after some college-aged cousins joined an anti-government protest movement at Guatemala City's public university.

Eva's uncle, the dissident students' father, had already been tortured and killed by the country's secret police.

Her own father would disappear three years later.

This week, Ms Morales is in Bermuda to deliver the annual Colin Horsfield Memorial Lecture on human rights violations and to educate Bermudians on the secret military campaign that she says is still being conducted against agitators in the Central American nation.

Mr. Horsfield, a Bermudian, was the founder of Amnesty International in Bermuda.

Amnesty Bermuda is the sponsor of Ms Morales' visit.

"What I'm trying to do is tell people that we have have serious problems in Guatemala, that people -- women and children -- are still disappearing,'' Ms Morales, 27, told The Royal Gazette yesterday.

"The secret police just take whoever they want away. Most of the time we never hear from them again.'' Now living in the US -- Ms Morales was released from her Guatemalan jail cell after a year and eventually gained refugee status in New York -- the petite, soft-spoken activist estimated that some 100,000 people have been killed and over 40,000 "disappeared'' in the 31 years of military rule in Guatemala.

Despite a return to civilian rule in 1986 and the awarding of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize to Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchu, little has changed in terms of killings and disappearances, Ms Morales said.

She added the military continues to exercise a great deal of control over the government of current president Ramiro de Leon Carpio, who was described by Mrs. Lucy Attride-Stirling of Amnesty Bermuda as a "weak man'' and a "figurehead''.

"They have all the money and all the power,'' Ms Morales said of the Guatemalan army. "There is no one to oppose them and they also get military support from countries like the United States.'' Mrs. Attride-Stirling added: "Things haven't changed much for those who are being persecuted. Rigoberta Menchu, who actually lives in Mexico, is really in danger when she is in Guatemala. And just last year, the secretary of the Casa Alianza (youth home) was gunned down in the street for helping street children who are routinely killed by police.'' In coming to places like Bermuda, Ms Morales said she hoped to dispel the myth that it is just the Mayan Indians who have launched a long-standing guerrilla war against the Guatemalan government that are brutally suppressed by authorities.

Ms Morales came from a middle class family in Guatemala City, she said, adding that her involvement with the Group of Mutual Support, a band of citizens that went to the Presidential Hall every Friday to demand information on missing relatives, came only after her father was "disappeared'' in 1984.

It was the murder of two Group members that finally prompted Ms Morales to flee to the United States.

"They said they had died in a car accident,'' Ms Morales said of the members, "a lady with a three-year-old child and her brother.'' "But when they found the bodies, the baby's nails had been pulled out and the lady had been raped.'' She added: "I was lucky. Many children die under these circumstances. Many women are raped and tortured. I don't know why they let me go.'' In addition to raising the awareness of outsiders to the situation in her native country, Ms Morales said she hopes that her "testimony'' will compel listeners to voice their outrage over the actions of the Guatemalan army and its Western military supporters.

Bermudians, Mrs. Attride-Stirling added, can do their part by stopping by the Amnesty International display outside Pink's Deli every Friday and adding their signatures to the letters of protest that the human rights organisation routinely sends off in aid of political prisoners.

"We want peace and we want justice,'' Ms Morales, who claimed that she works with "over a dozen organisations'' in the US and most recently allied herself with the Guatemala-based Families of Displaced Guatemalans. We are tired of all the widows and orphans.'' Ms Morales, who will be in Bermuda a week, will speak in the Wesley Methodist Church Hall at 7.30 p.m. on Thursday.

Her lecture is free to the public.

Ms Eva Morales