Wife’s Fight Causes U.S. Policy Shake-Up Woman Believes Husband Killed In Guatemala With Possible Complicity Of Cia Officials

She was a lawyer from Texas, married outside Austin four years ago to Comandante Everardo, a leader of Guatemala’s leftist insurrection. He had helped guide a violent revolution for 17 years before he disappeared. She wrote a book supporting the guerrillas and staged hunger strikes demanding to learn his fate.

And Jennifer Harbury may end up doing more to overthrow the military’s grip on Guatemala than Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, her husband, ever did.

“I couldn’t save him, but at least I can prevent this war from going any further,” the 43-year-old Harbury said. “That I will do. This will end now.”

Harbury’s crusade to find out what happened to her husband and end a war that has left more than 100,000 people dead has riveted the attention of many Americans - Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives alike.

The former Texas Rural Legal Aid lawyer from Austin and the Rio Grande Valley has become a celebrity. Ted Turner’s Castle Rock pictures has paid Harbury more than $200,000 for the movie rights to her story.

She intends to use the money to create the Everardo Foundation, “dedicated to the survivors of the holocaust in Guatemala,” Harbury said - and to prosecute the men who killed her husband.

On April 5, Harbury testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee about the lies, rumors and horrors she has faced in trying to learn what had happened to Bamaca.

She was told he had died in a March 12, 1992, skirmish. But the body buried in his grave was too young and too short. Then a guerrilla who had seen him five months after Bamaca’s capture told her that her husband was being tortured in a secret prison where the military tried to convert top guerrillas into collaborators.

Harbury staged two hunger strikes to learn more. She met several times with the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala and with top Clinton administration officials, who told her they did not know for sure but thought her husband was dead.

Finally, Rep. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., told her on March 22 her husband had been executed on the orders of a Guatemalan colonel who was a paid CIA informant.

The colonel, Torricelli said, was “the intellectual author” of the 1990 murder of Michael Devine, a U.S. innkeeper who lived in Guatemala.

Because of Harbury, six investigations of the CIA, the eavesdropping National Security Agency, the Pentagon and the Justice Department are under way.

The CIA has denied complicity in the killings but admitted it withheld information from Congress about Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, who Torricelli says was the agency’s informant.

President Clinton has suspended military aid to Guatemala as well as much of the CIA’s work in the country. The agency’s station chief has been recalled.

“It’s a start,” Harbury said.

Harbury wants all the U.S. government’s files on her husband. The guerrilla who said he saw Bamaca in prison, Santiago Cabrera Lopez, says Bamaca was being tortured and questioned by many high-ranking Guatemalan officers, including Alpirez.

“This could bring down the army if we prosecute all these guys,” Harbury said.

Harbury said she trusts Torricelli but does not trust the State Department and certainly not the CIA. She believes that U.S. diplomats lied and that her tax dollars “fed a monster.”

“We need to find out what happened: Did we, the United States, acquiesce or even collaborate with the death squads? And if we were doing that, my God, what have we done?” she said.

And working with reformers in the Guatemalan military is “like working with the good guys in Nazi Germany,” she said.

Harbury has been warned not to go back to Guatemala. Her name was on a list of targets from an unidentified death squad.

She plans to go back anyway.

Once, in Guatemala, she was staying with a woman whose son had been killed by the military. She awoke in the middle of a bad dream to see the woman ironing and reironing her son’s shirts.

“I want no more nightmares where I wake up to see mothers ironing the shirts of their dead sons.”