Guatemala, the Question of Genocide

Elizabeth A. Oglesby, Diane M. Nelson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351401326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Guatemala, it was called the "trial of the century": the 2013 prosecution of former de facto head of state (1982-1983) General José Efraín Ríos Montt and his intelligence chief, General José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Maya-Ixil people. Ríos Montt's seventeen-month reign was one of the bloodiest periods in Guatemala's history, with "scorched earth" massacres, the destruction of hundreds of Maya communities, and militarized resettlement of Mayas into "model villages." Ríos Montt was convicted on all charges. Ten days later, a higher court vacated the verdict on dubious procedural grounds. Nevertheless, Guatemala's genocide trial, held in the domestic courts in the country where the crimes were committed, was precedent-setting.

In this volume, Guatemalan and international scholars rigorously explore the complexities of the Guatemala experience and reflect upon the case's implications for understanding and prosecuting the category of genocide more broadly. Topics include: the nexus of racism and counterinsurgency in explaining Guatemala's genocide; the politics of Maya collective memory; the intersections of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity in genocide; the decades-long interconnections of national and transnational justice processes that brought the case to trial; and the limits and contributions of tribunal justice.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.

INTRODUCTION

Guatemala’s genocide trial and the nexus of racism and counterinsurgency

Elizabeth Oglesby and Diane M. Nelson

An elderly man sits accused in a cavernous courtroom in Guatemala City wearing noise-blocking headphones. Before him are three Guatemalan judges, two of them women, from the Special Tribunal for High Risk Cases, a special court set up to deal with high-profile human rights and organized crime cases.¹ Behind him sits an array of ‘interested parties’—journalists, international observers, activists, retired military, survivors of massacre and starvation, ambassadors, Nobel laureates. During his long career, the accused had risen through the ranks of the Guatemalan army. He ran for president with a centre-left party in 1974 but was denied his win. As de facto head of state following a March 1982 military coup, he proffered fiery, sermonesque oratory with apocalyptic promises of both salvation and devastation, while troops under his command were massacring entire villages in the majority indigenous Guatemalan countryside. He served as leader of the national congress, a position that kept prosecution at bay and from whence he launched several failed presidential campaigns after Guatemala’s ‘return to democracy’ in 1986 (following more than three decades of nearly unbroken military rule). He is General José Efraín Ríos Montt, and he is on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. Beside him sits his former military intelligence chief, José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, accused of the same crimes.

An elderly woman takes the stand. Her slender body is covered in the resplendent colours of Guatemalan indigenous site-specific clothing. Her face is shrouded, and the judge asks reporters to refrain from publishing her name. She is one of nearly a hundred survivors from the Maya-Ixil region of the northern Guatemalan highlands who have come to the capital to testify in this unprecedented forum about army atrocities against Ixil villagers between March 1982 and August 1983. (The Ixil are one of twenty-two Maya ethno-linguistic groups in Guatemala. Indigenous people comprise about half the country’s population; see Olson and Falla and Vanthuyne, in this special issue.) This was the period of Ríos Montt’s reign as de facto head of state, and it is the geographic and temporal focus of the charges. Ten women testify specifically about sexual violence during the war, covering their faces in the courtroom because of the social stigma still attached to these crimes.

Survivors speak of things they had spoken of before, to anthropologists and human rights investigators, Catholic Church and United Nations truth commission staffers, and lawyers working for more than a decade to prepare the genocide case. The soldiers came. They killed. They burned. They raped. The army slaughtered people and animals, laid waste to cornfields and smashed household and religious objects. Massacre survivors fled and hid in the mountains; over one million people were displaced throughout the country. There were more losses in this exodus as the elderly collapsed and children starved or fell victim to disease, while the army bombed them. These testimonies are replete with loss and infused with many kinds of translations: translations from Maya-Ixil and Maya-K’iche’ to Spanish, as well as the efforts, sometimes pained, to reduce traumatic events and immense sorrow into the exact parameters of the courtroom setting. One by one, the survivors come forward. This time, after thirty years, they are telling their story to someone who might do something about it.

