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Guatemala’s Gross National Products: Cocadollars, Repression, and Disinformation

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In the early 1980s, leftist guerrillas in Guatemala blew up bridges, ambushed army convoys, and attacked military outposts. A decade later, the fighting in Guatemala’s civil war is winding down. Combat between the government and the guerrillas now occurs in only a few departments and only a few times each year. But political violence, almost exclusively by the government, continues. Even the U.S. State Department reported in 1991 that the military, civil patrols and the police continued to commit a majority of the major human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, torture and disappearances.

The Guatemalan counterinsurgency campaign was conceived with the support of U.S. counterinsurgency experts such as Caesar Sereseres and Colonel George Minas. Sereseres has served as both a consultant to the Rand Corporation and a Central America expert in the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning. Today, Guatemalan army officers still describe him as someone who understands our situation. Minas served as a U.S. military attache in Guatemala in the early 1980s. Both encouraged Guatemala’s population control strategy, involving the use of Vietnam-style military-controlled strategic hamlets and civilian defense patrols.

The strategy of control was also characterized by a litany of human rights crimes that stand out not only in the region but in the world. The violence was so severe in the early 1980s in Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchu’s home department of Quich, to cite but one example, that the entire Catholic archdiocese shut down and withdrew, with all its priests, nuns, catechists, and many parishioners. The situation there and in other departments by 1982 led Guatemala’s Conference of Catholic Bishops to conclude: Not even the lives of old people, pregnant women or innocent children were respected. Never in our history has it come to such grave extremes.

REAPING THE BENEFITS OF STABILITY

Not everyone suffered. Guatemalan army spokesmen openly point out that the carnage has given Guatemala a level of national stability it lacked earlier in the war, and made the country comparatively more stable than El Salvador, Honduras, or even Mexico. With the military firmly in charge, and the civilian government largely irrelevant, foreign investment has climbed. Low wages have attracted Asian firms wanting to set up sweatshops, as well as European and U.S. tourists.

It has also attracted the network of cocaine traffickers based in the Colombian city of Cali. The cartel picked Guatemala because it is near Mexico, which is an obvious entrance point to the U.S., and because the Mexicans have a long established and well organized mafia, said a Latin America drug enforcement expert. It is also a better transit and storage country than El Salvador because it offers more stability and was easier to control.

THE GUATEMALAN CONNECTION

In the 1980s, Guatemala was an insignificant player in the cocaine trade. Today, however, Guatemala is the largest Central American bodega or warehouse for cocaine transshipments to the U.S., and ranks behind only Mexico and, perhaps, the Bahamas in transshipping cocaine to the U.S. Analysts at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (INM) now estimate that between 50 and 75 metric tons of cocaine are shipped through Guatemala each year. (In comparison, the same experts estimate that before the present embargo, between 6 and 12 metric tons a year passed through Haiti.) Mexico and Guatemala, which share a common frontier, together move at least two-thirds of the cocaine now reaching the U.S.

Guatemala’s booming cocaine trade now distorts the Guatemalan economy, drawing local businesses into a web of cocadollars and fostering corruption in both business and the military. The Cali cartel and its Guatemalan partners are trafficking cocaine that, at the wholesale price of $15,000 a kilogram, is worth as much as one billion dollars a year or one-tenth of Guatemala’s entire GNP.

Evidence of the cash flow generated by the cocaine trade is abundant: Real estate prices in Guatemala City, by conservative estimates, rose over 350 percent in just three years, while inflation dropped from 60 to 14 percent over the same period. Even more illicit funds appear to be channeled into the construction industry, which has grown steadily at a rate four times faster than the rest of the economy. While other Central American capital cities only seem to deteriorate, Guatemala City’s skyline continues to expand even though the newly constructed buildings still have ample vacant office space.

The situation became so unnerving by November 1992 that a group of local exporters organized an unprecedented conference: how to detect whether their export products are being used to run drugs. They held the conference seven months after 6.7 tons of cocaine enough to supply the total U.S. demand for a week was discovered in cases of frozen broccoli shipped to Miami. Even these business leaders concede that, in a sluggish global economy with many export markets depressed, the profits available from cocaine trafficking can be extremely tempting. Newspaper editors say that the cocaine trade in Guatemala has been able to buy out entire businesses as well as institutions. But although everybody in Guatemala seems to know about it, hardly anybody is willing, publicly, to say even a word.

PLACING THE BLAME

Off the record, Western diplomats, leading entrepreneurs, church officials and others all charge that senior Guatemalan army officers are deeply involved in the cocaine traffic. Although not even one military official has yet to be prosecuted in either Guatemala or the U.S., 10 military officers and 20 paramilitaries under them have already been indicted or implicated. They include:

1) Ex-Lt. Colonel Carlos Ochoa Ruiz and two army captains, all of whom were caught in a DEA sting back in 1990, smuggling a half metric ton of cocaine, worth $7.5 million wholesale, to Tampa, Florida.
2) A retired Guatemalan Air Force captain who owned a safe house outside Antigua where the DEA found 2.8 metric tons of cocaine.
3) Four army colonels, a major, a captain and 20 army-appointed civilian commissioners in Los Amates in eastern Guatemala, who are accused in legal testimony by survivors of having ordered the separate murders of nine peasants, and the torture and abuse of many more.

The Los Amates survivors charge that the army drove them off their land to build runways to smuggle drugs. One of the military commissioners they name, Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, was later extradited to Brooklyn, New York, where he will be tried for smuggling several tons of cocaine a month by tractor trailers to the U.S.

