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Prisoners worked to death in Guatemala

    I was nearing the capital, Guatemala City, only about 10 more miles...finally! According to the map I wouldn't have too far to go to reach the border of El Salvador after that. About 200 yds. ahead I could see what looked like a railroad track crossing the highway and snaking through the tall stands of sugar cane everywhere on both sides of the Pan American Highway. It was late afternoon and the sun was going down. It would be dark within an hour. Long curtains of golden sunlight streamed between the tall stands of dense sugar cane and the cut parcels. The warm afternoon sun illuminating the entire scene with deep, contrasting shadows. The dense growth of sugar cane was high and it was harvest time. Large parcels near the highway had just been cut in several places and the pleasant, sweet smell of freshly cut sugar cane filled the still air. 
About 500 feet from the crossing, I slowed almost to a stop so that I could see better what was happening on the tracks just ahead. Through the cut blocks of sugar cane I could see hundreds of men crossing the Pan American highway, stumbling along as they continued down the railroad tracks. I could see several carrying rifles. My first thought was that it might be one of the bands of communist guerillas that have been hiding in the mountains, fighting the Guatemalan military forces for so many years. If it were the guerillas, I would have to turn around immediately and return to a nearby village for a while, then try to proceed a few hours later after they had time to leave that area. I decided to get a little closer but to remain ready to quickly turn around if necessary. I continued on slowly.
    The mass of men raised a waist-high cloud of fine dust all around them from the rich volcanic earth as they staggered onward like a herd of cattle. As I got closer to the men the sweet scent of sugar cane was quickly overcome by the putrid stench of the mass of dirty, sweat-soaked men. The choking smell of rancid sweat and dirt, mixed with vomit, made the air difficult to breathe. 		 Sugar cane fields at harvest time.
I was surprised that humans could smell so bad, far worse than any herd of animals. It was apparent that they had been wearing the same unwashed garments for months. Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps were well dressed compared to these men.
    About 8 guards armed with double-barreled shotguns walked along both sides of the long mass of men. The guards appeared to be shocked that I had happened upon them right at that moment, as though I had discovered them in the midst of some terrible crime. They glanced cautiously at the prisoners and glared at me with worried, anxious looks on their faces, not knowing what to do about my inopportune presence. They cradled their shotguns carefully in their arms, ready for anything. Some of the guards had already begun noticing that I was gazing too intently at the deplorable condition of the prisoners and glanced angrily toward me. I knew they wanted me to leave immediately. Whether they liked it or not, I had already made the decision that somehow I was going to get a picture of this tremendous tragedy that was taking place, even if it meant risking my life. I fumbled nervously for my polaroid camera which I kept beside me on the car seat as I traveled.
When I was within a few feet of the railroad crossing I stopped the car pretending that I had decided to wait until all the men had a chance to pass. As I had hoped, the men did not try to make way so that I could cross the tracks, which would have obliged me to do so and would have caused me to be in a more difficult position to observe the prisoners. I think the prisoners did this deliberately so that looking at them would be unavoidable. This gave me a chance to study the situation more carefully. I looked the men over quickly from head to foot, trying to take in as much detail as possible. It was then that I suddenly I realized that I had stumbled onto something that no one was ever supposed to see. It was so terrible that logic told me that I should immediately floor the accelerator  and do my very best to get away before they tried to shoot me for being a witness. For a moment I looked for another chance to cross the road between the men to do just that, but there were just too many. I was definitely in the wrong place and at the worst possible time. What I saw was really disturbing. It looked like a well-orchestrated scene from a movie about prisoners at a concentration camp in Nazi Germany or Devil's Island. But it wasn't a movie, and I was sitting there in the middle of it all with my mouth hanging open and without a clue of what to do next. I froze for a moment, not knowing what to do, and felt moved at the sight of such unbelievably inhuman and cruel treatment of prisoners. It seemed incredible to me, looking at these men, to think that our own govenrment had been supporting these oppresive Guatemalan regimes financially and militarily for so many years. The U.S. Embassy must have been aware of these kinds of abuses if I could discover them so easily just by driving through the country as a tourist. Location where I came across the prisoners.
    I was now stopped at the edge of the railroad crossing. I noticed that most of the men didn't look like the typical Guatemalans who were almost all short little dark-skinned Indians. Many of these men seemed taller and looked more like Salvadorans. Maybe they were prisoners from some conflict between the two countries or perhaps illegal immigrants. Maybe that was why they were being treated so badly. Some of the prisoners gazed dizzily at me with their yellowed, blood-shot eyes as they passed close to me, their sunken faces expressionless except for their exhaustion, their heads flopped around as they staggered along, knees buckling under them, stumbling often on the uneven ground, barely having the strength to turn their heads up toward me, trying to let me know through their solemn stares that they were done for, looks of hopeless resignation, knowing and accepting that there was no longer any chance of their being saved from their fate. I felt that they were trying to tell me everything with their eyes, afraid to even turn their heads toward me or to say anything to me directly because of their fear of the guards. Seeing the incredulous expression on my face, the prisoners must have realized that I could see what was happening, that they were being worked to death. Five hundred men who would soon be dead and forgotten, their tragic story buried forever somewhere in the midst of the forests of sugar cane. The pitiful remains of men who once had meant something to someone, sons, fathers, husbands, hoping that in these brief passing moments, in the presence of an American, they could at least let someone know what was being done to them, that maybe someone would care at least enough to tell others what had been done to them. I noted the complete immoral indifference of the prison guards to the pitiful condition of the prisoners.
