A Beauty That Hurts: Life and Death in Guatemala, Second Revised Edition

13. The Daily News (1990)

thirteen Imake my way to my favorite table, in the corner of the patio where the light is good, and start to read. The waitress brings me coffee. She hovers, nods at the papers, and asks, “Don’t you ever get tired of all that news?” It is the summer of 1990, the time of year they call winter in Guatemala on account of the rains. I am here for several months, working with a translator on turning the English text of a book of mine into a Spanish-language edition. It is a slow, tedious process; sometimes progress is made not even sentence by sentence, but word by word. Reading the newspapers constitutes something of a break. “Not really,” I reply. “I like to know what’s going on.” “Nobody I know reads the newspapers as much as you do,” she says. “They find them too upsetting. Besides, they don’t have the time.” She leaves me to ponder our exchange. For better or worse, I do have the time. By summer’s end I have accumulated a larger pile of newspaper clippings than usual. Two items from El Gráfico of June 11 help put the country in social, economic, and political context. The first, with the headline “Guatemala: 6.4 Million Impoverished People,” states: With nine million inhabitants, Guatemala reflects conditions of poverty that embrace 71 percent of its population, a statistic that classifies the country as the worst off in this regard in all of Central America, according to a report released by the Instituto de Nutrición de Centroamérica y Panam á (incap). Data from incap reveal that poverty most seriously afflicts people living in rural areas, where the index pertains to 83.7 percent of the dAily news (10) the daily news 1 residents, the index for urban areas being 47 percent. incap’s figures lend support to the findings of the latest national survey of socio-demographic conditions, in which it was found that 83 percent of Guatemalan families live in poverty. Further analysis, specifically of families considered in dire need, shows that 64 percent of them earn 251 quetzales [at the time, $59 U.S.] or less each year. Poverty is most chronic, according to the national survey, in the northwestern departments of Huehuetenango and El Quiché, where 91.5 percent of families are affected. The second item, under the headline “Guatemala: 40,000 disappeared,” summarizes the proceedings of the “First National Seminar on the Effectiveness of Habeas Corpus.” Held in the civilized ambience of the Sheraton Conquistador Hotel, the seminar was reported by El Gráfico as revealing that “more than half of the 90,000 political disappearances that have occurred in Latin America in recent years relate to Central America.” The reporter covering the seminar further notes that most of the Central American cases involve Guatemala, “where more than 40,000 disappearances have been recorded and where no explanation has been given to the thousands of families who suffer on account of this phenomenon.” What the reporter failed to note is that no member of the government who had earlier promised to attend the seminar—representatives of the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Justice, and the Human Rights Office—actually showed up to discuss matters with members of non-governmental and international agencies who did. A couple of weeks later, on June 27, a story on the human rights situation appeared in the Prensa Libre, a Guatemalan newspaper whose official motto advocates journalism that is “independent, honorable, and dignified.” Careful to attribute what it states to the wire services of the Mexican daily El Excelsior, the story in the Prensa Libre runs: According to the [un] Commissioner for Human Rights in Central America, Guatemala heads the list of countries in that region in violation of human rights.With the coming to power of President [Vinicio] Cerezo, expectations were raised that an end would be put to the wave of terrorism unleashed by the military and death squads. But the [Cerezo] regime has been unable to distinguish itself in any way, or to leave behind a human rights record different from that of [military] dictatorships. Prensa Libre continues: a Beauty that hurts 2 According to statistics provided by the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission , during the time that President Cerezo has held office extralegal executions have taken the lives of two thousand people, while another two thousand have disappeared...