Guatemala Ex-Dictator to Stand Trial on Genocide

[Judi Lynn]

Guatemala Ex-Dictator to Stand Trial on Genocide
By SONIA PEREZ-DIAZ Associated Press
GUATEMALA CITY January 28, 2013 (AP)

A former U.S.-backed dictator who presided over one of the bloodiest periods of Guatemala's civil war will stand trial on charges he ordered the murder, torture and displacement of thousands of Mayan Indians, a judge ruled Monday.

Human rights advocates have said that the prosecution of Jose Efrain Rios Montt would be an important symbolic victory for the victims of one of the most horrific of the conflicts that devastated Central America during the last decades of the Cold War.

He is the first former president to be charged with genocide by a Latin American court.

Guatemala's leaders have been criticized for years for their inability or unwillingness to prosecute government forces and allied paramilitaries accused of marching into Mayan villages, carrying out rapes and torture, and slaughtering women, children and unarmed men in a "scorched earth" campaign aimed at eliminating the support for a left-wing guerrilla movement.

~snip~
During the 1960-96 civil war, more than 200,000 people, mostly Mayan Indians, were killed or went missing and entire villages were exterminated, according to the United Nations.

More:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/guatemala-dictator-stand-trial-genocide-18337699

[polly7]

1. It's hard to believe he served as president for 15 years

even having been judged a war criminal by international inquiries .... bet he was scared sh*less when he finally lost that immunity. Hope he's convicted and rots in jail / hell ... either, or.

[Bacchus4.0]

2. he served as president for less than two years as the head of a military junta n/t

s

[polly7]

6. Ack, thanks ... you're right. I should have said, congressman. nt.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Reagan Administration Knew of Guatemalan Atrocities, Documents Reveal

Reagan Administration Knew of Guatemalan Atrocities, Documents Reveal
by: PA Staff Writers
March 21 2009
3-20-09, 12:42 am

Upon entering office in 1981, Ronald Reagan overturned a Carter administration embargo against the military dictatorships that governed Guatemala with terror and violence. Reagan then side-stepped Congress and changed rules overseeing foreign aid and handed the dictators millions in military aid.

In December 1982, Reagan met with Efrain Ríos Montt, who had just seized power along with a junta of military officers, and described him as 'totally dedicated to democracy.' Reagan dismissed reports that his regime ruthlessly violated human rights as a 'bum rap.' Reagan continued to back successive dictators in that country.
Reagan's support for Rios and the country's subsequent dictators made human rights another casualty in his ideologically motivated Cold War against the Soviet Union, which Reagan insisted was backing the military regime's political opposition.

Over the course of the past several years, declassified documents from CIA and other US government sources revealed that Reagan's claims were lies and that the US government knew that the right-wing Guatemalan dictatorships systemically massacred political opponents. International and US sanctions against the right-wing Guatemalan dictators had been justified.

Newly declassified documents from the US State Department compiled and publicized this week by the National Security Archive gave further credence to claims that the Reagan administration understood and tried to hide the truth about the Guatemalan regime's human rights atrocities. While attempting to blame guerilla groups that fought the military dictatorship for the bulk of the violence, a State Department report in February of 1984 noted, 'Government security services have employed assassination to eliminate persons suspected of involvement with the guerrillas or who are otherwise left-wing in orientation.'

More:
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/reagan-administration-knew-of-guatemalan-atrocities-documents-reveal/

[Judi Lynn]

4. Guatemala court orders trial of former dictator, rejects appeals

Guatemala court orders trial of former dictator, rejects appeals
Reuters
6:08 p.m. EST, January 28, 2013

GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - A Guatemalan court ordered 86-year-old former dictator Efrain Rios Montt on Monday to face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, throwing out 13 appeals presented by his defense. A judge found sufficient proof linking Rios Montt, who ruled during a particularly bloody period of the country's 36-year civil war, to the killing of more than 1,700 indigenous people in a counterinsurgency operation in 1982 and 1983.

"It has been established that there is serious enough evidence to submit the parties involved to a public trial," judge Miguel Angel Galvez said, convening the defense and prosecutors to an initial hearing on Wednesday.

Prosecutors allege Rios Montt, who ruled as commander-in-chief for 17 months, turned a blind eye as soldiers used rape, torture and arson against leftist insurgents and targeted indigenous people during a 'scorched earth' military offensive that killed at least 1,771 members of the Ixil tribe.

