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Irma Flaquer Azurdia
October 16, 1980

Case: Irma Flaquer Azurdia



Previous investigation:

September 1, 1997
June Erlick

Reportes Relacionados

1999-11-1
1997-9-1


Noticias Relacionadas

2009-01-16


SUMMARY

On Jan. 31, 1980, the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City was taken over by peasant militants. A deadly fire broke out and many were killed. Later, the Spanish ambassador, who survived, blamed the army for the incident and had his government cut off diplomatic relations with Guatemala. A lone peasant survivor was abducted from his hospital bed and killed. No one was ever punished. It was one of many examples of impunity in the Eighties.

Irma Flaquer Azurdia, columnist, writer and occasional radio journalist, was standing with her tape recorder among reporters and onlookers who witnessed the assault. She taped the whole incident, including the sounds of the army breaking doors, shattering glass and barking orders to storm the diplomatic building. She sold that tape to a European radio station. Friends and family reported that she was outraged at what happened at the embassy.

But in Central America of the 1980s, no one was immune from violence. In Guatemala, many thought reports of massacres and murders were highly exaggerated or the work of common criminals. Others saw the violence as the unfortunate but necessary attempt to rid the country of "Communist terrorists."

When Flaquer was kidnaped and her son killed in 1980, newspapers dutifully gave the event front-page headlines. They quoted protests by the Guatemalan Chamber of Journalists, the Association of Guatemalan Journalists and the San Carlos University Students Association. They quoted presidential spokesman Carlos Toledo Vielman.

But the press did not feel free to investigate. No one published reports of witnesses at the scene or tried to question doctors who operated on her wounded son. The story disappeared from the press after a few days . Reporters from that period confess they were afraid to touch the story beyond official statements.

No one has ever been formally accused, brought to trial or punished for the death of Fernando Valle Flaquer and the disappearance of Irma Flaquer.

No one can be punished now because of an amnesty related to crimes committed before 1985. Guatemala, perhaps because of its civil war, has taken a different road from neighboring Honduras, where 14 military officers are being charged with human rights violations committed in the 1980s.

One Guatemalan citizen, Edgar Alfredo González Martínez, has filed a civil suit against five former heads of state, including Romeo Lucas García, who was president at the time of Flaquer’s disappearance. González is calling for 30 years in prison and US$300 million in indemnization for damages and losses to families of those assassinated or killed in massacres during those regimes.

THE CASE

On Oct. 16, 1980, Irma Flaquer went to her grandson Fernando’s fourth birthday party. Friends say that the visit was also intended as a farewell to her son Fernando, his wife, Mayra Rosales, and the little boy. She planned to leave for Nicaragua the next day. According to a relative, she and Fernando stopped briefly on the way back to her apartment, a stop that appeared important to her.

About a block away, two vehicles cut off their car, one in front, one in back. Fernando was shot through the head. As Flaquer screamed, "A doctor for my son, a doctor for my son," she was pulled out of the car by her hair, gagged and thrust into one of the vehicles. The vehicle, described as a Jeep or a pickup truck, drove off.

Blood found on Flaquer’s vehicle seat apparently was Flaquer’s because it did not match her son’s blood type. Fernando died hours later in a hospital. She has never been found, dead or alive.

Although many journalists, labor leaders, professors and students already had been killed in what Guatemalans now called the "dark times," Flaquer was the first white, professional, middle-class woman to disappear and presumably be killed.

In 1970, a hand grenade was hurled at her car, wounding her writing hand, damaging her hearing and filling her body with shrapnel that took several operations to extract.

She wrote a book as a result of what Guatemalans call "the bombing."

Entitled "A las 12:15, El Sol" (At 12:15 The Sun) the book is a surprising ode to forgiveness. In the book’s prologue, dedicated to "My dear murderer," she writes to her attackers: "I have done you harm, a lot of harm. The violence of my journalistic articles made you wish for my death. They provoked more violence than that which you had already suffered and converted you into a murderer. Perhaps you ought not to feel guilty, because often those who are possessed by hate are only the victims of their life’s circumstances. A product of adverse circumstances. Because of their own pain, they are converted into the executioners of others."

According to the accounts of several journalists, she arrived at the Congress one morning with the book in her hand to visit Congressman Oliverio Castañeda, allegedly the ring-leader of several death squads during the 1970s. Flaquer read him the prologue of her book, beginning with the statement, "As you have heard, I have forgiven my assassin."

