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By Russell Watson
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Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun, remembers her ordeal with such harrowing clarity that she still cannot bear the smell of cigarette smoke. In late 1989, three uniformed Guatemalan men kidnapped Ortiz, gang-raped her and burned her more than 100 times with lit cigarettes. They dropped her into a pit filled with dead bodies and live rats. Suddenly a man called Alejandro shouted, in English: "Shit!" Then. in American-accented Spanish, he told the three men: "Idiots. she's a North American! Let her alone." Alejandro helped Ortiz put on her clothes and ushered her to a gray Jeep, insisting that it was all a case of mistaken identity. He promised to take her to "a friend" at the U.S. Embassy. Fearing for her life, Ortiz fled. Years later, she remains obsessed with questions about the attack-and the man called Alejandro. "I believe he was an American," Ortiz said last week. "But when you try to get information from the State Department, it's just another form of torture."
Were CIA informants involved in crimes committed by 'A cover-up the military in Guatemala? What did American officials know, and when did they know it? Those are the questions now being asked as stories like Sister Dianna's come to light. Two weeks ago a Democratic congressman, Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, charged that a Guatemalan colonel was on the CIA payroll while he was involved in the murder of an American innkeeper and the torture and execution of a Guatemalan guerrilla married to an American lawyer. Last week President Bill Clinton ordered a wide-ranging inquiry into U.S. connections with Guatemala's notoriously heavy-handed rulers. And this week the subject will be aired in public hearings on Capitol Hill.
This sort of attention is exactly what the CIA doesn't want, demoralized as it already is by the Aldrich Ames fiasco and other recent failures. But once again the agency's wound is self inflicted, and salt has been rubbed into it by the CIA's own failure to come clean quickly enough. In the nervous '90s, it is difficult for even a spy agency to explain why it must deal with unsavory characters, or turn a blind eye to human-rights abuses. "If you want to know about scum, you have to recruit scum," insists a State Department official. But scum sticks to whoever employs it, Elliott Abrams, an architect of Ronald Reagan's anti-communist crusade in Central America, recalls what happened when he complained to the Guatemalan strongman of the day about the army's alleged complicity in the murder of two Guatemalan citizens working for the U.S. Agency for International Development. The two men were communists, claimed the strongman, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores. Even if so, said Abrams, murdering them was wrong. Replied Mejia: "These are necessary evils."
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It is hard to see how all the evils were really necessary. One of' the victim was Michael DeVine, an American innkeeper in the hinterlands of Guatemala, who was killed by soldiers in 1990. It still isn't clear why he died. His wife thinks he may have offended a Guatemalan officer; U.S. officials think he inadvertently witnessed some army skullduggery, The commander of the local army base was Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez. Some U.S. officials say he ordered the killing and then covered it up. And Torricelli charged that Alpirez had been a paid CIA informant at the time of the murder. (Alpirez denies working for the CIA or committing any crimes.) Six men were convicted of the murder, but in its 1994 human-rights report, the State Department charged that Guatemala "never brought to trial the senior officers believed to be involved in covering up the crime."
Torricelli also accuses Alpirez of ordering the execution in 1992 of Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a captured guerrilla. Bamaca's wife, American lawyer Jennifer Harbury, staged a hunger strike in Guatemala City last year to learn what had happened to him. The State Department disputes her claim that it didn't give her definitive word on his fate until last month. "It's a cover-up of a cover up," she charges,
According to Torricelli, Colonel Alpirez left the CIA payroll around the time Bamaca was killed. U.S. sources say Alpirez got $44,000 as a final payment. According to one authoritative source, by 1992 the CIA had enough information to connect Alpirez to the DeVine murder. But U.S. officials say the agency didn't pass that information along to policymakers, or congressional watchdogs, until recently. The CIA denies that it withheld information.
The agency was used to having its own way in Guatemala. It staged a coup there in 1954 to overthrow a leftist government, and in the 1980s, it used Guatemala as a staging ground for the U.S. campaign against Marxists in Nicaragua. The CIA's activities in Guatemala served U.S. interests, as they were defined at the time but at the cost of cooperating With a ruthless, undemocratic regime that has killed more than 100,000 civilians in its own campaign against leftists. Now, in a different political climate, the CIA's Guatemalan connection may provide more impetus for the overhaul the agency so badly needs.
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