by the government. “Between January and November in 1980 alone,” Amnesty documents in the report, “some 3,000 people described by government representatives as ‘subversives’ and ‘criminals’ were either shot on the spot in political assassinations or seized and murdered later; at least 364 others in this period have not yet been accounted for.”
The Israeli connection
After his parents’ deaths, their political colleagues in the underground soon learned that Israel, then (and today) a main arms supplier of Guatemala, had developed a sophisticated tool to help the government root out targeted leftists. In the months leading up to the deaths of Jaime’s parents, the Guatemalan government used two new computerized systems designed by the Israeli electronics firm Tadiran Israel Electronics Industries Ltd., partly U.S.-owned at the time. Israeli technicians came in to train Guatemalan personnel in the use of these computer systems. And some 25 to 40 Israelis worked in the Guatemalan intelligence services, according to a Latin American diplomat cited in an April 1984 report in Reuters.
One computer acted as “the nerve center of the armed forces” that coordinated troop movements in the field, in the words of Benedicto Lucas García, the former Army Chief of Staff under his brother, dictator Romeo Lucas García who led the government at the time of Jaime’s parents’ murder. (In 2018, Benedicto was convicted of crimes against humanity, as well as sexual assault, and today, in Guatemala, he faces further crimes, including genocide.)
The other computer, which maintained lists like the one uncovered by Father Burke, was also connected to Guatemala City’s power grid. The government could conduct “subversion checks” by monitoring electricity usage in Guatemala City at odd hours of the day. The computer system, which became operational in the several months leading up to the murder of Jaime’s parents, scanned for “suspicious activities” that could indicate an illegal printing press or a secret meeting of underground resistance, ultimately leading officers to hideouts of groups like ORPA.
Operating the new technology out of the Presidential Palace annex, the G-2, the Guatemalan intelligence service, raided at least 30 safe houses belonging to ORPA — the organization that Victor fought for. Over a year’s time, insurgents were rounded up, killed, or “disappeared.”
A new, anonymous life
After his parents’ murders, Jaime, still a child, was raised by relatives uninvolved in the political underground, starting with his grandmother until he was five, and then with his aunt until he came of age and set out on his own.
In 2007, Jaime met a Guatemalan woman who was visiting from the United States. Soon he found himself traveling back and forth, from Guatemala to Tucson, before the couple were married and he made Tucson his permanent home. But after several years the couple drifted apart and divorced. Jaime decided to stay in Tucson, having developed roots in the community. He landed a good job as an interpreter, often working for U.S. immigration agencies.
Three years into Trump’s presidency, Jaime decided he wanted to finally become a U.S. citizen. He wanted to be able to vote in the 2020 election, and to more safely continue his search for answers to questions about his own life.
His parents’ killers have not been brought to justice. He takes new satisfaction in a monument erected at the University of San Carlos to commemorate the lives of hundreds of university administrators, faculty, and students that were murdered, including his parents.
One breezy evening this spring, Jaime sits inside a bar in midtown Tucson. Despite his cool demeanor in many interviews about his life, the sum of everything he’s learned about his parents – the war, and his early childhood – now weighs heavily on him. He says the tragedy of his early life has become more real. He shakes his head, as if in disbelief of a haunting past, while the dim lighting overhead creates shadows under his eyes.
Jaime realizes he may never get to hold the true authors of his parents’ deaths fully accountable. Still, with the vacant spaces in his history now filled with facts, he believes he can honestly honor the lives of a mother and father he never got to know.
“It is remembrance, but it is not justice,” Jaime says.
Gabbriel Schivone is a writer and investigative reporter originally from the Southwest U.S. borderlands.