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Three well known prisoners were finally released on 22 November 1974, including Jaime Galarza. Three of their co-defendants remain imprisoned in Quito and two in the Penal Litoral of Guayaquil. All are adopted by AI which understands that these prisoners are held on the basis of cases originally heard by ordinary courts that were suspended when the special tribunals were estab- lished. These suspended proceedings in ordinary courts have now been reopened. Secretary General Martin Ennals wrote to President Rodriquez Lara in March 1975 expressing Al's concern over the five remaining prisoners.
During the past year AI investigated four other cases of Ecuadorians tried under the now suspended special tribunals. Four students involved in leftwing university and secondary school student federations in Guayaquil were charged with having hijacked an airplane from Quito airport to Havana, Cuba, in Septem- ber 1969. None of the four have been tried, although all have been held for well over a year in Garcia Moreno Prison in Quito. Each alleged that interrogation was carried out under severe torture. One of the four, Victor Quintero, presented newspaper clippings to court investigators reporting his public role in student associations in Ecuador throughout 1969 and 1970, thus demonstrating that he had neither visited Cuba nor left Ecuador.
AI adoption groups are currently working for nine prisoners in Ecuador.
Guatemala
Disappearances and political murder continue to be Amnesty International's principal concern in Guatemala. In January 1975 alone, the daily newspapers of Guatemala City reported the apparently politically motivated killing of 41 persons and the disappearance of seven.
AI adoption groups took up eight new investigation cases in the past year, most of them persons reported in the press as having "disappeared”—a descrip- tion that, in Guatemala, generally refers to kidnapping as a prelude to murder. Disappearances have been written up as investigation cases when there has been evidence that government officials played some part in the affair. Eleven AI groups are investgiating the cases of Guatemalans who disappeared prior to 1974. Al groups have also been supplied with material on the overall incidence of political violence in Guatemala for publicity purposes.
In February 1975, AI sent a list of 121 persons who have disappeared in the past three years to all the radio stations in Guatemala. Relevant data on each disappearance was included, as were copies of documents of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States concern- ing political murder and disappearances in Guatemala.
In May 1975, AI Secretary General Martin Ennals wrote to President Kjell Laugerud concerning reports that an official investigation had been instituted into police participation in political murder in Guatemala. Mr Ennals welcomed this initiative and enclosed an annotated list of 135 persons reported killed or found dead through apparent acts of political violence, many of them bearing signs of torture and mutilation. Each individual case was taken from Guatemala City newspaper reports and cited the source and date of the news item. All cases were reported between 1 July 1974, the date on which President Laugerud took office, and 31 January 1975.