The Other Americans: Guatemala's Far Right Seeks Amnesty for War Crimes

[Judi Lynn]

The proposed amnesty for the Guatemalan military comes as a blow to the families who have continued to search for their loved ones, especially Indigenous victims of the war.

BY JEFF ABBOTT JUNE 30, 2021 10:46 AM

Guatemala is on the cusp of commemorating its 200th anniversary of independence from Spain, and its twenty-fifth anniversary of the peace accords that ended the country’s thirty-six-year war. Yet the Guatemalan military and its supporters have sought to obtain a blanket amnesty for war crimes, with the far-right Valor political party presenting the latest proposed law to the Guatemalan congress in June 2021.

The proposal would modify the country’s national reconciliation law to exempt crimes against humanity. But this proposal goes against a February 2021 ruling from the country’s Constitutional Court.

“Amnesty is invalid,” Maynor Alvarado, a lawyer with the Guatemalan human rights organization Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo, tells The Progressive. “It cannot be applied to crimes against humanity.”

In 2009, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that amnesty could not apply to cases of war crimes.

The return of the proposed amnesty for war crimes comes as a blow to families who continue to search for their loved ones, especially the Indigenous victims of the war.

“Amnesty for the military is nothing more than impunity,” Victoria Tubin, the daughter of one of the victims of the campaign of forced disappearances in the 1980s, tells The Progressive. “[Amnesty] is as if to say that ‘you Indigenous people do not matter.’ That we do not value the same as the rest of the population. It is racist.”

More:
https://progressive.org/latest/guatemala-amnesty-war-crimes-abbott-210630/