MAY 3, 2013
Efraín Ríos Montt -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rios_Montt -- the eighty-six-year-old former dictator of Guatemala, has, for the past six weeks, been spending his days in a courtroom in Guatemala City with his former chief of intelligence, José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, where they are being tried for genocide and crimes against humanity. (Both men maintain their innocence.) The trial is unprecedented. It’s the first time a former head of state has gone on trial for genocide in a national, as opposed to an international, court. Even more importantly, in a country with one of the highest crime rates in the world and a long history of legal impunity, it’s a defining moment for a justice system that has been painstakingly rebuilt with help from the international community (including the United States) since 1996, when peace accords ended Guatemala’s civil war.
Ríos Montt and Rodríguez Sánchez are charged with being the intellectual authors of a savage campaign against the Ixil Maya, a stubbornly independent group of perhaps a hundred thousand Indians who speak their own language and inhabit a lyrically beautiful region of the northern highlands, where the Cuchumatan mountains descend in long green folds toward the tropical forests along the Mexican border. In the early nineteen-eighties, the Ixil started coöperatives and unions. They were aggressively resisting seizures of their land and attempting to take back land that they claimed had once belonged to them. The region had become the base for a small group of guerrillas, the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres, who’d arrived over the border from Mexico.
On March 23, 1982, Ríos Montt, who was an Army general, and two other officers seized power in a coup. They promptly dissolved Congress, suspended the constitution, and declared the National Plan for Security and Development. Ríos Montt, who was a fundamentalist Christian and belonged to an organization called Church of the Word, announced plans to go after “those who offer the red paradise of slavery, those who have unleashed a chain of death.” He declared that a “final battle had begun and it would be a fight without limits.” Ríos’s army considered the Ixils, and many Maya, an “internal enemy,” and while they couldn’t easily catch the guerrillas they could catch the Ixils, who lived in vulnerable conditions amid corn-and-bean fields in small subsistence communities scattered through the mountains.
Beginning in July, 1982, the Army descended on the Ixil region, indiscriminately burning houses, murdering men, women, and children, destroying fields, and killing livestock. Refugees who fled into the mountains were bombed and strafed by helicopters and planes. In the end, between seventy and ninety per cent of the Ixil villages were destroyed. Ríos Montt and Rodríguez Sánchez are specifically charged with fifteen massacres in which eleven hundred and seventy-one Ixils were killed and twenty-nine thousand Ixils forcibly displaced. There are also rape and torture charges.
Ríos Montt wasn’t the only Guatemalan dictator to engage in political murder. Two hundred thousand Guatemalans were murdered or disappeared during the thirty-six years of the country’s civil war. But he has been singled out because of the systematic scale of his brutality. Ríos Montt quickly dismissed the two officers with whom he took power and, until deposed in another coup, essentially ruled Guatemala on his own for seventeen months—a period in which over eighty thousand people, mostly Maya Indians, were killed or disappeared. Amnesty International referred to it as a “government program of political murder.”
The case against Ríos Montt has been in both international and Guatemalan courts for years. In 2006, a Spanish court charged Ríos Montt and eight others with torture, genocide, and state terrorism and issued an arrest warrant, but Guatemalan courts declared the warrants invalid. Ríos Montt has not been able to leave Guatemala since. Domestic cases were held up because after Ríos Montt retired from the military, he became a powerful member of the Guatemalan congress, and in Guatemala congressional representatives enjoy legal immunity. Then, in 2012, Ríos Montt lost his congressional seat.
The trial opened on March 19th. The prosecution scheduled some hundred and thirty witnesses. Many testified in Ixil Maya, their own language. There were wrenching accounts of military assaults on Ixil towns with names like Xesayi, Chel, and Tu B’aj Sujsiban; of old people slain when they were too old to flee; of infants tossed into the flames of burning houses; of unborn children being cut out of pregnant women’s uteruses; of captives being held in holes in the ground, raped in churches. Others told of fleeing to the mountains, where they were forced to live off of wild plants. Numerous witnesses testified that if they tried to plant crops, or even build a fire, they were bombed and strafed from the air. A further twenty-nine thousand Ixils are estimated to have perished under these conditions. A former soldier testified that, as far as he could tell, his orders were simple: Indio visto, Indio muerte. (“Indian seen, Indian dead.”)
