The Conviction of Rios Montt [View all]

[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/