Sixteen years after her disappearance, friends, colleagues and even former political foes remember Flaquer’s long fingernails and her skinny legs. They talk about her pet owl and her little dog. They conjecture about how far she had become radicalized as every single door to conventional protest shut in her face. They wonder why she did not leave the country despite repeated warnings. And they remember her sardonic writing and her bitter wit. It was impossible to shut Flaquer up.

For many years, a veil of silence surrounded Flaquer’s disappearance. To talk about her abduction, to insinuate military involvement, even to reminisce, could court danger. And in the early years, at least, there was always the hope she would appear. Accusations might endanger her life, if indeed she were living.

To understand the life and probable death of Flaquer is to understand the institutional violence that suffocated the voices and eventually the lives of so many journalists and others during the 1980s. It is, in the words of Ronalth Ochaeta, director of the Diocesan Office of Human Rights, "a way of returning dignity to the nation. If there is no history, there is no present. And if there is no present, there is no future."

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES

Flaquer was born in 1938 to Fernando Flaquer and Olga Azurdia. He was a Catalán theater producer of operettas and zarzuelas; she a budding Guatemalan opera singer. Flaquer spent much of her early childhood abroad and on the road, traveling with her parents as they performed throughout South and Central America. Moving from country to country, she had little formal schooling and saw first-hand the region’s misery and poverty. She also lived several years in México, where the theoretical ideals of the Mexican revolution were still strong.

Flaquer returned to Guatemala as a young woman. She was quite worldly for a Guatemalan girl and beautiful. She soon met Fernando Valle, a promising architect. They married and had two children, Fernando and Sergio. But the couple soon divorced.

She maintained a good relationship with her little boys, although they often lived with their father and grandparents.

Flaquer began to work as a freelance journalist, supporting herself by writing articles and radio commentary. She was always in search of the truth. One particular piece — no one seems to remember what it was about — so aroused the fury of a politician that he sent three market women to beat her up.

Beaten and bloodied, Flaquer showed up on the doorstep of La Hora. She had heard of publisher Clemente Marroquín, and wanted him to take photos and document her beating. According to his daughter Marina, Marroquín hired Flaquer on the spot.

She began a column called "Lo que otros callan" (What Others Keep Quiet) in which she exposed political corruption, the oppression of indigenous peoples and the plight of the poor.

She called Marroquín "Grandpa," and so did her children. When he became vice president, she became press secretary to Sara de Méndez Montenegro, wife of President Julio César Méndez Montenegro, leader of the Revolutionary Party.

The Revolutionary Party was center-leftist; Flaquer hoped that by being an activist, she could help to resolve the country’s social problems. She continued to write her column for La Hora.

Between 1966-1970, she frequently traveled, both as journalist and member of the Revolutionary Party, to Guatemala’s eastern region. She journeyed up and down the Motagua River in a motorboat to take pictures of bodies floating in the water.

She showed the photographs of bloated bodies to government officials in Guatemala City, including Defense Minister Rafael Arriaga Bosque. She heatedly told them that the victims were not guerrillas, but members of the Revolutionary Party. In her typically sardonic way, she asked the officials to have the decency to shoot their political adversaries, instead of hacking them to death.

In 1970, after the grenade attack against Flaquer, Méndez Montenegro gave her money to live in exile in El Salvador. She returned within a month, saying she could not stand to live outside of Guatemala. She resumed writing her column at La Hora and her work as press secretary and began to study law at the Jesuit’s Rafael Landivar University.

Her professor, Jesuit priest Carlos Amann, remembers her as a combative and brilliant student, who would learn that she was not cut out to be a lawyer. She went on to study psychology and earned a degree. She set up a private clinic for about a year, but discontinued it when she saw that she was only serving "the rich with neuroses."

Shortly after the grenade attack, Flaquer went to work for Carlos Girón Lemus at La Nación, where she eventually became assistant editor. For a short time, she started her own magazine, which was printed at La Nación.

In her writings in the early 1970s, Flaquer struggled with the notions of pacifism versus violence, and how to put a premium on individual human rights. Sometimes she was termed a "leftist," but her columns could not be easily labeled.

Her strongest columns named names and accused government officials of corruption, excessive travel and other types of abuses. But she was not afraid to apologize. In one column, for instance, she admitted that her information was not correct in the case of a scandal involving a congressman.

