Church says Guatemalan army traded in Mayan children

  • The Guardian,
The Roman Catholic church in Guatemala has accused the country's armed forces of kidnapping, and possibly trading in, hundreds of Mayan children during the civil war that ended in 1996.

"What we have in our hands is the confirmation that children were used as war booty, that forced disappearance was used as an instrument of war against those most vulnerable, the children," said Neri Rodenas, director of the archdiocesan human rights office in Guatemala City.

The church has released the results of a seven-month investigation into 86 documented cases of minors who reportedly disappeared during the 36-year conflict.

The 200-page document, entitled Until we find you: the case of children disappeared in Guatemala's civil war, reveals that 74 of the children were abducted, almost exclusively by the army - but in some cases by pro-government militia, or leftwing guerrillas. The investigators said they have as many as 400 similar cases to investigate.

Presenting the report to a news conference in the capital, Bishop Mario Rios Montt said: "This report aims to prevent such instances of pain and suffering from occurring again in our country."

An spokesman for the army said it would cooperate fully with any investigations stemming from the report. Captain Jose Valladares said: "We have absolutely nothing to hide _ if we are summoned to court we will go."

The report says that most of the children were from the majority Mayan population and went missing in the west ern highlands in the early 1980s at the height of army repression against indigenous communities.

According to a 1999 UN-sponsored Truth Commission, more than 400 indigenous villages were razed by the military as it attempted to stamp out Mayan support for the leftwing guerrillas. More than 200,000 people are estimated to have been killed during the war.

One of the report's authors, Claudia Anleu, said: "Previously, it was thought that there were no children disappeared as in Chile or Argentina and that the war here had been so cruel that survivors had not been left."

But investigators now believe that the army deliberately seized the children from their fleeing parents, perhaps to prevent them joining the guerrillas, or to sell them into adoption.

Only three missing Guatemalan infants have so far been located and reunited their families.

Among them is Denise Becker, a young Mayan woman, who returned to Guatemala in June, 18 years after being taken away by soldiers during an army massacre in her village. Her real name is Dominga Sic. She grew up with an adoptive family in the US state of Iowa.

Investigators believe that tracking down other children will be a difficult task, especially as Guatemala was renowned for easy adoptions to foreign couples. Ms Anleu said: "We have not found the children yet. All we've done is confirm that there was forced disappearance of infants, and that if there are further investigations carried out, with a larger team of investigators, then the results will be greater."

The church could also find itself in trouble with the military, which still wields considerable power, if it begins to investigate the military's role in the country's murky past.

In April 1998, two days after publishing a damning report into army human rights abuses during the war, the report's principal architect, Bishop Juan Gerardi, was bludgeoned to death outside his parish home.

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