Guatemala genocide trial resumes for ex-dictator Rios Montt
Guatemala genocide trial resumes for ex-dictator Rios Montt
The Associated Press
OCTOBER 13, 2017 6:06 PM
GUATEMALA CITY
The genocide trial of former Guatemala dictator Jose Efrain Rios Montt resumed behind closed doors Friday as the 90-year-old retired general faces charges related to the killing of 1,771 Ixil Indians during his brief time in power.
The proceedings restarted after being suspended for more than a year while his lawyers argued that he was too senile to participate.
Rios Montt ruled from March 1982 to August 1983. His lawyers contend his faculties have deteriorated significantly, leaving him with no memory and unable to make decisions.
Rios Montt was convicted of genocide in 2013 and sentenced to 80 years in prison, but the country's Constitutional Court threw out that conviction and ordered a new trial.
More:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article178774816.html
(Short article, no more at link.)
Efraín Ríos Montt and Ronald Reagan
Trial on Guatemalan Civil War Carnage Leaves Out U.S. Role
By ELISABETH MALKINMAY 16, 2013
MEXICO CITY — In 1999, President Bill Clinton went to Guatemala and apologized. Just two weeks earlier, a United Nations truth commission found Guatemalan security forces responsible for more than 90 percent of the human rights violations committed during the country’s long civil war.
Mr. Clinton’s apology was an admission that the Guatemalan military had not acted alone. American support for Guatemalan security forces that had engaged in “violent and widespread repression,” the president said, “was wrong.”
But that long history of United States support for Guatemala’s military, which began with a coup engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1954, went unacknowledged during the genocide trial and conviction of the man most closely identified with the war’s brutality, the former dictator Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt.
During a month of testimony before the three-judge panel that found General Ríos Montt guilty last Friday, the prosecution never raised the issue of American military backing in the army’s war against leftist guerrillas. The 86-year-old former dictator barely mentioned the United States when he argued in his own defense that he had no operational command over the troops that massacred and terrorized the Maya-Ixil population during his rule in 1982 and 1983.
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/world/americas/trial-on-guatemalan-civil-war-carnage-leaves-out-us-role.html
LBN:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/world/americas/trial-on-guatemalan-civil-war-carnage-leaves-out-us-role.html
