Lawyer`s One-Woman Crusade Lands at U.S. Supreme Court

Jennifer Harbury, a veteran staff attorney for Texas Rural Legal Aid in the Rio Grande Valley, injected a rare personal narrative into a U.S. Supreme Court argument on March 18 as she told the justices that U.S. government officials should be held liable for deceiving her about the CIA’s role in the torture and death of her husband, a Guatemalan guerrilla fighter opposing military rule, a decade ago. “My day in court, when I could have saved my husband’s life, was extinguished,” said Harbury, the respondent in the case before the court, Christopher v. Harbury. Harbury’s husband was Efrain Bamaca-Velasquez, better known as Everado, a rebel fighter. During her stint as a Florida legal aid lawyer and after she started what has been described in the press as a one-woman crusade against U.S. policy in Central America, Harbury met and married Velasquez.

When Harbury’s husband disappeared in 1992, she says, she asked for U.S. help in finding him. But Harbury claims government officials deceived her by saying they would investigate his disappearance – when in fact they knew the Central Intelligence Agency had on its payroll the Guatemalan military officer who had held Harbury’s husband prisoner.