Rios Montt was ordered to trial in January 2012 for the same alleged crimes, but his defense team stalled the process with a series of appeals, arguing that he did not control battlefield operations and that genocide never happened in Guatemala.

More:
http://www.courant.com/news/nation-world/sns-rt-us-guatemala-riosmonttbre90r15i-20130128,0,4878150.story

[Judi Lynn]

5. A "killing field" in the Americas:US policy in Guatemala

A "killing field" in the Americas:
US policy in Guatemala

~snip~
Reagan and Rios Montt
The 1980s was marked by barbaric repression and the massacre of the indigenous population. A succession of elected dictators, supported by the US, left suffering in their wake. Because of the notoriety that again developed from reports of human rights violations by the Guatemalan Army, President Reagan changed the US policy of overt aid to the Guatemalan Army to a two- track policy. While government spokespersons made public pronouncements in support of human rights and the return to civilian rule, the Reagan Administration signaled to the Guatemalan Army its approval for winning the war, and it lobbied Congress for more aid. The CIA continued to work with Guatemala's security forces.

General Efrain Rios Montt, a graduate of the School of the Americas (SOA), at Fort Benning, Georgia, came to power in a 1982 coup. Praised as a "born-again" Christian reformer, in truth he was one of the most savage of Guatemalan dictators. His "Beans and Rifles" program was designed to keep guerrillas out of Indian villages -- beans for those who cooperated, rifles for those who didn't. He declared a "state of siege", and on television, he stated that he had "declared a state of siege so that we could kill legally". He banned public meetings, suspended the constitution, replaced elected officials, and censored the press. He also instituted Civil Defense Patrols (PACs) to control the population.

Rios Montt moved the war from urban centers to the countryside where "the spirit of the lord" guided him against "communist subversives', mostly indigenous Indians. As Guatemalans suffered torture, kidnappings, and massacres at the hands of the government, he presented himself as the savior of the population. Using the lessons he had learned at the SOA, he implemented a "pacification" program similar to that used by the US in Vietnam, intended to give the impression that the government wanted to reestablish democracy in the country. In reality, as the "pacification" program moved from village to village, it essentially established concentration camps populated by those who had been able to survive the massacres and political genocide which the government itself carried out.

During the 17 months of Rios Montt's "Christian" campaign, 400 villages were destroyed, 10 - 20,000 Indians were killed, and over 100,000 fled to Mexico. Early in 1983, President Reagan resumed military shipments to Guatemala, claiming that Montt's program against the guerrilla insurgency was working. He said that Montt was given a "bum rap" on human rights.

More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/US_Guat.html

[polly7]

7. Thanks for all the information Judi Lynn,

I hadn't known just how horrible it was. And Reagan defending this monster - it's hard to say who was more evil.

[Judi Lynn]

9. It's an unbelievable subject, and it's been kept a secret from the US American public

all this time, while so much of the country's tax dollars were being poured into making life a living hell for innocent, totally helpless Guatemalan indigenous, and poor farmers, workers, children, elderly people, everyone born without powerful allies.

Beyond the death squads, shocking torturing, mindless slaughter, they even went this far. No better than Nazis:

Guatemala Experiments: Syphilis Infections, Other Shocking Details Revealed About U.S. Medical Experiments

By MIKE STOBBE 08/29/11 10:20 PM ET

ATLANTA -- A presidential panel on Monday disclosed shocking new details of U.S. medical experiments done in Guatemala in the 1940s, including a decision to re-infect a dying woman in a syphilis study.

The Guatemala experiments are already considered one of the darker episodes of medical research in U.S. history, but panel members say the new information indicates that the researchers were unusually unethical, even when placed into the historical context of a different era.

"The researchers put their own medical advancement first and human decency a far second," said Anita Allen, a member of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.

From 1946-48, the U.S. Public Health Service and the Pan American Sanitary Bureau worked with several Guatemalan government agencies to do medical research – paid for by the U.S. government – that involved deliberately exposing people to sexually transmitted diseases.

