www.sfgate.comGood, bad, ugly in Guatemala
By Mary Jo McConahay
PACIFIC NEWS SERVICE
Sunday, April 9, 2000
©2000 San Francisco Examiner
GUATEMALA CITY – A retired UC-Davis football coach is at the quiet center of a milestone human rights case in which two former members of an elite army unit have turned state's witnesses, naming other officers in the massacre that wiped out the village of Dos Erres in 1982.
Will Lotter, 75, has worked for years for victims of the political violence that wracked Central America through the 1970s and '80s. Yet he has spent the last four years on behalf of a pair of ex-death-squad members who agreed to turn state's evidence in the Dos Erres case. The wave of killing between Dec. 6 and 8, 1982, was just one tragedy in the 36-year Guatemala civil war that killed about 200,000 people, mostly unarmed civilians.
Lotter slowly – sometimes clandestinely – raised money for lawyers and travel and built trust with the star witnesses. He sat with the two witnesses during court proceedings where they gave their damaging testimony. And when they were done, he accompanied them on a tense journey into exile outside Guatemala.
As a result of their evidence, Special Prosecutor Mario Leal said on March 29 that he would request the arrest of 23 persons and was considering formal charges against former Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the one-time military strongman who was chief of state in 1982 and is now president of Guatemala's Congress.
High-profile cases
The Dos Erres case comes as a number of high-profile international cases reach all the way up to the highest levels of power. A Spanish court recently decided to hear a case, brought by Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchú, charging Ríos Montt and seven other generals with genocide, torture and terrorism in Guatemala. The same Spanish court pursued former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and Argentine officials, while war crimes tribunals in the Netherlands focus on the Balkans and Rwanda.
But it is the lower-profile human-rights cases such as Dos Erres that give momentum to the legal wave.
Since 1996, Coach Lotter, as he was known for 42 years at Davis, is one of a scattering of ordinary Americans who continue to contribute money and support to bring egregious human rights cases to justice in Central America.
It is risky work, performed out of the limelight by family members of the dead and disappeared, sometimes in alliance with volunteers from abroad, like Lotter, who provide a modest connection to the outside world.
"We feel safer, and we feel deeply the accompaniment," said Aura Elena Farfan, a founder of the Families of the Detained and Disappeared of Guatemala (FAMDEGUA), speaking of Will Lotter.
A star athlete at UC-Berkeley – lineman on its first Rose Bowl team, first baseman on its 1947 national champion collegiate baseball team – Lotter was no lifelong political activist. He flew Navy fighters in World War II, and he and his wife Jane, a UC-Davis graduate, reared four sons. At Davis, he coached football, soccer and tennis to a couple of generations of students.
The family left Davis for only 2 years during the 1960s, when Will Lotter took a leave to direct the Peace Corps in Malawi.
Sanctuary movement
By the 1980s, as the city of Davis became one of the strongest outposts of a nationwide "sanctuary" movement, the Lotters joined thousands of members of church and other grass-roots groups who helped refugees fleeing Central American violence. They helped find housing, schools and even psychological help for survivors who reached Northern California.
FAMDEGUA approached Lotter while he was on a Spanish study trip in Guatemala, asking the small but active Davis group to make the switch from assisting victims of the violence to helping two men who had been among the perpetrators.
"At first I was leery," Lotter recalled.
The witnesses' testimony to FAMDEGUA confirmed evidence from a forensic investigation by an Argentine team that exhumed bodies at the Dos Erres site. The two witnesses said that their unit, specialists called kaibiles, carried out the assassination of about 300 men, women and children, raping adolescent girls, torturing some, stuffing bodies – some still alive – down a well.
Both men insisted they did not kill at Dos Erres. Whether or not the claim is true – Lotter doesn't speculate – the fact remains that between them they had served a total of 30 years in special forces notorious for brutality in counterinsurgency campaigns.
Despite his misgivings, Lotter agreed to meet the witnesses.
"I wasn't feeling good about him," he said of a first encounter, unable to shake the idea of the man's background. "But later I spent five days with him, and found he was straightforward. I came to believe his regret."
Initially dubious, Jane Lotter said her husband "made me come around – this testimony is so important."
They spent weeks on the project, soliciting funds that would be used for lawyers and travel.
By 1998 the Davis group and the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant in Berkeley, a coalition of 35 local churches and synagogues, presented the case to California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and then-Rep. Vic Fazio, D-Sacramento. All four lawmakers wrote to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City recommending that visas go to the witnesses in the interest of "significant public benefit" for U.S. policy. The State Department denied their request.
A check for $25,000
For months, the search continued for a country to take in the former kaibiles, whose lives in Guatemala would be worthless after their testimony.
A turning point came with a telephone call from a convent of Roman Catholic nuns in Southern California, who said they were sending a check for $25,000. "'It's the only way you'll bring people like Ríos Montt to justice," Lotter remembers the nun saying. "It's the only kind of testimony that will hold water."
