The Sun is to be commended for providing front-page coverage of the Guatemalan truth commission report and for emphasizing the report's conclusions about U.S. responsibility, through military and CIA aid, for human rights violations ("Guatemalan truth panel details U.S. role in war," Feb. 26).

To prevent deaths, torture and disappearances, informed people in the United States will have to stop their government from complicity in human rights abuses. The Sun made a significant contribution to such information with its series about human rights abuses in Honduras and the shameful role of the United States.

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THE GUATEMALAN MILITARY'S WAR AGAINST THE MAYANS HAS FINALLY BEEN DOCUMENTED, BUT THE STORY OF ITS ROLE IN THE COCAINE TRADE HAS YET TO BE FULLY TOLD.

WASHINGTON -- Last week a United Nations report confirmed that the Guatemalan military committed genocide against its own Mayan people during the country's four-decade civil war. But the impunity the military has long enjoyed for war crimes extends as well to drug trafficking. Many officers responsible for the human rights abuses documented by the U.N. have also been implicated in Guatemala's thriving drug-transshipping trade, but to date there has been no such public accounting of those activities.

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An appellate court in Zacapa,Guatemala,cleared a former Nestle executive and two other men of drug charges Friday and reduced the sentences of two other Swiss men, enabling all five to walk free.

Citing insufficient evidence, a three-judge panel overturned a September conviction of Andreas Haenggi Wyndler on drug-smuggling charges. The case against Haenggi, 62, his son Nicholas Haenggi Chalandrian, 23, and three others had involved shipments of cocaine worth $100 million sent from Guatemala to Europe in shipping containers and ornamental plants.

"I'm very pleased with the decisions, but after 18 months in prison, my client was there too long," said Andreas Haenggi's lawyer, Fernando Linares. "Justice took too long."

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ZACAPA, Guatemala (AP) An appellate court cleared a former Nestle executive and two other men of drug charges Friday and reduced the sentences of two other Swiss men, enabling all five to walk free.

The three-judge panel of the Sixth Appeals Court in Zacapa, 70 miles northeast of Guatemala City, overturned a September conviction of Andreas Haenggi Wyndler on drug-smuggling charges, citing insufficient evidence.

The case against Haenggi, his son and three others had involved shipments of cocaine worth $100 million sent from Guatemala to Europe in shipping containers and ornamental plants.

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The court also reduced the sentence of Haenggi's son Nicolas, 23, in the case for "personal coverup" to three years from 20 years, which is commutable for a fine.

Another Swiss citizen, 31-year-old Silvio Geovanelli, had his sentence for "supplying the means" for drug-trafficking reduced to five years from 20 years. His new sentence is also commutable to payment of a fine.

German Frank Schilling was acquitted of an original sentence of five years and ordered to be released immediately. Guatemalan police office Jose Luis Zebadua, was also acquitted of an original sentence of 12 years for drug-trafficking.

The five men were arrested in 1997 after drug agents in the Atlantic port city of Puerto Barrios seized 28 pound (13 kg) of cocaine in a shipment of ornamental plants bound for Europe.

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Guatemala City, June 27. In the midst of snail-paced investigations into the assassination of Monsignor Juan Jose Gerardi, U.S. lawyer Jennifer Harbury has dropped a bombshell that has the Guatemalan military scrambling for cover.

In a press conference in Washington two day ago, Harbury -- widow of guerrilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez who was allegedly captured and killed by the Guatemalan military in 1992 -- declared that she has information on who may have killed the elderly cleric. She accuses 23 military officers who she says make up the notorious death squad Jaguar Justiciero, or Jaguar of Justice.

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GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA -- Guatemalan troops on Monday freed a group foreigners who had been kidnapped in a jungle region of northern Guatemala, an Interior Ministry official said.

"A group from the DOAN (anti-drugs unit) liberated a family of six or seven people, Americans or Swiss, who were detained," the official said. The victims earlier had been identified as 13 Swiss missionaries.

Authorities had said the kidnappers were seeking more than $300,000 in ransom..

