Guatemala Reacts to Intl Arrest Orders For Ex-Dictators & Military Leaders Responsible for Genocide

by albert id
Guatemalan human rights activists met with members of the UN High Commission for Human Rights to discuss state amnesty laws on Wednesday in response to a landmark decision by a Spanish judge on July 7 to issue international arrest orders against former dictators and top military officers on charges of genocide after more than two decades of impunity.

Efraín Ríos Montt, who served as president of the Guatemalan National Congress as recently as 2004, is one of eight individuals sought for crimes including genocide, terrorism, torture and illegal detention.

According to a UN-sponsored Truth Commission the 36-year civil conflict, in which Ríos Montt´s presidency (1982-1983) was one of the bloodiest, resulted in the death or disappearance of upwards of 200,000 people– the overwhelming majority of whom were indigenous Maya. They calculate that at least 626 state-led massacres occurred during this period.

HIJOS-Guatemala | Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala | Amnesty Intl on Guatemala

In June, Spain’s National Court Judge Santiago Pedraz launched a fact-finding mission to Guatemala to investigate claims filed in 1999 by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum. In particular, Pedraz was looking into the 1980 government-led siege of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City which resulted in 35 deaths (including Menchu Tum’s father), in addition to the murder of four Spanish priests.

Although Pedraz had planned to collect testimony from the accused during his trip, their defense lawyers filed multiple appeals and successfully prevented the hearings.

Ríos Montt’s lawyer, Francisco Palomo, told the Guatemalan daily El Periodico that the Spanish court’s move would not affect the former president. “The [Guatemalan] amnesty decree was a phase prior to the Peace Accords which also protected Rigoberta Menchu, without recognizing her as a terrorist, as well as my client in September of 1990, without recognizing that he had not committed a single illegal act.”



Also listed in the Spanish arrest orders are ex-presidents Óscar Mejía Víctores and recently deceased Romeo Lucas Garcia. Pedraz explained that due to a lack of adequate documentation of Romeo Garcia´s death, his name was also included in the official calls for capture and detention.

At downtown Constitution Plaza last Sunday, activists spread out hundreds of photographs of persons murdered and disappeared during the era of intensified military violence along with pictures of street protests from the same time period and more recently completed exhumations of mass graves.

Lawyers with the Centro de Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos (Center for Human Rights Legal Action), who have attempted since 2000 to advance charges of genocide against the accused through Guatemalan courts, emphasized that the Spanish arrest orders spring from the failure of the state’s justice system to hold the men accountable for their crimes.

Raúl Nájera, a member of HIJOS-Guatemala, an organization comprised of daughters and sons of persons disappeared or killed by the military, told people gathered on the plaza, “If the order for capture is not executed, Guatemala itself will become the prison for those guilty of genocide.”