Woman to End Guatemala Hunger Strike : Human rights: U.S. lawyer will seek criminal charges against army officers. She had starved herself for 32 days in effort to learn of her husband’s fate.

WASHINGTON —  An American lawyer who has been on a hunger strike in Guatemala for 32 days said Friday that she is changing her tactics for pressuring Guatemalan authorities for information on her missing husband’s whereabouts.

Jennifer Harbury, 43, said she will end her hunger strike and seek criminal charges against eight Guatemalan army officers, whom she claims have committed crimes against her husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a Mayan guerrilla commander who has been missing since March, 1992. The army says Bamaca died at that time in a firefight with an army unit.

Before seeking criminal charges, Harbury plans to fly to Washington this weekend for talks with White House officials who, she said, want to talk with her. She expects to return to Guatemala in about a week.

Harbury’s intentions were disclosed in a letter made available here by her public relations firm.

She began her hunger strike Oct. 11 and said she would continue her fast until death or until Guatemalan authorities owned up to what she says is a 2 1/2-year unbroken record of deceit.

She had assumed her husband was killed in the 1992 firefight. But a guerrilla colleague of Bamaca’s, Santiago Cabrera Lopez, claimed to have seen Bamaca in detention. Cabrera has testified before the United Nations and the Organization of American States that he saw Bamaca in a secret military prison several times during 1992.

On Thursday, Harbury was taken to a site 175 miles northwest of Guatemala City where the bodies of two unidentified men were exhumed. She said neither was her husband. Harbury’s lawyer, Jose Pertierra, said the government concocted Thursday’s exhumations “to deflect criticism from the ineptness of the government’s investigation.”

In Guatemala on Friday, Harbury and Pertierra met with U.S. Ambassador Marilyn McAfee, who Pertierra said told them that U.S. officials had concluded Bamaca was taken captive by the army in the March, 1992, firefight and had suffered injuries that were not life-threatening. But McAfee also reportedly said U.S. officials had no information to suggest Bamaca was alive more than a few weeks after that.

U.S. officials were unavailable for comment.

Harbury, a Harvard law graduate, met Bamaca in 1990 while interviewing guerrillas in western Guatemala. They married a year later in Texas.