An honest cop

...Merida Escobar's story is unique in one respect...

...I really did not do these things...

...One witness concluded that the men were from "alla arriba"--"up there"-----colloquial for Guatemala's feared G-2 Intelligence...

...On the same grounds, in other circumstances (if for example I were a direct descendent of Thomas More), I may not claim my ancestor's heroism, courage, or wisdom...

...It has documented that Escobar's self-confessed "killer" didn't arrive in the capital until August 23--two weeks 22 November 1991...

...As accurate as the psychological observation is, and as ugly as the phenomenon it refers to is, something else can be found in the statement as well...

...Then they videotaped it with two police officers posing as news reporters...

...In the f'trst eight months of President Jorge Serrano's government, nearly five hundred extrajudicial killings have been documented by the Catholic archdiocese's Human Rights Office...

...The army, despite some dissent within the ranks, is participating in the talks with the aim of essentially negotiating the rebels' surrender...

...Such worries--and the failure to address them well, as economic times get tough--are responsible, among other factors, for the success of the neoNazi candidate for Louisiana governor, David Duke...

...PATRICK LACEFIELD Patrick Lacefield is associate director of the Commission on United States-Latin American Relations in Washington, D.C...

...The status quo in Guatemala means continued impunity by the security forces...

...That would be hard to believe in a similar situation in the U.S...

...Sources close to the talks joke that "the Guatemalan government will sign anything----on paper...

...In his report, filed September 29, Escobar fingered Noel de Jesus Beteta Alvarez as the killer and concluded that Mack's murder was a systematic operation involving numerous personnel, cars and motorcycles, and automatic weapons...

...Should the children of black lawyers or doctors be given preference over the children of unemployed white assembly-line workers in college admissions...

...But even if it were solved, like the relationship between Jews and Germans, something more than class would be involved here...

...We are not trying to solve our--the URNG's--problem by integrating ourselves on generous terms while all else remains unchanged...

...In the same way, you may--perhaps appropriately--fear that something of nazism was handed on in children of Nazis, but you may not assume it...

...It was a case of vengeance...

...But on August 9, he was gunned down in broad daylight, fifty meters outside National Police Headquarters...

...In truth, if we do not safeguard the unconditional demands of family life as a "school for virtue," we risk rationalizing away every human duty and loyalty, including the duty to understand those different from ourselves...

...Though Serrano's efforts to control inflation and stabilize the national currency draw kudos from business circles, the standard of living for the 85 percent of Guatemalans who live in poverty has dropped precipitously...

...An authority on Guatemala's estimated 1 million internal refugeesqisplaced by the country's three-decade-long civil war--she had been stabbed sixteen times as she left the offices of a progressive think tank on September 11...

...In addition, Escobar had sexually abused the man's wife, who had subsequently developed ovarian cancer...

...This explains in part the weight of wariness black Americans carry when they deal with whites...

...Pluralism, in other words, can defeat itself by so relativizing all values that the value of pluralism itself cannot be defended...

...I am not doomed to be what my father and grandfather were, if my father was a Nazi and his father an instigator of pogroms...

...The complications they involve may not be solved in the ways proposed by conventional liberalism, and conservatives have taken appropriate note of that fact...

...The National Police will say they caught the killer but, alas, the courts let him go...

...I have even met people who manage this, who have no religion, who downplay to the point of near-nothingness their religious or ethnic identity-they make white bread look positively dari n g - i n their desire not to be anything in particular...

...In another sense, however, it is the same old story for Guatemala...

...Finally, it is right, as Jean Elshtain observes, to "privilege" some sexual relationships over others...

...Should white Irish Americans pay reparations to black Americans on the grounds that, by virtue (or vice) of their being white they have oppressed black people-----even if their ancestors were busy being oppressed by the English, did not arrive in America until 1925, and may never personally have participated in racist structures...

...Merida Escobar's is one...

...They did test her blood for alcohol content...

...That was it," Escobar's boss National Police Chief Colonel Mario Enrique Paiz told me...