SHIFTING THE BLAME

The Guatemalan army’s office of Information and Dissemination, on the other hand, counters that leftist guerrillas of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) are responsible. Not one guerrilla or political opponent of the Guatemalan government has been either charged or indicted. Yet the Guatemalan army maintains that they should be.

Its Department of Information and Dissemination has a manila envelope, marked with an official stamp SECRETO, which spokesmen are eager to show to journalists upon request. The documents describe an alleged anti-drug operation high up in Guatemala’s northern Peten jungle, where the URNG guerrillas were once strong. According to the documents, in July 1991 a Treasury Police unit engaged in combat with guerrillas discovered a small plane with Colombian registration. Included in the file is a photograph of a white male wearing a baseball cap with the letters, in place of a ball team, DEA. He is standing over the plane’s cargo stacked brown paper-wrapped packages and holding up a flag with the initials FAR the acronym for one of three wings of the URNG.

For reasons still unexplained, the Army waited 16 months until November 1992 to release the secret file, the color Polaroids, and an army-produced video of the alleged raid.

The video begins with members of the Treasury Police running single file up to a line of trees, and firing automatic weapons in sequence at an unseen enemy. Later, these armed soldiers are seen around a small plane and the brown packages. The film then zeros in on the Polaroid of the white male wearing the baseball cap with the letters DEA. When asked whether this man with the DEA baseball cap was a DEA agent, army spokesman Captain Yon Rivera said, Look at it. You can see for yourself. When asked why the DEA hasn’t said anything about the guerrillas running cocaine, spokesman Yon Rivera, commonly identified in local newspapers as The Voice of the Armed Forces said: The DEA has not accused the guerrillas for this. I don’t know why they don’t want to say it.

U.S. Embassy officials in Guatemala City declined comment. When asked about the raid, Joyce McDonald at DEA headquarters in Washington faxed a description of the raid, the video, and the man with the DEA baseball cap to the DEA Field Division in Guatemala City. That office faxed back a brief response: DEA is unfamiliar with the film or scenario described above.

Blaming the guerrillas is not without a certain irony. The same army spokesmen who claim the guerrillas are running tons of cocaine boast in the same breath how the guerrillas are militarily defeated. The army estimates that there are fewer than 500 full-time guerrilla combatants left.Yet, the army fails to explain how a mere 500 stragglers under pressure just to stay alive, let alone fight could be responsible for receiving, storing and transshipping the bulk of Guatemala’s flow of cocaine.

THE ARMY AND THE PRESS

Although the charge that the guerrillas are behind the cocaine traffic is, on the face of it, without basis, it is regularly reported as fact throughout Guatemala. The Guatemalan army’s ability to manipulate the press is yet another violent legacy of its past. After seeing more of their colleagues killed or disappeared than in any other country in Central America (and that is saying a lot), Guatemalan journalists rarely challenge anything the military says. No matter how broad or baseless, the military’s allegations are still regularly reported in Guatemalan daily newspapers, radio, and television reports in most cases, without a word of qualification. And regionally based foreign journalists have simply ignored the military’s accusations, if they’ve bothered to report on Guatemala at all.

As a result, neither Guatemala’s nine million citizens (most of whom, like the peasants in Mexico’s Chiapas, are of Mayan descent), nor North American consumers of news about Guatemala are well served. Guatemalan citizens have been saturated with the view that their tiny country is the victim of a global communist conspiracy that endures despite the end of the Cold War. And countless Guatemalans, especially among the whiter, wealthier members of its population, very much do believe it. This is a war here, said one such businessman, between the country and those who want to destroy it, the guerrillas. Meanwhile, North American readers have been insulated from the most outlandish of Guatemalan officials’ accusations, and their by any post-Cold War standard extreme world view. The failure of the U.S. press to adequately report on Guatemala is one reason why the Clinton administration enjoys warm relations with Guatemala despite its authoritarian past and present.

The Guatemalan army maintains that the URNG guerrillas have compensated for their battlefield losses by shifting their resources to a political warfare campaign. While the guerrillas are poor military commanders, say Guatemalan army representatives, they are brilliant manipulators of world opinion. The army claims that the guerrillas’ propaganda campaign is not only successful but has managed to either manipulate or control individuals, organizations, publications, and even governments.

In August 1992, Newsweek ran a story, “Subtle Clues in Shallow Graves: Uncovering evidence of massacres in Guatemala”. In response, then Guatemalan Minister of Defense Jos Garcia Samayoa threatened to press charges against Newsweek and respected forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow, who conducted the investigation. The General said, “It worries us to see how foreign interference in this case has grown in dimension, injuring…the independence and sovereignty of Guatemalans.”

International authority Clyde Snow, who has examined cadavers in Kurdistan, Chile, Argentina, and most recently Mexico’s Chiapas, has harsh words for the Guatemalan army: The military guys who do this are like serial killers. They got away with it once, so they think they’ll always get away with it. If Jeffrey Dahmer had been in Guatemala, he would be a general by now. Around the same time, indigenous leader Rigoberta Menchu, from Guatemala’s most war-torn department of Quich, was a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Then army spokesman Yon Rivera was not impressed: The only thing Miss Menchu has done abroad is create a very bad image of our country. After she won the prize, Rivera charged that Guatemala had been the victim of a global political warfare campaign, but he didn’t know whether it was a case of direct infiltration. At the very least, he charged, the Nobel committee itself had been, somehow, unduly influenced by the URNG.30

The Guatemalan army has accused the U.S. of participating in the political warfare as well. By 1991, congressional critics had helped persuade the Bush administration to cut military aid to Guatemala, which it did partly over the murder of an American innkeeper, Michael Devine. That led the Guatemalan army to claim that the U.S. government itself had been unduly influenced by the URNG. According to the army’s Department of Information and Dissemination, members of the U.S. Congress and the State Department have been, respectively, conspirators and dupes. There is a U.S. congressman who has on his staff a member of the URNG, spokesman Rivera said in an interview, although Rivera could remember neither the congressman nor his staff member’s name. But one name he could recall was that of Frank LaRue, whose activities Rivera said proves his point. According to Rivera, LaRue is a lobbyist for the URNG, who enjoys undue influence in the State Department. “He has an open door,” said Rivera, nodding his head. He has the key.