The anti-narcotics unit was sent to the town of Sayaxche, in the Peten province, a sparsely populated jungle area bordering Mexico and Belize, officials said. The team was mobilized because it was the closest security force in the area.

- --- Checked-by: Mike Gogulski

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Authorities in Alta Verapaz have issued a "maximum alert" after having found out that there are 445 kilos of cocaine still circulating.

This information was obtained after Alberto Pitam, the pastor of the evangelical church at Cubilhuitz, Alta Verapaz, was arrested as he was attempting to negotiate the sale of 45 kilos of cocaine. After several months of investigation, Antidrug police forces obtained information that the Finca Dolores was being used as a storage center for the drug, and that during the course of the week Pitam would make a sale.

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Colombian Hernando Mauricio Ramirez, who was being tried on drug charges, was freed late Sunday from the station where he was being held in Puerto Barrios, 145 miles northeast of Guatemala City, the capital.

The armed men also freed Fredy Amilcar Popol Perez, accused of kidnapping and extortion. Seven other men also escaped through doors left open during the jailbreak, police director Angel Conte Cojulu said.

Police set up roadblocks throughout the region and were combing the area for the fugitives.

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GUATEMALA CITY, Aug 8 (Reuter) Guatemalan officials said on Friday they would bring formal charges next week against three Swiss men who are in jail in Guatemala under suspicion of drug trafficking.

``A judge will hear statements in the case on Tuesday. I don't know what the exact charges will be until after the hearing,'' public prosecutor Jose Alberto Lopez told Reuters.

Police have arrested Andreas Haenggi, head of a Nestle foodstuffs factory in Guatemala since 1993, his son, Nicolas, and an Italianborn Swiss citizen, Silvio Geovanelli.

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No Job for the CIA The Central Intelligence Agency has a way of exceeding the worst expectations about its behavior. After stalling on the declassification of mountains of secret papers about its past actions, the agency now concedes that many of the documents were destroyed by protective officials several decades ago. The CIA has clearly forfeited the right to manage the declassification of its records. That job should be turned over to an independent body. This past week the CIA released a small stack of documents about its role in the 1954 coup that toppled the elected leader of Guatemala and installed a murderous military dictatorship. The papers include some previously unknown plans for assassinations that officials insist were never carried out. The agency promises more Guatemala records in the months ahead. But the pace of this exercise has been glacial, and many of the documents made available this past week were heavily excised to shield information already in the public record. Other early agency operations will never yield their secrets. Only a few dozen pages remain from the files about the 1953 coup in ban that put Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi back in power. Nick Cullather, a historian who worked for the agency in 1992 and 1993, reported this past week that records of covert agency operations in Indonesia and Guyana had been destroyed. No one apparently bothered to tell CIA Directors Robert Gates and James Woolsey, who had publicly promised ambitious efforts to declassify the agency's records. The ClA's fight against openness started long before Mr. Gates or Mr. Woolsey ran the agency. The CLS has stubbornly resisted cooperating in the preparation of the government's own histories of American foreign relations. The agency was forced by Congress to establish an internal Historical Review Panel to propose declassifications, but the group has had little influence and did not even meet from 1991 to 1993. All records from the agency's directorate of operations are exempt from NFreedom of Information requests. Many of the documents the CLA has made public over the years are meaningless because so much information is blacked out. Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihatl and Jesse Helms have proposed the establishment of an interagency board to manage the declassification of all government records. This would help but is likely to leave individual agencies with too much control over what information is made public. A more decisive remedy is needed for the CIA. Either the board proposed by the two senators or another body made up of historians and other informed citizens ought to control the declassification of CIA materials. The agency can be consulted and its interests honored in cases where secrecy is required, but the impulse should be to declassify whenever possible. Congress should also remove the exemption of the operations directorate from declassification. b addition the CIA must comply with laws requiring that its documents be turned over periodically to the National Archives. The destruction of historical records bespeaks a contempt for the principles of democracy. Unfortunately, that is nothing new at the CIA. THE NEW YORK TIMES.

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