For seven and a half weeks in 2013, national and international attention was riveted on the courtroom in Guatemala City as the history of army repression was aired. Guatemalan television, radio, print and social media delivered non-stop coverage. Although numerous charges were bundled into this case, it became known in Guatemala and abroad as ‘the genocide trial’ or the ‘Ríos Montt trial’.²

In fact, the charges against Ríos Montt and Rodríguez Sánchez were but a piece of a wider effort to prosecute Guatemala’s grave war crimes. As Brett, Burt and Ross describe in this special issue, it took decades to prepare the ground for this and other trials, including fighting amnesty laws and both legal and extra-judicial forms of impunity, and creating the institutional and juridical structures able to carry it out. It also meant years of grassroots organizing by and among survivors in different parts of the country, as Falla and Vanthuyne address, to overcome the terror of reprisals and the horror and shame at what occurred.³ Guatemalan human rights organizations such as the Center for Legal Action on Human Rights (CALDH) and the Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR) acted as civil parties in the trial, with a seat at the prosecution table, following years of heartrendingly slow work with victims and within the legal system to push the case forward. Partly due to the recent opening of possibilities to prosecute human rights cases, the Guatemalan Public Ministry had a snap legal team under the direction of Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey, a human rights activist and scholar appointed by Guatemala’s centre-left president in 2010. Also essential were the extraordinary labours by international legal teams and other support networks, as Gregoire and Hamilton describe.

The information yielded during the trial was not new; the general patterns of this violence were already known. Following peace accords in 1996 that ended a thirty-six-year armed conflict between the Guatemalan state and leftist insurgents, two major truth commission projects had provided a comprehensive account of war crimes; these were the Roman Catholic Church’s Recovery of Historical Memory (REMHI) report in 1998 and the investigation of the United Nations Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH, Guatemala’s ‘truth commission’ mandated in the peace accords) in 1999. Yet, unlike South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Guatemala’s truth commission did not include public hearings, and few Guatemalans read its multi-volume final report.⁴ Nor does the public have access to the 8,000 testimonies compiled by the CEH. They are locked in a United Nations vault in New York City for fifty years. Several trials prior to 2013 had given the public a chance to watch and hear testimony on specific war crimes (such as the killing of Guatemalan anthropologist Myrna Mack and the Dos Erres massacre, discussed by Vela Castañeda in this special issue), but the genocide trial was the first time the army’s entire counterinsurgency strategy was laid out in public hearings in such graphic detail. Moreover, it was the first time in Guatemala that a former head of state was on trial for human rights crimes, and international observers were also transfixed. As Marcie Mersky, from the International Center for Transitional Justice, notes, ‘It is the first time that a former head of state is being tried for genocide in a credible national court, by the national authorities, in a country where the alleged crimes took place’.⁵

During a period of nearly two months, the prosecution presented a mosaic of evidence arguing that the army’s actions amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity. Nearly one hundred Ixil survivors testified; just over half were men. Most came from villages surrounding Nebaj, the largest of the three Ixil towns in northern Guatemala, with smaller numbers coming from rural areas around the towns of Chajul and Cotzal. The youngest witness was thirty-three years old, and the oldest eighty-seven. Three quarters of the Ixil witnesses who testified in the genocide trial were over eighteen in 1982, when the crimes were committed, while one quarter were children or adolescents at the time of the genocide. Two thirds of the testimonies were given in the Ixil language, with translation provided by the court. Twenty-five per cent of the testimonies were in Spanish, three per cent were in the Maya-K’iche’ language and the rest were a mixture of Spanish and Ixil, or Spanish and K’iche’. Most of the testimonies lasted between twenty and forty minutes.⁶

In addition to the survivors, expert witnesses included several dozen Guatemalan forensic anthropologists who described the exhumation of massacre victims, the slow, careful work to reveal bones in mass graves and the scientific rigour of determining gender, approximate age and circumstances of death. The anthropologists’ photographs corroborated the testimonies: they showed skeletons of pregnant women with tiny foetal bones in their bellies, as well as the remains of victims of all ages with their skulls smashed or with evidence of having been shot, garrotted or hacked to death with machetes. Many had their hands tied behind their back when they were killed. US statistician Patrick Ball, director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, testified that from April 1982 to July 1983 in the majority Ixil municipalities of Chajul, Cotzal and Nebaj, the army killed 5.5 per cent of the indigenous population and 0.7 per cent of the non-indigenous population. Ball concluded that the murder rates of an identifiable group in Guatemala during this period were comparable to acknowledged genocides such as Rwanda and Srebrenica.⁷ (Nelson addresses the production of these legal facts in her contribution.) Other social scientists testified on the psychological effects of the repression and its long-term impact on the social fabric of indigenous community life, as well as the deleterious impact of the army’s ‘war of reconstruction’ that forced villagers to form paramilitary ‘civil patrols’ and resettled the displaced into army-controlled ‘model villages’ (strategic hamlets).⁸ The prosecution also introduced Operation Sofia, a 350-page cache of military communiqués from the Ixil region dating from September 1982, which show that the army’s actions were not excesses but part of a carefully conceived counterinsurgency strategy that targeted rural, indigenous populations as an ‘internal enemy’ of the state. Prosecutors argued that Ríos Montt and Rodríguez Sanchéz were aware of what was happening and were, in fact, culpable for these crimes, since the military documents demonstrated that the chain of command led directly to the two generals.

