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Shoot the messenger

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The Cabal to Silence Bruce Harris: A Retrospective“No one likes the bearer of bad news.” -- Antigone, line 277, Sophocles (496-406 B.C.E.)

BY W. E. GUTMAN

GUATEMALA CITY -- Journalists and whistle-blowers share common traits: they are perceived as arrogant, insensitive and vexing. Their revelations -- sometimes embarrassing, often incriminating, always untimely and damn inconvenient -- are seldom appreciated. Both seek the truth, one in the interest of history, the other in the service of justice. Each is a vital cog in the vast and complex machine that energizes a democracy. They become indispensable in marginally democratic nations (read repressive plutocratic regimes) where the press is routinely muzzled and journalists are often bumped off. Whereas the press is the watchdog and the conscience of a nation, human rights monitors and advocates are the gatekeepers of a higher moral ground upon which rests the very foundations of a free society.

Being the watchdog and message-bearer to the multitude is a tall order, especially for an institution as fragile as the press. The task takes on Herculean proportions when the truth is uttered, not by a credentialed journalist, but by an eminent and respected activist. What is endured as “inauspicious rumor” by the first is branded as “seditious effrontery” when exposed by the other.

Take the curious case of Guatemala vs. the late Bruce Harris, an eighteen-month saga of judicial shenanigans inspired by the defendant’s investigation of illegal adoptions and culminating in a fraudulent defamation of character lawsuit by the plaintiff which could have cost Harris his freedom at the time. Harris’ defense was further compromised by Guatemala’s contemptible assertion that, not being a journalist, he had no freedom of speech, and by influential power brokers who had considerably more to lose than their freedom -- namely colossal earnings in the service of fraudulent adoptions. The recent, long awaited and much celebrated arrest and imprisonment of Susana Maria Luarca Saracho de Umaña, after years of legal contortions, evasions and spurious counter-accusations, represents the tip of a bottomless iceberg. But fast- forward to the future.

TWO SYSTEMS, BOTH CORRUPT

International adoptions from Guatemala, which has the weakest adoption statutes in Central America, rose dramatically in the past few years. They grew exponentially when Honduras cracked down on illegal adoptions in 1994.

There are two methods of adoptions in Guatemala -- private and “official.” The first is handled by attorneys, generally at the behest of young, desperately poor, often multiparous mothers. By law, the mother can stop the adoption process at any time, a right rarely spelled out or enforced. Despondent and economically strapped, mothers are treated by the attorneys to prenatal, delivery and post-partum care -- a benevolence the attorneys are quick to levy against mothers who decide to keep their babies. The private system invites both coercion and corruption. Although mothers must, by law, submit to an interview with the Solicitor General’s Office and the diplomatic representative of the adoptive parents, attorneys often threaten the mother with dire consequences if they back down.

The “official” system occurs when an infant has been declared legally abandoned by a juvenile court judge. The State becomes the “birth mother” and acts to protect the child’s best interests. While this form of adoption appears to be more reliable, collusion between judges and attorneys for the adoptive parents is widespread.

HARRIS SMELLS A RAT

Casa Alianza Guatemala had a formal agreement with the Solicitor General’s Office under which the organization was empowered to lend its expertise in investigations of civil and human rights violations of Guatemalan minors.

In mid-1997, Casa Alianza was asked to help investigate the trafficking of babies from Chiapas, Mexico to Guatemala City, and, from there, to overseas destinations. The probe yielded immediate and disturbing results: babies were being systematically stolen, bought or tricked away from their mothers’ arms then issued fake or illegally acquired birth certificates. Casa Alianza also found that Public Registrars were routinely bribed in return for birth certificates and that midwives were paid to attest to being present at births that hadn’t taken place. A woman was paid about $50 to act as the birth mother. Warned of the consequences of perjury if she snitched, she was then dispatched to Guatemala City where she “voluntarily” surrendered the infant to attorneys who, for $15,000 -- and in the absence of DNA testing linking the infant and the fake mother -- arranged for the baby to be promptly flown out of the country by its adoptive parents.

On September 11, 1997 , the Solicitor General’s Office called a press conference at which, represented by Bruce Harris, Casa Alianza was invited to take part. Also present were Carmela Curup, head of the Juvenile section of the Solicitor General’s Office, and Asisclo Valladares, the-then Solicitor General, who had high praise for Casa Alianza’s work. Results of the joint investigation were publicly released, along with a list of 15 criminal complaints which had been filed with the Public Prosecutor’s Office. One of the complaints alleged that attorney Susana Maria Luarca Saracho de Umaña, wife of the former President of the Guatemalan Supreme Court of Justice, Ricardo Umaña [then an influential Supreme Court Magistrate] had routinely engaged in influence peddling and solicitation of favors. She was specifically accused of pressuring public officials to look with favor upon her adoption schemes.

On September 24, Mrs. Umaña accused Bruce Harris of defamation, perjury and slander. In contravention of international statutes, defamation in Guatemala is considered a criminal, rather than a civil offense. How convenient.