The researchers apparently were trying to see if penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent infections in the 1,300 people exposed to syphilis, gonorrhea or chancroid. Those infected included soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/29/guatemala-experiments_n_941284.html

[Bacchus4.0]

11. Atrocities committed under Rios Montt have not been a secret. n/t

s

[Judi Lynn]

12. No one sane would buy your claim, as you know.

Ronald Reagan, Enabler of Atrocities
By Robert Parry
February 6, 2011

When you’re listening to the many tributes to President Ronald Reagan, often for his talent making Americans feel better about themselves, you might want to spend a minute thinking about the many atrocities in Latin America and elsewhere that Reagan aided, covered up or shrugged off in his inimitable "aw shucks" manner.

~snip~
Defending Rios Montt

Despite the widespread evidence of Guatemalan government atrocities cited in the internal U.S. government cables, political operatives for the Reagan administration sought to conceal the crimes. On Oct. 22, 1982, for instance, the U.S. Embassy claimed the Guatemalan government was the victim of a communist-inspired "disinformation campaign."

~snip~
During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President Bill Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala.

"For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake," Clinton said.

Though Clinton admitted that U.S. policy in Guatemala was “wrong” -- and the evidence of a U.S.-backed “genocide” might have been considered startling -- the news was treated mostly as a one-day story in the U.S. press. It prompted no panel discussions on the cable news shows that were then obsessed with Clinton’s personal life.

More:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2011/020611.html

[Bacchus4.0]

13. I've known about Rios Montt for over 20 years, and I don't listen to Reagan tributes as you do

Some of us have acquired knowledge by pursuing it. The information during the rule of Rios Montt has been known for decades. Rigoberta Menchu's book was first published in 1987 (fiction or not).

[polly7]

14. Ah, well ...

we're not all as well-read as you. I learn something new here daily and greatly appreciate anything and everything posted. It's fascinating, to me.

[Bacchus4.0]

15. I learn everyday too, but just because I didn't know something before doesn't mean

its a secret that is being kept from me and everyone else.

[polly7]

16. Much of what I've learned by reading here over the years certainly

was tried to be kept secret. It sure wasn't in news sources and mainstream media, or our history books ... and if it was, it was a version so completely backward to what I'm seeing now really happened, it might as well have been cartoons.

[Judi Lynn]

17. The more you learn about US/Latin America relations, the less likely you'll be

to take anyone pitching the US right-wing spin seriously.

Guatemala has been controlled by US interests for ages. Here's an abreviated look at the filthy overthrow of Guatemala's elected President, Jacobo Arbenz in 1954:

1954 Guatemalan coup d'état
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Operation PBSUCCESS: the deposed Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (1951–54)
The 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état (18–27 June 1954) was the CIA covert operation that deposed President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán (1950–54), with Operation PBSUCCESS — paramilitary invasion by an anti-Communist “army of liberation”. In the early 1950s, the politically liberal, elected Árbenz Government had affected the socio-economics of Decree 900 (27 June 1952), the national agrarian-reform expropriation, for peasant use and ownership, of unused prime-farmlands that Guatemalan and multinational corporations had set aside as reserved business assets. The Decree 900 land reform especially threatened the agricultural monopoly of the United Fruit Company (UFC), the American multinational corporation that owned 42 per cent of the arable land of Guatemala; which landholdings either had been bought by, or been ceded to, the UFC by the military dictatorships who preceded the Árbenz Government of Guatemala. In response to the expropriation of prime-farmland assets, the United Fruit Company asked the US Governments of presidents Harry Truman (1945–53) and Dwight Eisenhower (1953–61) to act diplomatically, economically, and militarily against Guatemalan President Árbenz Guzmán, which, in 1954, resulted in the Guatemalan coup d’état that provoked the thirty-six-year Guatemalan Civil War, from 1960 to and 1996, in which 140,000 to 250,000 Guatemalans were killed.[1]

Initially, the US saw neither political nor economic threat from President Árbenz Guzmán, because he appeared to have “no real sympathy for the lower classes”. Yet, he soon continued the progressive elimination of the historic economic feudalism of Guatemala, which had been initiated by the predecessor Government (1945–51) of President Juan José Arévalo Bermejo; which although “favorably disposed, initially, toward the United States, was modeled, in many ways, after the Roosevelt New Deal”; nonetheless, such relative political and economic liberalism, in the governing of a Latin American country, was worrisome to American corporate and political interests.[2][3]

From the dismissive cultural perspective of the CIA, the socio-economic development of Guatemalan society effected by the Árbenz Government was only “an intensely nationalistic program of progress colored by the touchy, anti-foreign inferiority complex of the Banana republic”;[4] thus the geopolitical opinion of the US State Department, wherein the Inter-American Affairs Bureau officer Charles R. Burrows explained the perceived threat to US interests:

Guatemala has become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program, of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises, has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors, where similar conditions prevail.

