SUFFER THE CHILDREN


IN THE LAND OF ETERNAL SPRING, WHERE DEATH IS OFTEN THE LIGHTER OF TWO
SENTANCES, A GROWING NUMBER OF CHILDREN ARE BEING CONDEMNED TO EVERLASTING HELL
BY AGENTS OF THE STATE

Dawn rises on Guatemala City's sixteenth-century cathedral, flushing the nave
with shafts of spectral radiance and suffusing the marble altar and colonnades,
crystal chandeliers, richly carved gilt pulpit, and solid mahogany pews with a
celebration of light over the forces of darkness.

For Jorge, sunrise heralds the start of another perilous journey. He has just
spent the night in a fetid culvert girding the cathedral's northern flank,
drowsing into a thin, turbulent sleep, one eye trained against the creeping
shadows, a keen ear attentive to any sound louder than his heartbeat. Normally,
Jorge beds down with his friends Pedro and Felipe under a pile of filthy rags,
sharing scraps of food pilfered at an outdoor stall or recovered from the
garbage pit. Normally, they huddle like newborn pups, seeking warmth, sharing a
bag or two of cobbler's glue until the noxious fumes yank them from the grips of
hunger, cold, and fear. But these are not normal times. Beatings, torture,
sexual abuse, rape, and extrajudicial executions have been on the rise in
Guatemala, and Jorge, Pedro, and Felipe have decided to split for a while, to
disperse, to find safety not in numbers but in solitude and stealth like hunted
animals.

Jorge's eyes are red, the pupils dilated, the eyelids puffy and moist. A
yellowed cigarette butt dangles from a blistered lower lip. He reeks of sweat
and urine and glue. "Un quetzal, Senor, dame un quetzal por favor [please give
me a quetzal], " he ventures, conspicuously embarrassed. I stop, dig into my
pockets, averting his eyes. He does not fit the part but he has that look that
mendicants and tramps have 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 in broken Spanish and walk away.
Jorge follows me, ambling along sideways like a crab, tugging gently at my
sleeve. He wants to shake my hand. He needs to touch and be touched, with love
not lechery, with reassurance not rancor. I pat a grimy cheek, drawing a
nit-infested head toward my bosom. Jorge puts his arms around my waist and
begins to weep. "Porque tu lloras? [Why do you weep?]" I ask. "Porque estoy en
el infiemo [Because I am in hell]," he tells me. Jorge dries a sea of bitter
tears, blows into a small plastic bag lined with a sticky amber
substance-cobbler's glue-then avidly breathes in the caustic fumes. A flood of
words gushes forth. I don't understand them all but his expression speaks
volumes of 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.

Eyewitnesses now in protective custody in North America, and graphic photography
obtained by Omni, confirm that Guatemala's ninos de la calle -children of the
street-are being subjected to a spree of tortures matched only by the Holy
Inquisition. Many children were abducted, beaten, burned with cigarettes,
subjected to mock executions, and sexually assaulted. Some had their ears torn
off (they had heard too much), their tongues ripped out (they had spoken out),
and their eyes gouged (they had seen compromising deeds) before the merciful
coup de grace was applied, generally a blow to the head or a bullet to the base
of the neck. Others were pushed into the countless ravines that gird Guatemala
City's shantytowns, stinking chasms littered with garbage and human waste, and
patrolled by feral dogs and cats. It will not surprise the reader, therefore,
that I set out for Guatemalaand carried out the better part of this
assignment-strapped in a lightweight bulletproof vest obligingly supplied by
Point Blank Armor and aimed at protecting me not against crime lords or common
felons but soldiers and cops.

While the Nineties have witnessed dramatic political changes that culminated in
victories for human rights, violations continue to defile a world already
crippled by war and disfigured by famine and disease. "We've seen human rights
take a backseat to trade or diplomatic concerns," said Amnesty International in
releasing its 1991 report, "and become the casualty of political expediency."

