Will Victims of Genocide Obtain Justice?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
 
On May 10, 2013, a Guatemalan court found General Efrain Rios Montt, former de facto head of state, guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity during his 17-month rule in 1982 and 1983. But that wasn’t the end of the story.

In a country long mired in corruption and lacking accountability, an ongoing civil war had pitted Marxist guerrillas against the murderous regimes that governed it. Before it finally ended in 1996, some 200,000 Guatemalans were killed and missing during the conflict, making it one of Latin America's most violent wars in modern history.

Indigenous Mayas suffered disproportionately, as his government deliberately targeted thousands of indigenous people suspected of harboring sympathies for, supporting, or participating in the rebel movement.

The court described the nature of the violence deployed against the indigenous Maya Ixil people  as including indiscriminate massacres, rape and sexual violence against women, infanticide, the destruction of crops to induce starvation, the abduction of children, and the forcible displacement and relocation of surviving populations into militarized “model villages.”

The court found that the crimes were committed as part of a systematic plan to destroy the Maya Ixil as a group. Racism, the tribunal found, was one of the causes of the genocide. Rios Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison.

Sebastian Elgueta, representing Amnesty International, stated that “With this conviction, Guatemala leads by example in a region where entrenched impunity for past crimes sadly remains the norm.”

The Washington-based Center for Legal Action for Human Rights (CALDH), the non-governmental human rights organization behind the Rios Montt genocide case, declared that the judgment “confirms what has been claimed over the past 30 years, and acknowledges that crimes against humanity should be punished in order to ensure that they never again occur.”

The Guatemalan army high command had planned and launched a series of operations that transformed counterinsurgency into acts of genocide. For example, it perpetrated the Finca San Francisco massacre on July 17, 1982, as part of its scorched earth policy. CALDH mobilized massacre survivors to become participants in the trial.

CALDH had filed petitions on behalf of victims before the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Its Guatemala office interviewed victims’ family members, prepared affidavits, reviewed court records, conducted investigations of court procedures and wrote reports.

The trial and verdict were hailed as an example of justice for Latin America and the world. The region leads the world in efforts to prosecute perpetrators of gross violations of human rights in domestic courts.

But Rios Mont’s lawyers immediately filed an appeal, and the country’s Constitutional Court struck down the conviction on procedural grounds.

On March 16 of this year, a Guatemalan court convened for a new trial. But due to the former dictator’s advanced age – he is 90 years old –and medical and psychiatric condition, the special proceeding can determine his guilt or innocence, but would not result in any punishment if he is convicted.

Nonetheless, the very fact that the initial trial took place at all is historically and politically significant. The trial involved approximately one thousand volunteers from a dozen countries who acted as “international accompaniers.” Their physical presence served to deter political violence against local human rights defenders and witnesses.

Even after the abrogation of the guilty verdict against Rios Montt, young people from the group Sons and Daughters of the Disappeared issued the following statement: “More than a failure, this can breathe life into our ongoing fight for justice.”