Jennifer Harbury: Deaths of Guatemalan Children at Border Have Roots in Decades of U.S.-Backed Genocide

Five Guatemalan children have died after being apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol since December. We look at the humanitarian crisis unfolding on the border and its ties to decades of bloody U.S. intervention in Latin America with human rights attorney Jennifer Harbury. Her husband, Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, was a Mayan comandante and guerrilla who was disappeared after he was captured by the Guatemalan army in the 1980s. After a long campaign, she found there was U.S. involvement in the cover-up of her husband’s murder and torture. “We trained them. We taught them torture techniques. We funded them, and we armed them,” Harbury says of the Guatemalan military. “They’re devouring the country using the same techniques of torture and the terror that they used before. Once again, everyone is roaring north.” We also speak with Fernando Garcia, the founding director of the Border Network for Human Rights, an advocacy organization based in El Paso.