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.
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16125-did-guatemalas-president-try-to-shut-down-the-genocide-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
Xeni Jardin Xeni Jardin Verified account ?@xeni
-- Ixil women in court include survivors of mass killings, sexual violence in Chajul, Nebaj, Cotzal, other aldeas.
-- Many traditionally-dressed Ixil women in 3 first court rows are barefoot. Crowned in translation headphones+txij (colorful woven head wrap).
-- Hearing from local press that Guatemalan president went to Nebaj, was greeted with banner: “Ixil survivors demand justice for genocide.”
-- Marco Tulio Álvarez will now testify (expert witness for prosecution) on the forced displacement of Ixil children during armed conflict.... Álvarez Bobadila, writer, journalist, former director of Peace Archives currently testifying about military displacement of Ixil children.
-- “Displacement of Ixil youth during armed conflict wasn't an isolated event but a political policy executed by military institution.”—Álvarez
-- The military routinely changed last names of displaced Ixil children, hid their ethnic/family roots or cultural origins, says Álvarez.
-- Alvarez: These children were denied their identity…the social fabric was destroyed, was an attack against Ixil culture.”
-- Álvarez is relating detailed story of one Ixil man who was orphaned when Army occupied his aldea, killed his mother before him. He escaped.
-- Jacinto Lupamac was separated from community, taken to orphanage in Guate where no other children spoke Ixil. Was given new name, papers.
-- The army occupied Ixil villages; children were either executed or captured & given new identities then given up for int'l adoption.— Álvarez
-- “In Plan Sofia, an entire civil population (Ixil) was defined as internal enemy regardless of political affiliation.”—Álvarez.
-- Álvarez: Army objective in displacing Ixil children from families/identities was to “destroy seeds...prevent creation of future guerrillas.”
-- Álvarez: This (displacement & de-acculturation of Ixil children) wasn't an isolated act (or accident) but the Army's operational plan.
-- Álvarez: Boys & girls were removed from their Ixil culture; no preventative measures were taken to protect this vulnerable population.
== Ramón Cadena of Intl. Commission of Jurists is testifying on violations of internationally recognized human rights against Ixil Maya.
-- Cadena references Plan Sofia (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB297/) which stated that “100% of Ixil population supported the subversives.”
-- Cadena: The Army's operational plans included the creation of what amounted to Ixil concentration camps, totally controlled by military.
-- Cadena: the concentration camps included psy-ops and psychological "rehabilitation" of Ixil.
-- Cadena: Systematic sexual violence against Ixil by Guatemalan Army was intended to terrorize and is an aspect of genocide.
-- Cadena: The question the military was dealing with was how to eliminate the Ixil population; how to control the unarmed civil population.
-- Related to ongoing Guatemalan genocide trial: president Otto Perez Molina is visiting the Ixil region today. http://www.elperiodico.com.gt/es/20130411/pais/226816/?tpl=61874 …
12 APRIL
-- We have been in the Ixil area today listening to the stories of men and women who survived horrible things.... We are now in the village of Cotzal, meeting with other Ixil people to hear their stories, and their thoughts about the Montt trial.
-- We are in the home of a widow in Cotzal, an aldea in the Ixil area of Guatemala; her husband was disappeared.
-- Dinner, Cotzal, Ixil region, Guatemala. La casa de Doña Juana, who was kidnapped and sexually abused by soldiers. pic.twitter.com/UECAHNCKpn
(Yes, that is literally dinner for the poor. Corn tortillas. Sometimes a little beans. )
-- Family photos on the wall in Doña Juana's house, Cotzal, Ixil region, Guatemala.
-- Graffiti we have seen along the road today in Guatemala, all in Spanish or Ixil: “The forests belong to the Ixil people,”
-- No to mining & hydroelectric dam,” “forests & rivers belong to the people, not to corporations,” & others re Ixil property rights.
-- Walking to site of a clandestine cemetary exhumation in progress in Xexuxcap, near Nebaj, Ixil area, Guatemala.
-- Ixil woman works in her field; mule looks on. Xexuxcap, Quiché, Guatemala. Ixil area, focal point of armed conflict.