LaRue made the Guatemalan national stage over a decade ago when he defended Coca-Cola workers in a bitter strike in Guatemala City, after which he went into political exile until 1994, when he returned briefly to Guatemala. While in the U.S., LaRue was a well-known activist in the Guatemalan opposition movement, and continued to work on labor and human rights issues in Guatemala through the privately-funded Center for Human Rights Legal Action in Washington, D.C. It was in this capacity that he was invited to the State Department for meetings with Guatemalan army representatives to discuss issues of military justice and human rights.

U.S. journalists who criticize the military are also accused of being part of the conspiracy. After the Washington Post published an article by the author about the Cali cartel and the Guatemalan army on December 26, 1993, the Army’s Department of Information and Dissemination held a press conference the following day to respond: Members of the Department of Information and dissemination of the Guatemalan Army reiterated that `there exists a campaign against the prestige of the government and the armed forces on the part of groups that seek to satisfy their own interests by creating a negative image of the country and the democratic process that we live in.

FROM THE QUESTIONABLE TO THE RIDICULOUS

Indeed, according to the Guatemalan army, this campaign against the prestige of the government and armed forces is one of the broadest in the history of the Cold War, which, it maintains, has yet to end. And, if the Guatemalan military is to be believed, the propaganda campaign has extended its tentacles to some very unlikely places. In January 1993, the army uncovered a conspiracy involving an entertainment establishment, a local television station and U.S. Secret Service agents attached to United Nations dignitaries visiting New York.

Guatemala’s then formal head of state, President Jorge Serrano (who last May failed to survive his own Fujimori-style self-coup), was on an official trip to the United Nations. Although the visit coincided with President Clinton’s inauguration, the Guatemalan leader was not invited. After Serrano spoke to the U.N. General Assembly, blaming Guatemala’s leftist guerrillas for much of his country’s problems, he went for a drink at Stringfellows of NY, Ltd. in the posh Gramercy Park neighborhood of lower Manhattan.

The Guatemalan leader found a table facing a stage with naked, dancing women. A local free-lance cameraman happened to be having a drink and watching the show too.

The next day at 6:00 p.m., WNBC-TV’s News 4 New York aired an exclusive report. It captured the Guatemalan leader trying to hide his face behind a white ski parka and hood, while exiting the club and entering the back seat of his waiting limousine. In addition to close-ups of the President’s face, viewers saw his armed U.S. Secret Service escorts as well as his entire diplomatic motorcade. After running the tape, the news anchor added that President Serrano is an outspoken born-again, evangelical Christian.

News 4 New York aired the report again at 11:00 p.m. But in the later broadcast, the anchor included President Serrano’s official response. He blamed his capture on film at the go go bar on manipulation by Guatemala’s leftist guerrillas.

Spokespersons for News 4 New York, Stringfellows of NY, Ltd., and the Secret Service were all, at first, incredulous and then offended. All deny the charge.

What the Guatemalan army fails to realize is that the more it blames leftist guerrillas for its problems, the more isolated it becomes. During the Cold War, Guatemala was already a pariah regime within the world community. But with changes and reforms now taking place or on the horizon in places as troubled as South Africa, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland, continuing Guatemalan political violence, cocaine trafficking, and military impunity leave that country more alone than ever.

Official Sources, Western Diplomats and Other Voices from the Mission

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On the post-Cold War era, ethnic rivalry may have replaced ideology as the most likely cause of conflict, but while all else changes, one journalistic habit picked up during the past four decades will, in all likelihood, persist — the habit of relying heavily on the mission, as the U.S. embassy is known, for assessments and information. In an increasingly unfamiliar world, in fact, the temptation to do so will be even stronger.

What’s wrong with this? A close look at coverage of the last of the Cold-War conflicts — the civil war in El Salvador — shows that all too often such reliance results in distorted news.

Following the November 1989 murder of six Jesuit intellectuals, their housekeeper, and the housekeeper’s daughter, U.S. embassy officials in San Salvador told Newsweek that they had intelligence information indicating that rightist leader Roberto D’Aubuisson, long identified with El Salvador’s death squads, had been planning to kill the priests. The claim was based on an alleged CIA report. The officials said that, on the night before the murders, D’Aubuisson had told advisers that something had to be done about the Jesuits. Newsweek ran the story as an “exclusive” on December 11, 1989.

But it was later shown in court that D’Aubuisson had nothing to do with the murders. And except for the mission officials who spoke to Newsweek, almost every other Western diplomat in the country told reporters — from the start — that the Salvadoran military, not D’Aubuisson, was most likely responsible.

No corroboration of the alleged CIA report pointing to D’Aubuisson has ever been provided, not even to the presiding Salvadoran court or to the U.S. congressional task force investigating the Jesuit murders. In fact, the report may very well have been a fabrication designed to deflect attention from the Salvadoran military, which was then receiving nearly a quarter million dollars a day in U.S. aid.