In Latin America, a region historically traumatized by social and political
turmoil, branded 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 neatly cultivated
escarpments join to form a lush landscape of extraordinary beauty, crimes
against humanity often eclipse the excesses recorded in other parts of the
world.

Embarrassment, if not outrage, at Guatemala's apathy, at its unwillingness to
address what has begun to draw sharp public and press attention, at long last
prompted the United States-Guatemala's military and economic godfather-to
suspend weapons deliveries last December. Expressing grave concern over what he
termed "an escalating spree of violence, disappearances, and extrajudicial
executions," Representative Jim McDermott (D., WA), one of a two-member
congressional fact-finding team that toured Guatemala, told Omni at a press
briefing that U.S. foreign policy in Central America has been "an unending
disaster. We've had a history of picking the wrong sides, of aiding and
abetting despotic regimes." Reminded that the United States is the only Western
nation that refuses to sign and ratify the 1989 UN Children's Rights Convention,
Congressman McDermott, expressing dismay, held out little hope for an imminent
change of heart.

Those at greatest risk are the children inhabiting the streets of Guatemala
City. According to Bruce Harris, the tireless executive regional director of
Casa Alianza, a charitable agency that works with street children, offering them
shelter, food, clothing, counseling, medical attention, and legal support,
"There are at least five thousand such kids, perhaps as many as twice that
number-we may never know for sure," aged five to eighteen, doomed to the
sidewalks and rank alleyways of the capital. Many have been orphaned by the
so-called 30-year-old counterinsurgency operation in the altiplano-the
highlands-much of it funded and orchestrated by the United States. Some were
abandoned by parents no longer able to feed a growing number of hungry mouths.
Countless others have fled a home life punctuated by deprivation, brutality, and
sexual abuse.

"For the hordes of kids that end up on the street," says Harris, "life turns
into a sordid blend of boredom, reckless improvisation, and ever-present danger.
Every encounter with an adult- sometimes even with their peers- carries the
risk of exploitation, abuse, and violence. All are undernourished. All are in
precarious health."

Precocious and opportunistic, at once ubiquitous and invisible, los ninos de la
calle scour open garbage dumps for food, sleep under parked cars, in doorways,
and on sidewalks. Most survive by stealing, begging, and engaging in both
homosexual and heterosexual prostitution.

In recent months, Amnesty International has recorded an escalating number of
complaints of human rights violations against Guatemala's street children,
including harassment, threats, beatings, torture, "disappearances," and
extrajudicial executions reportedly carried out by the police, who frequently
patrol the streets in plainclothes or pocket their badges to avoid
identification, and agents of private security firms acting under license from
the National Police and the Ministry of the Interior.

An Amnesty International USA spokesperson told Omni that "the policemen involved
in these abuses," officers moonlighting as executioners on behalf of local
municipalities and private businesses, " are seldom brought to justice, even
more rarely tried, convicted, and imprisoned. We [Amnesty International] are
very concerned at the delays, irregularities, and blatant reversals connected
with official inquiries. Children's rights have taken a backseat to trade or
diplomatic concerns."

Street children do commit petty crimes. They also sniff glue. Most are
severely malnourished, and the sensations induced by the glue help overcome
hunger pangs and numb them against the chill of night. Over time, the fumes
destroy brain cells and can cause death. They also produce hallucinations and
the reckless courage to steal.

"Every year forty-two thousand children die of preventable or curable diseases
in Guatemala. But nobody cares. Corruption and inertia prevail," says Dr.
Carlos Cossich Marquez, shaking a white head of close-cropped hair. Chief of
pediatrics at Guatemala's General Hospital, Cossich sees lots of children in the
course of a day. Many come from the streets. Some go directly to the morgue.

"Diarrhea, dehydration, parasitic and contagious diseases, severe upper and
lower respiratory infections, we get them all," says Dr. Cossich.