...Some people are born into this condition, a new phenomenon...

...Drug Enforcement Agency, Guatemala has become a major transshipment point for drugs entering the United States...

...They will fit well into a society that desires such citizens--but from what basis will they be able to tell us anything we might need to hear, or teach, or heal, or offer stories that could be instructive at any level that we need to know...

...He is not married, and never has been...

...I don't know that this calls for reparations of any sort, or quotas, and I am not sure that it can be solved governmentally...

...His investigation uncovered witnesses who testified to continued surveillance of Mack by heavily-armed men dressed in civilian clothes...

...I remember reading about an exchange between Joan Baez and a young black woman, who said, "You have been oppressing me for two hundred years...

...Former President] Vinicio Cerezo was elected in 1985 to bring peace and justice...

...a lot of kids live in places where, as is the case in one part of New 22 November 1991:679...

...Curiously, we don't know what we want as a people...

...But Escobar couldn't...

...We are not fighting to incorporate ourselves into the status quo...

...Such a neutral moral measure suggests, falsely, that the human activity of procreation is bereft of any unique meaning...

...The very fact that as a white man I ~ u i t e a c c i d e n t a l l y ~ o not encounter barriers that black people commonly encounter (do not, for example, have cabs routinely pass me by in Manhattan) is relevant...

...But let us not as a consequence simply plead neutrality about the value of procreative sexuality...

...But in Guatemala, where torture is an everyday tool of interrogation, it is inconceivable...

...For all the fine speeches and good will, there is a wave of violence selectively targeting possible postwar leaders of the popular movements...

...Just vengeance...

...The story, however, does not end there...

...The army and the security forces provide the protection needed and benefit handsomely...

...Political philosopher Michael Sandel warns that"a politics that's empty of larger meanings--moral, spiritual meanings, or for that matter, that's empty of any sense of a shared project--is not a democracy that can sustain itself...

...Tipped off far in advance, he is believed to have fled to Los Angeles...

...For the Catholic archdiocese, however, the case is anything but closed...

...When Escobar's report was publicly issued on November 20, Alvarez's name was nowhere to be found in it, key testimony had been excluded, and no conclusions were drawn as to motive or perpetrators...

...On the other hand, such definitions can be murderously inclusive...

...Still, Serrano has a problem...

...but it is a fact, and collective identities adhere to us whether we like it or not...

...OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey SINS OF THE FATHERS NOTHING PREORDAINED 6 he Germans will never forgive us for their having gassed us at Ausc h w i t z . " These words of a rabbi, quoted in a recent New York Times book review of The German Comedy by Peter Schneider, referred to a new form of anti-Semitism, which blames Jews for tamishing the self-image of their persecutors...

...The authorities did not take samples from Mack's fingernails--standard procedure in deaths involving a struggle--nor did they dust the area for fingerprints...

...Under pressure, Escobar's partner endorsed the "sanitized" version...

...On the tape, the supposed killer is cool, calm, and hasn't a mark on him...

...Most of the discussions going on about black/white relations now avoid the more troubling issue of class, because we would like to believe that this is not a major issue in America...

...Beteta Alvarez, an ex-soldier, had ties to G-2...

...And it means honest cops like Jose Merida Escobar put their lives on the line in more ways than one...

...Their conclusion: The killing was simply a common crime, perhaps a crime of passion...

...They also can't be sentimentalized away, as the rhetoric of some of Clarence Thomas's defenders suggested...

...Baez asked how old she was, and then pointed out that she wasn't old enough to have been oppressed for that long...

...He took from us all our hope...

...I want to be clear," URNG commandante Pablo Monsanto 678: Commonweal told me in Mexico City...

...His own political party holds barely 20 percent of the seats in Congress and just 13 of 330 mayoral positions...

...The man was getting a shoe shine in the plaza outside National Police Headquarters when he saw Escobar emerge from the building...

...No politics...

...677 after the slaying...

...It means a continued division of the country between the few who have the power--and wealth--and the many who hold little of either...

