Latinnews Archive
Caribbean & Central America - 4 May 1984
Senior officers promoted to key positions;AS GENERAL MEJIA VICTORES SEEKS TO CONSOLIDATE HIS OWN POSITION
When on 28 February a new government decree was put into effect, stipulating that the commander-in-chief of the armed forces was also to become deputy chief-of-staff -- and thus able to assume command in the absence of General Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores -- Colonel Rodolfo Lobos Zamora became the second most powerful man in the government.
Mejia Victores has not stopped there, however. Changes in the government and armed forces since then suggest General Mejia Victores is still busy consolidating his position in the light of rumours of a possible coup.
On 31 March, Zamora was promoted to the rank of brigadier general. This promotion is the first since he became a colonel in 1975 and the second for a superior officer under the same constitutent law (passed last December) which promoted Mejia Victores to his present status.
Also climbing to greater heights in March was Colonel Pablo Nuila Hub, named as chief of the presidency's general staff. He replaced Colonel Juan Jose Marroquin Siliezar, who held the post since 8 August last year, and who will become head of the 'Adolfo V. Hall' del Sur military institute.
Nuila Hub was acting as public relations secretary to the chief-of-staff before taking on his new job. He did intelligence and counterinsurgency work in the army, for example, founding and heading in 1976 the 'Kaibiles' school of survival. He also acted as consul to Belize and was head of public relations in the army.
Taking up Nuila Hub's vacated post is a journalist by the name of Ramon Zelada Carrillo, who held the position of undersecretary to Nuila Hub since last August. Julio Mendizabal, also a journalist, took over Zelada Carrilla's job. Zelada Carrillo was president of the association of journalists (APG) in 1982 and at the time strongly against the idea of journalists participating in the government. For several years he contributed to the conservative daily El Imparcial. Mendizabal was director of the Camara Guatemalteca de Periodismo in 1981, and for several years worked in the US embassy in Guatemala for the US Information Service.
Other changes recently hinted at by unofficial sources in the press but denied by the government include the removal of Fernando Andrade Diaz Duran as foreign minister, who is said not to get on with Nuila Hub. Diaz Duran has recently been the subject of attacks in the press. Colonel Jaime Rabanales Reyes, former head of army public relations, has been unofficially named as the next military attache to Mexico.
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