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To: Gord Bolton who wrote (31577)	4/12/1999 8:52:00 AM
From: Bobby Yellin	Respond to of 116791

so painful.. thank you for that post..didn't know it had been that awful. bobby

To: Gord Bolton who wrote (31577)	4/12/1999 9:51:00 PM
From: Alan Whirlwind	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 116791

Gord, Interesting piece. Guatemala has been pretty much out of the news since Hurricane Mitch. I would say the articles give a fair cross-section of events there as far as I've researched. The refugee totals are prabably exaggerated. A million exiled and a million displaced. Native American publications here in the states in the late '80's placed the refugee totals at 4 or 5 hundred thousand--they had representatives down there assessing the situation. I believe this was after the worst of the displacing. Most ended up right across the border in Mexico. In some cases the Mexicans killed and forced them on the move on that side of the border. The idea of many people in the middle '80's suddenly disappearing is true. I stayed a night once in Santiago on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala in '91. The Guerrilla war was still underway. The owners of the hotel I stayed in there were US citizens and told me about 800 people "disappeared" from their village one night. There were disappearances all over Guatemala. In '95, the Guatemalan papers were filled with stories of mass graves and people traveling hours to see remains of bodies in hopes of claiming loved ones. 200,000 dead may again be high, however there was a bombing campaign against villages suspected of aiding/harboring guerrillas. I was leaving Guatemala for a trip home in the middle of December of 1992 and a guy I'd met earlier in Guatemala who happened to be on the same flight pointed down the runway. "See that camouflaged jet getting ready to take off?" he asked. "Sometime this morning the bombs under each wing will napalm Indian villages in Western Guatemala." Not that the guerrilla movement there was anything to emulate. They blew up power towers and forced thousands into rotating blackouts. They blew up key bridges. I have a photo of one from '91 I can e-mail anyone interested. This act forced poor workers to detours of up to 18 hours in the rainy season until the bridge was rebuilt several years later. The guerrillas also attacked coffee plantations, burned coffee and assaulted with hammers the huge coffee roasters and other mechanical devices necessary to purify the commodity to a drinkable state. This sent a few coffee growers out of business and many of the poorest of the poor out of work or on the road to find work elsewhere at a time when the coffee industry was already under pressure from Brazilian competition. And to pay for their continued existence, they waylayed buses and robbed the locals of their money and valuables. They would also hijack trucks and buses and shoot out there tires after parking them to block heavily travelled roads. I have seen this myself. It was all so useless. One priest I stayed with a night told me he had received death threats from the army and the guerrillas. As for the CIA, they were involved in the killing of a US journalist in Guatemala in '95 while I was there. Everyone knows it and denials seem silly at this point. --Alan