"We're also beginning to see infants with congenitally contracted AIDS.
Gonorrhea is spreading at an alarming rate."

Dr. Cossich extends the fingers of his left hand and enumerates other startling
statistics: There is only one doctor for every 1,400 inhabitants and only 36
hospitals in a country of 8.2 million people; 52.5 percent are under the age of
seventeen. Guatemala is the only country on the American continents lacking a
pediatric hospital. Guatemala suffers a 56.3 percent infant mortality rate.
Eighty percent die because of inadequate pediatric services. Out of every 3,500
children who are treated for burns, only 700 survive. Of those, 70 percent are
deformed or permanently handicapped. Dr. Cossich has run out of fingers.......
and when cholera crosses into Guatemala, as it soon will, the children-street
children in particularare doomed."

Cossich also tends to the growing number of children caught in the web of
violence that stretches across Guatemala. "In addition to bullet wounds,
punctures, and slashings sustained in the streets in the course of a day, we see
an increasing number of battered children, children with severe burns,
lacerations, dislocations, and fractures sustained at the hands of their parents
and other adults.

"Malnutrition"-85 percent of Guatemala's children are chronically malnourished,
according to Cossich-"in addition to illiteracy, abject poverty, and unsanitary
conditions, can all be directly traced to a government that has abdicated one of
its most fundamental responsibilities: education. We have a long way to go,"
sighs Cossich.

At the foot of the majestic Agua volcano rests a small cemetery with
white-washed mausoleums and tired wooden crosses bent by age and neglect. At
the Casa Alianza plot, where the broken vestiges of youth and innocence are laid
to rest, a simple marble tombstone for Nahaman Carmona Lopez says infinitely
more about his death than about his brief existence, laconically recording his
final words: "I only wanted to be a child; they wouldn't let me."

The thirteen-year-old Nahaman-he barely looked ten-died last March after four
policemen found him and nine other street children, aged six to fourteen,
sniffing glue. The officers, witnesses said, seized the glue and began pouring
it over the children's heads. Nahaman resisted. The commanding officer yanked
him to his feet by his ears, threw him back to the ground, and kicked him
viciously in the stomach, rupturing his liver and breaking six ribs. A friend
of Nahaman's who had narrowly escaped the onslaught said that his screams of
pain could be heard three blocks away. Screams, laughter, and howls are hard to
tell apart in the darkened, slop-splattered alleyways of Guatemala City. The
police then abandoned the children, leaving Nahaman for dead curled up on the
ground.

When the children returned about 30 minutes later, Nahaman had managed to move a
few feet. He had lost bowel and bladder control. He was unconscious. Someone
had covered him with paper flowers and a piece of white crepe, as is customary
in Guatemala when children die. Nahaman was taken by ambulance to San Juan de
Dios, a state-run hospital. No police report was filed-he was registered as
"XX" (unknown)-nor was a medical exam performed. Comatose, Nahaman was
suffering convulsions and urinating blood. In addition to six fractured ribs,
the boy sustained two broken fingers and open wounds to his cheeks and head.
Seventy percent of his hair had to be shaved, as it was covered with glue. He
also had a three-inch gash on his back. Surgery was performed in an attempt to
repair Nahaman's liver and save his life. Despite recurring convulsions, no
brain scan was ever done. He never regained consciousness and died ten days
later.

In their brutal yet eloquent simplicity, Nahaman's last words serve as an
epitaph for the 40 or more Guatemalan children who shared his fate, all killed
this year in the unrelenting underground police-led campaign of extermination.
In one incident, eight street children were kidnapped from a downtown
neighborhood by men in a jeep. The bodies of three of the boys were soon found.
All bore messages carved in the unmistakable language of torture: Their ears
had been sliced off, their eyes burned out. And in a traditional warning to
witnesses not to "sing," their tongues had been carved out. The other five boys
were never found.

