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Soldiers massacred 200 mayans { October 19 2003 }

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Story last updated at 7:03 a.m. Sunday, October 19, 2003

Grief over massacre fuses with election fears in Guatemala
BY LETTA TAYLER
Newsday
PLAN DE SANCHEZ, GUATEMALA--The shootings began at dusk, after soldiers rounded up nearly 200 Mayan peasants returning from a market along a remote mountain path.

Down went the men in their tattered straw hats, the barefoot children and the white-haired grandmothers. Down went the young mothers in brightly embroidered dresses, clutching babies to their chests. Their screams ebbed only as the troops doused gasoline on the house where the victims had been corralled and shot, and set it on fire.

By the light of those flames, the soldiers beat and raped 14 teenage girls they had set aside during the roundup. Then they slit the girls' throats or shot them, and left their corpses on a verdant hill.

"All that was left were piles of dead people, some with limbs cut off," said Juan Manuel Jeronimo, a subsistence farmer who lost 14 relatives in the 1982 massacre at Plan de Sanchez. "I couldn't even recognize my wife or children, their remains were so charred."

For Manuel and others who lost loved ones during Guatemala's brutal civil war, grief over the past is fusing with terror about the future: Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, the strongman widely believed responsible for the Plan de Sanchez massacre and hundreds of other war atrocities, is running for president.

Across the world, human rights groups and governments including the United States fear a Rios Montt victory could unravel what little democracy exists in Guatemala, a country wracked by poverty, violence and official corruption.

But nowhere is the fear -- and fury -- more palpable than in villages such as Plan de Sanchez, where troops during Rios Montt's presidency implemented what a United Nations-sponsored truth commission labeled a "scorched earth" campaign to quash leftist rebels.

"Rios Montt is the devil, nothing less," said Manuel, 58.

Two years ago, Plan de Sanchez joined 23 Guatemalan communities in a lawsuit charging Rios Montt with genocide. A special prosecutor is investigating whether to bring the case to trial.

Rios Montt, 77, a former evangelist preacher who is president of the Guatemalan legislature, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. He has denied any involvement in the massacres.

Praised by then-U.S. President Reagan during the 18 months in which he ruled this country after seizing power in a 1982 coup, Rios Montt remains one of the most powerful men in Guatemala.

A conservative populist, he hovers at third place in polls but has the best-oiled party machinery and could sway many undecided voters, political analysts say. After a 12-way runoff Nov. 9, voters will cast ballots for the top two candidates Dec. 28.

More than 200,000 people, most of them indigenous, died or disappeared during the 1960-96 civil war in Guatemala. The truth commission concluded that the worst carnage occurred during Rios Montt's brief rule, especially in Plan de Sanchez.

At least 184 people died in the massacre here the night of July 18, 1982, half of them women and children. Another 90 people disappeared in the days before and after. Few survivors, who hid nearby in forests or cornfields, were willing to speak on the record about what they heard or saw.

"We've been threatened that if we say anything, Rios Montt's people will come for us if he wins the elections," one man said.

The campaign is off to a bloody start.

More than a dozen members of opposition parties have been killed since June. Human rights offices have been ransacked and their workers threatened.

"It is a delicate situation. An outbreak of violence could happen at any time," said Tom Koenigs, chief of the United Nations mission in Guatemala.

Among his followers, Rios Montt is believed to be the man who will bring security to Guatemala and stand up for common folk in a nation where 57 percent of people live in poverty.

During the 1980s, "people were sick of the war, and Rios Montt said, 'No more,' " said Antonio Merida, 56, a factory guard in Guatemala City. "He combated corruption and crime and he helped the poor people. He'll do it again."

Critics aren't so sure. Under nearly four years of the Portillo administration, which Rios Montt is widely believed to control, nearly a half-billion dollars in public funds are missing, organized crime has flourished, and Guatemala has become a major transit point for drugs and undocumented immigrants bound for the United States.

And the wounds of war continue to fester.

"For a long time, I wanted to be dead, too," Manuel said as he showed a visitor the simple white chapel that villagers built at the Plan de Sanchez massacre site, atop the mass grave where victims are buried. Murals inside depict the slaughter. "But then I thought, who will seek justice?"



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Soldiers massacred 200 mayans { October 19 2003 }

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