WORLD Canadian delivers award to embattled human rights group ___ After a 10 year absence, two days in October was a Short visit home for Guatemalan native Patricia Garcia _ Crowther. Returned to her homeland in search of her brother, Edgar Fernando Garcia, a trade unionist and UNiversity student who has been missing since February 1984, it was a terror-filled 48 hours for the Toronto Tesident. Another reason for her visit was to deliver a human- Tights awad to GAM — the Mutual Support Group for the Appearance, Alive of Our Children, Spouses, Pa- nts and Brothers and Sisters. Founded in June 1984, GAM has a membership of Over 760 families. Like similar organizations operating in ‘Chile, E] Salvador and Argentina, GAM was formed to Seek the safe return of illegally abducted relatives. __ Their search takes them to jails, hospitals, morgues; to the offices of government officials and to meetings with International delegations. 100,000 dead since 1954 Since a CIA-backed coup crushed the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954, the state has been involved in a vicious war against its own people, Over 100,000 people have been killed, 38,000 have dis- Appeared and a further 100,000 languish in undeclared Tefugee camps along the Mexican border. Despite so- Called reforms instituted in 1983, the terror has if any- thing accelerated. It is estimated that 100 people dis- appear or are killed outright every month. _ The government’s response to GAM has been to al- lege the disappeared have voluntarily abandoned their families or joined subversive groups. In March, the Chief Of State, General Mejia Victores accused the group of ing manipulated and -controlled by subversives’’. € following day a statement.was issued making the ‘Search for the disappeared ‘‘a subversive act’’. __ Of the original six co-founders of GAM, four have Since been murdered. Its press secretary Hector Gomez Was found in late March, his chest crushed and his ton- ‘Sue cut out. A few days later its vice-president Maria = Sario Godoy de Cuevas was found dead ina staged car _ 4¢cident, along with her brother and 2-year old son. The y’s finger nails had been torn out. On July 30, two er GAM executive members were slain. _ Crowther’s sister-in-law, Nineth Garcia, is yet a sur- Vivor. She was to have travelled herself to Washington to cept the. Letelier-Moffit Memorial Human Rights Despite ‘elections’, army rules. Award, named for the former Chilean ambassador and his assistant who wer assassinated in the U.S. capital. Fearing that she would be refused re-entry to her coun- try, Crowther brought the award to her. Now the president of GAM, Garcia describes its work: “*All we are asking is that the government account for our missing relatives. Our hope is to discover the piece that was stolen from our lives.” Other ‘‘hot spots’’ in Central America have drawn attention away from the genocide in Guatemala. State security forces operate Salvadorean-style death squads to eliminate any opposition. The army enforces the government’s “‘scorched earth”’ policy. Hundreds of vil- lages suspected of harboring guerrilla forces have been wiped out; houses, crops, burned to the ground. The inhabitants are massacred or driven into ‘‘model villag- es”, which double as concentration camps, surrounded by armed guards and barbed wire with nightly curfews. At least 80,000 Mayan Indians, who have tilled the roll- ing farmlands for centuries have been murdered in the past 10 years; another 100,000 have fied. The “guerrilla theory’’ has won Guatemala the atten-. tion of the White House which has lifted its suspension of military aid. ‘‘Elections’’ in November prompted the U.S. Congress to okay $10-million in military hardware for the coming year, up from.$300,000. As for a civilian government dealing effectively with political assassina- tions, even president-elect Vinicio Cerezo Arevalo acknowledges the military still holds the reins. Guerrilla forces do operate in Guatemala, but a more plausible reason for the slaughter is the ruling oligarchy’s uatemala: the anguish continues — desire to confiscate the land distributed during the te: form period of 1945-54. A business, not a country Otten dubbed ‘‘a business rather than a country’, 75 per cent of the land is owned by 20 family-run agibusi- nesses and U.S. corporaions. Its staggering foreign debt of $2.3-billion, eats up 40 per cent of the country’s export earnings. Inflation runs at 60 per cent and unemployment at 47 per cent. Guatemala rivals Haiti, the poorest coun- try in the Western hemisphere, in illiteracy and infant mortality rates. In the cities this year the high schools are closed, occupied by the army to quell protest. The student demonstrations were in response to a 50 per cent hike in the cost of public transportation and bread. Crowther’s