Word: guatemala
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Wishing to avoid a replay of the previous week's catastrophe in Guatemala, where a police attack on the occupied Spanish embassy resulted in 39 deaths, Salvadoran authorities kept their security forces away from the scene. Right-wing terrorists showed no such restraint: shortly after the embassy seizure, a leftist doctor was gunned down at his clinic; members of an ultraconservative group threatened to execute three kidnaped Communist leaders and burn down the embassy if the occupiers did not withdraw within 24 hours. Before that deadline was reached, the militants at the embassy freed seven of their hostages...
There were 34 of them, Indian peasants from the troubled Guatemalan province of El Quiché. As they entered the Spanish embassy in Guatemala City at 9:30 one morning last week, some were bearing machetes. Others, according to police accounts, were carrying pistols and Molotov cocktails. In short order, the embassy was peacefully occupied, and the Indians announced that they would hold a news conference at noon. In another part of the building were Spain's Ambassador Máximo Cajal y López, Guatemala's former Vice President Eduardo Caceres Lehnhoff and onetime Foreign Minister...
...Guatemala's tough military regime responded with an attack that by week's end was still sending shock waves throughout much of Latin America. Ignoring the fact-Iran notwithstanding-that embassies are "foreign soil," the government ordered police to begin an assault on the Spanish mission. It started shortly after noon, bringing the frantic Ambassador and the former Guatemalan officials to an upstairs window in protest. "Please don't enter!" pleaded the Ambassador. "We have immunity!" He was ignored...
...attacked his embassy "with extraordinary brutality," and that their behavior was "absolutely intolerable." In Madrid, the Spanish government handed the Guatemalan Ambassador a stiff note declaring that the police had acted "in violation of the most elementary norms of international law." In protest, Spain broke off diplomatic relations with Guatemala...
...Guatemala's military government is regarded by much of Latin America as particularly brutal in its suppression of peasant dissent. Usually, its actions against insurgent campesinos take place in provincial backwaters, thus escaping widespread attention. This time, however, the regime moved against a foreign embassy in the full glare of worldwide publicity. Said one diplomat in Mexico City: "It is worse than the Iranian hostage business. This is outright murder...