Who Killed Nick Blake?
Rosenau, William
William Rosenau WHO KILLED NICK BLAKE? Returning to Guatemala in search of a friend's dead brother. Dominated by rugged mountains and studded with volcanoes, blessed with near-perfect weather and...
...Nevertheless, Sam meets with Ambassador Thomas Strook and his deputies...
...He said that, as he went through customs at the airport, "they saw on my passport that I was born in Cuba...
...Guatemala's last president, Vinicio Cerezo, "ran rings around the military," according to a Western diplomatic source...
...J orge I. Dominguez, a professor of j government at Harvard and a prominent Latin Americanist, warned me about Guatemala before I left...
...Think of the militant "students" who seized the U.S...
...The head of the department's Office of Per-sonnel Responsibility was one of those detained, according to Cardenas...
...According to a Guatemalan press account, "Over 600 children, many of them still nursing, as well as 75 dogs and hundreds of adults, were left in the streets...
...For one thing, Nick Blake was one of the few North American reporters killed in the course of the government's counterinsurgency campaign...
...When the other American saw what was happening, he tried to communicate by radio...
...We were sitting around his office, telling horror stories about Central America...
...Mexican narcos are the masterminds behind the poppy business, although Guatemala's home-grown guerrillas appear to be involved in the trade as well...
...People will kill you, and they'll get off," said the diplomat...
...Many are outright criminals themselves...
...There is an air of violence, bodies are everywhere...
...A patrolman called 'Polo' shot one of the North Americans, killing him immediately...
...Justice Department, in an effort to reform the police, is trying to train them in modern investigative techniques...
...doubt that the military has changed since the early 1980s, when it massacred thousands of Indians in an effort to "dry up the sea in which the guerrilla fish were swimming...
...Rios Montt, during whose 198283 dictatorship the army massacred thousands of people...
...The army, he said, is the country's best-run and most efficient institution, "with its own banks, which are very profitable...
...Back in Guatemala City, we learn that a trip the embassy had arranged to San Marcos, a department along the Mexican border, has been scrubbed...
...The embassy has met with every Guatemalan remotely connected with the case, Ambassador Strook says, and there is nothing else the embassy can do...
...Embassy chronology of the case puts it, "The family seeks only bones, not justice...
...The Camino Real Hotel, our base of operations, sits in the heart of Zona 10, the "nice" part of Guatemala City...
...The patrols, organized by the army as part of its thirty-year counterinsurgency campaign, were made up of poorly armed and trained Indians...
...As one American expatriate explained, "The liberals who come down here are denying the humanness of the Indians...
...Guatemala, I told him, impressed me as genuinely scary—the sinister cars with tinted windows, the guns, the police...
...The lake is stunning...
...Some of those the army killed were thugs and criminals, and the Indians, for the most part, suffer no qualms about their removal...
...As a U.S...
...He was then shot and killed by Vicente Cifuentes...
...It can run anything...
...In March 1985, Blake wound up in El Llano during his search for the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), one of the country's four guerrilla factions...
...For one thing, he's not afraid to mention the words "human rights," and he freely admitted to me that mistakes had been made during Guatemala's military rule...
...It was the most magnificent spectacle we ever saw...
...It's easy to come down here and dump on Guatemala," says a Western diplomat...
...But Gramajo's sentiments also make him a dangerous "liberal" among the country's army officers—as does the fact that he's at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government on a year-long fellowship paid for by the gringos...
...Ever since then, Americas Watch has hated us," he says...
...Even the airport, with its skulking, chain-smoking officials, was vaguely menacing...
...next to the lake is Panajachel, a once-quaint community overrun by buses, knick-knack shops—and hippies, most of them blond and apparently German...
...The chain-smokers were still hanging around customs, but they didn't seize anybody...
...strictly enforced law and order while in charge, and most Guatemalans were grateful to be able to walk the streets safely at night...
...They don't want them to have TVs, washing machines...
...While the Guatemalan supreme court has taken many risks to consolidate civilian democratic rule, most notably barring Gen...
...A Western diplomat describes Rios Montt—an ordained preacher in the "Church of Word," a California-based evangelical sect—as "a nut, a religious nut...
...Affluent tourists have begun to trickle back, lured by the promise of colorful Indians, the wonders of Lake Atitlan, and massive Mayan ruins...
...And they didn't investigate, so we left...
...But the place is evil...
...The police burned down a few huts and sent a handful of people to the hospital...
...In fact, the airport looked a little better than the last time I had been there...
...After five years of meetings with U.S...
...His younger brother Sam has been down to Guatemala nearly twenty times in the last five years, and I accompanied him during his most recent trip...
