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Victory in Guatemala? Not Yet (No Military Assistance to Guatemala)
Op-Ed Contributor
Victory in Guatemala? Not Yet
By VICTORIA SANFORD
Published: May 13, 2013
...
But it’s too soon to declare victory in Guatemala. There is serious evidence that the current president, the former military commander Otto Pérez Molina, who took office in January 2012, may have been involved in the same mass killings for which General Ríos Montt has now been convicted.
...
In September 1982, during the dictatorship, Mr. Pérez Molina, then a major in the Guatemalan Army, was filmed by a Finnish documentarian, Mikael Wahlforss, standing amid dead men, as soldiers were kicking their bodies, in a Mayan area known as Nebaj. One soldier says in the film that the soldiers had taken the men to Mr. Pérez Molina for interrogation, but that the men gave no information. The soldiers do not explain how the men were killed.
...
The Obama administration should call for Mr. Pérez Molina’s resignation and rally support among other members of the Organization of American States to join this call. This kind of action is not without precedent. In June 1979, with backing from the Carter administration, the O.A.S. successfully demanded the resignation of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.
...
Mr. Pérez Molina has been lobbying the United States for direct military assistance to aid his war on drug traffickers — whom he claims to see everywhere he finds opposition to his policies. Earlier this month he declared a “state of siege” and suspended civil liberties in response to an environmental protest in four mining towns. How can the Obama administration possibly justify sending military aid to a president who does this, let alone a president who might be guilty of genocide?
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/opinion/its-too-soon-to-declare-victory-in-guatemalan-genocide.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
23 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
.... that Molina's role in the death squads wasn't brought up during Mont's trial. 
Early in the trial, a former soldier implicated him as having ordered attacks. Allan Nairn's was just about to testify about what he witnessed and Molina's involvement when Molina stopped the trial in its tracks.
Molina had made a deal with the US government that the trial could go forward, with Montt as the sacrificial lamb so US military aid can resume using this trial as proof that there's been amazing progress on human rights in Guatemala. The deal was that neither he nor any other serving in positions of power would be implicated in the atrocities.
Ah, here's one article
Efrain Rios Montt Trial: Soldier Implicates Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina In Civil War Atrocities
By SONIA PEREZ-DIAZ 04/04/13 11:43 PM ET EDT
GUATEMALA CITY -- A former soldier implicated Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina in civil war atrocities on Thursday during the trial of former U.S.-backed military strongman Efrain Rios Montt, proceedings that have heard witnesses recount a litany of horrors.
Hugo Reyes, a soldier who was a mechanic in an engineering brigade in the area where atrocities were carried out, told the court that Perez Molina, then an army major, ordered soldiers to burn and pillage during Guatemala's dirty war with leftist guerrillas in the 1980s.
"The soldiers, on orders from Major `Tito Arias,' better known as Otto Perez Molina ... coordinated the burning and looting, in order to later execute people," Reyes told the court by video link.
...
The secretary general of the presidency, Gustavo Martinez, called the testimony "poorly intentioned declarations and in bad faith." He said the presidency reserves the right to take action against Reyes.
...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/05/efrain-rios-montt-trial_n_3020052.html
When Molina commented on the trial after the verdict, he again said that soldier was lying. Allan Nairn, who was so much on film, including Molina, wasn't called to testify when the trial restarted. Dropped cold from the witness list.
...
The interview became more uncomfortable for Perez when the interviewer questioned him about documentary American journalist Allan Nairn had filmed in September 1982, where he declares that "all the families are with the guerrillas."
At that time, the signal from Guatemala was cut and the interview paused. After re-establish communication, the president said that the testimony of the protected witness who identified him as responsible for the massacres in Nebaj is false.
He also said that he spoke with the Attorney General and she told him that the (pre)trial record when the witness gave his testimony, no one was being accused so she didn't understand why, when he was on the stand, he pointed to him (to Otto Pérez Molina).
- Why did you talk to the Attorney General, Mr. President? - the journalist questioned him. "The prosecutor was the one who spoke to me about other criminal coordinations, she said she was astonished at what had happened," Perez said in a raised tone and did not allow the journalist to continue with his question.
The reporter continued (instead) with questions about the Allan Nairn interviews. Annoyed, Perez said that the children, women and elderly were with the guerrillas.
...
http://www.elperiodico.com.gt/es/20130511/pais/228130/
Edit: See post #4 too. I just found it, thanks to your question.
The aid was already resumed. They just want much more now. It was resumed in 2005 with $3.2 million. As usual, that poster is just throwing out wild accusations, or "plain stupidity" as he calls it.
The basic numbers were already brought up in another thread but this gives more detail.
Guatemala Gets U.S. Military Aid
A 15-year freeze on the funds because of human rights abuses is lifted in recognition of reforms.
March 25, 2005|John Hendren | Times Staff Writer
GUATEMALA CITY — The United States released $3.2 million in aid to Guatemala's military Thursday, ending a 15-year freeze on the assistance in a largely symbolic recognition that the Central American nation has made progress reforming an army tainted by past human rights abuses.
The money was freed up after this nation of 14 million agreed to make its military subject to civilian courts, establish an office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and remove legal impediments to U.N. investigations of rights abuses.
...
Although the military assistance is small compared to the more than $100 million a year in economic aid the U.S. gives Guatemala, Berger welcomed the decision.
...
In addition to the $3.2 million, the Bush administration has included $900,000 for international training aid and a program to buy foreign military equipment in its 2006 budget proposal. That is a substantial increase from the $350,000 provided in the 2005 budget, for strictly limited purposes.
...
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/mar/25/world/fg-guatemala25
A 15-year freeze on the funds because of human rights abuses is lifted in recognition of reforms.
