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DePaul University WBEZ 91.5 FM National Public Radio in Chicago Gretchen Helfrich, Producer
Baseball, Harry Cary reminds us, is a game of inches. In some countries, the game of inches has a different name: It is called life. In the middle of a long Guatemalan night in 1993, a group of men armed with military weapons stopped a public bus on a rural highway. Dressed in military shirts, but wearing civilian pants and ski masks, they ordered everyone off. Everyone, that is, except for one passenger -- Carlos Gomez Lopez, a labor union leader who, despite having received death threats, had recently filmed army harassment of dissident refugees returning from Mexico.
Carlos Gomez Lopez Mr. Gomez Lopez was asleep in the back of the bus. Several of the intruders approached him. Telling him, "You're going to die, marxist dog," one then shot him a few inches from the heart. Assuring their accomplices that he was dead, the intruders took his camera equipment, shot out the tires of the bus, and fled. If the story had ended there, it would have been one more episode in Guatemala's national nightmare. Another activist assassinated. But it did not end there. Miraculously, Carlos Gomez Lopez survived. When the police refused to take him to a hospital, a good samaritan passer-by did so. When customs agents later tried to prevent him from boarding a flight to the United States for specialized treatment, an insistent Guatemalan physician escorted him onto the plane. Four years later, thanks to treatment at Chicago's Marjorie Kovler Center for the treatment of survivors of torture, Mr. Gomez Lopez has made an astonishing recovery. Now married and living in Chicago, he is once again working for Guatemalan human rights organizations. And more. He demands justice. He refuses to accept the usual pro forma criminal investigation of his case which, like nearly all such cases in Guatemala, went nowhere. With the pro bono services of Chicago lawyer John Graettinger, a seasoned litigator, Mr. Gomez Lopez filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an arm of the Organization of American States in Washington, D.C. In its annual report, to be formally presented to the Organization this June, the Commission has now ruled in his favor. The Commission finds that his attackers, though never identified, were agents of the government. It relies on their dress, weapons and modus operandi, as well as the threats against Mr. Gomez Lopez before and afterward, and the selective nature of the attack, which the Commission finds was both a reprisal for and an effort to thwart his work. Moreover, his case follows a pattern in Guatemala, reports the Commission, of "selective murder of officials, and community, union, university, and human rights, and other leaders, seeking thereby to instill generalized terror and to choke off the process of constitutional and democratic opening." The violence has slowed Guatemala's process of democratization and made it precarious, but has not defeated it. Unstoppable activists like Mr. Gomez Lopez, who continue to press ahead, deserve our support. And lawyers like Graettinger and the Inter-American Commission, which refused to settle for anything less than the truth, deserve our applause. Now it is Guatemala's turn at the plate. Will the government, which recently signed peace accords, comply with the Commission's recommendations to conduct a serious investigation and compensate Mr. Gomez Lopez for his injuries? Or is it still too soon to hope for justice in Guatemala?
This is Doug Cassel of DePaul University's Sullivan
Program for Human Rights in the Americas, for WBEZ's
World View.
For further information on this case, see "Carlos Gomez vs. Guatemala" at this site. |