Reporters in El Salvador frequently received information and assessments from the mission. And correspondents who have covered El Salvador say that editors in almost all U.S. media have tended to demand a far lower standard of evidence for information obtained from embassy officials than for that obtained from other sources. For example, while claims by political activists of any stripe would rarely be published without at least two additional sources of confirmation, information coming from U.S. officials was frequently run without any additional confirmation. “Don’t worry, I got it from the embassy,” was usually enough to put an editor at ease.

The assumption here is that political activists have a political agenda, while American officials do not. This ignore that fact that U.S. embassy officials in El Salvador were engaged in what they themselves called the largest and most significant American military endeavor in the period since the Vietnam war. The assumption led to inaccurate and misleading reports.

For example, on July 30, 1989, New York Times correspondent Lindsey Gruson wrote an article headlined “With Training and New Tactics, Salvador’s Army Gains on Rebels.” The story’s nut quote was from a “senior American official” who said: “The F.M.L.N. [leftist guerrillas] can still mass troops, carry out actions, and inflict casualties, but not with its previous success. . .These offensives now come at greater cost and achieve less. In contrast to the early 1980s, many guerrilla actions are now a draw or outright defeat.”

While the U.S. embassy was claiming in briefing papers that the insurgency “is now in a period of decline and frustration,” many other observers, including non-American diplomats, believed that the war was stalemated — at best. Indeed, in November, less than four months after Gruson’s piece appeared, the F.M.L.N. launched its strongest sustained offensive of the war, taking over much of the capital and other major cities for up to ten days. American officials were taken completely by surprise. So were most American readers.

Another problem for reporters in El Salvador was attribution. For example, in background briefings given in early 1991, William Walker, U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, told reporters that U.N. mediator Alvaro de Soto was biased toward leftist guerrillas, unprofessional as a diplomat, and ineffective. But when speaking in San Salvador, Walker demanded that he be referred to only as an unidentified Western diplomat, giving the impression that his view of the U.N. mediator was representative of that of the diplomatic corps at large. In fact, most other major Western diplomats in San Salvador considered the veteran Peruvian mediator to be not only highly competent, professional, and fair, but the right man for the job.

The term “Western diplomat” is meant to inspire confidence in readers. It implies that the source is an experienced diplomat of some stature, is knowledgeable about the country in question, and has access to a wide boy of both public and official information. But in El Salvador, reporters sometimes allowed the term to be misused.

New York Times correspondent James LeMoyne found ways to deal with this problem, using attributions such as “a top official whose country has an active interest in El Salvador.” The reader was thus alerted that this diplomat was not a neutral observer. Another solution was to follow a debatable statement — uttered by American officials but attributed only to unidentified “Western diplomats” — with something like “But many non-American Western diplomats disagree.”

Unfortunately, reporters and editors tend to be more interested in securing access to embassy sources than in substantiating embassy claims. The El Salvador experience suggests that strict standards of evidence and uniform rules of attribution should be applied to all sources.

Salvadoran Rebels Anticipated Soviet Fall, Shifted Tack

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Please see the original story here: http://www.csmonitor.com/1992/0506/06102.html

SAN SALVADOR – EL SALVADOR’S leftist guerrilla movement began moving away from Marxism-Leninism several years before the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, they and independent analysts say.

Since the FMLN was already in transition, the Soviet Union’s collapse “wasn’t like a bucket of cold water, but of water which was already warmed,” says William, a pseudonym for a high-ranking 15-year veteran of the Salvadoran Communist Party, one of five rebel organizations that make up the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) coalition.

On Feb. 1, El Salvador’s 12-year civil war came to an end as a result of UN-mediated negotiations. With the FMLN now a legal entity openly participating in the political process, its members are willing for the first time to discuss previous clandestine relations with the Soviet Union and other countries.

“We’ve studied all the texts, Marxism-Leninism, Mao, and social democracy,” says Chano Guevara, a peasant who rose to become a top FMLN comandante in the rebel stronghold of Guazapa volcano. “But if we had followed the socialist camp we wouldn’t exist now. We continue to exist [because of] the politically and economically rooted problems in this country.”

Despite their ongoing ties to Cuba, the FMLN is one of the largest leftist insurgencies in the world to accept democracy. The decision to make reforms in advance of the Soviet Union’s collapse is a main reason the FMLN remains a viable political force in El Salvador, Western experts say.

“The age of the romantic revolutionary linked with Marxist-Leninist ideology is finished,” said Wayne Smith, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, who was the chief United States diplomat in Cuba in the early 1980s. “[But] movements such as the FMLN, who champion the poor but who do it through electoral means, are going to have a growing place in Latin America.”

The FMLN’s transition began as a direct result of changes in the Soviet Union. Although by the late 1980s, the FMLN was not dependent on the Soviet bloc to continue fighting, the insurgency would have needed direct foreign aid if they had ever taken power by force. But as early as 1986, the reform government of Mikhail Gorbachev communicated to the FMLN that it favored a negotiated settlement and would not finance a new leftist government, FMLN sources say.

Guerrilla leaders left secluded base camps in northern El Salvador to embark on a nine-country tour of Latin America in October 1988. FLMN leaders had always viewed themselves as within a broad vein of Latin American nationalism. But on this tour, they received criticism from many governments considered allies, such as Mexico, Argentina, and Peru, all of whom encouraged the rebels to consider a negotiated settlement.

THE rebel leadership was especially influenced by the dramatic decline of the Nicaraguan economy in the late 1980s, which signaled that no revolution in Central America could survive in isolation, FLMN sources say.

FMLN leaders were also swayed by changes in Eastern Europe. Most, including the FMLN’s top comandante and strategist, Joaquin Villalobos, supported popular reform movements there. Two months after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a January 1990 internal document was published, which praises the “social forces that demand more democracy and independence” in Eastern Europe and openly rejects a one-party state.