The defence, for its part, expended very little energy on refuting the charges. Instead, the defence team focused on throwing wrenches into the gears of the legal system through what prosecutors called ‘malicious litigation’ in the form of amparos, a legal instrument that allows parties to a court case to file motions for the protection of their constitutional rights. Under Guatemalan law, these amparos are not limited to the appeals process, but can be filed at any point during the case and can be applied to virtually any aspect of the law. In recent years, abuse of the amparos has become a key mechanism of impunity for grave human rights crimes in Guatemala. At any one time, there are thousands of unresolved amparos gumming up the courts and stalling cases.

A second strategy of the defence was to encourage opposition to the trial within Guatemala. This meant that events inside the courtroom were only the tip of the iceberg of a complex political dynamic. Disgruntled military officers and their relatives launched an aggressive campaign to present the trial as destabilizing peace and reconciliation. A shadowy group made up of these Cold War remnants, calling itself the Foundation Against Terrorism (FTC), used intimidation through the media and street protests to recode the trial’s significance back into the regnant military’s dominant narrative, accusing prosecutors, witnesses and human rights advocates of being the very ‘terrorists’ from which the army claimed to have saved the nation during the thirty-six-year war.

As Brett and Burt address in their contributions to this issue, the FTC launched direct personal attacks against Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey, as well as against other members of the prosecutorial team, the broader Guatemalan human rights community and international allies. A (pricey) twenty-page insert in the major Guatemalan daily newspapers during the trial, for example, paid for by the FTC, proclaimed the genocide trial a ‘farce’ spearheaded by a ‘Marxist conspiracy’ of ‘guerrillas turned human rights activists’ in tandem with ‘traitors’ within the Catholic Church (a reference to the role that progressive Christian activists inspired by Liberation Theology played within the Guatemalan revolutionary movement). Another FTC broadsheet published in the national press, entitled ‘The Faces of Infamy’, was simply a collage of photos of individual prosecutors and activists. This was a chilling echo of the days when death squads ran rampant in Guatemala and often distributed anonymous leaflets with the photos of those about to be targeted for assassination, a history that Vrana outlines in her contribution.

As opinion pieces for and against the genocide trial filled the Guatemalan newspapers, duelling hashtags spread across social media: #sihubogenocidio (Yes, there was genocide) and #nohubogenocidio (No, there wasn’t genocide). Similar slogans appeared as graffiti, mainly in the capital but also in some rural areas heavily affected during the war, as the trial’s proponents and opponents took to the streets.

On 10 May 2013, the three-judge panel delivered its verdict to a packed courtroom. The judges found Ríos Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced him to eighty years in prison, the maximum penalty under Guatemalan law. They absolved Rodríguez Sánchez, rejecting the prosecution’s claim that military intelligence was part of the operational chain of command. As police led Ríos Montt away to jail, rights activists in the audience erupted into cheers, tears and embraces. ‘Here, we just want to be human’, a lone voice rang out wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Guatemala’s genocide trial and the nexus of racism and counterinsurgency
• 2. From heaven to hell in ten days: the genocide trial in Guatemala
• 3. Bonesetting: the algebra of genocide
• 4. International accompaniment, reflexivity and the intelligibility of power in post-conflict Guatemala
• 5. Surviving in the margins of a genocide case in the making: recognizing the economy of testimony at stake in research on political violence
• 6. Perpetrators: specialization, willingness, group pressure and incentives. Lessons from the Guatemalan acts of genocide
• 7. ‘Our ongoing fight for justice’: the pasts and futures of genocidio and justicia in Guatemala
• 8. Carrying a heavy load: Mayan women’s understandings of reparation in the aftermath of genocide
• 9. Peace without social reconciliation? Understanding the trial of Generals Ríos Montt and Rodriguez Sánchez in the wake of Guatemala’s genocide
• 10. ‘The realities of power’: David Stoll and the story of the 1982 Guatemalan genocide
• 11. The reconciliation trap: disputing genocide and the land issue in postwar Guatemala
• 12. Waging peace: a new generation of Ixiles confronts the debts of war in Guatemala
• 13. The Ríos Montt case and universal jurisdiction
• Index
• Index1