DEMOCRATIC OPENING'

...He denies that the Sandinistas are supplying the weapons: "We would never be politically or logis-tically so stupid...

...Send the military back to the barracks, cut taxes, cut the federal budget, and give incentives to local and foreign capital to invest in production...

...What's more, Mexico has removed many of the Guatemalan refugee camps from its southern contiguous border, which the Guatemalan military viewed as the rear-guard of the Guatemalan insurgency...

...The U.S...

...In August, the government announced it was auctioning off its gold reserves to pay for imported oil...

...If they refuse, they may be shot or placed in narrow pits with water up to their thighs, where most will collapse from exhaustion and drown within a day or two...

...Eddie Fischer, executive director of PEACE for Guatemala, a relief organization based in Washington, D.C., says the camp residents are "fortunate": "They're the ones who were able to get out, and who have a more or less constant food supply...

...The repression has been terrible...

...Nevertheless, in Washington the elections scheduled for November are being hailed as the "democratic opening" of Guatemala...

...They have enough beans and rice but no shoes for the children...

...All along the periphery of the conflict zone in the north are "model villages," where tens of thousands of Mayans who fled the counterinsurgency campaign have been relocated...

...Bullet holes still perforated the wall...

...In Paso Hondo camp, Manuel agrees...

...They can't function without executive complicity...

...The business sector blames the army for many of the problems, citing mismanagement and corruption...

...The Sandinistas do perhaps represent a threat to the region if they want to spread the revolution," says Cerezo...

...He calls for Guatemala's withdrawal from the Contadora process, which he describes as "a failure from the start that no one but the Sandinistas had ever intended to agree to...

...It has been the odd-man-out of every attempt to unify the Central American nations in a single military and diplomatic bloc against Nicaragua...

...embassy says the human rights situation has already improved...

...Within Guatemala, people in hiding are literally starving to death...

...The army will still be there...

...All of the candidates, as if on cue, emphasize the need to change Guatemala's image as a nation of flagrant human rights abuses and glaring social injustices...

...The five candidates running for president offer in its stead civilian rule and Reaganomics, Guatemala style...

...There is very little to do all day," says Manuel, who left his home and family in Huehuetenango, Guatemala, in 1981...

...It doesn't matter who wins," says one Western diplomat...

...They all have to move...

...The Mexican government provides the camps with food and some medical and housing assistance, but it is under pressure from Guatemala to repatriate the refugees, or at least to remove them from the border areas...

...This is not a defeated army like Argentina's...

...Few people doubt that the elections will bring a harder-line policy toward Nicaragua...

...As an urban guerrilla group, the PGT almost no longer exists," he says...

...Dr...

...The successive waves of repression have Paul L. Goepfert has reported from Central America for two years for Pacific News Service, the Baltimore Sun, U.S.A...

...Another group, FAR, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, continues to operate in the sparsely populated jungles of the eastern Peten Province, though its national presence is minimal...

...General Oscar Mejia Victores, the Guatemalan ruler, claims the camps harbor "persons committed to subversion" and are, therefore, a threat to his country...

...In July 1984, Mexican authorities burned two of the camps, cut off food to about 7,000 refugees who refused to be transferred, and closed the camps to national and international press and human rights organizations...

...U 'Fortunate' Refugees In Paso Hondo refugee camp, one of more than sixty such camps near the Guatemalan border in Chiapas State, Mexico, ninety Guatemalan escapees live with one source of running water...

...Students, workers, and housewives engaged in two days of pitched battles with the army and police, burning buses and police cars and exchanging fire bombs for tear gas...

...It's hard to believe that it's really going to give up that power now—even if it does let a civilian move into the National Palace...

...George L. Leventhal (George L. Leventhal is a free-lance writer in Washington, D.C...

...The rebels, however, keep a watchful eye on events in Nicaragua...

...We are the sons-in-laws of Reaganomics," says Jorge Carpio Nicolle, the candidate of the center party...

...Guatemala will change its position on Nicaragua after this election...

...The Guatemalan army will have to think twice about committing troops elsewhere...

...It's simple economics that even the extreme Right can understand," says Carpio...

...We control very little territory, our civilian base has been killed off, and the population is tightly controlled by the army," says the EGP representative in Managua...

