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