Guatemala: Summary of Amnesty International's concerns: January 1995 - January 1996

Guatemala: Summary of Amnesty International's concerns: January 1995 - January 1996

Comments:
Amnesty International continues to document a disturbing pattern of human rights violations in Guatemala. Extrajudicial executions, "disappearances", torture, death threats, harassment and intimidation persist. The violations have been directed at many sectors of society including: trade unions and popular organizations, human rights defenders, journalists, students, religious personnel, those attempting to investigate past human rights violations, witnesses, former refugees and displaced people returning to their lands and street children. Of particular concern is the alarming level of threats and attacks that have been reported against human rights defenders during the year. Some have been the subject of verbal or written death threats as a result of their work. Others have been attacked and killled. The perpetrators of these human rights violations are mainly the police and military and army-created civil patrols. The government also encouraged the formation of new civilian "self-defence" squads to be armed and trained by the military. These and other vigilante-style groups were implicated in abuses against perceived opponents of the government, reportedly disguising the attacks as common crimes to avoid official accountability. There has been little progress in clarifying the tens of thousands of past abuses. Those responsible for human rights violations continue to benefit from almost total impunity. To date, none of those responsible for the deaths of thousands of people during the late 1970s and early 1980s at the height of the army's counter-insurgency campaign, have been brought to justice. During 1995, independent forensic groups undertook further exhumations at sites where large-scale extrajudicial executions had been reported during this period. Several hundred remains were uncovered, but Amnesty International knew of no case where official bodies undertook investigations to determine how the victims died nor who was responsible. Instead, family members, witnesses and human rights defenders involved in the exhumations were themselves threatened and harassed.

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