March 25, 2005|John Hendren | Times Staff Writer
GUATEMALA CITY — The United States released $3.2 million in aid to Guatemala's military Thursday, ending a 15-year freeze on the assistance in a largely symbolic recognition that the Central American nation has made progress reforming an army tainted by past human rights abuses.
The money was freed up after this nation of 14 million agreed to make its military subject to civilian courts, establish an office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and remove legal impediments to U.N. investigations of rights abuses.
...
Although the military assistance is small compared to the more than $100 million a year in economic aid the U.S. gives Guatemala, Berger welcomed the decision.
...
In addition to the $3.2 million, the Bush administration has included $900,000 for international training aid and a program to buy foreign military equipment in its 2006 budget proposal. That is a substantial increase from the $350,000 provided in the 2005 budget, for strictly limited purposes.
...
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/mar/25/world/fg-guatemala25
The New York Times covered this also in 2005
And check out the war criminal quote:
"I've been impressed by the reforms that have been undertaken here in the armed forces. I know it is a difficult thing to do, but it's been done with professionalism and transparency," ... "My impression is that this is a magic moment for Central America." - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld
Now they just want to make it legal so they can send even more.
U.S. law says Guatemala can regain aid once Secretary of State Hillary Clinton certifies Guatemala's military is "respecting internationally recognized human rights" and cooperating with judicial investigations of former military personnel and with the U.N.-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/military/story/2012-08-29/marines-drug-fight-guatemala/57414788/1
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/military/story/2012-08-29/marines-drug-fight-guatemala/57414788/1
Taking Chomsky at his word, in his book "How The World Works"
"By the late 1970s, atrocities were again mounting beyond the terrible norm, eliciting verbal protests. And yet, contrary to what many people believe, military aid to Guatemala continued at virtually the same level under the Carter "human rights" administration. Our allies have been enlisted in the cause as well...
http://www.books.google.com.gt/books?id=D4ZxhXwx19gC&pg=PT38
http://www.books.google.com.gt/books?id=D4ZxhXwx19gC&pg=PT38
That bastard sure had a gift for prettifying the hideous, the venomous and the unspeakable!
-----------------
I can see that Bacchus needs some lessons in "How the World Works." He (she?) is so-o-o-o-o-o naive...
Ríos Montt Guilty of Genocide: Are Guatemalan President Pérez Molina, U.S. Officials Next?
....
AMY GOODMAN: One former general implicated in abuses during the trial was Guatemala’s current president, Otto Pérez Molina. In the early 1980s, Pérez Molina was a military field commander in the northwest highlands, the Ixil region where the genocide occurred. At the time, he was operating under the alias "Major Tito Arias." During the trial, one former army officer accused him of participating in executions.
To talk more about the historic trial and the significance of the verdict and sentence, we go to Guatemala City, where we’re joined by investigative reporter Allan Nairn, who covered the trial and attended it in Guatemala and has covered Guatemala extensively in the 1980s.
Allan Nairn, welcome back to Democracy Now! The significance of the verdict and the 80-year sentence?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, this was a breakthrough for the idea of enforcing the murder laws, a breakthrough for indigenous people against racism and for human civilization, because you can’t really claim to be civilized unless you can enforce the law against the most basic taboo: murder. And when the murders are committed by people at the top, usually they get away with it. Even in recent years, when there’s been some progress internationally, through institutions like the International Criminal Court, in prosecuting former heads of state, generals, for atrocities, almost always the only ones who get prosecuted are those who have lost the power struggle, those who no longer hold onto the reins of power or are no longer backed by the elites. But this case was different. In this case, a conviction was obtained against a general who represented the elite that triumphed, the military and the oligarchs who were responsible for perhaps up to a quarter million civilian murders, especially in the 1980s. Those are the people who still rule Guatemala. Yet, one of their number, General Ríos Montt, has now been convicted, because this was a prosecution that was initiated from below. And I don’t know of a case where that’s ever been done before. And this could be the beginning of something very big. I think this will be remembered for 500 years.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted of, what exactly he did?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, he was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. Ríos Montt ordered basically a program of extermination against civilians in the northwest highlands. That’s the area where the Mayan population of Guatemala is concentrated. They make up now, today, about half of the population of the country. And they formed—they were the part of the population that was most resistant to the rule of the army and to the rule of the oligarchy. They were pushing for land reform. They were pushing for rights to be recognized as equal citizens, which was something that, to this day, the Guatemalan oligarchy does not want to concede. And there was also a guerrilla movement that arose in the highlands.
And the Guatemalan army used a strategy of massacre. They would wipe out villages that did not submit to army rule. And the soldiers at the time described to me how they would conduct interrogations where they ask, "Who here gives food to the guerrillas? Who here criticizes the government?" And if they didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear, they would strangle them to death, or they would slit their throats. If the people being questioned were women and they were pregnant, they would slit them open with machetes. They would make people dig mass graves. They would then make them watch as they shot their neighbors in the head, in the face, in the back of the skull. And this just happened in village after village after village.
And it wasn’t an armed confrontation, because the villagers were unarmed. The soldiers were armed with American and Israeli weapons. The villagers were not. It was straight-up murder. It was part of a strategy that had been developed in conjunction with the U.S. In fact, the U.S. military attaché in Guatemala at the time, Colonel George Maynes, told me that this village—that he, himself, had helped develop this village sweep tactic. There was a U.S. trainer there, American Green Beret, who was training the military, and this is, in his words, how to destroy towns. And that’s what they did. And now Ríos Montt has been convicted for it.
AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, can you describe the scene in the courtroom, from the point where the judge announced the verdict and the sentence and what happened in the courtroom and with Ríos Montt next?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, after the sentence, at one point, it looked like Ríos Montt was actually trying to flee the courtroom. It looked like his lawyers were trying to ease him out the door. And the judge started calling for security to stop Ríos Montt before he could sneak out the door.