...Sam decides to do some more work on the Blake case...
...On half a dozen occasions, poppy farmers have shot at DEA crop-dusters, and the DEA sends helicopters armed with large-caliber machine guns to protect them...
...But there something went wrong, and they never made it to El Quiche...
...Human rights groups, including Americas 'Watch, say this will lead to more repression...
...Another Western diplomat, chuckling nervously, joked that unnamed Guatemalans might "get him" for all the rash statements he's made about the country's military officers and politicians over the years...
...Everybody who's anybody in Guatemala hangs out here, and a steady stream of Jeep Wagoneers, BMWs, and large vans with tinted windows flows up to its doors...
...Efrain Rios Montt...
...2 When the police aren't raping, they're busy gunning down street urchins and razing shantytowns...
...Last summer, for instance, an anti-riot platoon showed up.at a dump in Zona 3 to evict some 500 families from their pitiful nylonand-cardboard shacks...
...We had elections because the military allowed it," one former student leader told me...
...officials and Guatemalan army officers, trips to the country's western highlands, government-to-government meetings, forensic expeditions, FBI probes, and the interrogation of witnesses, suspects, and informants, the Blakes have concluded that Nick was murdered by members of the civil patrol in the remote village of El Llano, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991 17 on the border between the departments of Huehuetenango and El Quiche...
...No one has described it better than Stephens: From a height of three or four thousand feet, we looked down upon a surface shining like a sheet of molten silver, enclosed by rocks and mountains of every form . . . rising from five hundred to five thousand feet in height...
...But the place is evil...
...Gramajo also repeatedly mentioned the importance of maintaining civilian control of the military...
...Lawyers with brains refuse judgeships, preferring the more lucrative world of private practice, with the result that judges are drawn from the dregs of the Guatemalan legal community...
...officials went to El Llano on a fruitless search for remains...
...Their goal seems to be to try and spend as little money as the "natives," which infuriates the locals, who depend on their hard currency for their livelihood...
...It was not these charms, however, but a remnant of the bad old days, that brought me to Guatemala...
...in January, Jorge Antonio Serrano became the country's new democratically elected president...
...Civilian rule seems firmly in place...
...After attending a public flogging in the all-Indian town of Santo Tomas, he noted that the abolishment of this cruel and unusual punishment had been "one of the reforms instituted by the Central government of Guatimala [sic...
...But relative calm has returned in the past three years...
...Two years after their disappearance, an informant who had lived in the village came forward...
...If they'd do that to a Harvard professor, what would they do to me the next time I showed up in the country...
...There was a wave of killings last August carried out by the security forces, and they were unmistakably not investigated by the Guatemalan legal authorities...
...There is an air of violence, bodies are everywhere...
...4 T es easy to come down here and 1 dump on Guatemala," says a Western diplomat...
...This is West of the Pecos, like the United States in the 1840s, where everyone carries a gun...
...Later, as pressure from the U.S...
...Dominguez had visited Guatemala in 1982, during the dictatorship of Gen...
...State Department insists that the army has loosened its vise-grip on Guatemala, but to judge from the phalanxes of officers who frequent the Camino, they remain a powerful force...
...Minister to Central America, illustrated a hundred and fifty years ago in his fuddy-duddy, high-Victorian masterpiece Incidents of Travel in Central America Chiapas and Yucatan...
...Blake and Davis, said the informant, were taken away from the village by the local patrol, and searched...
...They are among the biggest supporters of Gen...
...To the disgust of most Guatemalans, the North American and European bourgeoisie were replaced by penny-pinching hippies and guerrilla-groupie activists from the United States, Germany, and Sweden...
...human-rights organizations, for whom Guatemala and its armed forces remain a locus of evil...
...Guatemalans are growing more and more opium poppies out there, and for the last couple of years the U.S...
...The police took me into a side room, searched me, and photographed me...
...Blake and journalist Griff Davis had passed through half a dozen patrols by the time they reached El Llano...
...Speed bumps and other obstacles have guarded the entrance ever since some terrorists half-heartedly tossed a hand grenade into the lobby a while ago...
...Dominated by rugged mountains and studded with volcanoes, blessed with near-perfect weather and hospitable inhabitants, Guatemala was once a mecca for prosperous gringo pleasure-seekers...
...El Salvador, we agreed, was kind of tranquil...
...Last July, Guatemalan and U.S...
...It's time to get out of Guatemala...
...They want them to keep sitting in the dirt, selling their tortillas...
...According to Sam Blake, these suspicions angered Americas Watch, which argued that the military must have killed the journalists...
