By Tracy Glynn
http://www.nbmediacoop.org/

Guatemala City - Eighteen years after her husband was captured, tortured and murdered by a CIA-backed Guatemalan military officer, Jennifer Harbury is preparing ten landmark lawsuits against some of the perpetrators of torture and killings during Guatemala's brutal 36 year civil war, which
lasted from 1960 to 1996. The torture and disappearance case of Harbury's husband is one of those being advanced in Guatemalan courts at this time.

Harbury is a Harvard Law School graduate and Texas-based attorney and writer who spent the early eighties collecting supporting evidence for the political asylum files of Guatemalan refugees fleeing terror. She moved to Guatemala in 1985 where she lived for two years doing human rights work
during the country's brutal civil war.

Harbury came to know those working underground for equality, education, healthcare and justice for all Guatemalans. Many of them took up arms and joined the guerrillas in the mountains for this cause. They were men and women, old and young, Mayans and ladinos, professors, priests and peasants, doctors, lawyers and students, and human rights workers. Some of them are still alive today but many of them are now dead - tortured and killed by the Guatemalan military. Over 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the civil war.

Harbury began writing down the stories of the brave people she met during a time when the  Guatemalan army was practicing "Scorched Earth" and wiping out entire communities in an afternoon. Atrocities committed by the Guatemalan Army included burning people alive, gang-raping women and
disembowelling children in front of their parents. Years later, Harbury published these stories in her first book called "Bridge of Courage."

Harbury was driven out of Guatemala in 1986. She says she took the hint to leave when armed men began staying in the lobby of her hotel.

On another trip to Guatemala in 1990, she met and fell in love with a guerrilla leader, Efrain Bámaca Velasquez, known as Comandante Everardo. They married in 1991.

Everardo was a Mayan man who grew up starving on a cotton plantation. His mother died from an infection when he was very young. There was no one to feed Everardo and his siblings while their father was away working. He began running away from the plantation when he got older to join people who were organizing to change the unjust reality of the majority of the people of Guatemala. They were organizing clandestinely and building a political base with the people. These people taught him how to read and write. He ran away for good at the age of 18 and joined an armed front that later became the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity - URNG.

Everardo's first love, Gabriela, was a law student in Guatemala City who decided to go to the mountains and fight for the cause. She was shot dead in a military raid only six months after their union. Everardo's second partner was tortured then killed.

The guerrillas carried cyanide tablets in case they got captured. Death by cyanide was better than being held and gruesomely tortured. Amnesty International did not have letter writing campaigns for political
prisoners at the time because there were no known political prisoners. Anyone captured was immediately killed or tortured secretly then killed.

After seventeen years of fighting in the mountains, Comandante Everardo disappeared in 1992. The Guatemalan Army said that Everardo shot himself in the head after being injured in combat. However, it was clear from the investigation results that the dead man found was not Everardo.

Harbury was given a detailed description of his face and body - everything from his eyebrows, lips and scars. Many of the facial features described in the report matched Everardo's but the description failed to include glaring white scars on his dark body. Harbury also knew that Everardo's rifle was powerful enough to take down a helicopter and there was no way that the investigators could have identified his facial features if he had shot himself in the head.

Harbury started asking questions and again was kicked out of the country, this time by the Attorney General, who she later found out knew that the cadaver found was not Everardo's.

Two escaped prisoners confirmed that Everardo and thirty others were being secretly detained and tortured by the Guatemalan Army. Everardo had been beaten with bricks until he hemorrhaged. He was chained to a bed. There was fungus growing on him. Everardo soon discovered that in order to stay
alive and avoid torture, he needed to give information to the intelligence officers. He would give them old codes that he knew no longer worked and he would identify dead bodies. They stopped torturing him briefly. He was told that if he escaped, his family members would be killed.

Harbury visited the Guatemalan Ministry of Defence where she had unnerving conservations with the Minister and intelligence officers before going on a seven day hunger strike in front of the Ministry of Defence Building in 1993. Her demand was to get the comandantes out of the torture chambers.
She held her hunger strike under their gun towers. She decided to leave the country with the Organization of American States' team, which was in the country at the time, to be safe. She had another meeting with the Minister of Defence and several meetings with intelligence officers who
conveyed such threats as "you better shut up or we'll send you his hands in a box" or "you would think you would keep quiet if you cared about your husband." She was led across walkways with sharp shooters.

Near the end of 1994, no one wanted to meet with her. A ceasefire was holding and the peace accords were being negotiated. She had enough. She unfurled a banner and began a hunger strike in front of the Guatemalan National Palace in Guatemala City in 1994. She prepared to die in this hunger strike. She took water and pedialyte to stay sound. By day 32, she had a heart murmur, was losing vision in her left eye and was starting to have nerve damage. She ended her hunger strike. She would go on another hunger strike in front of the White House on March 12, 1995 to demand the release of her husband. She ended her hunger strike on day 12 when a U.S. Senator told her that the army had executed her husband. CIA files revealed that Everardo had been confined and tortured for two and a half years before being murdered without trial by a Guatemalan army official on the CIA's  payroll.

Harbury has brought a number of legal cases to national and international courts to demand justice for the atrocities committed against Guatemalans. Many witnesses and lawyers involved in her cases have either been killed, have had family members killed or have experienced violence or harassment. A visit from the FBI to her home in Texas in 1995 made her aware that the Guatemalan military was preparing to send a paid hit man to her home. Her sister-in-law was chased around her home by armed men. Harbury escaped capture by fleeing to Mexico. Her case files have disappeared. She has been pulled off a plane by armed men.  Her lawyer’s car was bombed in 1996 outside his Washington, DC home and her DC home was shot at. Harbury's second book called "Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala" was published in 1997.

Harbury's third book, "Truth, Torture and the American Way," was published in 2005, and documents the use of torture by the American government in Central America, Vietnam, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and  Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Today, Harbury wants the world to encourage the Guatemalan government to support ten cases making their way through the Guatemalan courts. These cases, known as the "ten paradigmatic cases," will be the first cases to be brought forth in Guatemala's court against the country's war criminals.

Harbury says that her first book, "Bridge of Courage", is her best book. The battered copies of her book found in the library of a Spanish school in Xela, Guatemala, demonstrate it has been read by many students. Many of these students are foreigners, who like myself, are only now beginning to grasp the extent to which our governments and companies, American and Canadian, intervened and created the abhorrent conditions of poverty and violence seen in Guatemala in the past and today. Like Harbury has for decades, we must stand alongside the people of Guatemala in solidarity as they seek justice and plan their future.

Tracy Glynn, a Fredericton-based contributor to the NB Media Co-op and organizer with the Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking the Silence Network, is currently in Guatemala documenting stories of of Mayan women resisting Canadian mining companies on their land. The Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking
the Silence Network is working in solidarity with the people of Guatemala. Chapters exist in Fredericton, Tatamagouche, Halifax, Antigonish and Prince Edward Island. This article was originally published by the New Brunswick Media Co-op.