    The guards were very disturbed with me appearing there at that moment and were acting very restless as though they were trying to decide what to do about it. I didn't know exactly what to do but I didn't want it to seem obvious that I thought there was anything out of the ordinary occuring so when I saw a break in the line I crossed the tracks very slowly and just on the other side, stopped the car and put it in park. For a brief moment I pretended to be looking at the map. I quickly got the camera ready trying to make sure that everything was just right because I knew I would only have one chance.  I wanted to make sure that I got a good shot of this. The more I saw, the more terrible I realized the situation was. This was the kind of scene that you would see on the covers of LIFE and TIME magazines. and I knew that not many people would believe it if I didn't manage to get a photograph. With my peripheral vision I could see that the guards were still keeping an eye on me.
    I looked to my left quickly in the direction that the men were walking and off in the distance I could see where they were headed. It was a large prison about one mile away, just outside the capitol and was the only building nearby large enough for this many men. I knew that the guards must be in a hurry to get the men back to the prison before darkness fell or they would risk prisoners trying to escape into the cane fields. I was nervous and unsure of how the guards would react if they saw the camera and I knew that I probably wouldn't get a second chance to take a shot, so I quickly raised it just to the edge of my window and rested it carefully on the edge to hold it still so that I could capture as much detail in the shot as possible. I had no more than done so when suddenly one of the guards turned his shotgun quickly toward me and took careful aim. He was really going to shoot me! Just for taking a picture! I still wanted to try to squeeze off the shot quickly before he realized what I had done but I didn't. I could tell he wasn't bluffing. He was watching me too closely, looking for any movement that would indicate that I was trying to take the picture. I lowered the camera instantly and held my right index finger away from the camera a little to show the guard that I wasn't going to go through with it. He was still watching me closely to see if I tried again to depress the camera button. He suddenly took aim again and was about to fire when the guard standing next to him tapped him on the arm and motioned for him not to. The guard lowered his double-barreled shotgun a little and muttered something angrily to the other guard in disagreement, then raised his shotgun again.
    Luckily the other guard seemed determined not to let him shoot me and yelled something at him and motioned with his hand not to do anything. If he hadn't intervened, the guard would have shot me in the face with the shotgun.The prisoners kept walking and were relatively unaffected by what took place. They were in no condition to be worrying about any one else's problems. The guard hadn't wanted to shoot me for no reason. He knew what might happen if a photograph like this were to appear in the newspapers in the U.S. I lingered nervously for a moment, looking the men over again, trying to remember every minute detail in my mind as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
    There were about 500 prisoners being walked back from a long day's work in the sun-baked cane fields near the prison, probably the personal property of some corrupt politician or prison official. Most of the men weren't wearing regular clothes. Instead they all seemed to be dressed in some sort of net-like garment covering their entire body. It seemed that their garments were made from small scraps of cloth, apparently the smallest scraps from a clothing factory, tied together in knots to form a netlike covering. None of them wore shoes and from the looks of their swollen and caloused feet, they hadn't worn shoes in a long time. The men were all totally fatigued. Their legs wobbled and gave way under them from their exhaustion and sickness as they struggled to walk along the rough tracks. Some of them could barely keep from falling on the ground and grabbed their legs above the knees to keep them from buckling under them. It was obvious from the efforts they made that they were mortally afraid of the consequences if they were to stop walking.
    But they continued on, their blood-shot eyes rolled in their heads like a drunks' but it was obvious that it was due to their terrible physical condition and the tremendously hard labor forced upon them. I saw about a dozen or so who looked so starved and weak that I don't think that they could have made it to the prison that afternoon. Surely several of them died that same evening before reaching the prison, that's how bad they looked. All of the men looked like they were being starved and forced to do extremely hard labor at the same time. I heard several men with loud, deep, pneumonia-like coughs. I had never in my life seen men in such terrible physical condition, not even in movies. I never had seen men dressed literally in rags over their entire body, not even prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. I'm sure that if the men stayed there at the prison, working like this every day, that each and every one of them would surely have died within a week or two. It was no wonder that many people in Guatemala had decided that the only way to stop these kinds of atrocities was to try to overthrow the government. I continued to watch the men as they disappeared around a curve in the track.
Comment: A couple of days later I reported the incident to CIA chief John D. Negroponte in Tegucigalpa, Honduras who told me that it was nothing compared to other things that go on all the time. Then he proceeded to relate an account of something that he had seen while he served in Colombia. I decided that someday I would try to tell the story about these men. I could tell that trying to help them was hopeless. The U.S. Embassy obviously didn't want to be bothered with stories about abuse committed by a government that we were supporting. For now there wasn't much I could do. I continued on my trip to Costa Rica. I had been driving for eight days and I was exhausted. All I wanted to do now was to get to my destination.
    The Guatemalan guerilla may have been financed by the Communists, but it was obvious that they only wanted to get rid of their corrupt leaders by any means available to them, they were desperate. Since the U.S. was known to be supporting their government, the only ones they could turn to for arms were the Communists. The uneducated campesinos had no concept at all of what it meant to be a Communist or to be a member of any kind of political system. They knew that they would probably always be slaves under whatever system came to power. It didn't make any difference to them except that they knew that the present system was unbearable and that any change in government couldn't be any worse than what they already had.

     Just as I had seen elsewhere, these were government employees, most likely being paid with salaries financed by our generous foreign aid which even permitted the Guatemalans to maintain a heavily armed army of murderers and thieves. I couldn't understand why they needed a big army. For what? Who did they have to defend themselves against? I had noticed pictures in the government posts everywhere in Guatemala of fat, stupid looking army generals, "caras de barro"as the locals call them in Spanish, with their chests ridiculously wallpapered with all kinds of cheap medals, medals on "soldiers" from a country that has never had a real war. Any one of them with more medals than Audie Murphy and Westmoreland put together. (to be continued...)

 Text Copyright  © 1999 William LaRoche
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