by W. E. Gutman
Jorge’s eyes are red -- his pupils dilated, the eyelids puffy and pasty. A yellowed cigarette butt dangles from a blistered lower lip. He reeks of sweat and urine and shoe glue.
“Un quetzal, Señor, dame un quetzal por favor,” he ventures. I stop and dig into my pockets, averting his eyes. He has that look that vagabonds and madmen convey that is best unheeded, unacknowledged, a liquid gaze in which float the cadavers of hope, will and purpose. I surrender all my change. It isn’t much. I mumble an apology and walk away. Jorge follows me, ambling along sideways like a crab, tugging at my sleeve. He wants to shake my hand. I pat a grimy cheek, drawing a nit-infested head toward me. Jorge puts his arms around my waist. Pity renders me speechless.
Jorge dries a sea of bitter tears then bursts into joyless laughter. He blows into a small plastic bag lined with a sticky amber substance -- Resistol, a brand of cobbler’s glue -- and avidly breathes in the caustic fumes. A flood of words gushes forth. I don’t understand everything he says but his expression speaks volumes about the pain, the hopelessness, the cruel absurdity of life.
Jorge is eleven. Pedro and Felipe are twelve and nine, respectively. They all look half their age. Life is cheap. They may never grow up. Or old.
*
“The Reverend Billy Graham is too busy to comment on this issue.” -- The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
*
Eyewitness accounts and graphic photographs shot by this writer, confirm that niños de la calle -- street children -- are routinely abducted, beaten, burned with cigarettes, subjected to mock executions, sexually assaulted and routinely slain by members of the national police, urban constabularies and private security guards. Some had their ears sliced off (they heard too much). Others had their tongues ripped out (they snitched). Others yet had their eyes gouged out, ostensibly because they’d witnessed things that put the cops at risk, before the merciful coup de grace was applied, generally a blow to the head or a bullet to the base of the neck. They were then heaved into the countless ravines that gird the city’s shantytowns, stinking chasms littered with garbage and human waste, and haunted by feral dogs and desperadoes.
While the 1980s witnessed dramatic political changes that culminated in minor victories for human rights, violations continued to defile a world already crippled by war and disfigured by chronic poverty, misery and disease.
“Human rights have taken a back seat to trade and diplomatic concerns,” Amnesty International reported in 1991, “and become the casualty of political expediency.”
In Central America, a region traumatized by social and political turmoil, shaken by wild swings from dictatorship to anarchy and back, human rights violations are legion. And in Guatemala, a country kneaded by volcanic and seismic upheaval, where lush mountains and precipices and fertile escarpments join to create a lush landscape of extraordinary beauty, crimes against humanity often eclipse the excesses recorded in other parts of the world.
Congressman Jim McDermott (D., WA), whom I first met in Guatemala, described U.S. foreign policy in Central America as “a disaster. We’ve had a long and shameless history of picking the wrong sides, of aiding and abetting despotic regimes.”
*
Promised anonymity and baited by a five-dollar bill, a Guatemala City cop told me that “crime has been spiraling out of control. There are more and more street children. They’ve been giving us a lot of trouble. They’re bad for business, bad for tourism, bad for our national image.”
“Bad enough to kill?”
“We do what we must. We have orders.”
I’d heard this excuse in another time and place.
It is this bureaucratic insolence that has time and again helped block investigations into an upwelling of human rights violations, including the assassination of several prominent Guatemalan centrist politicians, lawyers, human rights activists, journalists and children’s rights advocates. Anthropologist Myrna Elizabeth Mack Chang was murdered on orders from a high-ranking member of the Guatemalan Army. U.S. citizen Michael Devine was abducted, tortured and killed by a group of uniformed men.
According to a U.S. State Department source:
“…evidence indicates that Guatemalan security forces and civil patrols commit, with almost total impunity, most of the major human rights abuses. These include extra-judicial killings, torture and disappearance of, among others, human rights activists, trade unionists, indigenous people and street children.... Security forces are virtually never held accountable for these crimes. With few exceptions, the government has failed to investigate, detain and prosecute perpetrators of extrajudicial and politically motivated killings. It has also been unwilling to investigate cases aggressively if the military were thought to be involved. It is likely that military officials also shield lower-ranking personnel involved in the killings. Approximately 400 policemen were discharged for a variety of abuses, including corruption.”
The ex-policemen did not idle for very long; they were swiftly resettled as bodyguards or given various private security assignments -- and continued to carry guns supplied by the U.S. and Israel. No one protested.
The reign of terror that gripped Guatemala had also thwarted probes into the brutal abduction, torture and gang-rape by Guatemalan police of Sister Dianna Ortiz, an American nun working with children. ABC’s Diane Sawyer eloquently told Ortiz’s story on Prime Time Live.
*
Guatemala City is a dusty, noisy metropolis that has grown and spilled over its outer limits, physically and economically. Like a festering sore, far from the opulent estancias and chic town villas where the well-to-do live in splendid isolation, the city has spread, tentacle-like, into pestilential slums, along sunlit ridges and down the slopes of dank garbage-strewn canyons where barefoot children, vultures, feral cats and dogs share a precarious existence.