"Hopefully, they were killed first," said Bruce Harris, who brought charges
against Nahaman's executioners. "But that's not the way it's usually done
around here." Harris ought to know. Harassed by Guatemalan police, he and his
family had to leave and now reside in Mexico.

In a larger sense, Nahaman's words also underscore the vulnerability of
innocence and truth in the eternal contest with the forces of evil and
injustice. The four policemen who were finally detained in connection with his
death have been sentenced to prison terms of between 10 and 15 years. At this
writing, however, government-led efforts are being made to release the officers.
The rationale: Alleged typographical errors in court documents filed by Casa
Alianza invalidate the ruling for some reason, thus prompting the authorities to
conclude with characteristic sophistry that there is, therefore, no case.

Promised anonymity and baited by a $20 bribe, a Guatemala City cop told Omni
that "the crime rate has been spiraling out of control. There are more and more
gangs of street children. They've been giving us a lot of trouble. It's bad
for business, bad for tourism, bad for our national image," explained the
officer. "We cope as we can. We obey orders." I had heard this somewhere else.
It is the same kind of crass official insolence that has time and again blocked
investigations into a number of recent human rights violations, including the
assassination of several prominent Guatemalan "centrist" politicians, a lawyer,
scores of human rights activists, more than 50 Guatemalan and U.S. journalists,
anthropologist Myrna Elizabeth Mack Chang (whose murder, it was recently
confirmed, was ordered by a high-ranking member of the Guatemalan security
forces), U.S. citizen Michael Devine (abducted, tortured, and murdered by a
group of men that included soldiers), and children's rights advocates, including
a Casa Alianza staff worker.

According to a U.S. State Department report, "Reliable evidence indicates that
[Guatemalan] security forces and civil patrols committed, with almost total
impunity, most of the major human rights abuses. These include extrajudicial
killings, torture, and disappearances of, among others, human rights activists,
unionists, indigenous people, and street children.... Security forces are
virtually never held accountable for these violations. With few exceptions, the
government has failed to investigate, detain, and prosecute those perpetrators
of extrajudicial and politically motivated killings who were unwilling to
investigate cases aggressively if the military was thought to be involved. It is
likely that military officials also shield lower-ranking personnel involved in
killings. Approximately 400 policemen were discharged for a variety of abuses,
including corruption." Ex-policemen, however, are usually resettled as
bodyguards or in a variety of private security assignments-and continue to carry
guns.

The reign of terror that grips Guatemala has also thwarted investigations into
the brutal abduction, torture, and rape by Guatemalan police of Sister Dianna
Ortiz, a U.S. nun working with children. Her story was reported earlier this
year by ABC's Diane Sawyer on Prime Time Live.

Guatemala City is a dusty, noisy metropolis that has grown and spilled over its
own 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, (three percent of Guatemalans own ninety-eight percent of the
country's arable land) the city has spread, tentacle-like, into pestilential
slums, along sunlit ridges and down the slopes of dank garbage-strewn canyons
where barefoot children, chickens, cats, and dogs share a common precarious
existence. It is in one such slum, named Limon, that thirteen-yearold Angelica
agreed to meet us. With a price on her head, stalked by the policeman who has
repeatedly raped and threatened to kill her, Angelica now moves from hovel to
hovel, hiding during the day, earning a few quetzales at night selling herself.
We found her in a room with bare cinderblock walls, seated at the edge of a cot,
her feet, pitted by insect bites and skin lesions, resting on the dirt floor,
under a leaking corrugated sheetmetal roof held by waterlogged and rotting wood
beams.

