SIZE MATTERS: GUATEMALAN ARMY TO SHRINK.

The Guatemalan Army will soon be a lot smaller. Reports differ on the size of the cuts, but the budget, number of bases, and troop strength will shrink on the order of from one-third to one-half. "This unprecedented historic act consists of the beginning of the substantial modernization and transformation of the Army of Guatemala, to adapt it to the new times of peace," said President Oscar Berger.

Speaking at a ceremony before an audience of high-ranking military officers and members of the international diplomatic corps, Berger said that, prior to June 30, the armed forces would be reduced to 15,500 troops from the present 23,000, an approximate 35% reduction. The military budget will be fixed at 0.33% of GDP from now on.

"The times of armed conflict are, definitely and fortunately, things of the past, so the Army needs a different conception of its functions," said the president. The ceremony was convened at the National Palace of Culture for this announcement. Berger staked out his place in history just a few months after his Jan. 9 inauguration when he declared the end of institutional violence as an instrument of political power.

Berger is the first president in recent history to even dare to speak in public of a proposal like this, but he said he felt no fear of reprisals from the military, and he tried to lay to rest any fears in the audience that this initiative would compromise the governability of the country (see NotiCen, 1998-02-05).

Retired Gen. Otto Perez Molina, Berger's presidential commissioner for defense and security, said troop strength would be reduced by 12,109 through a combination of voluntary retirement and elimination of positions. Bases will be reduced to five--Peten, Huehuetenango, Suchitepequez, Jutiapa, and Guatemala City.

Defense Minister Cesar Augusto Mendez Pinelo said committees would be formed to decide what to do with decommissioned military assets, including but not limited to the munitions factory, the Escuela Politecnica, and the Adolfo V Hall military school.

The cost of the massive demobilization will be about US$50 million. About US$37.5 million will go for severance pay. Berger said this "should be viewed as an investment."

The overall military budget will be cut from US$118.7 million to US$97.5 million and is scheduled to fall to 0.33% of GDP by 2005. For 2003, GDP was US$3.09 billion. In 2001, during the just concluded presidency of Alfonso Portillo (1999-2004), military spending reached 0.94% of GDP.

Politically important, but questions remain

Independent analyst and security expert Bernardo Arevalo called the reduction politically important and noted that, while he has not had the opportunity to review the plan in detail, it very obviously goes beyond the merely cosmetic, but much remains unanswered. He said that, apart from size and budget, it is still necessary to determine how the Army's "theory of conflict," its structure, deployment, doctrine, educational system, all respond to genuine defense needs of the country.

"The government has decided, in this case, to start with the establishment of new parameters in budget and troop strength," Arevalo said. "Now it will be necessary to confront, in an urgent manner, the subject of what, how, and where resources will be applied to build a functional military force for a democratic state."

Turning to the sociopolitical context, Arevalo said that globalization does not bring with it a tendency toward the disappearance of armies, but rather a redefinition of civil and military security needs of countries. In Guatemala, that means adaptation to a democratic state and response to security needs emerging from the new international environment brought about by the trade and integration deals to which it is party.

Shrinking the army has other implications. Underemployment and unemployment are endemic to the country. Berger admitted that "the possibility exists" for demobilized soldiers to become involved in crime, both organized and not, but he said he had confidence "in the principles and values of the members of the military" to avoid that.

Confidence of this kind has no known historical basis. The Guatemalan Army is world famous for its criminality. The reduction in force that accompanied the peace process destabilized drug rings, international car theft organizations, and smuggling organizations as their leaders came out from under the authority of the Army and entered private practice (see NotiCen, 2003-11-06).

Keep them from crime by making them cops

Berger said that some of the discharged soldiers would have the opportunity to enter the national police academy and join civilian security forces. The president also anticipates that the business community will step forward "to help them identify productive activities in which they can participate with the good severance payments they will receive." Here again, the president's confidence in the Guatemalan economy's capacity to absorb the soldiers into the work force may be misplaced.

From the perspective of the UN Mission in Guatemala, MINUGUA, the reduction represents the most significant change for the Guatemalan army in decades, and in line with the now overdue requirements of the provisions of the Peace Accords of 1996 that MINUGUA is in the country to monitor. MINUGUA spokesperson Marie Okabe said the new military budget would liberate funds for education, health, and public security.

This, too, may be misplaced confidence; there are few funds to free. Hugo Maul, member of the Comision Tecnica del Pacto Fiscal (CTPF), said on April 12 that the government needs to cut spending even further. The CTPF is a presidential committee charged with finding a solution to the problem of public finance by April 30. The CTPF has to find more than US$1 billion to fill the "hole" in the budget.

To avoid "dramatic" consequences, said the economist, the Berger government must "prioritize, rationalize, and reduce public spending. Just as was done with the Army, so with the social funds." The situation will soon come to a head, said Maul, and "the government could confront cash-flow problems in May and not have resources to pay worker's salaries."

To this sorry assessment must be attached an addendum. Although the budget will technically decline from US$118.7 million to US$97.5 million, according to Otto Perez Molina, US$50 million must be added for retirements, over and above the 2004 budget. And in 2005, although the budget ought to be about US$100 million, another US$31.3 million will be added for "the process of modernization." Nor is that the final word on the matter. Military analyst retired Lt. Col. Mauricio Lopez warned that it is necessary to "wait and see how the process evolves, because now it is all confused."

If a smaller Guatemalan Army is not destined to have a decisive fiscal effect, it must at least have a salutary influence on the country's social-justice deficit, Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu insisted. The 1992 peace prize recipient, now ambassador of good will in the Berger government, said, "The social groups must demand that the violators be judged." Her call resonated with that of the Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado, whose director Nery Rodenas said, "This reduction, which is pro forma but not fundamental, concerns us because it should have reduced the number of commissioned officers and purged those who violated human rights or were involved in other crimes."