“The people are removing the authoritarian, inept, and corrupt governments,” notes the document. “The masses feel … they must sweep out the mistakes of the parties in power, as well as their old and closed formulas.”

More than 1,000 Salvadoran revolutionaries received political and military training in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Nicaragua, they and East German sources say.

“During the week we had classes in Spanish,” says William, who was in the Soviet Union for nine months in 1979-80. “On weekends, we all had military training.”

The Soviet Union, Cuba, and to a lesser degree Nicaragua provided funds, weapons, and training to the FMLN throughout the war, FMLN veterans here say. But the support was heaviest in the early 1980s, they say.

While Moscow began to distance itself from the FMLN in 1986, East Germany continued to train Salvadorans until the collapse of the Berlin Wall, according to an East German who worked with the FMLN there.

In order to make up the aid shortfall, the FLMN developed new sources of weapons and funds from radical third-world countries including Vietnam and North Korea, and won substantial funding from church groups in the US and Western Europe, FMLN veterans say.

The Cubans, however, were the FMLN’s most consistent backers, providing specialized military training, as well as materiel and other support to the Salvadoran insurgency throughout the war, FLMN veterans say.

“We still have relations with Cuba, Vietnam and others,” says Ramon Medrano, a member of the FMLN’s top political commission, “and we have a right to.”

The insurgency also received substantial funds from several social democratic Scandinavian countries, especially in the early 1980s, according to FMLN veterans.

This eclectic base of support boosted the insurgency, FMLN leaders say. Nonetheless, they insist that the insurgency itself was domestically rooted, and that degree of foreign support was always exaggerated by the US.Some Western experts agree. “I don’t think there’s any question the Cubans helped the FMLN,” said Dr. Smith. “[But] the movement would have continued without any outside help at all.”

FMLN units extorted war taxes — running as high as $60,000 from individual coffee growers during harvest season, rebel and coffee-producing sources here say.

Throughout the war, these and other funds were used to buy weapons from the Salvadoran military, which ran a ubiquitous business in sales of US-provided weapons, according to FMLN operatives and civilians involved in arms transactions with Salvadoran military officers.

Guatemalan Army Crushes Land Protest

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San Jorge la Laguna — Security forces have ignored the exhortations of Roman Catholic Church officials and other mediators in a local land dispute here and violently put down a two-week-old indigenous peasant occupation of disputed land. Mediators were still hoping to find a peaceful resolution when military riot police attacked on Saturday.

Military police moved in at dawn, hurling and swinging truncheons, according to witnesses. The dozens of injured included many women and children. Sixty-seven others, all men, were arrested.

The military’s swift and unexpected response to the peasant occupation has heightened tensions between the government of President Jorge Serrano Elias and Guatemala’s majority indigenous population. Indigenous organizations here have become increasingly active in both land and human rights issues in the past several months.

During the occupation, thousands of indigenous peasants from nearby towns and villages marched to San Jorge in an unusual demonstration of support.

“This is the sentiment and pain of all the people,” said one San Jorge resident.

“The situation in San Jorge is the situation in all of [Guatemala],” says Antonio Argueta, a labor attorney representing the community.

The villagers claim they have a “historic right” to more than 200 acres in a fertile valley on the shores of volcano-ringed Lake Atitlan. But entrepreneurs Luis and Carlos Saravia Camacho, who hold the current legal title to the property, plan to convert the valley into a luxury lakeside resort.

Ramon Varios Chiguil, one of their attorneys, said: “We don’t want a confrontation. But the land is legally ours.”

The conflict illustrates one of Guatemala’s most deeply rooted problems: reconciling the rights of land owners and those of indigenous people of Mayan descent, who make up roughly 60 percent of Guatemala’s population of about nine million.

At issue is whether the indigenous population’s historic claim to land supersedes titles written during the coffee boom of the late 1800s. Against a backdrop of increasing social unrest and two decades of declining living standards in the indigenous community, the government faces a difficult task in solving the dispute.

“We don’t even have a place to build a latrine,” says one of San Jorge’s community leaders. “We are poor. We don’t have enough land to farm.”

The disputed land lies between the village and the shores of Lake Atitlan. Last month, attorneys for the Camacho brothers notified the community that because of an impending investment project they would be denied access to either use or pass through the land. Two weeks later, about 1,000 villagers — more than half of San Jorge’s population — left their homes a half-mile up the mountain to build shacks and occupy the land in question.

On March 31, a smaller contingent of riot police destroyed the squatters’ shacks but did not attempt to remove the population. The Catholic bishop for this region, Monsignor Eduardo Fuentes, along with officials from the quasi-independent government Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman, then began to mediate between the two sides. During the talks, the villagers rebuilt their shacks.

The Camacho brothers bought the land from the Fuentes family in 1975. According to still existing documents, Domingo Fuentes inherited the land from his parents in the late 1800s.

Two weeks ago, representatives of the Camacho brothers came to the site to negotiate with the community. They offered to expand a school, improve electrical lines, and install sewers if the villagers agreed to end their occupation of the land, community representatives say.

But the villagers rejected the offer, maintaining that what they want is the land. Community leaders say their claim to the land dates back to the 16th century, and that they can demonstrate that their forefathers, before the arrival of Europeans, were the rightful owners of the land.

“The historical claim and the [current] legal claim are not the same,” Mr. Argueta says. “The legal claim is divorced from [this community’s] history. What we are attempting to do is to convert their historical claim into a real right.”

The community enjoys the support of this region’s elected deputy to Guatemala’s National Congress, Julio David Diaz Chay, who met with villagers on Friday before the military crackdown. He said he would prepare a formal petition to the Serrano administration asking it to hear the villagers’ case.