Two days later, the 4th Tribunal of Criminal Sentencing hastily agreed to reconvene for a conciliation hearing on October 13. Casa Alianza was officially notified of this decision on September 30. A sheaf of documents was found wedged into the door of CA’s Crisis Center. Conspicuously absent from was Mrs. Umaña’s formal complaint. That same day, Casa Alianza returned the incomplete dossier to the 4th Tribunal with a letter notifying the court of its oversight. Harris subsequently questioned the competence and impartiality of the 4th Tribunal.

Early in October, Casa Alianza retained an attorney. At the 13 October hearing, in a Kafkaesque scheme to frustrate the defense, the 4th Tribunal repudiated Harris’ attorney. It also impugned Harris for being absent at the hearing. The 4th Tribunal was subsequently asked to withdraw from the case, which was transferred to the 5th Tribunal.

In November, the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala took over Harris’ defense. The new Tribunal rejected every petition for reconsideration filed by the defense. In June 1998 the court cleared the way for a criminal trial

LEGAL LAWLESSNESS?

Guatemala’s legal system is notoriously slow and scandalously corrupt. Of the 385 lawsuits instituted by Casa Alianza in cases involving violence against minors, only 15 were successfully prosecuted -- not for lack of incontrovertible evidence, but because the courts refused to examine the evidence. The criminal case against Harris appears to have been unusually -- and suspiciously -- swift. If convicted, he faced a stiff prison term.

In Guatemala , “the truth” is not an argument in defending a defamation case. Clearly, and in flagrant violation of both the American Convention on Human Rights and Article 35 of the Guatemalan Constitution, the courts had prejudged Harris and unilaterally concluded that constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression did not apply to him.

The 5th Tribunal’s rationale appears all the more skewed considering that Harris’ chief accuser – Mrs. Luarca -- was herself the subject of at least two criminal investigations, and that the “defamatory” charges leveled against her at a public press conference and in the presence of Guatemala’s Attorney General, proved to be true and fitting. Indeed, Mrs. Luarca was ordered to return two infants destined for adoption in the U.S. to their birth mothers. Casa Alianza and the Archbishop's legal office were instrumental in reuniting the infants with their mothers, who had been tricked into giving them up.

Disregarding Harris’ ad honorem status with the Solicitor General’s Office and his participation in that capacity at the press conference, the Tribunal further contended that he was not a journalist and therefore had no right to attend a press conference at which accusations -- legitimate or not -- were aired in public. The Tribunal doggedly denied Harris the right to summon the Solicitor General’s Office for corroboration.

In 2004, Harris was tried and acquitted. He later made a speech welcoming the theoretical collapse of Guatemala as a "befitting a corrupt state."

THE MAN GUATEMALA LOVES TO HATE

Bruce Harris died on May 30, 2010 of pancreatic cancer at his Florida home. He was 55. Born in Scotland, the charismatic Harris received numerous awards and honors for his work, including the Olof Palme prize in 1996 and the Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize in 2004. In 2001, he was made an Officer of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. He dedicated his life to ending the persecution, torture and routine murder of street children by Guatemalan and Honduran police. Some 392 cases alleging such offenses were brought to trial. He also testified on behalf of children's rights before international bodies, helping obtain punitive rulings against Guatemala and Honduras by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

From 1991 to 2004, I closely monitored his work on behalf of homeless minors and reported on his successes, trials and tribulations. I knew him to be a fiercely dedicated, courageous, tireless advocate of the voiceless, whether they were street children, alleged "delinquents" or defenseless infants consigned to the auction block of illegal adoptions.

Harris, a maverick and an incorrigible gadfly, was involved in major disputes with Central American authorities. In 2000, Costa Rican president Miguel Angel Rodríguez accused him of plotting to damage that nation's reputation by conducting raids on brothels specializing in child prostitution and writing scathing articles describing Costa Rica as a “sex tourism paradise.” Costa Rica remains a top child-sex tourist destination.

Bruce Harris left Casa Alianza after vague and unsubstantiated allegations of sexual indiscretions. The Honduran special prosecutor's office for crimes against children investigated the claim and, lacking sustainable evidence, dropped the charges and closed the case. I have reason to believe that Harris was the victim of entrapment. His engaged and combative style, his unbending belief in the rule of law, while paving the way for much needed reforms and resulting in the indictment of scores of child abusers, rapists and murderers, also earned him enemies, some in the countries in which he worked, others within his own organization. The latter, I am convinced, engineered his demise because his uncompromising style brought undue negative attention upon Casa Alianza by the host countries.

Meanwhile, Casa Alianza has lapsed into self-imposed inertia and obscurity, the kind that shields it from the rabid animosity of government and local constabularies.

Last, I take serious issue with the damning portrayals of Bruce Harris in recent posts, notably the scurrilous lies being spread by Hannah Wallace and her cronies.

POSTSCRIPT

Guatemala’s insistence that the truth is not a legitimate defense and freedom of expression excludes the right to speak up against official crime and injustice bodes ill for a nation whose somber and violent past continues to be the subject of scrutiny. Underlying the Harris case is the nagging reminder that in Guatemala, despite claims to the contrary, transparent politics, justice and a respect for fundamental rights is a nebulous objective, not a priority.

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W. E. Gutman is a veteran investigative journalist and author. He covered politics, the military, human rights and other socio-economic themes in Central America from 1991 to 2006.

2011 May 17