The report of the Comision de Esclarecimiento Historico (CEH), produced by the archdiocesan office and funded by the UN, has concluded that the Army was culpable in 93% of the crimes and 623 of the massacres committed during the 36 years of war that began in 1960. But rather than being held accountable, many of the guilty will receive hefty severance packages. The CEH recommended the establishment of a commission to examine the conduct of officers active during the war, "with the objective of adopting administrative measures for their purging" in 1999. Berger's response was, "If someone has something to pay for, there are the courts." [Sources: Notimex, 03/12/04; Associated Press, Spanish news service EFE, United Press International, 04/02/04; La Opinion (Los Angeles), 04/03/04; Prensa Libre (Guatemala), 04/02/04, 04/08/04, 04/11/04] .HEADLINE DIGGING UP THE TRUTH IN GUATEMALA .TEXT

[The following article by Eduardo Garcia is reprinted with the permission of Noticias Aliadas in Lima, Peru. It appeared in the March 6, 2004, edition of Latinamerica Press.]

Forensic anthropologists are digging up clandestine cemeteries and with it, thousands of human dramas.

Carlos Paz Lopez, Dolores Chumes Chex, Feliza Tuyuc, Paulino Colaz, Mateo Chali are the names of some of the people who disappeared during the armed conflict in the village of Comalapa, two hours from Guatemala City.

On Feb. 25, celebrated as a national day for victims of the armed conflict, the Coordinadora Nacional de Viudas de Guatemala (CONAVIGUA) unveiled a monument in Comalapa with the names of the 250 local people who went missing during the war.

Most of their bodies were never found. However, since August 2003, at CONAVIGUA's request, the Fundacion Antropologia Forense de Guatemala (FAFG) has been exploring the land surrounding the former military base in search of them (see NotiCen, 2002-06-27).

The numbers, say the anthropologists, are not that important. Nevertheless, armed only with spades and with the help of neighbors, the FAFG is rewriting the history of Comalapa. They have dug 721 pits in the village and have found the bodies of 119 people--117 men, a woman, and a boy.

"A great number of the bodies show clear signs of violence," said Juan Carlos Gatica, a FAFG anthropologist.

Most of the disappearances in Comalapa occurred between 1981 and 1983, according to the Comision para el Esclarecimiento Historico (CEH), and 81% of human rights abuses during the war took place during these three years, which included the military dictatorship of Gen. Efrain Rios Montt (1982-1983)

The CEH calculated there are nearly 669 clandestine cemeteries in Guatemala (see NotiCen, 1999-04-15), although the FAFG estimates there are twice as many, around 1,300. The CEH report said 83.3% of the victims were Mayan, and 93% of human rights abuses were committed by government forces and the civil self-defense patrols.

In the last twelve years, the FAFG has unearthed around 3,000 corpses, some of them in individual tombs and others in mass graves.

"If we carry on at this speed, it would take us 15 years to recover all the bodies," said Alan Robinson, the FAFG's director of forensic anthropology.

However, "exhumations are not mathematics, the most important thing is the human dimension," said Jesus Hernandez of the Centro de Antropologia Forense y Ciencias Aplicada (CAFCA), another association of forensic anthropologists that has been carrying out exhumations since 1999.

Carmen Gomez of CONAVIGUA, one of the nearly 200 people looking for a relative in Comalapa, saw her husband for the last time on May 8, 1981, when two strangers burst into her house and took her husband away. "One of them said, 'One question only, we are going to ask him one question and we will let him go, sleep in peace with your children,'" said Gomez.

Her husband, Felipe Pollan, at the time 24 years old, knew what was going to happen to him. Gomez said his last words to her were, "Goodbye forever, look after my children." Pollan never got to see his daughter, who was born a few months after his disappearance.

"Since we started, demand has been increasing, we are doing more and more exhumations with the passage of time, because fear is dying," Hernandez said.

The main goal of the anthropologists is to find the bodies of the disappeared and try to identify them by determining age, sex, height, and other individual features.

Robinson said that the rate of success in identifying the bodies is quite high, 56%, given that they use a very basic technique. In the case of Comalapa, identification is more difficult because many bodies were brought from regions as far away as Huehuetenango or Quiche.

However, their mission is more than technical because these organizations want the past to be remembered and justice to be done. Additionally, they also want to end the widespread fear and help families of victims to overcome the psychological trauma caused by the conflict.

Clandestine cemeteries not only epitomize victims' pain, they are also a symbol of impunity. The need for justice is one of the main motivations of the anthropologists, and all exhumations are carried out after a formal request by the attorney general's office, which is then responsible for prosecuting each case. However, prosecutions are so far the exception rather than the rule.

Hernandez said: "I think there is going to be justice, but it is wearing us out." He added, "The judiciary is very weak, but we have to carry on..., work has to be done with objectivity, always hoping that the cases are going to end in court."

The need to find the bodies of the disappeared, the most obvious proof of the brutality of the armed conflict, is evident in the light of declarations of those that deny that there was genocide in Guatemala.

Among them are powerful people, some within President Oscar Berger's new government. One is Otto Perez Molina, security and defense commissioner, whose role as a general in the department of El Quiche has been questioned--some cast him as a pacifier while others say he was a brutal officer. "There was no genocide, because there was no attempt to exterminate a race...this was a battleground for the Cold War fight between the US and Russia. We provided the bodies and they provided the ideology," Perez Molina said.

The work in the clandestine cemeteries "is not a revenge, we do it because we want them and us to have peace. As long as we do not know for a fact that they are dead it is very difficult to recover that peace and that tranquility," said Rosalina Tuyuc, founder of CONAVIGUA and one of the first congresswomen of Maya origin.