Mr. Diaz’s constituency is among the poorest of Guatemala, which has one of the largest gaps between rich and poor in Latin America. While 2 percent of Guatemalans own more than 70 per- cent of the nation’s arable land, most Indians are chronically underemployed and landless.

Guatemalan Murder Probe Beset by Irregularities

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Guatemala City — Her short stature and soft voice were deceiving. Among Guatemala’s highland Indians, she was a legend. Among her colleagues in North America and Europe, she was a rising academic star.

An ethnic Chinese Guatemalan, Myrna Elizabeth Mack Chang had become one of Latin America’s most eminent anthropologists. Her research focused on Guatemala’s nearly one million indigenous refugees, dislocated by severe military counterinsurgency practices in the early 1980s. Government authorities have been reluctant even to recognize the existence of these refugees; traveling on foot from camp to camp, Ms. Mack was the first to document their numbers and conditions.

But on Sept. 11, 1990, Mack was attacked and killed upon leaving her office here. Her colleagues and relatives believe she was murdered on the orders of Guatemala’s Military Intelligence Division.

One suspect, Noel de Jesus Beteta Alvarez, a former special sergeant major from the Security Section of the Presidential High Command, was charged in December with the crime. Mr. Beteta had been missing for a year before being apprehended in Los Angeles and extradited back to Guatemala.

The Mack murder case has become one of the most important in Guatemala’s history and is widely seen as a case challenging decades of military impunity. Both U.S. Ambassador Thomas Stroock and Guatemalan President Jorge Serrano Elias have pledged support for a full investigation.

But high-ranking civilian and military officials are undermining the investigation, according to independent investigators, human rights monitors, and non-American Western diplomats. The case has been beset by irregularities from day one:

* Key physical evidence was either ignored or discarded by investigating authorities, according to a forensic report commissioned by the New York-based human rights group Americas Watch.

* For nine months, authorities denied charges of military involvement. Only last June, after unprecedented international pressure, did the government announce that the crime was politically motivated.

* In August, the chief investigator on the case was himself gunned down in broad daylight outside his own police headquarters. According to the Roman Catholic archbishop’s office on human rights here, the investigator had evidence linking Mack’s murder to the military high command.

* A key witness he interviewed has since recanted his testimony.

* An military intelligence file — indicating that the military at the very least had an interest in Mack — has not been turned over to court authorities, despite several formal requests, according to the government’s own human rights ombudsman.

* On Dec. 9, the presiding judge removed himself from the case, claiming that Helen Mack, sister of the murdered anthropologist, had challenged his integrity by requesting access to presumably public documents on the suspect.

* On Dec. 10, the Mack family announced that groups of men had conducted surveillance of their home in Guatemala City for several days, in a manner similar to surveillance conducted on Mack prior to her murder.

The Mack family was formally visited by Ambassador Stroock in early December, as well as by ambassadors from Canada and France, in a public demonstration of support. “I hope this case does not remain, like so many other crimes, committed in a cloak of impunity.” Helen Mack told a local newspaper.

The Mack murder is but one of thousands of politically motivated murders in recent years. Since January 1990, extrajudicial murders and disappearances have continued at a rate of two per day, according to the ombudsman’s office.

Human rights monitors and Western officials say military-controlled security forces are the primary killers. The US State Department’s 1990 report on Guatemala reads: “Reliable evidence indicates that the security forces committed, with almost total impunity, a majority of the major human rights abuses.”

Based on previously recorded testimony, independent investigators and sources sympathetic to the Mack family say they believe Beteta was indeed one of Mack’s assailants. But the number of men involved in the murder of Mack and the surveillance that preceded it indicate that he was not acting alone, they say.

In El Salvador, Both Sides Say That New Year Pact Will End Long Civil War

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San Salvador, El Salvador — The signing of a conditional agreement at the United Nations in New York to end El Salvador’s 12-year civil war is irreversible and likely to be respected, longtime activists on both sides of this embittered conflict say.

Although there is still fear that violence by ultra-rightist groups opposed to the accords may escalate in the coming months, activists and diplomats alike say they are confident the war will soon end. They add that supporters of both the government and guerrillas have already begun work on their postwar political strategies.

Less than an hour before the stroke of midnight here on New Year’s Eve, Salvadoran President Alfredo Felix Cristiani and the top five commanders of the guerrilla Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) reached a tentative bilateral agreement to end the fighting. According to its terms, a nationwide cease-fire will go into effect Feb. 1, to be followed by a transitional period until Oct. 31, when the demobilization of the rebels is to end.

Specific details on the accord must still be worked out. But the most difficult matters — including the formation of a new civilian police force and major reforms of the military — have already been agreed upon, guerrilla leaders and United States officials here both say. The cease-fire agreement is expected to be formally signed in New York on Jan. 16.

Rebels see victory

FMLN combatants and supporters, many of whom have had relatives killed by the military, see the accords and especially the proposed military and police reforms as a victory after decades of struggle. Most of the 75,000 Salvadorans killed in the 12-year civil war did not die in combat, but were assassinated on suspicion of supporting the rebels.

Two days after the accords were signed, leftist groups organized a block party in downtown San Salvador in front on the Metropolitan Cathedral. One banner read, “The FMLN has arrived.” Thousands of FMLN supporters as well as hundreds of combatants in civilian dress recently returned from the mountains, mingled, and greeted old friends in the central square. As a Ranchera band changed the words to a slow, Mexican ballad, the elated crowd swayed and sang along in unison to the tune of “Goodbye, Armed Forces.”

