The Conviction of Rios Montt

[Judi Lynn]

May 20, 2013

An Interview with Allan Nairn

The Conviction of Rios Montt

by DENNIS BERNSTEIN


In a historic decision, Guatemalan Strong Man, and close US Ally, General Efrain Rios Montt, was convicted by a Guatemalan court, last seek, of genocide and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to 80 years in prison. According to Alan Nairn, who has covered this story closely, since the 1980’s, and was in the courtroom for the recent verdict, there are two distinct battles going on right now, as a result of the historic verdict. On the one hand, those who fought to have Rios Montt convicted, often risking their lives to do so, are pushing to widen the investigation, to focus on other US supported 1980’s Mass Murderers, including the current president, General Otto Perez Molina. On the other hand, there is the powerful Guatemalan right-wing military oligarchy, with their hands bloody from some of same slaughters Rios Mont was just nailed for, fighting to have Montt’s mass murder conviction annulled by a higher court in Guatemala.

In this interview with Alan Nairn, Dennis J Bernstein, talks to Nairn about the fight to prevent the verdict from being overturned, and the grass roots efforts to expand the genocide investigations in Guatemala. Nairn also offers some deep background on an interview he did back in the 1980s with Guatemalan President, Otto Perez Molina, when he was a General, in which Perez Molina seems implicate himself in mass murder. The interview also zero’s in on how the US govt. continued its cozy relationship with mass murderers in Guatemala, by inviting one of Rios Montt’s top killer Generals to study at the Harvard Kennedy School.

DB: Allan, can you tell us about the verdict of last week, and the significance of the court decision?

AN: What happened is that somebody finally enforced the murder laws, impartially. In this case the murders were massacres committed in the northwest highlands of Guatemala against the Maya Ixil people. The perpetrator was a general, a military dictator who was backed by the United States, General Rios Montt. Usually, in every country in the world, a perpetrator, a killer with that kind of position and backing gets away with it. But in this case, it didn’t happen. General Rios Montt was convicted and sentenced to 80 years in prison. As we speak, he is in prison, although he’s claiming that he’s ill, so he’s now in a military hospital, but he’s still locked up. It’s a breakthrough in many ways. It’s the first time that any country has been able to prosecute a former president for genocide using its own domestic criminal courts. More importantly, it’s a prosecution from below. It’s not a case of victor’s justice where the one who wins the war prosecutes the one who lost the war. This is a case of survivors whose movement was crushed, but they were able to persist and use whatever levers of power that exist within the system to bring to justice one of the killers, a killer who represents a social order that is still in power. The same individuals and kinds of individuals who ran Guatemala in 1982 and 1983 still run it today. It’s still the army and the oligarchs of kacife; the chambers of commerce, industry and finance. But due to the brave fight of the survivors of these massacres, enough political space has been opened up in Guatemala that a few honest people have been able to rise to positions of importance within the prosecutorial system and within the judiciary, so this trial was able to move forward. It is also a breakthrough on the fight against racism and for the rights of the indigenous people.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/20/the-conviction-of-rios-montt/

[Catherina]

1. Great interview. Here's the Molina CNN interview

These are the men of the current president, describing how they did this under orders. He is now in charge of Guatemala, and is very worried about this verdict. He allowed the trial to go forward. In the Guatemalan justice system, the attorney general is politically much more autonomous from the press than the US attorney general is, so it’s difficult for the president to control what the attorney general does. The current attorney general in Guatemala is very honest, with a sense of legal duty. But Perez Molina still has a great deal of clout. He allowed the trial to go forward on the understanding that it would only go after Rios Montt and his co-defendant, a general named Rodriguez Sanchez and the trial would not touch Perez Molina. He was basically willing to sacrifice Rios Montt. But to everyone’s surprise, in the middle of the trial, one witness, a former soldier, named Perez Molina and said he ordered atrocities. I had been due to testify about a week after that, and as a result of all this, I was kept off the stand because Perez Molina was furious that his name came up in the trial. There was fear that if I took the stand, it would provoke him to shut down the trial entirely.

Audio starts here at minute 16:50- http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/91631

Here's the CNN Spanish video Allan Nairn mentioned. It's all in Spanish.

17:12 is where the reporter brings up the 1982 Allan Nairn interview that Molina had totally forgotten about, and quotes "Tito Arias" saying all the families were with the guerrillas and the signal from the palace suddenly went dead for 5 minutes, at which point a very animated Molina returned to *defend* himself. .

On the night after the verdict he gave an interview to Spanish language CNN and interviewer Fernando del Rincon pressed Perez Molina on the interviews he had with me in the middle of the massacres in the mid-1980?s, and his own role in the massacres. As soon as Rincon began asking about that, the signal from the President in his palace to CNN suddenly went dead. Back at the CNN studio they were surprised. The line remained dead for several minutes. By the time it came back on, and Perez Molina had gathered his wits, he started fiercely contesting the question, refusing to answer. In the end he said you’ve go to understand, the guerrillas had recruited entire families as collaborators – they had women and children as collaborators. It seemed he was giving a rationale for the killing of families. After the interview was over – I was in Guatemala at the time – I got to see the second half of the interview. The CNN access to the interview on the website was blocked in Guatemala, but some viewers managed to videotape it and put it up on youtube. The confrontational interview with Perez Molina got more than 21,000 hits in a matter of hours, which is a huge amount for Guatemala. It was a sensation. Everybody was talking about it. Then those youtube interviews were inexplicably taken down. Last night I did an interview on CNN en espanol on that same show. I know people in Guatemala have attempted to put that up on youtube. We’ll see how long those stay up there. Perez Molina is clearly very worried about this.

Audio here at minute 19:10: http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/91631