By Rick Clifford

PROMESA Program Serves as Life Preserver to

Guatemalans in Tesorito

CAMINOS has entered its 2 nd year as the sponsors of PROMESA, the locally-run, and locally-staffed health promoter program in Tesorito, formerly a CPR community that CAMINOS accompanied after the 1996 Peace Accords were signed. In the wake of devastating floods that hit the Guatemalan highlands and southern coast in early October, the PROMESA program has provided a measure of relief to Tesorito residents adversely impacted by the disaster.

The heavy rains associated with Hurricane Stan began on October 4, 2005, and continued to fall non-stop over the next five days. According to the Guatemalan agency Coordination for Disaster Reduction (CONRED), Tesorito was one of 683 communities adversely affected by the flooding. Although Tesorito was not as badly damaged as communities such as Panabaj, Panjachel, Solola, or San Marcos , hundreds of families in Tesorito have lost their crops and found their homes damaged by the storm. Plataforma Agraria , a coalition of campesino , indigenous, religious, and human rights groups reported that aid to towns like Union Victoria, El Triunfo, and Tesorito, began to see their humanitarian aid redistributed to larger towns according to the political interests of the parties in power.

The damage inflicted by Stan was enormous yet for the most part received little attention by the U.S. media. CONRED calculates that 1.5 million Guatemalans have been directly affected and another 2 million have been indirectly affected by Stan. The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) has warned, “parts of Guatemala are facing a starvation time bomb in the aftermath of Hurricane Stan.” Trevor Rowe of the WFP said, “Even before Stan arrived Guatemala had chronic child malnutrition of 50%, with 80% in some areas.”

The monies required to fund PROMESA have been raised through benefit concerts and outreach to local churches. One in particular, St. Andrews Episcopal, graciously donated the seed money needed to fund PROMESA during the first year of operations.

More recently, CAMINOS members participated in DJPC's yearly Build for Peace work-a-thon. Several members of CAMINOS raised approximately $4,000 on October 15 th , cleaning and repainting one of the units of Family Homestead, a Denver non-profit organization that provides temporary emergency housing for families who would otherwise be homeless.

CAMINOS' commitment to accompanying the Guatemalan witnesses of genocide continues in 2006, while the genocide case against former dictators Efrain Rios Montt and Romeo Lucas Garcia remains bogged down in the Guatemalan judicial system. The Guatemalan judicial authorities are not yet capable of dispensing justice. Some judges, lawyers and witnesses have already been murdered; others have received threats to their lives. The case has also triggered controversies within the Spanish judiciary. On March 27, 2000, Judge Guillermo Ruiz Polanca declared himself competent to open the case against the Guatemalan dictators. However, on December 1 st of the same year, the highest Spanish Criminal Court ruled with 4 against 3 votes that the proceedings had to be stopped, one reason being that “the Guatemalan judiciary investigated the case, which means that the Spanish courts are incompetent.” In March 2003, the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Fonundation filed an appeal against this decision. On February 23, 2003, the Appeal Court allowed the appeal at least partially with 8 versus 7 votes. In effect, it denied the Spanish courts the competence to judge the genocide inflicted upon the Guatemalan Maya, but it authorized them to deal with the murder of Spanish citizens in Guatemala . According to the majority of the judges, “the Spanish judiciary is competent to investigate the circumstances that lead to the attack on the embassy and to examine the murder of Spanish priests by the Guatemalan army.” Furthermore, the Spanish judiciary “condemns the crimes perpetrated against the Guatemalan Maya”, but declares itself incompetent to judge them. On September 26, 2005, the Spanish Constitutional Court rejected this view. It asserted that according to international law, the fact that the victims are of Spanish nationality is not required to pass judgment. According to the Court, the existence (or non-existence) of national interests must remain secondary in view of the principle of universal jurisdiction.