By David A. Sargent,Special to the Sun Journal

LEWISTON – Two women told about their personal experiences with torture in a talk at Bates College on Monday night.

For Jennifer Harbury, now an attorney, author and activist, the events she recounted followed her marriage to a Mayan resistance leader, Efran Bmaca Velsquez, who was captured, tortured and murdered by the Guatemalan military in 1992. She told of her subsequent attempts to find her husband and to arrive at the truth about his death.

For Neris Gonzalez, it was a painful memory of torture and humiliation at the hands of the El Salvador military in 1979 for her involvement in grassroots efforts to increase literacy among El Salvador’s poor. She told how she was granted political asylum in the United States and how she eventually located two generals who had been involved in her ordeal. The courts in the United States tried her case, and she won, she said.

Gonzalez spoke in Spanish, and her message was translated for the audience.

Harbury has spent the past 20 years working for human rights reforms in Guatemala and in the United States. She told the audience at Bates that torture “is the most relevant question facing our country today.”

Her remarks were mostly anecdotal. She said it is alarming to recognize connections between various kinds of torture that were known to have been used in Vietnam and that are now being revealed in Iraq and at Guantanamo Naval Base on detainees there.

“It’s everywhere the CIA has gone,” she said. “That’s what’s terrifying to me.”

Harbury said government leaders have always made a point to establish that torture “is never a policy.” She said blame is always placed on “a few bad apples,” but she said there are many patterns that appear again and again when evidence of torture is produced.

What’s new in recent months is an apparent attempt to “legalize” torture, she said.

She also emphasized that torture is always a useless exercise. She said it leads to unreliable information. That’s why United States courts don’t allow confessions that are produced under torture, she said.

Gonzalez told, through an interpreter, how she underwent torture involving electric shock, being hooded and deprived of air, burns from cigarettes, having fingernails or toenails pulled out, and being forced to watch other tortures and killings.

She told the Bates group that she believes there is a need for schools that teach how to prevent torture, rather than how to carry it out.

Harbury and Gonzales spoke to a multiage and multicultural audience of about 50.

The event, held at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, was open to the public at no charge. It was sponsored by Amnesty International, the New World Coalition, the Multicultural Center, the Bates Christian Fellowship and the Women’s Resource Center.

Copy the Story Link