M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award--2008

Jennifer Harbury

Bio:

For Jennifer Harbury fighting injustice has been a way of life. After graduating from Cornell University, she traveled through Africa and Asia, fueling her passion to end inhumanity and oppression. By the time she graduated from Harvard Law School, her passion became a commitment to social justice and life as an activist lawyer. She moved to rural Texas close to the Mexican border where she began work at a legal aid office. There she met hundreds of Mayans fleeing from the death squads and massacres in Guatamala.

She decided to go to Guatemala to see for herself.

There she met Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, called Everardo by his friends, a leader of the Mayan resistance to the Guatemalan oligarchy’s repression of its indigenous people. They fell in love and were married. In 1992, he was captured by the Guatemalan military who falsely claimed that he had been killed in combat. Six months later, Ms. Harbury learned that he was, in fact, still alive. The military had faked his death in order to torture him, with medical attendants, to avoid accidentally killing him. Their intention was to break him psychologically. Ms. Harbury tried a variety of tactics to find out what happened to her husband: hunger strikes, demonstrations, and endless petitions to the United Nations, the State Department, the OAS, and, of course, Capitol Hill. These gestures proved fruitless, bringing the same message back: no information about the whereabouts of Everardo.

After two and a half years, after her longest hunger strike, which lasted 32 days in Guatemala and then another 14-day hunger strike in front of the White House, in 1995, U.S. Rep. Robert Torricelli, who was then on the Intelligence Committee, revealed that Everardo had indeed been captured alive, had been tortured for two and a half years, and then extra-judicially executed by military intelligence officials in Guatemala.

A U.S. State Department official, Richard Nuccio, leaked the story. The U.S. had known all along what had happened to Everardo; men on the CIA payroll had participated in his torture and murder. Jennifer Harbury’s book "Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala" (1997) tells the chilling story of this government’s complicity in keeping that Latin American dictatorship in power.

In 2005, Harbury published "Truth, Torture, and the American Way," which documents how the CIA uses torture. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are nothing new. Not only are these methods cruel, inhumane, and against international law, but they are also ineffective ways to secure the peace and safety of Americans. Torture does not elicit accurate information; it creates desperation and falsehoods.

“In the end, our use of violence and repression can only sow seeds of hatred and trauma, which in the end will produce only greater violence against us.”

Jennifer Harbury is also the author of "Bridge to Courage: Life Stories of Guatemalan Companeros & Companeras" (1995). In 1995 she received a Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, and in 1997 the Cavallo Award for Moral Courage. She shared this award with Richard Nuccio, the U.S. State Department official who leaked the information about the CIA’s cover-up of and complicity in the torture and murder of her husband Everardo.

SALT is honored to award Jennifer Harbury the M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award.  For a copy of her comments upon receiving this award, click here.