The people in the audience started singing hymns. They started chanting, "Justice! Justice! Justice!" They chanted, "Yassmin! Yassmin!" That’s the name of the judge, Judge Barrios, who delivered the verdict. The Ixil people in the audience, many of whom had been survivors of these atrocities, who had risked their lives and come to Guatemala City to be witnesses in the trial, they stood up, and they put their arms across their—crossed their arms across the chest in the traditional way of saying thanks, and they all gave a slight bow in unison to pay tribute to the court.
The supporters of Ríos Montt, his family and the former military, some of them at certain points started shouting. They actually seemed most upset when the judge said that Ríos Montt would have to pay money reparations for his crimes. And, in fact, this morning there’s going to be a hearing on the reparations.
It took the—it took about 45 minutes for the prison police, who were supposed to drag Ríos Montt away, to get into the room. When they came in, I happened to be standing next to the door that they entered, and I asked, "Are you the guys who are supposed to take away Ríos Montt?" And you could see that they were extremely nervous. They were carrying long rifles. But, I mean, this is such an event that this is something they’ll be telling their grandchildren about.
AMY GOODMAN: And how did they take him out, after he tried to leave with his lawyers before they got there?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, there was a huge swarm of press. He was taken out, and at one point, when he was being put into the police vehicle, you could see that he was being held by the scruff of his neck by the police who were taking him away to prison.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to talk about a very interesting CNN interview with the current president of Guatemala, Otto Pérez Molina, because that’s the question everyone is asking now: Does this point the finger at him, he who enjoys immunity while he is president of Guatemala? We’re speaking with investigative journalist Allan Nairn in Guatemala City, attended the trial of Ríos Montt. Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison, where he sits today. Stay with us.
(break)
AMY GOODMAN: We continue our discussion about the historic verdict against former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, found guilty Friday of genocide and crimes against humanity, sentenced to 80 years in prison. Shortly after the verdict was announced, Guatemala’s current president, Otto Pérez Molina, was interviewed on CNN en Español, Spanish CNN. The host, Fernando del Rincón, asked the president about his time, Otto Pérez Molina’s time, as a military commander, but the line mysteriously cut off right after he asked the question.
FERNANDO DEL RINCÓN: (translated) In September 1982, Allan Nairn, an investigative journalist, had documentation where Major Tito Arias appeared in a video in which he said, quote, "All the families," referencing to the families in the zone, "are with the guerrillas." That’s what you said in September 1982 in the video in an interview with Allan Nairn, an investigative journalist from the United States, who, for certain, was there to be questioned in this process against Ríos Montt.
Let’s see if we’ll return with the president, to see if we’ll hear his response to that.
AMY GOODMAN: CNN host Fernando del Rincón returned to the question when the satellite was restored later in the interview.
FERNANDO DEL RINCÓN: (translated) In 1982, you appear in a video of Allan Nairn’s, which you have confirmed that you appeared, then with the name Major Tito Arias, where you say, "All the families are with the guerrillas." What did you mean by that?
PRESIDENT OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: (translated) Look, this is another case where a phrase is taken out of context of what we were talking about. I don’t think the thing is like that, Fernando.
FERNANDO DEL RINCÓN: (translated) No one is taking anything out of context. It is a video where it is a declaration you made.
PRESIDENT OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: (translated) It must be raised. Of course you were taking it out of context. I can tell you here now. If you want, I can explain. In 1982—and you can come here to verify it everywhere—the faction of the guerrillas that was called the Guerrilla Army of the Poor in that area involved entire families, without respecting their ages, from the elderly to the smallest children. They were given pseudonyms. They took over the local power. They built what they called "irregular local forces." They built what they called the "clandestine local committee." The plan was to burn. Better said, it wasn’t just a plan; they actually did burn the entire municipalities, in order to—
FERNANDO DEL RINCÓN: (translated) Mr. President, Mr. President, I must interrupt you.
PRESIDENT OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: (translated) That was the context in which we were living.
AMY GOODMAN: That is Guatemala’s current president, Otto Pérez Molina, being interviewed by CNN en Español host Fernando del Rincón. We’re joined by investigative journalist Allan Nairn, who Rincón was referring to in his questioning of Pérez Molina. You interviewed the Guatemalan president, Pérez Molina, when he was known as Tito in the highlands, Allan—that’s what he’s referring to—more than two decades ago. Explain the significance of this line of questioning and what Pérez Molina’s role was at the time that Ríos Montt has now been convicted of crimes against humanity for.
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, now this—now that Ríos Montt has been convicted for the actions that the Guatemalan army took in the highlands, the next logical step is to look at those who were implementing the plan of Ríos Montt. And the field commander on the ground at that time in the Ixil region was Pérez Molina, who is now the president. With the ruling of the judge, this is more than just a logical conclusion that Pérez Molina should be investigated. It’s now a legal mandate from the court, because the court said that the attorney general of Guatemala is ordered to investigate everyone who could have been involved in the crimes for which Ríos Montt was convicted.
When I met Pérez Molina in '82, his troops were in the midst of a series of massacres, and the troops described how they would go into villages and execute civilians and torture civilians. At one point, one of the discussions with Pérez Molina took place as we were standing over the bodies of four guerrillas who the—his troops had captured. One of the soldiers said they had turned them over to Pérez Molina for interrogation after one of them had set off a grenade. The soldier said, "Well, they didn't want to say anything in their interrogation." Another soldier told me that they, the military, had in fact finished those troops off. So, Pérez Molina is a definite logical target for criminal investigation, although at this moment, as president, he still enjoys legal immunity. But that lapses as soon as he leaves an official position.
