Back Before the President was Always Apologizing for the U.S.

It is important to remember this. From The Art of Political Murder, by Francisco Goldman:

Rosario Godoy de Cuevas spoke at Héctor Gómez's funeral, promising that his death would not be in vain. Three days later, Rosario, her young son, and her twenty-one-year-old brother were abducted from the parking lot of a shopping center. The next day her car was found flipped over in a shallow ditch by a road outside the city. The bodies of Rosario, her brother, and her child were inside. The government announced that it had been a tragic car accident, as did President Reagan's State Department spokesman, and the State Department spokesman's declaration, probably unnoticed by anyone in the United States, was repeatedly played on Guatemalan television.

The journalist Mark Fazlollah, later a distinguished reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, but at the time a young stringer, was staying in my house, and he decided to do some old-fashioned police reporting. He looked at the car the three had died in, and at the ditch where the accident had supposedly occurred, and concluded that the car had been rather gently rolled into it. He spoke to the doctor who had performed the autopsy confirming that the incident had been an accident. The doctor, who was soon murdered, could not bring himself to stand by his autopsy report. When Rosario Godoy de Cuevas's relatives went to claim her body at the morgue, they noticed that there were bite marks on her breasts. Her underpants were stained with blood, indicating rape. At the funeral, people noticed that her infant's fingernails had been torn out. The torturers would have done that, torn out the baby's fingernails while the mother was still alive, to try to get her to say whatever it is they wanted her to say.

Always lovely to see the Reagan administration being the Reagan administration.