Report: Guatemala Military Stole Kids

When the army raided his village, Baudilio Monzon ran one way, his parents ran the other. That day, Feb. 18, 1984, was the last they saw of the 9-year-old Mayan boy.

A week later, came a sign he was still alive. A military helicopter dropped propaganda fliers with a photo of the boy in a hospital bed and a promise of safety for villagers who surrender to the army.

"Thank God, I am being healed," the flier had the boy saying.

Since then, Baudilo's parents have heard nothing of his fate.

Monzon's case is one of 86 documented in a report being released to the public Tuesday by the Roman Catholic Church's main human rights office in Guatemala on children who vanished during the country's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996.

The report's authors said there are accounts of 358 other cases that could not be fully documented.

Of the vanished children, 86 percent were abducted, said Nery Rodenas, director of the Archbishop's Human Rights Office. Most of the disappearances were caused by the military, the report said.

"What we have in our hands is the confirmation that children were used as war booty, that forced disappearance was used as an instrument of war against those most vulnerable, the children, and in cases such as that of Baudilio, they were used for military ends," Rodenas told a news conference.

The report attributed 92 percent of the disappearances to the military, 3 percent to government-organized paramilitary groups and 2 percent of guerrillas. The causes of 3 percent could not be clarified.

The office of the military spokesman, Capt. Jose Maria Valladares, said it had not seen the report and would not comment until it had.

The Archbishop's Human Rights Office says they are still looking for the children, so no one knows for sure whether they are dead or alive.

Most of the victims were members of Guatemala's Maya Indian majority, who suffered most from the army's scorched-earth campaign against leftist rebels. Hundreds of villages were raided and many were obliterated.

Baudilio's father -- not named in the report -- said he had heard soon after his son's disappearance that the boy was being kept at a military unit in Xalbal, about 180 miles north of the capital. Years later he heard Baudilio was in the care of a colonel named Castillo.

"They told us he had been wounded by a bullet... and after that he had gone to the capital. But we know nothing about him," the father said in testimony published in the report.

Rodenas said many of the families lack the resources to search for the children. "Furthermore, there is still fear of reprisals, which leads them to leave things as they are," she said.

She said the next step is to try to locate the missing children and try to reunite them with their families.

The coordinator of the human rights office, Bishop Mario Rios Montt, urged Guatemalans to confront th problem.

"Let it not be a political issue nor a motive for profit or sensationalism," he said. "Remember that it involves human beings who have been profoundly harmed by war."