It was in one such slum named Limón that thirteen-year-old Angela agreed to meet me. With a price on her head, stalked by the policeman who’d raped her and threatened to kill her, Angela was moving from hovel to hovel, hiding during the day, earning a few quetzales at night in the arms of strangers. I found her sitting at the edge of a cot, her feet and calves pitted with insect bites and scarred by skin lesions, in a bunker with bare cement walls under a leaky sheet metal roof.
On the streets since she was eight, Angela saw her mother murdered by the woman who now lived with her father. She started drinking and sniffing glue when she was ten. A man raped her when she was eleven. She was placed in a shelter where an older girl molested her. Caught stealing trinkets from a street vendor, she was dragged by a policeman into a cul-de-sac and raped. The officer then shoved the barrel of his gun into her mouth and, smiling, threatened to kill her if she “squealed.” Angela staggered into a hospital and told her story. A formal complaint was filed on her behalf and forensic evidence submitted to a local judge. The policeman, who was identified three days later, was never charged.
In one corner, under the pallid rays of a bare 40-watt bulb swarming with flies and moths, stood a table littered with rags and old newspapers and on which rested a garishly painted plaster figurine, a Madonna and child whose introspective gaze conveyed a trance-like stupor. Every now and then, almost mechanically, Angela cast a forlorn glance at the holy icon, perhaps for reassurance. But in her large brown eyes all I saw were false hopes and broken dreams.
Outside, the vultures, the ever-present vultures, had resumed their abominable vigil, gliding overhead like black-winged demons at a Witches’ Sabbath, awaiting death, smelling it, tasting it. Surely I reflected, even God must find Limón a very bitter fruit.
*
For most of Guatemala’s street children, the nightmare begins at conception, an act endorsed and sanctified by the Church and very soon trivialized by the postpartum experience. Life thereafter has neither meaning nor value. Aloof and ethereal, Guatemala’s Catholic Church has the solid backing of some mighty friends who have demonstrated greater obedience to doctrine than ethics. Continuing to bo
w to interests stretching from the Vatican to powerful Christian right-wing cells with close ties to the murkiest segments of U.S. intelligence and paramilitary communities, Guatemala’s Church has little time for street children. While the Church cannot be directly linked to the killings, it bears a burden of guilt by omission -- it denies women access to birth control and abortion, it censures the teaching of safe sex, forbids the use of contraceptives, and demonstrates gross indifference toward the causes and consequences of overpopulation. Because of its affinity for conservative politics and its support of the military, the Church is also guilty by association.
While a number of activist priests and nuns were executed in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America -- front-line soldiers are always in the line of fire -- princes of the Church had been immune to such dangers. That was to change with the 1980 assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero by CIA-trained Col. Roberto d’Aubuisson during the U.S.-backed “Contra” war and, eighteen years later, with the slaying of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi, a maverick cleric who had accused the military of horrific human rights abuses. There is strong circumstantial evidence that high-ranking members of Guatemala’s U.S.-trained military intelligence apparatus, and supervised by then President Alvaro Arzu, were directly implicated in the crime.
These tragic exceptions notwithstanding, the Church’s actions, or lack thereof, on behalf of its flock, the company it kept, the tenacity with which it wielded control, the arrogance of its double standards, all speak louder than words and all too sadly point to what must be perceived as a depraved indifference to human life.
“His Eminence has asked me to inform you that he has no time to comment on the issues addressed in your article.” -- Father Whalen, spokesman for [New York’s] John Cardinal O’Connor.
*
This callous indifference was replayed when, not to be outdone, Guatemala’s first and second ladies -- both touted as ardent supporters of children’s rights, both blue bloods and devout Catholics -- failed to appear for a prearranged interview with this writer. No apology or explanation was ever issued.
“There is no justice in Guatemala,” a fellow journalist commented on the eve of my return to the U.S. “Kids are abandoned by their families, persecuted by the State, rejected by society. Ironically, it is those most apt to help cleanse the ‘sins that cry to heaven for vengeance’ -- oppression of the poor and the orphans -- whose hearts have turned to stone.”
Two crossed rifles with fixed bayonets and two crossed boarding sabers flanked by two olive branches on a field of double blue and white adorn Guatemala’s coat of arms. A nation of contrasts, it continues to live by the rifle. Sabers keep on rattling. Both are trained against easy targets. Inexplicably, as if guided by an irresistible urge to self-destruct, Guatemala is immolating its children. It may be depriving itself of a future as well.
*
A week after my return to New York, I learned that a shelter for children in Guatemala City had been peppered with machine-gun fire. The unidentified assailants, “four heavily armed men driving a dark blue BMW threatened to kill the director, the staff and the children.”
Several days later, I was also informed that a seven-year-old street boy had been beaten to death by police. His head had been so severely disfigured that positive identification could not be made. That same day, a fifteen-year-old boy was dragged by police beyond city limits where he was savagely beaten and burned over 90 percent of his body, including his genitals.
