International human rights groups are hoping that Pope John Paul II, who arrives in Guatemala Monday, will use the occasion to draw the world's attention to the resumption of death-squad activity directed against domestic rights groups and the Roman Catholic Church itself.

Groups monitoring a series of actions against rights workers and religious figures in the Central American country are lobbying the Pontiff to "sound the alarm" over a "catastrophic slide" in Guatemala's human rights protections.

"In the first half of 2002 alone, Guatemalan human rights organizations reported 125 cases of threats, attacks and intimidation against those engaged in the defense of human rights," Amnesty International noted last week. "However, to date, not one single case of threat or attack on a human rights defender has been resolved."

Last week, the headquarters of the National Coordinating Office for Human Rights in Guatemala was broken into and its computers and research files stolen.

The burglary followed similar incidents around the country in the past few months, as well as repeated death threats phoned and faxed to activists, including a Catholic bishop and at least six priests and other officials in the Church's main human rights office within the past month.

While the country's 36-year civil war ended with a comprehensive peace accord in 1996, the human rights situation has deteriorated since 1998, with tensions rising sharply following efforts by rights groups and the Church to investigate atrocities committed during the war and in advance of next year's presidential elections, in which former President Efrain Rios Montt, who ruled the country at the height of the army's violence against Guatemala's indigenous Mayan communities, is expected to run.

Rios Montt, a militant evangelical Protestant, has long had a hostile relationship with the Church, which has played a leading role in the fight for human rights for several decades. When John Paul II first visited the country in 1983, Rios Montt ordered the execution of six rebel suspects, an act which the pope denounced during his visit as a "very grave offense against God."

Most activists date the return of the deathsquads to the brutal 1998 death of Bishop Juan Gerardi just two days after he delivered the Church's report on a high-profile truth and reconciliation project. It found that the army and army-backed Civil Defense Patrols were responsible for more than 80 percent of the killings which took place during the war.

Four men, including three members of the Presidential Security Guard, an army group long accused of deathsquad activity that was supposed to have been dismantled by the peace accords, were convicted of Gerardi's murder.

Last week, according to an account in Sunday's Washington Post, shots were fired at the courthouse where the officers were convicted and where their appeals are now being heard. The attack, according to Frank LaRue of Guatemala's center for Human Rights Legal Action, was "clearly linked to the pope's visit."

Since Gerardi's killing, activists have reported a gradual increase in threats and intimidation directed against them, but these have increased dramatically during the past six months.

Among the more serious recent incidents was the burning of the parish house in Nebaj, Quiche, in February. The office included documents related to Bishop Gerardi's report and others belonging to a team of forensic anthropologists which had been carrying out exhumations in the area where a number of mass killings by the army and its civil defense patrols took place in the 1980s.

One month later, three offices belonging to the San Marcos Diocese were burglarized, and the local bishop, Alvaro Ramazzini, received a series of death threats.

In late April, Guillermo Ovalle de Leon, an accountant at the Fundacion Rigoberta Menchu Tum, was shot to death at a Guatemala City restaurant shortly after receiving a telephoned death threat. The Fundacion, led by Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu, has been pursuing legal cases against top military officers and Rios Montt for genocide.

In May, four forensic anthropologists were forced to leave the country after receiving death threats against themselves and their families.

In June, a fax sent to newspapers by a previously unknown group threatened the lives of 11 rights activists labeled "enemies of the state" due to their cooperation with the United Nations Special Representative on Human Rights Defenders, Hina Jilani.

"None of these incidents has been satisfactorily investigated by the Guatemalan government; nor have those responsible been brought to justice," according to the Washington Office on Latin America. "Civil society leaders say that these targeted attacks and the fear that they generate are comparable to the worst period of violence during the 1980s."

Rights activists and clergy are not the only ones targeted. Last week, three youths, including two 17-year-old boys, were killed and three others critically wounded in a drive-by machine-gun shooting while they were sleeping in downtown Guatemala City, according to Casa Alianza, a youth advocacy group.

The attack took place on the eve of the visit of the Special Rapporteur on Children at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Susana Villaran de la Puente, who is investigating the plight of street children in Central America.

Copyright 2002 OneWorld.net

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