AMY GOODMAN: CNN host Fernando del Rincón also asked President Otto Pérez Molina if he still denies there was a genocide after Friday’s verdict.
PRESIDENT OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: (translated) Well, Fernando, I was speaking my personal opinion. And personally, I do not want this. And I said it also when I said that there was no genocide in Guatemala. And I repeat that now. Now, after there has been a judgment, which was in a lower court, today’s ruling is not as firm. We are respectful of what justice declares, and we will continue being respectful.
What I believe to be of value here, first of all, is that in Guatemala things are taking place that have never happened before. And that’s important. That is, a head of state today in a lower court having been convicted of a crime of this magnitude, which is the crime of genocide, is something that was unthinkable just 10 years ago here in Guatemala. Today what we are seeing is that justice can be exercised, justice can advance and move forward.
Now, this sentence is not so firm. The ruling shall be final when the appellate process runs its course. And I imagine those defending General Ríos will pursue these options, as he, himself, stated today after he saw the sentence and said he will appeal the sentence that was declared today.
AMY GOODMAN: CNN host Fernando del Rincón pressied President Molina further, asking him if he would go against the Guatemalan justice system and continue to deny that there’s a genocide.
PRESIDENT OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: (translated) Well, that’s hypothetical, Fernando. What you are telling me is an assumption. What is missing here is that the higher courts declare on the matter. I am not a part of the defense of General Ríos, and I will not be part of the official defense of General Ríos. In any case, as an executive, as president of the country, what is my responsibility is to be respectful. And it is what I also ask of all Guatemalans, that we be law-abiding. Here, we have to respect and we need to strengthen all the levels of justice. And what I have always said, we want justice to be served, but we want it to be a justice that is not biased to one side nor the other, because it would cease to be justice. And then what would happen is that Guatemalans would lose rather than be strengthened. They would lose confidence in the justice system. I’m not going to issue an opinion at this time.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s the Guatemalan president, Otto Pérez Molina, being interviewed by CNN. Investigative journalist Allan Nairn, your response?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, at one point, it sounds like Pérez Molina is trying to take credit for the trial. And the trial happened against his will. And, in fact, just a few weeks ago, he intervened behind the scenes to help kill the trial, and it was only revived after an intense backlash from the Guatemalan public and also international pressure. This morning’s Wall Street Journal carries a piece that has additional evidence citing various residents of the areas that Pérez Molina commanded also talking about him committing atrocities.
One of the remarks that Pérez Molina made in response to the verdict against Ríos Montt—he was echoing the comments of the American Chamber of Commerce, which represents the U.S. corporations in Guatemala—was to say that this verdict will discourage foreign investment in Guatemala. It’s a very revealing comment, because foreign companies, when they come into a country and are looking to invest, they want some laws to be enforced, like the laws on contracts, and they want other laws not to be enforced, like the labor laws and the laws which stop them from murdering their employees if they try to organize unions. In the ’80s, the leaders of the American Chamber of Commerce described to me how they would sometimes turn over names of troublesome workers to the security forces, and they would then disappear or be assassinated. Fred Sherwood was one of the Chamber of Commerce leaders who described that. And now, with this verdict, it seems that Pérez Molina and the corporate leaders and the elites in Guatemala, in general, are worried that they may have a harder time killing off workers and organizers when they need to.
And it’s especially relevant right now because there’s a huge conflict in Guatemala about mining. American and Canadian mining companies are being brought in by the Pérez Molina government to exploit silver and other minerals. The local communities are resisting. Community organizers have been killed. There was a clash in which a police officer was killed. So Pérez Molina has imposed a state of siege in various parts of the country. And just the other day, the local press printed a wiretap transcript of the head of security at one of these mines, in this case the San Rafael mining operation, where the security chief says to his men, regarding demonstrators who were outside the mine, he says, "Goddamn dogs, they do not—they do not understand that the mine generates jobs. We must eliminate these animal pieces of (bleep). We cannot allow people to establish resistance. Kill those sons of (bleep)." And the security people later opened fire. This is the way foreign companies operate, not just in Guatemala, but around the world. I mean, it’s this kind of non-enforcement of law that made possible the Bangladesh factory collapse that killed over a hundred workers. And now they’re worried in Guatemala—
AMY GOODMAN: A thousand.
ALLAN NAIRN: Oh, I’m sorry, over a thousand workers—that this Ríos Montt case could also set a precedent for just starting to enforce the murder laws. And that can make their life a little more difficult. That can raise their labor costs. It has very serious implications for them.
And another aspect of this is that there’s going to be a fierce counterreaction against this verdict this week from the oligarchs, from the former military. They’re putting things out into the public calling Judge Barrios a dirty guerrilla, a hysterical Nazi. They have people following her around town with video cameras to try to imply that she’s not behaving in a proper manner for a judge. They’re going to try to get the courts, which have—other courts, which have traditionally been tools of the oligarchy and the military, to nullify the verdict against Ríos Montt. This battle is far from over.
AMY GOODMAN: Allan, there are three remarkable, prominent women who have—who are part of this verdict, who have helped to make it happen. One is the Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú, one of—who brought suit, that has led to this trial. One is the attorney general, the first woman attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz. And then there is Judge Barrios, the judge in this case. Can you talk about these women?
ALLAN NAIRN: Well, it was Rigoberta Menchú who helped to get this whole process started years ago with legal cases filed against Guatemalan generals for atrocities in the Mayan region. That helped produce a criminal court case in Spain, where—in the Audiencia Nacional, where the Spanish courts indicted and tried to extradite Guatemalan generals and former officials to Spain. I testified in that trial. And one of the survivors of the massacres who testified in that trial mentioned that Pérez Molina—this was an aside at the trial, because there were so many officers who were implicated—that Pérez Molina had been involved in this man’s torture.
