On Thursday a Guatemalan court ruled
the country's former president, General Efraín Ríos Montt, will stand
trial for genocide and crimes against humanity committed thirty years
ago. After decades spent hiding behind parliamentary immunity he will
finally be held accountable for ordering massacres, disappearances, and
the systematic destruction of hundreds of communities. The last few
decades have seen a revolution in the global struggle against impunity,
but even for those of us who follow the pursuit of justice in Guatemala
closely, Thursday's decision ranks among the most astonishing
developments. Belatedly, but valiantly, a new breed of prosecutors, led
by Attorney General Claudia Paz, have finally allowed his victims' pleas
for justice to be heard.
In 2004 the Guatemalan government admitted before the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights that Ríos Montt's regime had pursued a strategy of
genocide. The case before the court back then was the Plan de Sánchez
massacre in July 1982, where more than 260 people were murdered. The
army arrived at dawn, rounding up the villagers, cutting off all escape
routes, dividing the women into two groups; one for raping before their
deaths and the other just for killing. To save bullets women were
crowded into a small house that was set on fire with grenades. The Plan
De Sánchez massacre was one of well over 300 massacres during the worst
phase of the civil war and was by no means the largest.
The charges he is now facing rely in some part on investigations I
oversaw as the Legal Director of the Center for Legal Action on Human
Rights (CALDH) in Guatemala from 1997 to 2001, and that is a matter of
some satisfaction. We were one of many groups committed to justice on
behalf of victims, building on the work of the Commission on Historical
Clarification and the Catholic Church Project to Recover the Historical
Memory. No one thought justice would be quick in coming, and many
assumed it was not a battle worth fighting at all. But his trial is a
cause to celebrate, and to marvel at the heroic dignity of the genocide
survivors who throughout decades of, vilification, attacks and even
killing, have stood fast. They want the world to know the truth, how
their loved ones were massacred in systematic, precision-planned
operations at the hands of the General.
In the years after I worked in Guatemala, the image I carried of the
plight of the genocide victims was that of the haunting face in Edvard
Munch's famous painting
The Scream. The pain is obvious to the
observer, but there is no sound. The victims of Ríos Montt were largely
uneducated peasants: even screaming at the top of their lungs, their
voices were never heard.
Guatemala's civil war took the lives of 200,000 people from 1960 to
1996. The origins of the civil war can be traced to a U.S. backed coup
in 1954 that deposed President Árbenz, a moderate, centrist leader,
applying policies of land reform that threatened the holdings of large
U.S. property owners. General Ríos Montt seized power in a coup d'état
from a decrepit and corrupt military regime that was in danger of losing
the civil war in March 1982. He continued a genocidal campaign against
the indigenous Mayan population, implementing a scorched earth policy
that was endorsed by Ronald Reagan -- who famously said that Ríos Montt
was "getting a bum rap on human rights." President Clinton apologized
for the coup in 1998, although not for Reagan's support.
The war ended officially in 1996 amidst calls for stability and
investment from the international community. Predictably, a free trade
agreement with the U.S. followed and the frenzy of privatization that
followed led to ever greater inequalities in what was already one of the
continent's most disparate. Guatemala has since slid into failed state
territory becoming a narcotics transit zone between Colombia and Mexico,
with homicide rates that are higher now than they were during the civil
war. It is an impossible to compare the tragedies inflicted on the
populations of Latin America in the name of so-called national security
doctrines, but Guatemala's war took more civilian lives than any other
in Latin America, almost all at the hands of the army and their proxies.
It is hard to overstate the damage US policy has wrought on the ordinary
people of Guatemala, but the primary responsibility lies with the
Guatemalans who planned and carried out these horrors. Ríos Montt is but
one of many. But this is not the time to focus on him. It is a time to
admire the courage of impoverished peasants who screamed for justice
until their voices were finally heard.
Paul Seils -- Vice President, The International Center for Transitional Justice
Originally posted: 02/ 1/2012 12:02 pm
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-seils/guatemala-genocide-ruling_b_1247071.html