...No candidates of the Left will be participating in the upcoming presidential campaign...

...It will take time...

...Unemployment stands near 40 per cent, the price of basic goods has tripled since December, and the quetzal, the local currency, has fallen drastically...

...But times are tough now, and we can't afford to keep them in the Palace any longer...

...The ORPA spokesman predicts an intensifying rebel campaign by the end of the year...

...Most of the presidential candidates criticize the current Guatemalan government for being too lenient toward the Sandinistas...

...An estimated 46,000 refugees have inhabited the camps since 1981, and perhaps another 45,000 live illegally in towns or on farms in Chiapas...

...A hike in bus fares and prices of bread and milk in early September caused an explosion of violent popular protest that had not been seen for many years in the streets of this tightly controlled capital...

...The anomaly can be partially explained by Guatemala's relationship with Mexico, which has spearheaded the Contadora process...

...We have to have patience with the democratic process...

...Whoever is elected," says a Western military attache close to the Guatemalan army, "any civilian will be hard-pressed to keep stability in his government if he tries to change three basic things: the strategy of the Army's counterinsurgency campaign, control of the civil patrols, and the military budget...

...The electoral campaign began amidst rumors of military coups, an increasing wave of political violence, and the worst economic crisis in decades...

...For those who continue to resist, he warns, "there are other legal means we can use...

...During the last five years of conflict in the region, the right-wing military regime of Guatemala has remained strangely aloof from the campaign against the Sandinistas...

...This is a victorious army...

...While the army's official slice of the national budget is 10 per cent, sources close to the budget accounting office say that with the perquisites and corruption of the army, "you could easily add another 20 per cent without underestimating the take...

...No matter who wins, no matter whether the guerrillas or the Sandinistas provide the pretext for repression, "it will be the army that is giving the orders," he says...

...A spokesperson for the EGP, the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, which operates in northern Quiche and Huehuetenango provinces, concedes that the rebels are on the defensive...

...The Army has been running and robbing Guatemala for forty years," says Manuel Villanueva, sixty-two, a physician in a working-class neighborhood of Guatemala City...

...I don't say that one dictatorship is good because it may be revolutionary and another is bad because it is military...

...If Nicaragua is invaded," the ORPA representative says, "the war will not be confined to Nicaragua...

...In both places there is oppression," he says...

...Under pressure from Washington and its own business sector, the army may yield the formal trappings of power this November...

...One source close to the State Security Service says each of the twenty-three field commanders receives $25,000 a month, which is in turn distributed to junior officers...

...Several of the presidential candidates claim that the army and the security forces are responsible for the institutionalized state of violence in the country...

...Over the years, the army high command has acquired vast tracts of land and concentrated its financial power in the Bank of the Army, the sixth largest in the country...

...In September 1984, for instance, Guatemala resisted U.S...

...I only pray that the coming elections here will bring some peace to these people...

...Unless Guatemala, as the elder brother of Central America, joins in a united front with the other democratic countries of El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica," says Jorge Serrano, candidate of a moderate rightist party, "there will be no solution to the Nic-araguan problem...

...P not eliminated the guerrilla challenge, but they have effectively killed off or driven underground nearly all of the politicians who have proposed fundamental changes in Guatemala's traditional ruling structure...

...like other refugees, he is not allowed to work for pay or to leave the camp without permission...

...We buy them on the black market in Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Panama, where countless military officials are growing rich on our business...

...The priest pointed to a small shrine in the room...

...My father fled the country with twenty-two bullet holes in his body...

...COMAR maintains that relocation will advance the refugees' own health and safety, providing new opportunities for medical attention and work...

...For all the talk, though, not one of the candidates would consider bringing any army or state security officers to trial for human rights abuses, as has been done in Argentina...

...military aid...

...Three of the candidates are from the extreme moderate Right, with one candidate in the center and one slightly left of center, given the context of Guatemalan politics...

...Wherever there isn't a military garrison, there are round-the-clock civil patrols...

...Despite the deprivations they must endure, escapees in the camps are better off than Guatemala's "internal refugees," who have left their homes because of the government's counterinsurgency campaign but who remain in the country...

...They will enter your home and threaten you to keep you in fear...

...Soap and medicine are scarce...