Last month, the case finally was ready for court. On the morning of March 17, Will Lotter wore a white shirt and dark tie to the Guatemala City airport, first in line to check in for the early-morning flight to the northern jungle province.
A head taller than anyone else headed for court that day, Lotter discreetly acknowledged others as they arrived: the briskly cheery government prosecutor; a blue-jacketed observer from the U.S. Embassy; Farfan and fellow FAMDEGUA member Lilian Rivas, both indistinguishable from other middle-aged ladies in flowered dresses and clutching black handbags, but who had caused bones to be exhumed and repeatedly interviewed the star witnesses without protection, in remote locations; and two lawyers for FAMDEGUA, a man and woman in their 30s whose easy manner and blue jeans made them seem like graduate students.
In early March, the two lawyers had presented the case of Dos Erres at the Interamerican Court of Human Rights of the Organization of American States, where the Guatemalan government accepted responsibility. Now they were coming along to ensure the names of real people including army officers – a first – would be linked to the crime.
A professor from Fordham University Law School observing the day's proceedings met Will Lotter that morning and asked what he did, to which he replied, "Citizen."
Sitting with witnesses
Through the steamy day that followed, in the courthouse on a buff clay road in Santa Elena, some 300 miles north of Guatemala City and about 60 miles from the site where Dos Erres once stood, Will Lotter played a supportive role.
Finally the two men walked into the courthouse, one spindly and pale, the other short with dark skin and Indian features, escorted by burly Public Ministry guards in knit shirts with no visible weapons. The judge took testimony from each separately behind closed doors, over a period of seven hours.
As the shorter witness testified, the other sat alongside Lotter and at one point began to weep. He said he did not want to leave behind his 17-year-old daughter, whose abusive boyfriend would not permit a passport to be issued for their infant. The daughter wanted to accompany her family into exile, the witness fretted, but would not leave the baby behind.
This last-minute domestic crisis might derail the whole process, because testimony of just one man, without corroboration, would be of little use. Lotter listened sympathetically. The thin witness seemed to sense there was no turning back; the crisis passed.
As the light from the late sun went soft against the simple white courthouse, the door to the judge's chamber inside remained closed, and nerves began to fray.
Seated on the terrace to catch a breeze, guarding a folder holding the kaibiles' original testimony on her lap, Lilian Rivas stole looks at the thin witness, who was eating from a bag of corn chips. One late afternoon in 1982 her son left home to buy milk for his infant daughter and never returned. Since then she has marched and demonstrated for an accounting of his fate and that of thousands of others missing in the violence, and devoted herself to helping raise her fatherless grandchildren.
Normally unflappable, Rivas broke into silent tears during the long wait on the porch.
"It has cost us to work for murderers," Rivas said so the witness couldn't hear. "I hope their repentance is true."
Flight into exile
The next days were a blur of airports and unknown routes in a foreign land as the witnesses were shepherded swiftly around by the prosecutor and the guards and finally by officials in the country of exile, which is being kept secret for their safety.
At the house that the witnesses would now share, rented by the Public Ministry in the exile country, the former kaibiles were reunited at 2 a.m. one morning with their families, who had been whisked out of the country the night before the court hearing began.
The wife of the thin witness was distraught about her 17-year-old daughter, the one unable to join them. Wives and children grappled with the idea they would not go home again. On the lawn, "Willy" – as everyone calls Lotter – coached the children in endless games of soccer, sometimes diving for the ball and rolling on the ground, delighting the kids torn from their homeland.
Bags of groceries arrived, bought by Lotter and Farfan "with the nuns' money."
Inside, a security officer gave the couples simple cover stories, instructing them how to answer neighborly questions, impressing them with the potential gravity of mistakes. "Remember, one small thing could mean you would have to leave all this behind and go somewhere else," he warned.
When the ministry personnel left, the huskier witness sat on the edge of a bed and closed the door so the families could not hear, an expression of worry in his dark eyes.
"I feel something is going to happen – please don't let this case hang like something in the water," he told Farfan and Lotter.
After all he had gone through, the worst fear was that the prosecution would be dropped, hit a dead end, would come to nothing.
"I didn't leave the country because I am a traitor, but for something else," he said.
"Be assured, be assured," Farfan said. "We won't take a step backward. We are not going to cede."
"We trust you; we trust Willy," said the witness.
Why did the witnesses agree to testify? Each expressed exasperation and even hatred for the army, which as one said, "took my youth and gave me nothing in return."
Each gave details of other known cases of human rights abuse that have not been resolved. One said he feared for his life in Guatemala even before the issue of testifying about Dos Erres arose, because of his knowledge of the other cases and their perpetrators.
Will Lotter had always suspected that the two kaibiles turned witnesses because of their families, because they couldn't live with themselves without telling the truth.
One of them said, "I watched my own children growing and I said to myself, "Those children at Dos Erres did not deserve to die.'." Before he left the house for the last time, Will Lotter promised the men he would return someday, for a visit.
