Did Guatemala's President Try to Shut Down the Genocide Trial?
Did Guatemala's President Try to Shut Down the Genocide Trial?
Friday, 03 May 2013 00:00 By Lauren Carasik, Truthout | Op-Ed
The trial of former Guatemalan dictator General José Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity has been mired in defense maneuvering and possible political interference from Guatemala's current president, who may also be implicated in those crimes.
Guatemala today stands on the precipice, as the country faces a reckoning for the river of blood that flowed during a 36-year internal conflict that left 200,000 dead and 50,000 disappeared. The vast majority of those killed were unarmed civilians from the country's indigenous Maya population, whose communities were systematically devastated. Tireless and intrepid advocates have risked their lives to unearth the truth buried with the bones of their loved ones, honor their memories and pursue justice against the perpetrators of these crimes. Few have been prosecuted, and near complete impunity has cloaked the intellectual authors of the state-sponsored terror during the internal conflict.
The climate of impunity changed in 2010, when Guatemala's courageous Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz brought integrity to the office. Along with human rights lawyers and survivors who had been long fighting for justice, she pursued charges against former General José Efraín Ríos Montt, who presided over the bloodiest 17-month period of the conflict, and his chief of military intelligence, Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez. They are currently standing trial for genocide, war crimes and other crimes against humanity for the ruthless counterinsurgency strategy that unleashed a campaign of terror, in which the United States was complicit. According to the United Nations, this precedent-setting case is the first time a head of state is being tried for genocide in a national tribunal, testing principles of locally-based transitional justice.
Although the UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission found that the military was responsible for 93 percent of the deaths, and that in four regions, the state committed genocide, Guatemala has yet to reckon with its past. Many of the country's elite, including current president Otto Pérez Molina, deny that genocide occurred and denounce the trial and the societal divisions they claim the case has engendered. Instead of supporting the independence of Guatemala's institutions, the president warned last week that peace in the country was endangered by the trial process and that violence would ensue if Rios Montt was convicted.
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http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16125-did-guatemalas-president-try-to-shut-down-the-genocide-trial
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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