One of the reasons that this case against Ríos Montt has been able to go forward is because the current attorney general, Paz y Paz, is a person of great integrity and has allowed it to go forward, obviously against the wishes of Pérez Molina and the oligarchy.
And Judge Barrios was the one who was—who was directly on the lines. She ran the trial. She was the one who had to deliver the verdict. As she left the courthouse every night, you could see her wearing a bulletproof vest. The judges and prosecutors involved in the case received death threats. In one case, a threat against a prosecutor, the person delivering the threat put a pistol on the table and said, "I know where your children are." It takes a lot of courage to push a case like this. And there are enough people in Guatemala who have been willing to stand up that it’s been able to go forward, but they’re doing so at considerable risk.
And just to give you an idea of the kind of environment they’re operating in, there’s a piece that just came out in Plaza Pública, one of the—kind of the leading political magazine in Guatemala, where they interview the families of the military, who have been protesting against the Ríos Montt trial. These are young people, now extremely rich because of all their money their parents stole in the military. And one of the topics that they talk about in this interview is the rape charges against the generals and colonels, because witness after witness talked about how indigenous women would be raped in the course of these massacre operations. And one of the military family men says that, "Well, yes, these rapes—some of these rapes may have happened, but they didn’t happen as a rule." And he then defends the military men by saying he doesn’t think that they would systematically rape the indigenous women, and he then uses language so vile that I can’t repeat it on the air. But the essence of his argument is that—his argument is not that they wouldn’t have done it because it would be wrong to rape or because it’s against the law to rape or because these military men have honor or because it’s indecent to rape; his point was that they wouldn’t have committed these mass rapes because they wouldn’t have—because of personal characteristics of the indigenous women, they would not have found them desirable. But he expresses it in the most disgusting language you can imagine. This is the oligarchy that has now been—and the military, that has now been stung by this verdict and is itching for payback.
And one final legal point I should make, the mandate that the judge gave, the order to the attorney general, Judge Barrios’s order to the attorney general, Paz y Paz, to further investigate everyone involved in Ríos Montt’s crimes, that could encompass U.S. officials, because the U.S. military attachés in Guatemala, the CIA people who were on the ground aiding the G2 military intelligence unit, the policy-making officials back in Washington, people like Elliott Abrams and the other high officials of the Reagan administration, they were direct accessories to and accomplices to the Guatemalan military. There were supplying money, weapons, political support, intelligence. They, under the law—under international and Guatemalan law, they could be charged. The courts and the attorney general could have right to seek their extradition from the U.S. Also, in the investigation process, they could subpoena U.S. documents, because there would be extensive reports and National Security Agency intercepts of Guatemalan army communications from that period, and there would also be still-classified reports on exactly what the CIA and the DIA and the White House and the State Department were doing with Ríos Montt and with the commanders in the field, people like, well, before Ríos Montt, General Benedicto Lucas García, afterward Pérez Molina. So, both President Pérez Molina and the U.S. are now potential targets for criminal investigation for these crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity in Guatemala.
AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, we will leave it there for now, investigative journalist on the ground in Guatemala City, and end with a clip of Rigoberta Menchú, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who was there through the trial, speaking at the beginning of the genocide trial of Ríos Montt.
RIGOBERTA MENCHÚ: (translated) It’s a very big day for Guatemala. It’s a very big day for those of us who have defended our lives in difficult circumstances, very painful circumstances of great isolation, of exile. It looks like our period of pain is ending, because we hope that from now on we will be accepted by Guatemalan society, in our polarized society, the society that carries the burden of past genocide on their backs.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. The former dictator of Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt, has been sentenced to 80 years in prison. He was taken to prison after he was found guilty on Friday. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We’ll link to Allan Nairn’s blog at allannairn.org. That’s A-L-L-A-N-N-A-I-R-N.org. And you can see all of our coverage of this trial and our interviews on Guatemala at democracynow.org.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to "democracynow.org"
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/5/13/ros_montt_guilty_of_genocide_are
..... he's the one wearing his maroon Kabiles beret.
This is one of the videos where he states that "todas las familias están con la guerrilla" all the families were with the guerrillas. Nairn has more videos of him up on his site. Nairn's basically a dead man walking if he ever steps foot in Guatemala again. One of Molina's campaign promises was that he'd rule Guatemala with an iron fist. So we see.
Francisco Goldman, an American journalist/novelist, wrote that he was involved in the murder of Bishop Gerardi and spotted a few blocks from the murder scene along with 2 other high-ranking officers.
For years, Goldman writes, the military eavesdropped illegally on Gerardi and tracked his movements. On the day he was fatally bludgeoned, one of the killers, Sgt. Maj. Obdulio Villanueva, was clandestinely sprung from his prison cell (where he was serving a sentence for a previous murder) for the few hours needed to commit the crime. Homeless squatters outside the bishop’s home may have been given drugged food and drink. The killers had not counted on a passing taxi driver noting the license plate number of a military vehicle at the scene.
But justice remains incomplete. Goldman suggests that the mastermind of the murder may still be free, and that it may be Otto Pérez Molina, a former general who is campaigning for president on a law-and-order platform (a runoff election is scheduled for Nov. 4). Goldman effectively discounts as propaganda the efforts to absolve Pérez Molina and the military of any responsibility for Gerardi’s murder.
Goldman’s theory on the general’s culpability has gotten attention in Guatemala, where 50 candidates and political activists have died in the bloodiest political campaign there ever.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Curiel-t.html
But justice remains incomplete. Goldman suggests that the mastermind of the murder may still be free, and that it may be Otto Pérez Molina, a former general who is campaigning for president on a law-and-order platform (a runoff election is scheduled for Nov. 4). Goldman effectively discounts as propaganda the efforts to absolve Pérez Molina and the military of any responsibility for Gerardi’s murder.