A fellow journalist, who asked to remain anonymous, believes her position on the attack on the Spanish Embassy was "the straw that broke the camel’s back." It was one thing to write acerbic columns, another to damage Guatemala’s reputation overseas.

Her politics were always hard to pinpoint: she always came down on the side of justice, but not necessarily on the left or right. She had friends in all segments of the political spectrum, and they were more than just journalistic contacts.

For instance, she maintained a close friendship with Archbishop Mario Casariego, a conservative prelate best known for a photograph in which he is blessing police cars donated to Guatemala by the United States. She also had a friendship with Interior Minister Donaldo Alvarez, a childhood classmate of her former husband and subsequently a close friend of her sister. Police chief Valiente Téllez even gave her a gun with which to defend herself, she told a close friend.

Powerful friendships allowed her to feel some immunity. She also may have felt protected because she actually held three government positions. Through her government connections, she was substitute director of the electric company and a member of the Interior Ministry’s commission on crime policy and the prevention of juvenile delinquency. She also worked as a psychologist for the prison system.

Friends and colleagues say she didn’t see working for the government as a contradiction.

As generalized violence increased during 1980, Flaquer found herself more constantly on the edge. The system seemed to be closing down, but she still believed she could make the system work. In December 1979, she founded the first Guatemalan Human Rights Commission, choosing friends and acquaintances who represented a middle-of-the-road position. Among the members were labor leader Israel Márquez and retired Col. José Luis Cruz Salazar.

By July, the Human Rights Commission gave up, and several members fled into exile. Many of them, including Flaquer, had received anonymous death threats by mail and telephone.

Flaquer said she told Carlos Toledo Vielman, information secretary for the military president, Gen. Romeo Lucas García, about the threats. "He told me to be careful," she told a reporter later.

Flaquer wrote a biting column for La Nación on July 19, 1980, announcing the dissolution of the human rights commission. Looking back, some friends and colleagues see this column as the "final straw." For Irma Flaquer, who insisted on writing what others didn’t dare, there seemed to be many last straws.

In that column, she wrote of her "profound sense of impotence, frustration and even shame" at the dissolution of the human rights commission. She lamented Guatemala’s "crisis of social breakdown, of almost absolute disregard for the most basic values that distinguish us, or ought to distinguish us, from the bloody beasts."

Flaquer condemmed the "exaggerated social violence" that paralyzed the commission’s efforts to defend human rights in Guatemala. She warned that the group’s demise contributed "to the confidence of those who, with total impunity, have murdered hundreds of people."

It was one of Flaquer’s last columns. That same month, La Nación Managing Editor Girón Lemus asked her to stop writing temporarily. He told her that she was putting not only her life, but the lives of her colleagues in danger. The newspaper’s building had been threatened with fire bombing.

Flaquer continued to give declarations to the radio. Some sources say her voice was disguised, but military intelligence figured it out. She had been silenced in print, but continued to speak out. She was told that her government posts would be taken away if she was not more moderate.

She replied: "I can’t be bought. Let them do what they want."

In August, she gave an interview to Shirley Christian, then a reporter for The Miami Herald.

"If you want to cry out for the dignity of the human being, in this country they say you are a Communist. I am as Communist as Jimmy Carter, but here, liking Carter instead of Reagan means you are on the left," she told Christian, adding: "What is certain is that Guatemala is going to explode, sooner or later, whoever is president of the United States."

Christian says she checked Flaquer’s quotes with her again to reconfirm that Flaquer’s name could be published. Flaquer insisted that she wanted her name used.

Death threats directed at Flaquer continued. Late in August, she decided to leave. She called her former teacher, Father Carlos Amann, who had become a professor at Managua’s Central American University, and pleaded for help. As he remembers it, she rattled on and on about the death threats, about the horrors of being trapped, about being cooped up in her cubbyhole of an apartment. If she went outside, the military would kill her, she told him. He tried to calm her, because he assumed the phones were tapped. She kept on talking. Finally, he told her that he would find shelter and call her back the next day.

Amann approached Violeta and Mario Carpio, Guatemalan friends of Flaquer’s who were exiled in Nicaragua. They told him they would provide her with room and board for up to two years or until she found a job.

Meanwhile, Flaquer had called Violeta de Carpio herself, asking for help. De Carpio remembers that Irma sounded "extremely anguished and distraught." She told her to come immediately, but never heard from Flaquer again.

