Kidnap attempt on Amnesty delegate foiled in Guatemala

An Amnesty International delegate investigating the persecution of human rights activists in Guatemala was left drugged and gagged in a stairwell after a failed kidnapping attempt at a luxury hotel in the capital.

Colleagues found Barbara Bocek's room empty and the door open in the Westin Camino Real Hotel, government sources said. Hotel security officers discovered Ms Bocek, an American researcher, in a fire escape near an exit. She had answered a knock at her door, and was hit with a blunt object, drugged and gagged. It was not clear why the abduction plan was abandoned. Ms Bocek, who was attacked on Monday, has returned to the US.

"The attempted kidnapping of the Amnesty International delegate fortunately failed and resulted in no serious physical harm," said an Amnesty International official, who requested anonymity. "The assault that was suffered by the delegate at the end of the mission to Guatemala is yet another example of the dangers faced on a daily basis by human rights activists in the country."

Amnesty International's London-based Guatemala specialist, Tracy Ulltveit-Moe, who was with Ms Bocek, said death threats against rights activists have increased in the 18-month reign of President Alfonso Portillo.

Intimidation in Guatemala is almost on par with the urban violence of the late Seventies, she said. Machine-gun attacks and bombed-out offices have become routine. Judges, lawyers and politicians have been lynched, car-bombed and shot at. The government has ordered the army to help the police fight criminal gangs. Coup rumours are rife.

A court has ordered a genocide investigation of two former Guatemalan dictators, Romeo Lucas Garcia and Efrain Rios Montt, accused of ordering the mass slaughter of Mayan Indians between 1978 and 1983.

Ms Bocek has been working with Mayans in the Guatemalan highlands during the bloody 36-year civil war in which the majority ethnic group bore the brunt of state-sponsored violence.

The conflict ended in 1996 with peace accords but orders have now been given for mass graves to be exhumed. Rios Montt, who heads the country's Congress, is also being sued by the survivors of massacres in 12 Mayan towns.

Human rights activists had begun to praise the Guatemalan justice system for daring to challenge the military's impunity. Last week, a breakthrough court verdict convicted senior army officers over the political murder of a leftist cleric, Bishop Juan Gerardi, who was beaten to death with a concrete block after releasing a church report blaming the military for most of the village massacres in which 200,000 people were killed.

Those found guilty, the former head of military intelligence, retired Colonel Disrael Lima; his son Byron Lima, an army captain; Jose Obdulio Villanueva, a former member of a presidential security team; and Bishop Gerardi's assistant priest, Mario Orantes, all plan to appeal.