Goldman’s theory on the general’s culpability has gotten attention in Guatemala, where 50 candidates and political activists have died in the bloodiest political campaign there ever.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Curiel-t.html
Again, Democracy Now:
October 31, 2007
New Evidence Suggests Guatemalan Presidential Candidate Played Role in 1998 Murder of Human Rights Activist Bishop Juan Gerardi
(VIDEO AT LINK)
AMY GOODMAN: This is a major charge you are making on this eve of the Guatemalan election.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: It’s a charge that I’m repeating, because I was led to it by two of the major sources for me throughout the book. It’s funny, because it’s actually only a few pages of the book where this charge emerges, when the key — first the key witness in the case, apparently a park vagrant, who was situated outside the parish house where the murder took place the night of the murder, but who was actually an army intelligence agent who had been planted there and, in fact, had a role in the murder.
AMY GOODMAN: The vagrant?
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: The vagrant, Ruben Chanax, who years later, he was a key witness when the case finally went to trial. And I tracked him down when he was living in Mexico City as a semi-protected witness and working in a taco stand. And in the course of our conversations, when we went over the case time and time again, every detail of the case, it emerged that at the crime scene — you know, we know that the crime was being monitored by three military officers who were sort of overseeing events from a little store nearby the church that night. He had, in the legal case, identified one, Colonel Lima Estrada, one of the men who eventually was imprisoned, but he repressed the names of two, for his own reasons, including staying alive. And he told me that one of those men was General Otto Pérez Molina.
Now, just him saying that wasn’t really enough; I needed obviously confirmation. The confirmation for me came from the most important source I had, a man named Rafael Guillamón, a former Spanish intelligence agent who headed the U.N. mission’s internal investigation into the Gerardi murder. And when he interrogated this Chanax, this vagrant, two days after the murder, he first heard it from him. Now, this investigation was conducted for the U.N.’s internal knowledge, not to share with prosecutors, and so it stayed secret all these years. And then he had even more proof.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain the significance of Bishop Gerardi and the significance of the report that he released.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: When the '96 peace accords, which ended the 36-year war, were signed between — the U.N.-sponsored accords between the Guatemalan guerrillas, who were in a quiescent role, and the victorious Guatemalan army, the army was able to dictate, among other things, a blanket amnesty for all human rights crimes that had occurred during that war, in which 200,000 civilians were slaughtered. It also allowed for a U.N. sort of truth commission that would be allowed to look into the past, but wouldn't be able to name names, name military units who were responsible, and so forth.
And Bishop Gerardi thought that this kind of covering-up of the truth was not going to be healthy or good for Guatemala, and he sponsored his own — the Catholic Church, through the Archdiocese Office of Human Rights, sponsored their own human rights report. And as the Church, they were the only organization in the country, through the parishes, that could reach into every community. And he trained 700, you know, pretty humble people, people from local churches, to go out into these communities, into these highland villages that were so shielded off by speaking, you know, 16 different Mayan languages and traumatized by years of violence, massacres. There is such a thick taboo against speaking out and such fear of outsiders, but the Church, they’re not seen as outsiders. So they went in there for years and collected testimonies.
And on April 24th, two days before his death, he released the most unprecedented, extraordinary four-volume report, in which he managed to identify, for example, 400-plus of the 600 massacres we now know occurred in the war. He managed to list — that’s the whole fourth volume — 53,000 of the dead by name, of the 200,000 people we know that died. And he found the army responsible of 80 percent of the crimes, the guerrillas only 5 percent. He made it — he did name names and military units and made it clear that if the amnesty could ever be breached, he would make this documentation available to prosecutors and to families seeking justice. Now, this was an unbelievable impertinence. When the army had signed the peace accords, they had never expected to have to put up with something like this. And so, they obviously decided they had to do something.
Now, the real question, why it’s the art of political murder, is the question everybody asks, is why do they kill him two days after the report comes out, not, say, days before? And the answer to that, right, gets to the whole institution of impunity in Guatemala. When you know you don’t have to face justice, when you’ve never faced justice before, that gives you sort of, you know, the equivalent of what Virginia Woolf said to a fiction writer was "a room of one’s own," you know, that freedom of imagination to dream up an extraordinary crime.
And what this crime was, was pure theater. They rigged up a theatrical event that involved a man with no shirt stepping out of the garage after Bishop Gerardi had been murdered; the vagrant planted there to see him, who had probably taken part in the murder; immediately, in all different sophisticated ways, rumors coming out that it had been a homosexual crime of passion, which resulted —
AMY GOODMAN: By a priest.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: By a priest. A corrupt prosecutor, corrupt judges, corrupt media, everybody contributing to this farce. And the story of the book is how this was — what should have been, for the government, a slam-dunk case to pin the whole case on this poor, pathetic priest who shared Bishop Gerardi’s parish house. You know, they claim that he had sicked his dog, and they claim they found signs of dog bites in Bishop Gerardi’s skull, and it was ridiculous.
But in Guatemala, this kind of theatrical crime would ordinarily succeed, and would have if not for the efforts really of the young people portrayed in this book, young secular people in their twenties within the Church, who formed their own investigative unit, named themselves "the untouchables." And it’s just extraordinary. If it hadn’t been for the efforts of these four young guys and the small team of lawyers at the Church, who, through their own detective work, brought in the first important witnesses in the case and miraculously succeeded in derailing this phony prosecution.
