CIA accused of murder, conspiracy

It took Jennifer Harbury only thirty minutes to tell her story about the killing and cover-up of her husband's death.

The Harvard Law School graduate who struggled for three years to discover the fate of her Guatemalan guerrilla husband, and whose hunger strikes initiated a CIA shake-up, spoke to approximately 100 people in the student center Monday.

Her visit was sponsored by La Raza Student Organization and La Juventud por la Paz en El Salvador (Youth for Peace in El Salvador).

"My husband vanished on March 12, 1992 and I still don't know the whereabouts of his body," said Harbury, holding a large black and white picture of her husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a Mayan guerrilla fighter known as Comandante Everardo.

"I've been told he was captured and killed, but I don't know what happened."

Contrary to the Guatemalan authorities' claim that Everardo had committed suicide rather than be captured after a struggle with Guatemalan government troops, Harbury believed her husband was being held and tortured by the military.

According to human rights groups, the military has been responsible for the killing of more than 100,000 Guatemalan civilians struggling for better socio-economic conditions over the past 30 years.

During her search, Harbury engaged in two widely-reported hunger strikes, the first in Guatemala City in 1994.

"They were talking about this peace process in Guatemala. Before things cooled down, I put on a blanket and went on a hunger strike for 32 days in front of the national palace. I demanded to be told if he were alive or dead," said Harbury.

After graduation, Harbury worked for an organization providing assistance to migrant farmworkers in Texas, instead of becoming a corporate lawyer. She later traveled to refugee camps for Guatemalans in southern Mexico. There she began to collect oral histories of guerrillas in the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, including that of Comandante Everardo whom she later married.

After returning to the U.S. in 1995, Harbury began a 12-day hunger strike in March in front of the White House. It was the third anniversary of Everardo's capture. She then learned from a Congressman that her husband had been tortured and murdered after his capture in 1992. The Congressman also told her the man who ordered the killing was a Guatemalan officer on the payroll of the CIA.

"Julio Alpirez, that was the name of the man Santiago (another guerrilla) had told me had killed my husband three years before," she said. "They (the CIA and the US Embassy) had known Everardo was dead. All those hunger strikes were for nothing," she said.

Harbury has brought a case against the CIA in Federal Court to force the release of all documents related to her husband's case. As she continues to demand the whereabouts of her husband's body from Guatemalan authorities, she also awaits the results of the investigations about the incident.

"My story is no different from thousands and thousands of women in Guatemala who have lost their loved ones," she said.

[ Golden Gater Online December 5, 1995 ]

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