...For all their talk about the "honor and the integrity of the Army and the security forces," here the security forces were willing to assassinate one of their own and to pass it off as a common crime...

...But Escobar was a good c o , - a n d a thorough one...

...Let us respect and protect homosexuality as a personal value or choice...

...I have overheard a lot of arguments that go roughly like this: nationhood and religion are responsible for so much hatred and bloodshed that it would be better to adhere to neither, to see oneself simply as a self, not limited or defined by allegiance to anything else...

...The follow-up is what worries the URNG rebels, who have called for an end to impunity, abolition of forced recruitment into the army and rural civil defense patrols, and the dissolution of the clandestine security apparatus that snuffed out Myrna Mack's and Merida Escobar's lives...

...It is right for me to insist on that, and to insist that you may not absorb me into their deeds, their hatred, their cowardice...

...He happened to be carrying a gun a friend had lent him, and, in a fit of rage, he killed Escobar...

...The only breathing space that Serrano has is the dialogue for peace," Rony Ochaeta told me, referring to the negotiations taking place in Mexico City between the government and the rebels of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit (URNG...

...We need the "us," the identification that makes Germans and Jews see themselves not as individuals only but as people who come from something and know and remember it, with all its pain and complication...

...In his "confession," the man says that he and Escobar robbed a bank three years before and that Escobar cheated him of $5,000 from the take...

...He had the capacity and didn't use it...

...Ambassador Thomas Stroock has roused the ire of conservative Guatemalans by his forthright criticisms of the government on human rights issues...

...The papers quoted witnesses as seeing four men in a pickup truck with polarized windows racing from the scene...

...On the day of the murder, the accused was in far northern Chimaltenango...

...The people have lost faith...

...A lot of kids don't...

...They are the ideal post-Enlightenment products...

...The "us" is not the people who were gassed, but Jews who identify themselves with the victims of the Germans, for reasons of family and nation...

...I may hope that something was handed on, but can't claim it...

...And because his extrajudicial confession is not admissible in a Guatemalan court, the man will go free...

...The police detained a man on minor charges and gave him time to memorize a confession to Escobar's murder...

...We know we don't want a coup...

...You do have every right to suspect that something was handed on where you encounter defensiveness...

...As for the peace negotiations, prospects are uncertain...

...The Germans referred to here are not the Germans who did the gassing, but Germans who identify themselves with them, for reasons involving family and nation...

...The case is closed...

...Society can accommodate alternative visions of family life and childrearing, but it risks moral enervation if it displaces the biological family as its normative value, if it attempts to measure the meaning of all sexual relations by one overrationalized standard...

...I'm glad he had a strong grandfather and encouraging nuns...

...It was the first item President George Bush talked about with the Guatemalan President during Serrano's recent visit to the Oval Office...

...On July 4, 1991, the name of the presumed assassin was leaked to the press and the government reluctantly issued a warrant for Alvarez's arrest--nine months after his name was first broached...

...REPORT FROM GUATEMALA AN HONEST COP POLITICAL MURDER DIES HARD ~ , ~ , ~ etective Jose Merida Escobar was a member of the Guatemala National Police until he was D murdered outside police headquarters on August ~ w " A J 9. In September 1990 he and his partner had been assigned to investigate the murder of Myma Mack, a prominent Guatemalan anthropologist and human rights advocate...

...Escobar and his partner were assigned to write the report endorsing those conclusions...

...What happened, as Rony Ochaeta, director of the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala City, told me recently, is something else...

...The tape was aired on Guatemalan television on August 26-27 by order of the Interior Ministry and the National Police...

...What black Americans have to deal with is not a suddenly decreed "equality of opportunity," as if that could be made to happen by governmental fiat...

...While even Serrano's harshest critics judge him as an honest man of good intentions, all save government circles consider him unable to impose civilian control over the army and the police...

...I have signed my death warrant," Escobar told friends as he desperately sought help from human rights groups to leave the country...

...On August 26, the National Police declared that they had "broken the case" and apprehended Escobar's killer...

...That really isn't a bad point...

...Also, according to the U.S...