On the streets since she was eight, Angelica saw her mother murdered by the
woman who now lives with her father. She started drinking when she was ten. A
man tried to seduce her when she was eleven. She escaped and was placed in a
shelter where she was homosexually molested by an older girl. She has been
sniffing glue for the past three years. Caught stealing trinkets from a variety
store, she was dragged by a policeman into a cul-desac behind the store, where
she was repeatedly raped and sodomized. The officer then shoved the barrel of
his gun into her mouth and, with a smile, threatened to kill her if she talked.
"Still smiling," and as if to punctuate his threat with a small sample, he
kicked her in the stomach "so hard that I nearly fainted from the pain." The
policeman had not bothered to remove his shield and Angelica memorized the
number. She staggered into a hospital where she blurted out her story and was
treated. Despite a formal complaint lodged on her behalf and forensic evidence
submitted to a local magistrate, the policeman, while identitied three days
after the incident, was never charged. "Forensic evidence" goes bad after two
days and may no longer be used in a Guatemalan court of law.

In a corner of the room, under the pallid rays of a bare 40-watt bulb around
which a squadron of flies keeps circling, propped on a table littered with rags
and old newspapers, rests a tall, garishly painted figurine, a Madonna and child
whose introspective, tortured gazes, frozen in a point in space where God is
said to dwell, exude pain and disillusionment, betrayal and stupefaction. Every
once in a while, almost mechanically, Angelica casts a forlorn glance at the
holy icon, perhaps for reassurance. But in her large brown eyes all I see are
false hopes and broken promises.

Outside, the vultures have resumed their abominable vigil, gliding overhead like
black-winged angels at a witches' Sabbath, awaiting death, smelling it, tasting
it almost. Surely, I reflect, even God must find Limon a very bitter fruit.

For most of Guatemala's street children, the nightmare begins at conception, an
act advocated and sanctified by the Church and 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 ideology than altruism.
Continuing to bow to interests stretching from the Vatican down to powerful
Christian right-wingers 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 linked to the killings per se,
it directly and indirectly bears a burden of guilt by denying women access to
birth control and abortion, by censuring the teaching of safe sex, by
disallowing the use of contraceptives, and by exhibiting gross indifference to
the causes and consequences of overpopulation.

Contacts in Guatemala have quietly admitted that the Church has done far less
than it could on behalf of the children, "partly because of a lingering
antipathy by law enforcement agencies against the clergy, and partly because of
its own inertia and a traditional obstructionist policy that curiously places
greater emphasis on the unborn" than on the living.

While it is true that a number of activist priests and nuns have been executed
in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America-frontline soldiers are always in the
line of fire-princes of the Church rarely, if ever, face similar dangers. In
the case of Guatemala, the Church's actions, or lack thereof, on behalf of its
most vulnerable flock, the company it keeps, the tenacity with which it controls
its dominion, the arrogance of its double standards, all speak louder than words
and all too sadly point to what can be perceived only as a depraved indifference
to human life.

This inertia was dramatically illustrated during my visit to Guatemala when, not
to be outdone, Guatemala's first and second ladies-both touted as staunch
supporters of children's rights, and both who claim pedigreed blue blood
ancestry-failed to appear for a prearranged interview. No apology or explanation
for their lack of interest was ever offered, "There is no justice in Guatemala,"
Bruce Harris commented as we parted. "Kids are abandoned by their families,
persecuted by the state, rejected by society." Ironically, I noted, it is those
most apt to help redress the "Sins that Cry to Heaven for Vengeance"-oppression
of the poor and the orphans-whose hearts have turned to stone.

Guatemala's coat of arms consists of two crossed rifles with fixed bayonets and
two crossed boarding sabers flanked by two olive branches on a field of double
blue and white. A nation of contrasts, it continues to live by the rifle.
Sabers keep on rattling. Both are trained on easy targets. Inexplicably, as if
guided by an irresistible urge to self-destruct, Guatemala, by immolating its
children, may be depriving itself of a future. Can the olive branch ever
prevail?

*
POSTSCRIPT. A week after my return to New York, I received an urgent dispatch
informing me that the Casa Alianza shelter in Guatemala City had been peppered
with machine-gun fire. The unidentified assailants, "four heavily armed men in a
blue BMW" (most likely policemen implicated in brutal crimes against street
children) "threatened to kill the director, the staff, and the children. "

*
A week later, I was also informed that a seven-year-old street boy had been
beaten to death by police. His head had been bashed, his eyes gouged. Positive
identification could not be made. That same day a fifteen-year-old boy was
dragged by police to the outskirts of Guatemala City, where he was savagely
beaten and burned over 90 percent of his body, including his genitalia.