fears while in Guatemala were well found- ed. Nineth Garcia regularly receives phoned and mailed death threats. Hér concerns were somewhate abated by her travelling companion, British Columbian, Member of Parliament Jim Manly. But even Manly admits feeling relieved when their plane left Guatemala. “T felt my position as a parliamentarian provided me - some protection,’’ the New Democratic Party member told the Tribune. ‘‘Much of the violence of Guatemala is hidden from the visitor, but I noticed a hint of it while visiting a newspaper office. There were guards armed with submachine guns and pistols. In the night we heard police whistles and what I assumed to be gunfire’. Canada asked to act Canada has extensive corporate interests in Guatema- la, mainly through the International Nickle Company, but since the slump in the world market for nickle, there have been no recent new investments. Government aid was curtailed in the mid-seventies, but financing to build roads facilitated army operations against the. Indian population. Last year Canada co-sponsored, along with 10 other countries, a United Nation’s resolution condemning human rights abuses in the country. Manly met with External Affairs minister Joe Clark to ask Canada to pressure for a full accounting of the disap- peared. While he quotes Clark as saying Canada “‘shares the revulsion of the world’, over events in Guatemala, Manly says Clark ‘“‘was pretty non-committal”’ on any further action planned by his government. — K.M. | International Focus Tom Morris another link in the U.S. nuc- Murdering in private _ It’s now about a month since the apartheid regime banned Media coverage of the libera- ion struggle underway in South Africa. When’ it made the announcement, Pretoria | Claimed cameras were the Teason for popular unrest, that the thousands on the streets | Were playing up to the world _ press. It linked (correctly) the sud- den upsurge in the West to cut off ties with apartheid to the _ Images televised each evening of police shooting children, of teargas, coffins and armored Apartheid’s answer to the cry for freedom. Botha and Company ex- pelled the media, deciding to do their killing in private. The outcome was inevitable: in the past four weeks the re- ported death rate has msen from 3.4 daily to 5. Heavy equipment is increasingly used on unarmed people, including helicopter gunships. Arrests continue, as does every kind of repression. The regime isn’t stupid. It ‘knows full well that cameras d reporters didn’t create the Sabian 2 apartheid did and does. They have sown the wind and will reap the whirl- wind, cameras or no cameras. sae The public be damned - A chilling view of how determined the U.S. ‘and NATO are to tighten the nuc- lear noose around the USSR was provided recently in Holland. Under the plan to deploy 464 Ground Launched Cruise mis- siles (GLCRs) in Western Europe, the Netherlands was allotted 48. And since that day, the Dutch people have forged a mighty people’s movement to prevent their country from be- coming a nuclear belligerent (and target) with Reagan’s finger on the button. As the Summit approached, Holland’s *‘friends’’ turned the screws. Washington needed everything in place, they reasoned, as ‘‘bargaining chips’’ when Reagan met Gor- bachev.. The people were about to receive yet another lesson in democracy. Public opinion polls in the past two years showed a clear majority opposed to Cruise deployment. And, on October 26, a delegation of more than 20,000 handed Premier Ruud Lubbers a petition containing 3,750,000 signatures against the missile. Almost one of every three Dutch citizens was on the list, millions more were being recorded as opposed through their many organizations. eis Only days later Ruud Lub- bers and his government rati- fied deployment set to begin in 1988. In one swoop, Holland will be a nuclear attack base, PACIFIC TRIBUNE, DECEMBER 4, 1985¢ 9 lear necklace. Its sovereignty discarded, its citizens ignored, Holland sits vulnerable to meet Reagan’s European strategy. It’s quite a lesson for Canadians. The bright side to this story is the revulsion, anger and determination to prevent Lub- ber’s treachery from happen- ing. If he thinks he saw a peace upsurge in the last two years, indications are the next two will be something else. A friend in high places We’re told no less than 3,614 journalists descended on Geneva for the Summit talks and that they ran into the usual snags normal in this profession. For the working press, this means devising all sorts of methods to provide copy for hungry editors. One writer, however, was spared these trials of the trade. Ron Reagan Jr., covering the story for Playboy, was allowed to hang about his dad’s entour- age unhampered. No report on what Ron found out, but maybe we should check out next month’s centrefold.