Guatemala judge suspends Rios Montt genocide trial
Source: The guardian
A judge in Guatemala has ordered the suspension of the genocide trial of the former US-backed dictator Efrain Rios Montt, angering prosecutors who vowed that proceedings would continue as planned.
Judge Carol Patricia Flores was recently reinstated to the case after being recused from it in February 2012. She ruled that all actions taken in the case since she was asked to step down were null, in effect sending the trial back to square one.
"I am not doing this because I want to, but because it has been ordered by the constitutional court and the supreme court," said Flores, while relatives of the victims wept and shouted that she was "a sold-out judge".
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/19/guatemala-judge-suspends-rios-montt-trial
= new reply since forum marked as read
May 3, 2013
The Maya Genocide Trial
Posted by Peter Canby
Efraín Ríos Montt, the eighty-six-year-old former dictator of Guatemala, has, for the past six weeks, been spending his days in a courtroom in Guatemala City with his former chief of intelligence, José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, where they are being tried for genocide and crimes against humanity. (Both men maintain their innocence.) The trial is unprecedented. It’s the first time a former head of state has gone on trial for genocide in a national, as opposed to an international, court. Even more importantly, in a country with one of the highest crime rates in the world and a long history of legal impunity, it’s a defining moment for a justice system that has been painstakingly rebuilt with help from the international community (including the United States) since 1996, when peace accords ended Guatemala’s civil war.
Ríos Montt and Rodríguez Sánchez are charged with being the intellectual authors of a savage campaign against the Ixil Maya, a stubbornly independent group of perhaps a hundred thousand Indians who speak their own language and inhabit a lyrically beautiful region of the northern highlands, where the Cuchumatan mountains descend in long green folds toward the tropical forests along the Mexican border. In the early nineteen-eighties, the Ixil started coöperatives and unions. They were aggressively resisting seizures of their land and attempting to take back land that they claimed had once belonged to them. The region had become the base for a small group of guerrillas, the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, who’d arrived over the border from Mexico.
On March 23, 1982, Ríos Montt, who was an Army general, and two other officers seized power in a coup. They promptly dissolved Congress, suspended the constitution, and declared the National Plan for Security and Development. Ríos Montt, who was a fundamentalist Christian and belonged to an organization called Church of the Word, announced plans to go after “those who offer the red paradise of slavery, those who have unleashed a chain of death.” He declared that a “final battle had begun and it would be a fight without limits.” Ríos’s army considered the Ixils, and many Maya, an “internal enemy,” and while they couldn’t easily catch the guerrillas they could catch the Ixils, who lived in vulnerable conditions amid corn-and-bean fields in small subsistence communities scattered through the mountains.
Beginning in July, 1982, the Army descended on the Ixil region, indiscriminately burning houses, murdering men, women, and children, destroying fields, and killing livestock. Refugees who fled into the mountains were bombed and strafed by helicopters and planes. In the end, between seventy and ninety per cent of the Ixil villages were destroyed. Ríos Montt and Rodríguez Sánchez are specifically charged with fifteen massacres in which eleven hundred and seventy-one Ixils were killed and twenty-nine thousand Ixils forcibly displaced. There are also rape and torture charges.
More:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/05/the-maya-genocide-trial.html