I called Tom Strook, then the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala, on the phone.
“Tom, I need a statement from you, something that echoes your personal optic and mirrors U.S. policy on the subject. Make it strong, please.”
“Will do. I’ll fax you something first thing in the morning.” The next day, Strook’s offering was waiting on my desk. It read:
“The depraved conditions in which Guatemala’s street children live are, unfortunately, too reminiscent of situations in many other parts of the world.”
I reread the anemic statement and nearly threw up. I telephoned Strook and asked him for an elaboration, anything that demonstrated a virile stand by the U.S. on a problem that was causing outrage around the world.
“That’s the best I can do.”
I wove Strook’s masterpiece of diplomatic doublespeak into an article, verbatim, and let the chips fall where they may.
*
News of the bludgeoning death of the Financial Times correspondent in Guatemala also reached me at that time. He’d been probing local connections to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal. This brought to more than 50 the number of journalists killed in the line of duty in Guatemala since 1978.
*
Ah, the press. What strange and wondrous tidings it will impart when it is not busy manufacturing the truth or manipulating events. It seems like yesterday. One morning as I rode Metro North on my way to work, I read the following headline in the Wall Street Journal:
“General Media to cut 120 jobs.”
OMNI was folding, moving to Greensboro, North Carolina. Other properties in Bob Guccione’s shrinking publishing empire were “restructuring,” “retrenching” and “consolidating.” I’d lost my job. Had I not fortuitously picked up a copy of the Wall Street Journal at the Stratford, Connecticut train station, might I still be blissfully ignorant of my fate? I often toy with what ifs. But being skeptical of everything I read in the papers, I waited until I reached the office to confirm that the news of my demise had not been exaggerated. My professional obituary was replayed as I crossed the threshold. I was given the rest of the day to pack up and vacate the premises. Many of those who shared my fate were in shock or in tears.
“You must try not to take this personally,” said the human relations director, who didn’t lose her job.
“Really? I’m pushing 50, my whole world is caving in under me, I’m losing my livelihood, possibly forever, and I’m supposed to be relieved because this castration is not ‘personal’?”
“Who knows, perhaps if the economy picks up….”
Sure. Good journalists are expendable when the chips are down but, after all, we’re the “schmucks with typewriters” that publishers can’t quite do without.
Writers face all sorts of occupational hazards: a highly volatile work market, a fickle public -- it’s publish or perish -- long nights spent facing blank sheets of paper (now a blank computer screen) merciless deadlines, heartless editors who get paid to slash and burn precious prose and low, very low pay.
We live in a society that scorns culture, resents and mocks intellectualism and abhors free thought. The joy of reading has been replaced by the rapture of catatonic stupor in front of giant TV screens. Programming is shrinking, commercials are multiplying in number and duration. The object is to ensnare more viewers, trick throngs of gullible consumers into hoarding the sponsors’ products. In print journalism, photos are getting larger while text is shrinking to the bare essentials. Publications are dying left and right like cicadas in the first chill of a late summer night, their ephemeral lives cut short by declining circulation, dwindling advertising revenues and, in OMNI’s case, sundry stratagems engineered to prevent owner-publishers from having to relinquish the opulent lifestyles to which they are accustomed.
And so, a thing of beauty, OMNI, the exquisitely designed and trendy futurist vehicle in which the likes of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Carl Sagan had taken an ever wider audience to the far reaches of the cosmos, died in the spring of 1995. Older, richer, bored perhaps, Bob Guccione bled the magazine by committing it to the cold regions of cyberspace. It continued to orbit for a while, its propulsion system inert, now an aimless, lifeless, unidentifiable object that would be mourned by the generation it had transported to the frontiers of knowledge and the outer reaches of imagination.
And, once again, I found my way back to the far end of a long unemployment line.
Like happiness, misery arrives uninvited and lingers on.
OUR DAILY BREAD
In the beginning, comes inexperience. Armed with little more than snippets of lore, a zest for life and a spirit corrupted neither by worldliness or maturity, my friend’s son, Eli, soon to graduate from college, was looking for work. Finding a job that harmonized with his grades, aspirations, self-view and crass earthly needs, wouldn’t be easy. He lacked “experience.”
“Take heart,” I reassured him, cynicism and life’s lessons guiding my words. Inexperience is the gateway to “under-qualification.” The under-qualified always find work. They’re the backbone of the labor force, the mid-level cadres, the silent and unseen legions who energize America’s economic engine, the multitudes willing to be consigned to a life of mediocrity just to survive. (Employers consider “under-qualified” any 22-year-old first-time job-seeker who doesn't have a Ph.D. and at least 10 years' experience and/or anyone unwilling to start at below-subsistence wages “for the privilege” of forking a goodly percentage of their earnings to the IRS).
“Work hard,” I told Eli, “and in 20 years you too can become ‘over-qualified.’ (Over-qualification is a common malady that afflicts 40-something job seekers. It's also a code word for “we think you're terrific but because you seem to need us more than we need you, we’ll play mind games with you and offer you a salary we know is both shamefully low and inconsistent with your skills and experience.”)