Coming Clean on the Dirty War: José Efraín Rios Montt Goes to Trial

[DonViejo]

by Mac Margolis Mar 29, 2013 4:45 AM EDT

Stooped and white-haired, the generalissimo isn’t what he used to be. Mac Margolis on what the former Guatemalan strongman’s genocide trial means for Latin America.

In the conflicted history of Latin America, where political upheaval and state violence reached staggering proportions, the early 1980s in Guatemala stand apart. This was the time when security forces answering to military men unleashed a brutal offensive against left-wing guerrillas and their perceived fellow travelers. Independent investigators later concluded that some 1,700 people from several indigenous groups were killed in the 17-month counterinsurgency between 1981 and 1982—unarmed men, women, and children among them.

Though Guatemala has since made the transition from dictatorship to democracy, the memory of such barbarity is an open wound for this Central American nation of 14.1 million. Now all eyes in the hemisphere are on the supreme court in Guatemala City, where former strongman Gen. José Efraín Rios Montt stands accused of waging what may be the dirtiest chapter of Latin America’s dirty wars, capping a civil war that claimed more than 200,000 lives from 1960 to 1996. “As horrific as it got in the Americas, the killing in Guatemala was just off the charts,” says Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based policy think tank.

The trial under Chief Justice Jazmín Barrios, which began March 19, is expected to drag on for weeks and maybe months, but already is stirring comment across the globe. Rios Montt, 86, is the first former head of state ever to be tried in his own country for actions committed during his rule. The now stooped, white-haired general and his former military intelligence chief, José Maurício Rodriguez Sanchez, stand accused of genocide and “crimes against humanity,” offenses for which there is no statute of limitations and that are not covered by the blanket amnesty for combatants, signed in 1996.

Guatemalan prosecutors charge that the generalissimo waged a campaign to wipe out the Ixil-Maya and three other indigenous communities thought at the time to be in league with Marxist rebels in the countryside. They built their arguments on the word of witnesses and survivors, who told their harrowing stories to United Nations investigators ten years ago. Many described unspeakable atrocities, including cases of victims who were tortured and burned alive. Observers judge these few months as the worst moment in the 36-year civil war that turned this nation on the tropical Central American isthmus into a killing ground. It still roils the region to this day. The case against Rios Montt is the centerpiece of the recently inaugurated Central American Archives, a vast collection on the years of repression, backed by millions of digitalized documents, images, and depositions, housed in Guatemala City.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/29/coming-clean-on-the-dirty-war-jos-efra-n-rios-montt-goes-to-trial.html

[idwiyo]

1. K&R

[malaise]

2. There are way too many men who are enjoying the prime of their lives when they should be locked up

for crimes again humanity.
I suppose we should be grateful that this murderer is actually facing trial.