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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
At around eleven o'clock on the night of March 10, 2002, Deputy Sheriff Brian King was driving on Highway 101 near Forks, a remote, rainy town in the northwest corner of Washington, when he noticed a car stopped fifty feet down the Wilson Road turnoff, with its hazard lights flashing and its headlights off. When King pulled up behind the car, a silver 1997 Honda Civic, he saw that its windows were steamed up--perhaps indicating a "young couple engaged in a rendezvous," as the report of a private investigator later put it. There was someone in the driver's seat, but when King tapped the window and called out he got no reply. The car doors were locked. Radioing in the license-plate number, King learned that the car belonged to a Forks resident, Barbara Bocek. He had met Bocek, a woman in her late forties, at the nearby Quileute Indian reservation, where he had once been stationed, and where she had a job writing grant applications for the tribe. He also knew that, in the previous year, Bocek had reported a dozen or so threats against her life that were apparently connected to the volunteer work she had done on political violence in Guatemala for Amnesty International, the world's largest human-rights organization.
King broke the driver's-side window with his flashlight. Bocek was slumped across the front seats. Black electrical tape had been placed over her mouth and eyes, and was wrapped twice around her legs. Her hands were tied behind her back with wire. As King freed Bocek, she seemed "lethargic and relaxed," he later reported. An ambulance took her to Forks Community Hospital.
Bocek did not immediately describe what had happened, but in the emergency room (where a doctor found no serious physical injuries) the events of the evening began to emerge: Driving home from the reservation a little after seven, Bocek had turned off the highway to check a scraping noise coming from the front of the car. She had knelt to look under the wheel well, and had heard a car pull in behind hers. Frozen with fear, she had not looked up as two men approached, grabbed her, bound and gagged her, and threw her into the car, saying that if she ever returned to Guatemala she would be killed.
King went back to the scene that night, and the next day he presented a report to Randy Pieper, the sole detective in the Clallam County Sheriff's Department who serves the Forks area. Pieper made his own inquiries, and by the end of that week he came to a conclusion that would send Amnesty International into months of turmoil. In Pieper's opinion, Bocek had staged the attack.
Barbara Bocek (whose name is pronounced Boh-check) sometimes describes herself as an "aging hippie." She was born into a Catholic family in Seattle, where her five siblings and her parents still live. She first travelled to Latin America in 1980, when she was a doctoral student in anthropology at Stanford University. She spent five years, on and off, in Peru. "I loved it immediately--I think some people instantly take to the apparent chaos of a developing country's sprawling capital city and others don't," she wrote to me in an e-mail. "I wasn't put off by the black exhaust from buses, the armed guards at banks, the cow heads in market stalls, the pickpockets, the beggars, or the totally lawless traffic." After finishing her degree, in 1986, Bocek stayed on at Stanford as a staff archeologist, overseeing Native American sites on university-owned land, until 1992, when she resigned, partly, according to David Stoll, a friend who knew her from Stanford, because of a personality clash in her department. Bocek was then thirty-eight years old, and she decided to join the Peace Corps. She was sent to a village of two hundred and fifty Maya Indians in Totonicapan, in western Guatemala. Within nine months, she had become fluent in K'iche', the most commonly spoken native language in Guatemala.
David Stoll was also in Guatemala, researching a book about Rigoberta Menchu, the Maya Indian who, after publishing an autobiography that told of her family's brutal treatment during the country's civil war--in which military governments fought left-wing guerrillas and destroyed Maya populations who were said to harbor them--became an inspirational leader for indigenous people and, in 1992, won the Nobel Peace Prize. Stoll's work on a previous book, about the extent of Mayan support for the guerrillas, had led him to question the accuracy of Menchu's narrative. He asked Bocek to travel with him for a week or two at a time as his K'iche' interpreter on interviews, and on these trips Bocek heard witnesses recall, as she says, "acts of brutality that defy description." Stoll remembers that as an interpreter Bocek was "very astute, very skeptical--I would even say cynical, but she did not lose the elementary trust that you need to meet new people." Stoll's controversial book, "Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans," published in 1999, reported that Menchu's account was, in part, a fabrication. Atrocities of the kind she described had happened, but not all of them were inflicted on her family; she had made herself a "composite Maya." Stoll wrote, "With postmodern critiques of representation and authority, many scholars are tempted to abandon the task of verification, especially when they construe the narrator as a victim worthy of their support. At a time when rumor, myth, representation, and the construction of what we consider 'real' pose fascinating issues, it has become all too easy to deprecate the task of separating truth from falsehood, deferring instead to the authority of fashionable forms of victimhood."
Bocek returned to Seattle in 1997, when her father became seriously ill. Preferring not to live in the city, she took the grant-writing position on the Quileute reservation and moved into a two-bedroom duplex in Forks, a town of three thousand people, fifteen miles away. Once a logging center, Forks is "still a Carhart town," as David Johnston, a local psychiatrist, recently put it. "But there's also a socially conscious, intellectual base--a Birkenstock wing." Bocek does not seem to have made many friends in either group, but there is no sign that she wished to. As her friend and Amnesty colleague Angelina Snodgrass Godoy explains, Bocek is a "lone wolf, an independent person."
In 1997, Bocek applied to Amnesty International U.S.A., one of fifty-eight national sections of Amnesty International, which is based in London, to become an unsalaried part-time "country specialist," a sort of senior volunteer, for Guatemala. A.I.U.S.A. now has about a hundred and thirty country specialists. Volunteers submit a formal application, and those who are chosen to become country specialists spend several hours a week providing backup for Amnesty's paid staff, monitoring the local media of their chosen country and serving as links between the staff and the membership.
Amnesty International was founded in 1961 by Peter Benenson, a left-leaning British barrister, who was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford, and who served in Military Intelligence during the Second World War. After the war, Benenson ran for Parliament unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate. He also converted to Catholicism. With the support of Eric Baker, a prominent Quaker who had helped found the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and Louis Blom-Cooper, a lawyer, Benenson launched his human-rights campaign with a long article published in the Observer. "Open your newspaper any day of the week and you will find a report from somewhere in the world of someone being imprisoned, tortured or executed because his opinions or religion are unacceptable to his government," he wrote....
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