Searching for the Grave of a Guatemalan Guerrilla with Bianca Jagger

Memories from a 1995 Work Trip in Guatemala in Search of the Past, Present, and Possible Future

Photo by Shalom de León on Unsplash

One of the wonders of growing older is the sense of time unspooling in an ever extending panorama of past, present, and possible future.  You really are a poor player strutting on the stage for only a brief spell, it turns out, if you hadn’t quite known it before.  A great deal happened prior to your arrival, and (presumably) much will come after you go.  Even while you’re here, you don’t really know whether the parts you remember actually happened in the way you remember them (probably not) or whether the moments you forgot matter more than you know (probably so).  Things tend to get misplaced in the mind over time—important, trivial, tragic, and comic all jumbled up.  I think about this fact a lot as I think back to that trip with Bianca Jagger in the summer of 1995 in search of the grave of a disappeared Guatemalan guerrilla.

Three of us set out from Guatemala City in a US Embassy van: My friend Lance Root, an assistant regional security officer back then; the Nicaraguan human rights activist Bianca Jagger, Mick’s ex who at 50 remained very much a stunning supermodel at the time; and yours truly, a newly minted vice-consul one year into his maiden diplomatic tour.  Our destination was a remote field adjacent to a rural military base outside the town of San Marcos in Guatemala’s western tropics just south of the border with Mexico—roughly 3-hours drive from the capital.  If I told you the military base was called Las Cabañas, that’s only because I’ve sought to refresh my memory by reading articles on the web and watching videos on YouTube.  It may have been somewhere else.

The deceased guerrilla whose grave we were searching for, Efraín Bámaca Velázquez (aka Comandante Everardo), had been married to the American lawyer and human rights crusader Jennifer Harbury.  Harbury was traveling in a separate vehicle with a camera crew, as part of our small convoy.  Firm of moral conviction, fiercely determined in pursuing her cause, and with real gifts as a publicist and provocateur, Harbury had ignited a media firestorm alleging Guatemalan government stonewalling about the fate and whereabouts of her spouse.  Her appearance on “60 Minutes” with Mike Wallace in November of 1994 had raised the profile of her protest and hunger strike to new heights.  

Harbury had enlisted Bianca Jagger’s help to keep up the pressure.  Bianca had obliged.  For the record, any doubts we may have harbored about Bianca’s bona fides were quickly dispelled.  She was clearly a thoughtful and experienced human rights professional putting her star power to productive use.  Besides being a native Spanish speaker, herself from Central America, Bianca brought a searching intelligence, genuine seriousness of purpose, and nuanced understanding of the lay of the land.  She was also charming and sexy.  What can I say?  And how can I forget those black leather pants?

As for the reasons why we two humble servants had been along for the ride, Lance had to help jog my memory.  Unsurprisingly, Harbury had alleged US Government complicity in her husband’s disappearance and the subsequent coverup, and accused the Embassy of indifference to her plight as an American Citizen spouse.  Embassy leadership thought it prudent to provide Harbury and Jagger with visible support for their public expedition, however seemingly quixotic, in search of Bámaca’s body.  This support came in the form of security, i.e., Lance (Guatemala then as now could be a dangerous place); and me, a deputized American Citizen Services Officer; as well as (for Bianca) the ride. 

Ironically, I recall little about the visit to the place itself, the field where Bámaca was allegedly buried but may not have been.  Pictures were taken.  Statements were made.  Areas of grass were pointed to.  We milled about, talking briefly with a scrawny Guatemalan conscript who looked like a teenager.  We probably shared a soft drink; it’s the kind of thing you’d do.

But one detail I do remember with near photographic clarity.  (Does that make the memory suspect?)  Even at the time, it felt like a kind of caricature moment, a perfect Hollywood stereotype of a Banana Republic scene.  (Guatemala was, after all, the original Banana Republic.  Read the book Bitter Fruit for the sordid details.)  A silver sedan with tinted windows emerged from the gates of the adjacent military base, creeping slowly forward like a cat on the prowl.  As the car approached the place where our little group was gathered, a rear window was lowered and a man of military bearing with dark sunglasses and a submachine gun stared sternly out.  Then the window was slowly rolled back up again.  I remember thinking to myself at the time that either we were in real danger or they were plain stupid in their brazen, borderline comical display of intimidation, or possibly both.  Nothing could be ruled out.