And then, after that, finally — this is a case that saw more than 10 people related to the case murdered, two prosecutors chased into exile, judges chased into exile, countless witnesses in exile. But finally, through the most extraordinary bravery of a handful of people, the convictions managed to go through. There was a historic trial. It was the first time Guatemalan military officers had ever been found guilty of taking part in a state-sponsored, politically motivated execution.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, General Otto Pérez Molina is running for president.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: He’s running for president, and when these accusations emerged in the press, because this is just a few paragraphs, but back in June a Guatemalan newspaper ran them. And he immediately began to get himself in trouble with all kinds of, well, lies, right? First, he said I had written my book because I was in the pay of another politician. Later he accused me of being part of a narco campaign of defamation and political assassinations directed against him.
Then he said — for instance, he tried to say, "I have no knowledge." You know, when he responded to what had appeared in the paper, he said, "I don’t know Captain Lima," one of the imprisoned military men. Well, we knew from the U.N. that he and Captain Lima were constantly having cellphone calls when Lima was in prison. And the funny thing is, people in Guatemala immediately started to email the newspaper, giving details of the 30-year relationship between Captain Lima and Pérez Molina. So why did he lie about this?
And even more importantly, the U.N. mission investigator told me that — because Pérez Molina claimed that he was in Washington, D.C. the week the murder happened and that he had a passport that showed this. But the U.N. investigator told me, pay no attention to his passports. He is a military intelligence person. He uses multiple passports, and we know that three nights after the murder, he had dinner — Pérez Molina had dinner with the U.N. mission chief, Jean Arnault, who wanted to sound him out about his theories about the murder, because he’s an intelligence chief. And he thought this would never come out. And he thought he had an alibi. But then, even after this came out, a Guatemalan paper went and investigated, and they found that he had seven passports registered in his name, confirming the U.N.'s skepticism about his claims, and so forth. And since then, since these kinds of allegations came out, he has ducked his last three debates with his opponent, because they think he's afraid of answering questions about this case and other crimes, and his poll numbers have started to dip.
And just yesterday — this is very important — just yesterday, it came out and broke, and it’s already been picked up by international wire services, two reporters from El Periodico, the same newspaper, have discovered that Pérez Molina’s campaign has links to narcos. And they wanted to publish this information, and they immediately began to get death threats, and the paper was under a lot of pressure. And they’ve had to go to the Office of Human Rights basically to ask for help and protection, and want to get this story out. So this just broke yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: When you say "narcos," you mean…?
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: The narco cartels, because what’s at stake here, right — it’s important for people to understand, what’s amazing about this case is the bridge between 1980s violence and 21st century violence.
AMY GOODMAN: Over 50 deaths of political activists and candidates leading up to this election on Sunday.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: We have 15 seconds.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: OK. Well, military intelligence used to fight guerrillas. Right now, with political power, it’s all about organized crime, and that’s what they’re trying to hold onto. And that’s the faction, that’s the kind of power that General Pérez Molina is trying to legitimize.
AMY GOODMAN: Francisco Goldman’s book is called The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? I want to thank you very much for being with us.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to "democracynow.org".
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/10/31/new_evidence_suggests_guatemalan_presidential_candidate
October 31, 2007
New Evidence Suggests Guatemalan Presidential Candidate Played Role in 1998 Murder of Human Rights Activist Bishop Juan Gerardi
(VIDEO AT LINK)
AMY GOODMAN: This is a major charge you are making on this eve of the Guatemalan election.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: It’s a charge that I’m repeating, because I was led to it by two of the major sources for me throughout the book. It’s funny, because it’s actually only a few pages of the book where this charge emerges, when the key — first the key witness in the case, apparently a park vagrant, who was situated outside the parish house where the murder took place the night of the murder, but who was actually an army intelligence agent who had been planted there and, in fact, had a role in the murder.
AMY GOODMAN: The vagrant?
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: The vagrant, Ruben Chanax, who years later, he was a key witness when the case finally went to trial. And I tracked him down when he was living in Mexico City as a semi-protected witness and working in a taco stand. And in the course of our conversations, when we went over the case time and time again, every detail of the case, it emerged that at the crime scene — you know, we know that the crime was being monitored by three military officers who were sort of overseeing events from a little store nearby the church that night. He had, in the legal case, identified one, Colonel Lima Estrada, one of the men who eventually was imprisoned, but he repressed the names of two, for his own reasons, including staying alive. And he told me that one of those men was General Otto Pérez Molina.
Now, just him saying that wasn’t really enough; I needed obviously confirmation. The confirmation for me came from the most important source I had, a man named Rafael Guillamón, a former Spanish intelligence agent who headed the U.N. mission’s internal investigation into the Gerardi murder. And when he interrogated this Chanax, this vagrant, two days after the murder, he first heard it from him. Now, this investigation was conducted for the U.N.’s internal knowledge, not to share with prosecutors, and so it stayed secret all these years. And then he had even more proof.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain the significance of Bishop Gerardi and the significance of the report that he released.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: When the '96 peace accords, which ended the 36-year war, were signed between — the U.N.-sponsored accords between the Guatemalan guerrillas, who were in a quiescent role, and the victorious Guatemalan army, the army was able to dictate, among other things, a blanket amnesty for all human rights crimes that had occurred during that war, in which 200,000 civilians were slaughtered. It also allowed for a U.N. sort of truth commission that would be allowed to look into the past, but wouldn't be able to name names, name military units who were responsible, and so forth.
And Bishop Gerardi thought that this kind of covering-up of the truth was not going to be healthy or good for Guatemala, and he sponsored his own — the Catholic Church, through the Archdiocese Office of Human Rights, sponsored their own human rights report. And as the Church, they were the only organization in the country, through the parishes, that could reach into every community. And he trained 700, you know, pretty humble people, people from local churches, to go out into these communities, into these highland villages that were so shielded off by speaking, you know, 16 different Mayan languages and traumatized by years of violence, massacres. There is such a thick taboo against speaking out and such fear of outsiders, but the Church, they’re not seen as outsiders. So they went in there for years and collected testimonies.
