In addition to drawing President Laugerud's attention to the 135 murder cases, the Secretary General also referred to a report published in November in the Guatemala City newspaper Prensa Libre on an unsuccessful kidnap attempt in the Department of Escuintla. The style of this attempt was identical to the manner in which many Guatemalans have "disappeared" and been found dead shortly afterwards with gunshot wounds. But in this case the victim escaped when the car used by the kidnappers-apparently members of a death squad— crashed, killing an agent of the national police who was identified as one of the kidnappers.
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Noting that seven leaders of the Christian Democratic Party in the Department of Escuintla have been murdered by death squads in the past year, the Secretary General asked whether the kidnap attempt had been fully investigated and what the results of the inquiry were.
A number of submissions were made by AI to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights after the March presidential elections. In August 1974, AI submitted newspaper cuttings from the Guatemalan press on death squad actions and disappearances during the March election period.
In March 1975, AI made a further submission of information on an appeal by parliamentarians of the Guatemalan Christian Democratic Party to the Minis- try of the Interior concerning the violence endemic in the country. The submis- sion concerned both the parliamentary appeal and death threats and an assassina- tion attempt that followed. The same information was also sent via national sections to Christian Democratic and related political parties throughout the world.
Haiti
The adoption program initiated in 1973 has continued, and 70 prisoners are currently allocated to Amnesty International groups. Apart from a constant flow of letters to the Haitian authorities, group work has included approaches to the embassies and also publicity.
Prisoners are not allowed lawyers, nor contact with their families after arrest, nor-with few exceptions-are they ever charged or brought to trial. Such condi- tions of isolation and the general fear of arbitrary arrest make it difficult to obtain personal data on the prisoners and to establish their status as prisoners of conscience.
Hence, the main reason for taking up the cases is prolonged detention without due legal process, and the purpose of group work is to press for trial or release. The prisoners, who are peasant farmers, workers, teachers, students and other intellectuals, have been detained for between 2 and 12 years. It is possible that some of these prisoners are no longer alive, but, as the prison authorities do not inform even families of a prisoner's death, such facts cannot be established.
Shortly after adverse publicity on conditions of detention in Haiti in the Canadian news media early in 1975 based on material supplied by the Internation- al Secretariat, the Haitian government declared an amnesty for 26 prisoners. The most prominent of this group was an AI adoptee, Jean Bernardel, ex-director of the Royal Bank of Canada in Haiti, and one of the few prisoners to have been tried. Together with four other people, not included in the amnesty, he had been sentenced to life imprisonment. The list of amnestied prisoners included one other