...In 1985, Nick Blake, an American journalist working for the Toronto Globe and Mail, disappeared and was apparently murdered while searching for guerrillas in Huehuetenango, a remote "conflicted" region in the country's western highlands...
...Initially, their friends and family were led to believe by the U.S...
...For one thing, students in Guatemala, as in the rest of the Third World, are students until they graduate—and most of them never do...
...The Guatemalan police almost never collect evidence, track down witnesses, or carry out any other aspect of a criminal investigation...
...Drug Enforcement Agency has been spraying plants with the herbicide Roundup...
...They have experience...
...Embassy in Tehran...
...for another, his family had enough pull with then-Vice President George Bush to get the State William Rosenau is coordinator of research for the National Security Program of the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University...
...Knapsacks, sandles, and baggy purple unisex pants passed by as we feasted...
...The "Blake Case" is hardly typical of the human-rights abuses that plagued the country during the 1980s...
...Heymann told the justice minister that if no investigation was pursued, he and his group would leave...
...Hector Gramajo, the recently retired defense minister, is often cited as an example of the new military...
...Harvard Law School Professor Phillip B. Heymann, who had been running a U.S...
...The Indians so revered by American liberals and the Euro-left are themselves incredibly primitive, as John L. Stephens, the U.S...
...Agency for International Development program to reform the judiciary, gave up in disgust last summer...
...political reasons...
...Nothing, as it turned out...
...The area around Lake Atitlan, a few hours' drive from Guatemala City, is a good place to look at Indians and hippies...
...Many told me that, if the supreme court had permitted his candidacy, Rios Montt, not Serrano, would have been inaugurated in January...
...Given this mania for violence, it seems naive for human rights groups to insist that every student and "activist" who turns up dead was killed for 'The U.S...
...Rios Montt from last November's elections, the rank-and-file judiciary is unimpressive...
...As Americas Watch chairman Robert J. Bernstein told the New York Times last December, "I think Harvard is possibly being used to improve the image of a man who has a lot to explain...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1991...
...Last May, police chief Geovanni Valerion Cardenas announced that 150 policemen had been arrested for rape, torture, and other "delinquent acts" during the previous year...
...plates—mostly from places like 'Texas and California—attests to the size of the car-theft problem...
...Even today, the Indians have a high tolerance for brutality, even amongst themselves...
...Although it's clear who pulled the trigger—amazingly, the Blakes have a photo of Cifuentes—no remains have been found...
...High above Atitlan sits the Indian town of Solola...
...Department to launch a massive investigation...
...Members of the civil patrol were questioned, but "no new information" was gained, according to the embassy chronology...
...Sam and I, freely acknowledging our hopelessly gringo lineage, tore into bloody Uruguayan steaks and swilled Gallo ("rooster"), the Guatemalan national beer...
...But nothing ever gets done about it...
...In the absence of legal means for settling disputes, Guatemalans from all walks of life rely on machetes and firearms...
...The authorities eventually let him go, he said...
...There are plenty of 40-year old students running around San Carlos and other universities, and there are lots of opportunities for them to get involved in drug trafficking, petty jealousies, car theft, and other intrigues.' North American liberals, members of "faith-based" organizations, ex-Sandalistas, and hippies continue to romanticize Guatemalans—particularly if those Guatemalans happen to be Indians...
...but within the last month, at the wish of the Indians themselves . . . new whipping-posts had been erected in all the villages...
...At this point, the Blakes have no particular interest in seeing the men responsible brought to trial—in Guatemala, that's impossible, anyway...
...and Guatemalan authorities mounted, the remains apparently were exhumed and burned in an attempt to eradicate any trace of them...
...Nut or not, he 'The vast number of cars in Guatemala with U.S...
...Gen...
...Such talk delights the State Department, which sees the general as a civilized Latin the United States can work with...
...The guerrillas had nothing to do with the murders...
...He is equally suspect among U.S...
...They were not happy to see the North Americans," according to the informant's deposition...
...Thegrim corridor we shuffled through had been redecorated with large, improbable photos of grinning Indians and other citizens of the Guatemalan "fatherland," as the official literature calls it...
...Serrano, having replaced "Vinicio" (like Fidel, he's known universally by his first name), "will realize that the military can be controlled...
...By the late 1970s, however, a Cuban-backed guerrilla insurgency and massive human rights violations by the military put an end to upscale Yanqui tourism...
...Embassy and the Guatemalan High Command that the EGP had murdered them...
...Yet there's no 'The Banco del Ejercito is one such army financial institution, with branches all over the capital...
...The U.S...
...The Liberal party had abolished this remnant of barbarity...
Vol. 24 • April 1991 • No. 4