The conditional agreement was the result of 20 months of protracted negotiations under UN auspices to end one of the most entrenched civil conflicts in memory. It came as a result of changing attitudes of all major players in the war including the US, independent political analysts and American officials here say.

“There was a shift in emphasis,” says a US diplomat. Following the November 1989 offensive by the FMLN, American priorities went “from supporting the counterinsurgency to supporting a negotiated settlement,” says the diplomat, who was in the country during the rebel drive.

The strongest sustained FMLN attack of the war, the November 1989 offensive, took both US and Salvadoran officials here by surprise. It demonstrated that the US-backed Salvadoran military was unlikely to defeat the guerrillas, the diplomat says.

FMLN leaders had long maintained that the US was actively blocking a negotiated solution. But with the beginning of direct negotiations at the UN in September 1991 between President Cristiani and the top five FMLN comandantes, guerrilla leaders both in New York and here say the US has played a key, positive role in making a negotiated settlement possible.

Western officials admit they actively lobbied the Cristiani government. “He knew … we wanted this agreement by the end of the year, and we wanted it badly,” one says.

Western officials also say that both the government and the FMLN demonstrated moderation in negotiations. “The FMLN deserves a lot of credit to have come to the table to try and find a reasonable settlement for the country,” according to a US diplomat.

Previously, US officials had characterized the FMLN guerrillas as “terrorist extremists.” During the 1989 offensive, for example, US Ambassador William Walker denied the insurgency had any legitimacy, saying the conflict was the result of “foreign inspired Marxist aggression” rather than a civil war.

US ambassador’s role

But in 1991, Mr. Walker made two separate trips to meet directly with FMLN leaders in Santa Marta, in the northern El Salvador province of Cabanas, a longtime rebel stronghold. Both guerrilla leaders and Western officials say the ambassador’s initiative helped build confidence between the two sides.

“We consider our direct relations with the United States, including the very same Ambassador William Walker, to have been important toward achieving these definitive, global accords,” said FMLN leader Walter Funes. Interviewed during a guerrilla New Year’s party on the northern slopes of Guazapa volcano 20 miles north of the capital, just minutes after news of the agreements was announced, Mr. Funes said he and his fighters had confidence in their representatives in New York, and added that the accords seemed satisfactory to rebels in the field.

US officials say they are also happy with the terms of the agreement. “Cristiani came out in remarkably good shape for what was essential to them,” says one US diplomat. “He beat back the FMLN on every vestige of power sharing.”

The text of the accords is still confidential. But in the final hours of negotiations the FMLN was pressured to drop its demand to have former guerrillas assume command positions in the new civilian force, as well as its demand to share decisions over social and economic policy with Cristiani’s government, Western diplomatic sources say. However, there will still be former rebels in the new police force. The military will also be reduced and significantly reformed, diplomatic sources say.

Out on a Limb: The Use and Abuse of Stringers in the Combat Zone

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Somewhere just outside of Baghdad, I was blindfolded and led down a corridor into a room where, to judge by the sound of the voices, there were at least half a dozen men. The possibility of being beaten or tortured was on my mind. I was ordered to sit, and waited in the darkness.

The interrogator asked me what was my “real job.”

I said I was a reporter.

He said I was lying. “Tell us about your relationship with the CIA,” he said.

I denied having any relationship with the CIA or any other intelligence organization.

The interrogator, who was from Iraq’s military intelligence, then offered me a deal: “If you tell us the truth, you will go free. But if you continue to lie, you will stay here many years.”

Only twelve months before, an Iranian-born British journalist, Farzad Bazoft, had been offered the same promise: if he “confessed” to working for British intelligence, he would go free. He did, and was hanged.

This predicament demonstrates the risk faced by all journalists covering armed conflicts — a risk that is especially threatening to stringers.

The gulf war in particular proved an exceptionally difficult story to cover, due to its highly technological nature and to the logistical barriers erected by both sides: neither the allies or Iraq respected the concept of journalistic neutrality; both sides saw reporters as intruders.

Yet those barriers could be and on occasion were overcome, as journalists circumvented the allies’ press pool south of Iraq in Saudi Arabia and entered northern Iraq illegally without a visa. Reporters also paid a price: Gad Gross, a German photographer from J. B. Pictures on assignment for Newsweek, was executed by low-ranking Iraqi soldiers. Charles Maxwell and Nicholas Della Casa, a British freelance camera team on assignment for BBC Television, were also killed in northern Iraq last March, reportedly murdered by their Turkish guide. Della Casa’s wife, Rosanna, who was working with the team, has not been seen since and is believed dead.

For weeks, these four free-lance journalists, as well as several teams of staff reporters, were classified as missing. News organizations and professional associations pressured Iraqi authorities for information. But the level of concern varied greatly depending on the news organization involved, and sometimes on whether the missing reporter was a staff correspondent or a stringer.

These incidents raise the question of the obligation news organizations have to free-lancers in trouble in the field. The matter can be further complicated by the nationality of the journalist, and by the fact that the line between a legitimate journalist and an intelligence operative is — sometimes — blurred.

Every major network, newspaper, magazine, and wire service uses stringers, especially for reports from abroad. Some publications, such as The Christian Science Monitor and The Economist, rely frequently on stringers for their foreign reports. The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, and the Los Angeles Times, like most papers, give stringers bylines, designating them as “special” correspondents. The New York Times runs stringers’ articles, but does not give them a byline.

Leading wire services such the A.P. and Reuters rely on stringers’ copy from countries in which they do not have full-time, staff correspondents. Financially strapped U.P.I. currently has more stringers abroad than staff correspondents. Reuters and the A.P. use as many freelance photojournalists as salaried staff photographers in their foreign bureaus.

