The human rights group FAMDEGUA lamented that the inadequacies of the justice system meant that he had not died in prison and that the crimes of the past, in which he shared responsibility, had in effect been forgotten. The Rigoberta Menchu Fundation lamented that he “had died in impunity”.
On his death his son told Associated Press that "My father told us he felt responsible for what the police did, but the way a father feels responsible for the actions of his children - not directly for what happened."
Many would beg to differ with that analysis and point to a less familiar and a more managerial relationship. The period when he was in charge of the police, and at the time the police were run by the armed forced, was at the very height of the repression. 1980 was an annus horribilis for human rights, including two notorious events which showed the authorities brazen disregard for any standads of national or international law. The National Police were directly involved in both.
The first, on 31 January 1980, was the massacre in the Spanish Embassy. After a group of campesinos and students occupied the Spanish embassy to protest about killings in Quiche the building was surrounded by the police who eventually ended up storming the building and killing all but two of those still in it. One of these was the ambassador himself, Máximo Cajal, who described what happened in his book “¡Saber quién puso fuego aqui!” In it he describes making frantic phone calls to the interior ministry, all failing to get through to anyone in authority, to ask that the occupiers be given safe passage and that the police be called back. In Paul Kobrak's book “Organising and Repression” about the University of San Carlos he quotes the following testimony:
According to Elías Barahona y Barahona, then Secretary of Public Relations of the Interior Ministry (and an EGP spy), Lucas García met that morning with his interior minister Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz and police chief German Chupina Barahona in the national palace to discuss a response to the Spanish Embassy protest. Instead of trying to dialogue with protesters, they decided to send hundreds of agents to retake the Embassy (Blanck and Miranda 1998)
Máximo Cajal mentions the same meeting as described by the same Elías Barahona y Barahona, though he does not mention German Chupina's presence.
The second notorious event took place on on 21 June 1980, now the Day of the Disappeared in Guatemala. Twenty seven members of the executive of the Central Nacional de Trabajadores were kidnapped in broad daylight from their headquarters in Guatemala City. This caused the union to collapse, and none of the 27 were heard of again. The National Police had blocked all adjacent roads to prevent anyone escaping, though a couple of peole who had stepped out to buy a drink from an adjacent shop managed to escape over the rooftops. Those involved in the actual kidnap according to eye witnesses wore plain clothes but were alleged to be police, according to the verdict of the Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos.
Other allegations can be found of
German Chupina's involvement in other human rights abuses during his
time at the helm of the National Police: that he was in charge
of the Ejército Secreto Anticomunista, Secret Anticommunist
Army, which published death threats against 38 people in the popular
movements in 1980; that he was a passive
witness to the murder of the secretary general of the
Asociacion de Estudiantes Universitarios, Oliverio Castañeda
de León, named in the earlier list; and many others. One wonders what the police archives, currently being preserved, digitised and analysed may also reveal.
One wonders how much longer the roll call of those accused of the worst crimes dying untried has to be before justice is served.