And on April 24th, two days before his death, he released the most unprecedented, extraordinary four-volume report, in which he managed to identify, for example, 400-plus of the 600 massacres we now know occurred in the war. He managed to list — that’s the whole fourth volume — 53,000 of the dead by name, of the 200,000 people we know that died. And he found the army responsible of 80 percent of the crimes, the guerrillas only 5 percent. He made it — he did name names and military units and made it clear that if the amnesty could ever be breached, he would make this documentation available to prosecutors and to families seeking justice. Now, this was an unbelievable impertinence. When the army had signed the peace accords, they had never expected to have to put up with something like this. And so, they obviously decided they had to do something.
Now, the real question, why it’s the art of political murder, is the question everybody asks, is why do they kill him two days after the report comes out, not, say, days before? And the answer to that, right, gets to the whole institution of impunity in Guatemala. When you know you don’t have to face justice, when you’ve never faced justice before, that gives you sort of, you know, the equivalent of what Virginia Woolf said to a fiction writer was "a room of one’s own," you know, that freedom of imagination to dream up an extraordinary crime.
And what this crime was, was pure theater. They rigged up a theatrical event that involved a man with no shirt stepping out of the garage after Bishop Gerardi had been murdered; the vagrant planted there to see him, who had probably taken part in the murder; immediately, in all different sophisticated ways, rumors coming out that it had been a homosexual crime of passion, which resulted —
AMY GOODMAN: By a priest.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: By a priest. A corrupt prosecutor, corrupt judges, corrupt media, everybody contributing to this farce. And the story of the book is how this was — what should have been, for the government, a slam-dunk case to pin the whole case on this poor, pathetic priest who shared Bishop Gerardi’s parish house. You know, they claim that he had sicked his dog, and they claim they found signs of dog bites in Bishop Gerardi’s skull, and it was ridiculous.
But in Guatemala, this kind of theatrical crime would ordinarily succeed, and would have if not for the efforts really of the young people portrayed in this book, young secular people in their twenties within the Church, who formed their own investigative unit, named themselves "the untouchables." And it’s just extraordinary. If it hadn’t been for the efforts of these four young guys and the small team of lawyers at the Church, who, through their own detective work, brought in the first important witnesses in the case and miraculously succeeded in derailing this phony prosecution.
And then, after that, finally — this is a case that saw more than 10 people related to the case murdered, two prosecutors chased into exile, judges chased into exile, countless witnesses in exile. But finally, through the most extraordinary bravery of a handful of people, the convictions managed to go through. There was a historic trial. It was the first time Guatemalan military officers had ever been found guilty of taking part in a state-sponsored, politically motivated execution.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, General Otto Pérez Molina is running for president.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: He’s running for president, and when these accusations emerged in the press, because this is just a few paragraphs, but back in June a Guatemalan newspaper ran them. And he immediately began to get himself in trouble with all kinds of, well, lies, right? First, he said I had written my book because I was in the pay of another politician. Later he accused me of being part of a narco campaign of defamation and political assassinations directed against him.
Then he said — for instance, he tried to say, "I have no knowledge." You know, when he responded to what had appeared in the paper, he said, "I don’t know Captain Lima," one of the imprisoned military men. Well, we knew from the U.N. that he and Captain Lima were constantly having cellphone calls when Lima was in prison. And the funny thing is, people in Guatemala immediately started to email the newspaper, giving details of the 30-year relationship between Captain Lima and Pérez Molina. So why did he lie about this?
And even more importantly, the U.N. mission investigator told me that — because Pérez Molina claimed that he was in Washington, D.C. the week the murder happened and that he had a passport that showed this. But the U.N. investigator told me, pay no attention to his passports. He is a military intelligence person. He uses multiple passports, and we know that three nights after the murder, he had dinner — Pérez Molina had dinner with the U.N. mission chief, Jean Arnault, who wanted to sound him out about his theories about the murder, because he’s an intelligence chief. And he thought this would never come out. And he thought he had an alibi. But then, even after this came out, a Guatemalan paper went and investigated, and they found that he had seven passports registered in his name, confirming the U.N.'s skepticism about his claims, and so forth. And since then, since these kinds of allegations came out, he has ducked his last three debates with his opponent, because they think he's afraid of answering questions about this case and other crimes, and his poll numbers have started to dip.
And just yesterday — this is very important — just yesterday, it came out and broke, and it’s already been picked up by international wire services, two reporters from El Periodico, the same newspaper, have discovered that Pérez Molina’s campaign has links to narcos. And they wanted to publish this information, and they immediately began to get death threats, and the paper was under a lot of pressure. And they’ve had to go to the Office of Human Rights basically to ask for help and protection, and want to get this story out. So this just broke yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: When you say "narcos," you mean…?
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: The narco cartels, because what’s at stake here, right — it’s important for people to understand, what’s amazing about this case is the bridge between 1980s violence and 21st century violence.
AMY GOODMAN: Over 50 deaths of political activists and candidates leading up to this election on Sunday.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: We have 15 seconds.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: OK. Well, military intelligence used to fight guerrillas. Right now, with political power, it’s all about organized crime, and that’s what they’re trying to hold onto. And that’s the faction, that’s the kind of power that General Pérez Molina is trying to legitimize.
AMY GOODMAN: Francisco Goldman’s book is called The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? I want to thank you very much for being with us.
FRANCISCO GOLDMAN: Thank you. It was a pleasure.
The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to "democracynow.org".
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/10/31/new_evidence_suggests_guatemalan_presidential_candidate