Searching for Everardo: A Story of Love, War, and the CIA in Guatemala

She is Jennifer Harbury, a Connecticut-born, Harvard-educated attorney who came to Guatemala to help protect the rights of refugees fleeing the turmoil of that country's long-running civil war. He was Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, better known as Commander Everardo, a resistance leader dedicated to ending the Guatemalan oligarchy's brutality against its own people, and a Mayan Indian who reached the top ranks of the rebel army. Born a peasant and having grown up illiterate, he ran away to join the rebels at age eighteen. By the time he was thirty-five, he had already lost two loves to the war and most of his friends. They met in 1990 in guerilla camp at the Tajumulco volcano. He was emerging from the shadows of the pines with his distinctive mountain walk and old man's eyes. Knowing the odds were against them, they fell in love and married anyway. During combat in March 1992, Everardo vanished, and Harbury began her long, fiercely desperate search to find him. Two governments - one of them our own - blatantly lied to her. She would endure the nightmare of watching bodies unearthed from unmarked graves. Eventually, she would stage three hunger strikes - two in Guatemala City and another in front of the White House - to force officials to disclose their files. Her crusade attracted the attention of the world, galvanized public protest against the thousands of Latin American victims of official injustice, and inspired congressional investigations into long-standing abuses by the State Department and the CIA.