About the same time that Flaquer was calling frantically to Nicaragua, she requested a meeting with Guatemalan Interior Minister Alvarez. Sources had told her that he had received a report from the Presidential General Command (Estado Mayor Presidencial), the executive intelligence and military corps, in which her name came up. She wanted to find out what the report said.

Alvarez confirmed receiving the report, but said that he had not yet read it. Flaquer asked if she should stay in Guatemala or leave.

He replied, "Look, Irma, if I tell you to leave the country, you are going to say that the interior minister threw you out. If I tell you to stay and something happens, you are going to say that I didn’t warn you. You have to make the decision, because it is a very personal one."

She told Alvarez that she didn’t have the money for the trip. Alvarez, say three separate sources, wrote her a check. When Flaquer saw the amount of the check, she protested, "You’ve given me enough to leave, but not to come back." According to an associate, who confirmed that the version Alvarez told her matches what Flaquer recounted to a friend, Alvarez then tore up the check, and wrote another for twice the amount.

When Flaquer didn’t arrive in Nicaragua, Amann called her in Guatemala. She broke down on the phone, "They are going to kill me. But I have debts, and I have to say goodby to friends. You think this is easy to leave; it isn’t easy. I have things to do first."

Amann said he didn’t ask who "they" were; he had presumed from the context of the conversation that she meant the military. He never spoke to her again.

Men were stationed in front of her apartment building in downtown Guatemala City. She liked to point them out to visitors. On one hand, she was very scared; on the other hand, she refused to be intimidated.

A week before she was kidnaped, Alvarez phoned her former husband, Fernando Valle, and told him to warn Flaquer to leave the country immediately. Alvarez told Valle that she already had a passport and a ticket and shouldn’t waste any time.

LIES AND "HIGHER FORCES"

Valle heard from Flaquer that same day. "There are rumors that our son Fernando has been kidnaped," she told him. "Don’t pay any attention. I’ve confirmed through my sources that these are just lies to get me out of my apartment. If I leave my apartment, they will kill me."

Valle told Flaquer of Alvarez’ call. She said she was waiting for contact with "the kids from over there." He urged her to leave immediately.

Alvarez had told her former husband earlier that the assassins were "forces higher than he," according to both Valle and at least two associates. While Alvarez probably has knowledge of who was behind Flaquer’s kidnapping and presumed murder, thus far the IAPA has been unable to locate Alvarez. He is said to be living in the United States in the San Francisco Bay area.

According to Jennifer Schirmer, a Harvard University expert on the Guatemalan military, Alvarez was among the circle of the elite who approved weekly death lists. The others members of the Center for the Gathering of Information and Operations were National Police Chief colonel Héctor Montalbán Batres, Lucas himself, as well as the heads of the immigration and inteligence services.

The constant death threats and surveillance, as well as Alvarez’s plea to Valle to get Flaquer out of the country, seem to point at the top ranks of the military and/or police. The order could have come directly from Lucas García, who was said to have been offended by her piece in La Nación and her "denigration" of Guatemala.

But why kidnap her the day before her trip?

There are several theories. First of all, Flaquer would be a powerful spokeswoman outside the country able to write for foreign publications. Second, she knew a lot about Guatemala, politics and the military structure. Still others say that Flaquer — kicked out of the mainstream and no longer able to write for La Nación, or work with the Human Rights Commission and threatened with the loss of her government posts — decided to collaborate with the guerrillas.

But whether she had decided to share her information with the guerrillas or with the international human rights community and press, Flaquer surely posed a threat to Guatemala’s image abroad.

If she knew her life were in danger, why did she stay three months after begging to leave for Nicaragua? She told some people that she had debts to pay; she told her ex-husband that she was waiting to hear from the Nicaraguan comandantes. But she could have paid her debts from abroad and she could have, as her husband suggested, run into the comandantes on any street corner in Nicaragua.

The most likely answer is that she was waiting for some sort of information.

The government lamented her death for the record. Presidential press spokesman Vielman declared that "the criminal action touches the government closely" because of Flaquer’s government posts. He said the police had carried out a search of the area around where she was kidnaped, but found nothing. The Journalists Association of Guatemala demanded "that she be returned home safe and sound.’’ On the same day, it condemned the murder of journalist Victor Hugo Pensamiento Chavez.