Photo by Luis Ordóñez on Unsplash

That evening at the nearby rustic hotel, the mood grew lighter.  We were having dinner and drinking El Gallo beer (La Mejor Cerveza!).  At one point near the end of the meal, Bianca, feeling oppressed by the heavy tropical heat, asked whether someone might help alleviate her discomfort by sprinkling cold spritzer water on her bare shoulders and back.  This time (Lance tells me), I was the one who obliged, with reportedly artful movement of wrist and hand.  I’m further told I returned from that trip drunk with a younger man’s delirious dream (those with prurient interests should feel free to continue, prudes should skip ahead to the next paragraph) of taking a long, luxurious bath with Bianca.  While I have no such recollection, my Guatemalan spouse (who wasn’t my spouse at the time) swears it’s true.  I can tell by the look in her eyes that she has a clearer memory of this matter than I do.

—----

Many things are left out of this story; some probably belong.  For example, the quiet discussions we had about the legal validity of Jennifer Harbury’s marriage with Efraín Bámaca, which gave her political leverage as an American Citizen spouse to pressure the Guatemalan government in a way she would never have been able to do as a disinterested party.  The US government, too.  But in diplomacy certain things matter more than mere truth.  Even if the marital vow had been made for political purposes (I’m not claiming here that it had, and Harbury often spoke eloquently about an exchange of spoons in the Mayan tradition), it had to be treated for political reasons as an unalienable fact.  

Moreover, those purposes were – and remain – sadly compelling.  According to news accounts, Harbury first came into contact with Guatemala as a young human rights lawyer watching waves of Guatemalan refugees of mostly indigenous origin washing across our borders in the late 1980s.  She subsequently traveled to Central America to find out for herself what the “root causes” of these refugee flows were (a recurring undertaking it turns out).  There she discovered the dirty secret about Guatemala’s past.  In particular, the brutal repression of the civilian population by successive military regimes, and the killing and forced disappearance of over 200,000 people in the course of a simmering, decades-long civil war.  She reportedly met her future husband, an indigenous leader of the guerrilla resistance, during those travels.  

Harbury also learned about the unflattering reality of US complicity and (at times) active participation in Guatemala’s reign of repression.  Most notorious of all was the CIA role in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, which set the stage for the devastating decades that followed.  While still controversial, US support for Guatemala’s security forces during that time is no longer secret or the subject of debate, and in 1999 President Clinton publicly apologized for it.  Cold war memories and the fear of communism’s spread had begun to fade by then.

Still, I remember a certain feeling of frustration among those in the Embassy working the issue in 1995.  This includes my then boss, the late Chuck Keil, who was Consul General at the time.  A superb diplomat who understood the history and political sensitivities and cared deeply about the people involved, Chuck tried to make sure we did the right thing.  But it didn’t seem to matter that a fragile democratic government was then in place in Guatemala, led by a former Human Rights Ombudsman (no less) and political neophyte Ramiro de León Carpio.  As so often happens in politics, it seemed to us that pressure was being applied on the wrong people at possibly the wrong time.  A UN peace agreement was being brokered.  The fraught negotiations could easily collapse.  (The peace deal was signed in December of 1996.)  But the fledgling democratic government of the day had inherited the sins of mano dura military regimes past.  Somewhat unfairly, we thought, but that’s how things roll as the wheels turn round.

Fast forward to today, the past is not gone or dead, it’s not even past.  Guatemalan democracy has limped forward in fits and starts, stumbled sideways, and fallen back.  There is hope that the new government of Bernardo Arévalo (the son of Guatemala’s first democratically elected president) might buttress democracy and push things forward again, with the active support of the United States.  Meanwhile, refugees and migrants from Guatemala continue to flow to our southern borders, always near the top of an expanding list of source countries whose people live in fear for their lives or believe they have far more hope for a better future in the United States than at home.  Sometimes, it’s hard to avoid the sense of a karmic order, that what goes around comes around.  

Our debt to the past remains too.