The defense, by contrast, seemed based on a strategy of aggressively challenging the validity of the court. During the pre-trial, evidentiary phase of the proceedings, Ríos Montt’s defense team proposed entering into evidence documents from the Ministry of Defense, which they hadn’t yet obtained, let alone filed for. When the non-filed documents were ruled inadmissible, the defense argued that the trial couldn’t proceed. On the opening day, Ríos Montt showed up with a new lawyer, who demanded that the trial be delayed for five days while he familiarized himself with the case. When the judge denied his request and announced that the trial would proceed on schedule—with Ríos Montt being represented by Rodríguez Sánchez’s lawyer—the defense accused the judge of bias, challenged her right to preside, and suggested that her salary be blocked.
Guatemala is a country in which power operates ruthlessly and insidiously. Transparency and accountability do not often describe the country’s legal or political dialogue. In the past, intimidation or political assassination has been a common method of conflict resolution. But the Ríos Montt trial has been under an international microscope, and the cost for these kinds of maneuvers could be high. Nevertheless, challenges to the trial have been increasingly frequent. First, a higher constitutional court invalidated the exclusion of the defense’s nonexistent evidence. When the presiding trial judge accepted this ruling, a judge from an earlier evidentiary stage of the proceedings mysteriously reached out and annulled the trial—an annulment that was indignantly rejected by the presiding trial judge. This annulment held up proceedings for a week. There are other unresolved legal challenges but, with the American Ambassador and the State Department’s top official for human rights in the audience, the constitutional court has tentatively issued instructions for the trial to resume.
Ríos Montt has powerful enemies in Guatemala, and more than a few seem happy to throw him under the bus. One is Otto Pérez Molina, the newly elected President. Pérez Molina was a young officer when Ríos Montt staged his 1982 coup. When Pérez Molina and others resisted orders to move out of the capital, Ríos Montt briefly jailed them on grounds of corruption. But lurking behind the trial is the far bigger question of Pérez Molina’s own involvement in the Ixil genocide. Pérez Molina was a Major in the Guatemalan Special Forces during the height of the violence, and apparently operated in the Ixil region under the name Tito Arias. Before the trial was suspended, an ex-soldier testified, via a video link from a location that, for his own safety, was undisclosed, that during the height of the violence Otto Pérez Molina ordered soldiers to burn and loot villages and to execute people as they tried to flee into the mountains. The soldier’s testimony elicited astonished gasps from the courtroom.
Not long after the soldier’s testimony, a group of powerful Guatemalans who were instrumental in supervising the 1996 peace accords between the government and the guerrillas ran a full-page ad in a number of the capital’s newspapers. The ad argued that there had been no genocide and that the type of justice unfolding in the courts could damage the ongoing peace process and lead to more violence. Pérez Molina, who was involved in the 1996 negotiations and worked with many of the signatories, didn’t sign the statement but publicly endorsed it.
The case against Ríos Montt and Rodrigo Sanchez is based on a statute adapted from the 1948 convention on genocide, to which Guatemala is a party. Between its attempts at trial obstruction, the Ríos Montt-Rodríguez Sánchez defense has argued that the campaign in the Ixil was not genocide, that the Ixils were killed not because they were Ixils but, rather, as part of a military strategy to prevent them from joining the guerrillas. The prosecution has argued that Ixils were killed simply because they were Ixils. That legal issue may be difficult to resolve but, from the looks of it, not half as difficult as the political issues surrounding the trial. Meanwhile, outside the courthouse, Ixil Maya in traditional dress wait patiently for an outcome, tending shrines and carrying banners proclaiming “Todos Somos Ixiles.” “We are all Ixils.”
Above: Ixil people demonstrate outside the Supreme Court of Justice. Photograph by Johan Ordonez/AFP/Getty.
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