Jennifer Harbury, American wife of a Guatemalan freedom fighter who was tortured for two years and then killed, spoke on behalf of the many who have suffered the same fate at the hands of the CIA and Latin Americans trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia.
4:00 Jennifer Harbury spoke. She is the American wife of the tortured and slain Mayan peasant Efrain Bamaca Velasquez of Guatemala. Jennifer described how her husband was captured and held for two years, repeatedly and horribly tortured, confined in a full body cast, and finally killed either by being thrown from a helicopter or by being chopped to pieces.
Efrain grew up in the mountains of Guatemala under conditions of extreme deprivation. For 17 years he fought as a guerrilla before being captured in 1992 — during the Clinton administration and exactly 500 years after the landing of Columbus in the New World. The CIA knew within 6 days of Efrain's capture where he was, but this information was withheld from other parts of the government. In fact, the story was put out that he had committed suicide to avoid capture.
To substantiate this story, members of the death squad took another young Mayan peasant, an 18-year-old who had been forcibly conscripted into the Guatemalan Army, tied him up, and brutally killed him — his face and skull kicked and smashed in until he was unrecognizable.
But Efrain was held in secret, along with 300 others captured about the same time. While the treatment of Efrain has gained special prominence because he was married to an American, it is important to remember that he was only one of many who suffered a similar fate. All 300 were eventually killed.
It is now known that the torture was carried out with the full cooperation of the CIA, in concert with eight to twelve other individuals who had been trained at the School of the Americas.
As Patrick Martin has reported, "Both Efrain Bamaca Velasquez and a second man, Michael Devine, an American citizen and hotel-keeper in Guatemala, were murdered on the orders of Guatemalan Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, a paid CIA informant. The killings, which came after terrible torture, were carried out with the knowledge and approval of Alpirez's CIA controllers."
[http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/mar2000/usla-m21.shtml]
Alpirez had a long history of participation in genocide, having played a part of the liquidation of Guatemalan peasants throughout the 1980s.
Nor are Efrain and his 300 compatriots isolated cases of CIA and American involvement in torture and death. In fact, their story is merely representative of what has gone on throughout Latin America over many years now, with the School of the Americas playing a prominent role in providing training in terror to Latin Americans and connections into their death squads to such American interests as the CIA.