Most major news organizations use stringers to brief staff correspondents (who usually “parachute” into foreign locations for only a few days), arrange interviews, and provide background information. Television also buys footage from freelance camera crews. Magazines such as Newsweek and Time rely on a worldwide network of print stringers and buy most of their photos from agency-affiliated free-lance photographers.

Of all the media, radio is the most dependent on freelancers. All national news radio services rely predominantly on stringers for their primary international news, especially on-the-scene foreign reporting, or “spots.”

The main reason the media rely so heavily on stringers is money. While a salaried staff correspondent may draw well over $50,000 in salary and benefits, stringers are usually paid only for reports that are used. A one-minute radio spot, for example, pays about $50. A 900-word article pays an average of $150. And an average newspaper photo pays about $75. Meanwhile, as a rule, freelancers must pay their own transportation and other expenses.

And although stringers may be accredited with a major news organization and represent it in the field, they usually enjoy no benefits, such as health or life insurance. If, for example, a stringer is injured in a bus accident in a foreign country but not while pursuing an assigned report, it is unlikely that he or she would be covered. And when stringers are injured while actually reporting, compensation is usually arranged post facto on a case-by-case basis. Some stringers have their own health insurance. But they must first find a policy that does not exclude “acts of war” and they must usually pay at least $2,000 annually. With such a high premium, many work without coverage — even in war zones.

On a cost-benefit basis, freelancers are news organizations’ most productive journalists. In a recession, when both advertising revenues and operating budgets are low, stringers are in particularly great demand — especially when it comes to covering strife-torn countries. What news directors and editors are looking for, as a rule, is live combat footage or eyewitness print dispatches accompanied by dramatic still photos. Yet, the news organization rarely takes responsibility for sending the free-lancer into a conflict zone.

Take the all-too-typical case of veteran print journalist Tom Long. The Miami Herald has customarily identified Long as one of its “special correspondents.” Yet when he was recently injured in a mortar attack in northern El Salvador, the Herald identified him in its story only as a “freelance journalist.” Both the Herald and The New York Times, for which Long also reports, offered to cover some of Long’s medical costs. But both news organizations made it clear that the support was being offered only out of charity, on a one-time basis, and that Long, who did not have his own insurance, would be responsible for any long-term health care needs that might arise.

In countries like El Salvador and Chile, where the foreign press has been a frequent target of attack, members of the foreign press corps have organized press associations to lobby authorities on behalf of individual journalists in trouble. American journalists can also rely on the Washington, D.C.-based Congressional Committee to Support Writers and Journalists; American and non-American journalists alike rely on the independent New York City-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

The outcome of any particular confrontation may well depend on what such organizations and the news outlets involved choose to do. In Iraq, for example, captured reporters were accused of being Israeli, American, or other Western intelligence agents. My case and that of Gamma-Liaison photographer Alain Buu seemed to be caught up in a debate within the Iraqi government, the intelligence and information ministries taking different sides on whether we were spies or journalists.

Our predicament was aggravated by the fact that I was a CBS News stringer — a distinction in status that was lost on Iraqi authorities. They seemed aware only that, while CBS News had mobilized an impressive campaign for the release of staff correspondent Bob Simon, it had done considerably less for me. This difference was interpreted by the authorities as indicating that I was not a real journalist but a spy.

Unfortunately for legitimate journalists, the Iraqis may have had reason to be wary. One Western journalist who had been detained in the Middle East was approached by his country’s intelligence service soon after his release. The journalist, who requested anonymity, says he was asked to become a clandestine government agent while continuing to work as a journalist.

In the United States, the CIA’s use of journalists as intelligence agents is believed to have decreased since the practice was exposed by congressional inquiry in the mid-1970s. Whether it has been completely abandoned is impossible to ascertain. The best way for journalists to convince foreign authorities of their legitimacy is by maintaining their integrity. In other words, information gathered should appear only in published reports and not be relayed privately in background briefings given to government officials.

Veteran photographer Bill Gentile, who was the Dutch cameraman Cornel Lagrouw when Lagrouw was killed in El Salvador in March 1989, has observed that combat can be covered with reasonable safety when one is traveling with one side or another. The problem arises when battle lines swiftly change and journalists find themselves unwillingly or even unwittingly crossing sides. Lagrouw’s last words were, “Great pictures, aye,” only moments before a bullet struck him.

Journalists who take such risks are often responding to the networks’ insatiable appetite for “bang-bang.” The difference between a routine shot of Kurdish rebels posing atop a captured tank, for example, and a shot of an Iraqi helicopter attack could be — depending on demand –over $50,000. That is largely why free-lance cameramen have earned the reputation of being the loose cannons of the business.

However, the motivation may not necessarily be higher compensation but the compelling desire to document the situation at hand. Gvido Zvaigzne filmed some of the most spectacular footage of Soviet troops and tanks crushing the Latvian rebellion in January 1991. In his tape, the viewer hears the impact of the bullets and watches the landscape bob as the camera falls. The viewer sees and hears further battle, as Zvaignze, who died soon after, continues to aim his lens as he crawls away.

While news organizations are increasingly relying on freelance journalists for their primary coverage of foreign wars, they have yet to come to terms with the responsibilities this entails.

At the very least, they should offer freelancers working in war zones some kind of basic insurance coverage. Newspapers that publish stringers’ articles should not only offer them bylines, but pay them professional rates as well. And news organizations that find it both economical and convenient to buy material from free-lancers should recognize their obligation to stand behind anyone representing them — regardless of whether they are staff or stringer — in the field.