Flaquer’s aunt, cousin and daughter-in-law began to look for bodies. They were called to identify four female corpses in the space of two months. When the aunt looked at the tiny feet of a badly burned corpse, she was almost certain she had found her niece. She returned to the morgue with Flaquer’s dentist and orthodontist to confirm her suspicions. The teeth and jaw did not match.

After that, Mayra Rosales, Flaquer’s daughter-in-law and Fernando’s widow, began to receive anonymous threats. Because she wasn’t about to risk the life of Flaquer’s 4-year-old grandson, the search ceased.

Her former husband talked to military contacts about trying to find the missing woman. A military chum from school days finally warned him to stop asking questions or his entire family would be killed. He, too, stopped searching and asking questions.

After the takeover by Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, an article by exiled Guatemalan José Calderon, in México City’s Excelsior, reported that Flaquer had been seen alive, crazed and tremendously aged in a basement jail in the Guatemala City house of Alvarez.

The family immediately called México. Calderon, in 1996 no longer living, clarified then that he had not seen Flaquer, but "some sources" had told him that she was alive. Who were these sources? they begged. How could they find her? Calderon had no answers.

The family was furious; they had already reconciled themselves to Flaquer’s death. Fernando Valle, architect, remembered that Alvarez’ house had no basement. At a later date, a judge issued a court document, verifying the non-existence of the secret jail. However, neither journalists nor others were allowed to be present when the house was examined.

Today, one hears three hypotheses about Irma Flaquer’s kidnapping and probable death.

The first, espoused by the U.S. Embassy at the time, blamed the kidnaping on the guerrillas. This seems highly unlikely. The guerrillas would not have been able to carry out the very public surveillance of her house nor the military-style operation in which she was kidnaped. This theory would not account for the subsequent intimidation of her family by the military when they searched for the body. Besides, if the guerrillas had kidnaped and, in all likelihood, murdered Flaquer, they most likely would have trumpeted their deeds and denounced the victims for betrayal or duplicity. That would be the usual pattern. Former U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala Frank Ortiz says he no longer believes that the guerrillas were involved in the Flaquer crime.

The second is that Minister Alvarez was responsible. This story is influenced by the report in Excelsior, and in part by his reputation as a ruthless figure of power in the Lucas García regime. Proponents of this theory, told about his repeated attempts to save Flaquer, simply say that when he couldn’t get her out of the country, he decided to kill her. But the hypothesis that Alvarez is the mastermind behind Flaquer’s death seems unlikely, both because of close family ties and what appears to be a sincere attempt to help.

The third hypothesis is that the Presidential General Command — perhaps together with National Police Chief Chupina — made the decision to kidnap Flaquer. Alvarez could have known who masterminded the crime, but did not participate in its planning and execution.

CHRONOLOGY:IRMA FLAQUER AZURDIA

1958
Irma Flaquer Azurdia is beaten up by three angry market women, apparently as a reprisal for something she wrote. La Hora editor Clemente Marroquín hires her. She begins her column "Lo que otros callan."

1966-1970
She works as press secretary for Sara de Méndez Montenegro, wife of President César Méndez Montenegro. She continues to write her columns for La Hora.

1970
She is severely injured when a hand grenade is hurled at her car. For safety reasons, her youngest son, Sergio, born in 1957, is sent to Israel to live at a kibbutz.

1971-1980
She writes a book "A las 12:15 El Sol" (At 12:15 The Sun) in which she forgives her attackers. She begins a column for La Nación under the editorship of Roberto Girón Lemus. She becomes assistant editor.

Jan. 31, 1980
Militant peasants and students take over the Spanish Embassy. Thirty-one protesters, as well as government officials and foreign diplomats, die when the embassy is stormed and burned. Flaquer is outraged and smuggles a recording of the events to a European radio station.

February
Threats against Flaquer increase. She starts a human rights commission, which include such members as labor leader Israel Marquez and former military man Col. José Luis Cruz Salazar.

July
The human rights commission is dissolved and its members, except Flaquer, flee into exile.

Aug. 23
She calls Guatemalan Jesuit César Amann in Nicaragua. She tells him she wants to go there immediately.

Uncertain date
Interior Minister Donaldo Alvarez warns Flaquer that her life is in danger.

October
Alvarez tells Fernando Valle, her former husband, that her life is in danger and there is nothing he can do to protect her if she does not leave the country.

Oct. 16, 1980
Flaquer is kidnaped and never seen again. Her oldest son, Fernando, is wounded and dies hours later.

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