The Rise and Fall of Guatemala’s Most Feared General
The Rise and Fall of Guatemala’s Most Feared General
Otto Pérez Molina started his rise to power during a U.S.-backed dirty war. The uprising against impunity that brought him down has been waiting in the wings ever since.
By Jesse Franzblau, September 22, 2015.
(Photo:
Fuerzas de Defensa de Israel / Flickr)
On the first day of September, Guatemala’s Congress voted to end President Otto Pérez Molina’s immunity from prosecution. Crowds gathered outside Congress, setting off fireworks and celebrating the decision. The vote followed months of mass mobilizations against corruption and popular calls for Pérez Molina’s resignation. The following day, the ousted president was in jail.
Pérez Molina’s resignation is a watershed moment for Guatemala. It’s a striking blow to the wall of impunity that surrounds the country’s most powerful figures — and in this case, one of its most feared as well. Carrying out research in Guatemala several years ago on the human rights violations of the early 1980s, I got a sense of Pérez Molina’s pervasive power from the cloud of fear that materialized whenever his name was mentioned.
Indeed, Pérez Molina may be on trial for corruption now, but he’s been directly linked to far more serious crimes — including numerous human rights atrocities and political murders committed during and after Guatemala’s internal armed conflict.
In declassified documents, U.S. military intelligence officials wrote that Pérez Molina and his cohort of military officers had “blood stains on their hands” dating back to their actions in the civil war. During the conflict, the country’s U.S.-backed intelligence agencies and security forces were responsible for acts of torture, executions, enforced disappearances, and a military counterinsurgency campaign that involved genocidal massacres of the indigenous Maya population, according to a UN truth commission.
More:
http://fpif.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-guatemalas-most-feared-general/
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anticlericalism has had a long, shitty, terrifying history in Guatemala