...He had just learned that one of his young Mayan catechism teachers had been shot down by unknown assassins...

...However, the death-squad activity which had declined during the previous regime of General Rios Montt is again in the ascendancy, and disappearances are now endemic...

...They have dried up the sea...

...Despite the recent rumblings, the American embassy in Guatemala expresses optimism that the elections will be carried out and will help Guatemala shed its image as one of the most repressive regimes in Latin America...

...banks, many observers here believe that a quick Mexican divorce may be in the offing...

...We want to aid those Nicaraguans who want democracy in their homeland...

...They do not respect anybody's rights...

...We'll never get rid of the guerrillas until we eradicate the discontent in which they breed...

...DEMOCRATIC OPENING Whoever is elected in Guatemala, the army wins BY PAUL L. GOEPFERT The tall American missionary priest in a Stetson hat stood at the window of his home overlooking Guatemala's Lake Atitlan...

...It still protects plantation workers' rights by militarily enforcing the minimum wage laws that are flouted elsewhere in the country...

...Here we have the fear of relocation or deportation...

...The Guatemalan security forces often take into custody suspects for questioning about subversive activity, while officially denying that they have done so," the report states...

...One COMAR official says 18,000 refugees have already moved of their own accord...

...For thirty years, this country—the largest and economically most influential in Central America—has been ruled by a succession of military regimes that assumed power after the CIA-supported overthrow of the Arbenz government in 1954...

...In 1977, the Carter Administration cut off aid to Guatemala because of human-rights abuses, and Congress has been reluctant to go along with Reagan Administration requests to restore aid...

...In a guerrilla war, the most important thing is control of the population, and the army has done it...

...They have turned Mao's dictum that the guerrilla is the fish that swims in the sea of the people around on the guerrillas...

...When a tense calm finally returned to the city after the government rescinded the price hikes, six people were dead, twenty-five wounded, and 941 had been detained by the police...

...We can't demand that it be so pure...

...Throughout the 1970s, Guatemala enjoyed a booming economy with an average annual growth rate of 6 per cent—despite the extreme poverty that continued to beset the vast majority of its Indian population...

...If the elections meet with the financial approval of the U.S...

...But many of the refugees refuse to leave Chiapas, where the terrain reminds them of home and the people have close cultural ties to Guatemala...

...Congress and the U.S...

...But that may be all that changes...

...ambassador to Guatemala, Alberto M. Piedra, also strikes a cautious note...

...pressure and joined Nicaragua in agreeing to sign the first Contadora regional peace accord...

...It would be an error to think that everything will calm down with the election of a civilian president," says Ambassador Piedra...

...Today, and Newsday...

...And nothing will change...

...The U.S...

...Strategically, it is brilliant what the Guatemalan army has done without U.S...

...Relations between COMAR and the refugees have improved in recent months, and the government is now attempting to induce refugees to move to new camps...

...There have been many mistakes made, and this has caused a loss of support among the people and divisions among the leadership...

...When there are problems or a coup in the making, of course more money is needed," the source says...

...He has lived for a year-and-a-half at Paso Hondo...

...After so many years of violence and dictatorship, many Guatemalans may feel that such a miracle could come only from the realm of prayer...

...And you don't dare talk of bringing a victorious army to trial...

...Of course it will be blamed on the Sandinistas and used against them," he says, "but these things are not coordinated like that...

...All males under sixty are required to participate in the civil patrol, and in the countryside civil patrol members are forced to inform on their neighbors and to participate in assassinations ordered by the army, according to reports to local Amnesty International representatives...

...Members of the National Assembly openly called for the resignation of the government, led by General Hum-berto Mejia Victores, and closed-door meetings of the army high command sent rumors of a coup flying through local newsrooms...

...Though it began as simply the armed guard of the national oligarchs, the army has evolved into an institution that competes with the business sector as an economic equal...

...A young man whose father had been a leader of the PGT, the Guatemalan Communist Party, gives an even bleaker description...

...The Administration managed to have $300,000 allocated to Guatemala for military training this year, and Congress has allotted $5 million more in foreign military sales for each of the next two years, but only if the President certifies that an elected civilian government is in power...

...Still, the Reagan Administration needs to burnish the image of Guatemala to placate the U.S...

