Americans Who Tell the Truth |
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Jennifer Harbury |
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Jennifer Harbury Biography “The problem, of course, lies with the realities concealed from us. This has always been the case. While the American public has slowly grappled with ongoing injustices visible within our own borders, it has long failed to discover and correct our government's abuses abroad. In the end, however, this is our government, and torture is being utilized in our names and supported by our tax dollars. We are responsible.” By the time Jennifer Harbury entered Harvard Law School she already knew that she wanted to study civil rights law. After growing up in Connecticut and graduating from Cornell University she traveled widely in Asia and Africa witnessing first hand brutal injustice and repression in many cultures. After law school she began work in a small legal aid bureau on the Texas-Mexican border. In the early 1980s thousands of Mayans were escaping to Texas from death squads and massacres in Guatemala. U.S. immigration was sending these refugees back. Harbury decided to go to Guatemala to see for herself what was going on. Her life was changed. In Guatemala she met Efrain Bamaca Velasquez ( known as Commandante Everardo) a leader of the Mayan resistance to the Guatemalan oligarchy’s brutal repression of its indigenous people. ( Mayan’s were 80% of the population.) She and Everardo fell in love and were married. He was subsequently captured, tortured for two and one half years then murdered without trial. Harbury conducted hunger strikes in Guatemala and in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. to try to force officials in both countries to tell her the truth about what had happened to her husband. The U.S. denied any knowledge of the situation. Finally an official in the U.S. State Department leaked the truth that the U.S. had known all along what had happened to Everardo, and that men on the payroll of the CIA had participated in his torture and murder. Harbury’s book Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala ( 1997) is a classic work of courage and truth telling, uncovering the U.S. complicity in right wing torture and violent, anti-democratic suppression of poor people’s rights. In 2005, Harbury published another book, Truth, Torture, and the American Way, which documents the long time use of torture by the CIA. This book demonstrates that the use of torture by American interrogators at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is nothing new. She also stresses that torture is counter-productive. It does not elicit accurate information from its victims. By using torture, “We are reacting out of fear instead of thinking our way through the difficult process of conflict resolution. 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.” And, she says, “We must accept the fact that we are indeed our brothers’ and sisters’ collective keepers. If we are indifferent to the basic human needs of others, then peace will always elude us. Suffering, when too long ignored, inevitably leads to conflagration.” 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. For this act, Nuccio was denied his federal security clearance. |
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