*
News of the bludgeoning to death of the Financial Times correspondent in
Guatemala reached me at this writing. Sources tell me he was working on the
ongoing Bank of Credit and Commerce International scandal. This brings to more
than 50 the number of journalists killed in the line of duty in Guatemala since
1978. Death goes on.

*
-W. E. Gutman

YOU CAN HELP

If this article has struck a chord, a letter to your elected representatives is
a good start. If you desire further information or wish to help the children by
making a contribution, contact the following organizations:

• AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL USA, 322 8th Ave., New York, NY 10001; (212)
807-8400. Or contact your local AI office for additional information.

• CHILDHOPE, 333 E. 38th St., New York, NY 10016; (212) 983-1422.

• CHILDREN'S RIGHTS INTERNATIONAL, 21 S. 13th St., Philadelphia, PA 19107;
(215) 569-8850.

• COVENANT HOUSE, 346 W. 17th St., New York, NY 10011-5002; (800) 999-9999.

• PLAN INTERNATIONAL USA, 155 Plan Way, Box M024, Warwick, RI 02886-1099;
(800) 556-7918.


THE ATLAS OF SHAME:CHILDREN'S RIGHTS VIOLATIONS WORLDWIDE

*
There are more than 100 million street children around the world who live in
fear every day of their lives. According to Amnesty International, many of
these children "disappear," are beaten, illegally detained and confined,
sexually exploited, tortured, and systematically killed by agents of the
state.

*
1 ALBANIA: Beatings, torture, and confinement.

*
2 ARGENTINA: More than 200 children have "disappeared" since the late
Seventies.

*
3 BOLIVIA: Illegal internment and torture.

*
4 BRAZIL: Nearly 460 children and adolescents were killed by death squads
last year.

*
5 CHAD: Illegal imprisonment and torture of children related to
"politically subversive" adults.

*
6 CHINA: Selling of child brides*. Children were among the more than
1,000 people killed in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square massacre.

*
7 EL SALVADOR: Disappearances, illegal detention, and extrajudicial
executions carried out by both the military and the police.

*
8 GUATEMALA: See story.

*
9 IRAQ: More than 400 children have been detained by the police and the
military without trial, tortured, and judicially or extrajudicially executed.

*
10 ISRAEL/OCCUPIED TERRITORIES: Excessive force and beatings of young
Palestinians.

*
11 MAURITANIA: Beatings and executions.

*
12 MYANMAR (formerly Burma): Beatings, torture, and extrajudicial executions.

*
13 NIGERIA: Executions of minors.

*
14 PERU: Caught in the crossfire of war, hundreds of Peruvian children, some as
young as ten, have been killed by the army.

*
15 PHILIPPINES: Sexual exploitation and extrajudicial executions.

*
16 ROMANIA*: Nazi-like forced increase in population during the Ceausescu regime
resulted, following the revolution, in thousands of orphaned and abandoned
children, most of whom contine to live in squalid conditions.

*
17 SOUTH AFRICA: Harassment, illegal detention, beatings, torture, and
extrajudicial execution . 18 SRI LANKA: Sexual exploitation*, abductions,
"disappearances," and illegal imprisonment.

*
19 TAIWAN: Sexual exploitation.*

*
20 THAILAND: Sexual exploitation.*

*
21 TURKEY: Beatings, illegal detention, and torture.

*
22 USA: Police brutality. The United States Supreme Court has ruled that
execution of juvenile offenders as young as sixteen is not specifically
prohibited in the Constitution. Twenty-four states currently permit executions
of juveniles; 14 states currently have such prisoners on death row.