...But in 1981, the growth rate turned negative, the balance of trade fell into the red, tax revenue declined along with production, the deficit skyrocketed, and the Central Bank began to print money to pay bills...

...It was a memorial to his predecessor at the mission, who had spoken out against the deaths and disappearances of his parishioners and had been slain in that room by unknown assassins...

...Transportation came to a standstill, public schools were closed, work stoppages affected many businesses, and the army occupied the university for forty-four hours...

...It has dried up the sea' The army, indeed, has scored some successes against the guerrillas, as a visit to the interior of the country quickly reveals...

...The current border was not fixed until 1882...

...Look, these military guys were the only thing between us and the guerrillas, and they got used to being paid well for their services," says one executive who requested anonymity...

...Vinicio Cerezo, candidate of the Christian Democrats, generally supports the present regime's position of neutrality, but even he wants a more interventionist policy...

...The renewal of military aid is important to Washington both to contain Guatemala's insurgents and to tighten the grip on Nicaragua...

...The army has turned Mao's dictum that the guerrilla is the fish that swims in the sea of the people around on the guerrillas...

...During the last three decades, various guerrilla organizations have emerged to challenge the regime, only to be met by overwhelming counterinsurgency campaigns whose most distinguishing feature has been the extraordinarily high number of civilian, noncombat deaths...

...We don't want either kind of dictatorship...

...The Sandinistas understand that every revolution has its own time schedule...

...If the head of state says there will be no more death squads, there will be no more death squads," says Jorge Serrano Elias, a moderate right-wing candidate...

...As in many Latin American countries that have recently shifted to civilian rule, the faltering state of Guatemala's economy has increased the pressure on the military...

...In the plaza below, young Indian boys were raising dust with an impromptu soccer game, while soldiers in tiger-striped camouflage fatigues listlessly patrolled the street...

...But this may have been only a marriage of convenience between the two often hostile Latin neighbors...

...we don't want to knock him over the head for the first little mistake he makes...

...After at least seventeen military attacks on the camps by Guatemalan forces between 1982 and 1984, the Mexican government—angry over the incursions into its territory but reluctant to militarize its border with Guatemala-began forcibly relocating refugees to Campeche...

...We have plenty of arms," says an ORPA contact in Managua...

...There is considerable evidence that harsh treatment and/or torture is inflicted upon detained persons in Guatemala...

...Noncom-bat killings of a political nature have dropped from 483 a month during the height of the 1981 counterinsurgency campaign to forty-four a month last year...

...Mexico supplies financially stricken Guatemala with cheap oil...

...They are the friends and relatives of Guatemalans who have fallen victim to government-sponsored killing...

...It's like a child growing up...

...All of Central America will blow...

...The Mexican Refugee Aid Commission (COMAR), which controls distribution of assistance in the camps, intends to transfer the Guatemalans to new camps hundreds of miles east in Cam-peche and Quintana Roo in the Yucatan Peninsula...

...Even a U.S...

...And no one's economic program can do that unless we are able to regain the respect and the financing of the international community...

...Villanueva, between dispensing pills for babies with parasites and providing tranquilizers to a woman whose son has disappeared, just shakes his head...

...This is a daily reminder of the limits to what can be done here," the priest said...

...State Department report acknowledges that disappearances are on the rise, and the report places some of the blame on the state security forces...

...Only the ORPA, the Revolutionary Organization of the People in Arms, maintains a high profile, operating along the mountainous slopes and coffee, sugar, and cotton plantations of the Pacific coast...

...Don't even mention Argentina around here," says Luis Martinez Mont, party secretary of the Christian Democratic Party...

...These people understand power—all the way back to the Spanish Conquest," says a Western military attache stationed in Guatemala...

...They are dependent on the government and under strict surveillance by the army or civil patrol...

...But there, they will kill anybody...

...Indian women in elaborate headdresses dozed on piles of brightly woven cloth, waiting for tourists who no longer arrive...

...Congress...

...Shaken by these economic troubles, the Guatemalan elite has sent close to a billion dollars abroad in the last three years, leaving the country with little foreign exchange to buy necessary imports...

...It's power, not terror...

...Serrano promised to call off the death squads if elected...

...We want to maintain our neutrality but a more active neutrality...

...Our expectations shouldn't be so high...