— Shattered Hope: the Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954 (1992) p. 365.[5]

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'%C3%A9tat

[center]~~~~~[/center]

PINOCHET AND THE AMNESIA OF THE U.S. PRESS, by Roger Burbach

~snip~
The U.S. role in the coup and subsequent repression in Chile is certainly not a secret. Both before and after Pinochet's arrest, the alternative press reported extensively on U.S. involvement in Chile. In the Bay Area, the Information Service on Latin America (ISLA), published by the Data Center in Oakland, released a series of articles in December 1998 on Pinochet's bloody rule and his U.S. backing. In one of the articles, "The Hand of the CIA in the Coup of '73 Ignored by the Press in the United States" (originally published by the Mexican newspaper La Jornada), authors Jim Cason and David Brooks note that while "the dictator's career of repression is often recounted, with few exceptions (those that merely point out that the United States endorsed the coup) no mention is made of Washington's hardly disguised hand in the events of September of 1973, and during the following 17 years of dictatorship" (www.igc.org/isla/chile, Feature Coverage, Focus on Chile).

Another local news organization, San Francisco-based Pacific News Service, offered an article by Andrew Reding headlined "Reno Should Indict Pinochet." Published in the San Francisco Bay Guardian (1/20/99), the article notes that U.S. government agencies such as the CIA and Defense Department are "determined to avoid further exposure of their ties" to Pinochet's secret police (the DINA) and the Chilean military. Reding describes how the DINA carried out international terrorist actions, including the assassinations in Washington, D.C. of former Allende minister Orlando Letelier and his American associate, Ronni Moffet. In an age when U.S. grand juries are convened with increasing frequency to go after accused terrorists, Reding writes that "a grand jury would be certain to indict Pinochet."

Beyond the Bay Area, other publications and research organizations (all considered outside the mainstream or left of center) have amply documented Pinochet's reign of terror and U.S. involvement in it. The National Security Archive, based in Washington, D.C., has posted on the Internet 23 major declassified documents from FBI and U.S. intelligence agency files dating from 1970 to 1976 (www.seas.qwu.edu/nsarchive). One of the most damning is a report from then-Assistant Secretary of State Jack Kubisch to Henry Kissinger dated just two months after the coup. Kubisch wrote that 1,500 Chileans had already been killed and that there had been 320 summary executions in the first 19 days after the coup--more than three times the publicly acknowledged figure. The report goes on to detail U.S. aid to Pinochet, including special food shipments, plans to send Chile two naval destroyers, and efforts to get international agencies to open up to Pinochet financial coffers that were closed to the Allende administration.

Peter Kornbluh, who compiled the documents for the National Security Archive, wrote a feature article for The Nation ("Prisoner Pinochet," 12/21/98) concluding that "the CIA was well aware of the DINA's practice of 'completely barbaric' torture and murder," and knew about Operation Condor, "the campaign of kidnappings and assassinations of political opponents carried out by a network of Southern Cone intelligence agencies, led by Chile." The relationship between the CIA's Santiago station chief, Stuart Burton, and the head of DINA, Colonel Manuel Contreras, was so close that they "used to go on Sunday picnics together with their families," according to one human rights researcher cited by Kornbluh.

Kornbluh's article also discusses the U.S. government's current recent obstruction of efforts to bring Pinochet to justice: "The Clinton administration stonewalled for more than a year before producing any records" requested by the Spanish court that's trying to prosecute Pinochet. The documents that eventually were turned over by the United States amounted to "zilch," according to one Spanish lawyer.

In contrast, the United States was persuaded to provide some important documentation to the United Nations-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission in Guatemala. To the dismay of many U.S. officials, when its report was released in late February, the commission's head assigned major responsibility for 200,000 deaths and a 30-year civil war to U.S. involvement, including CIA support for death squads and a string of repressive Guatemalan regimes.

More:
http://www.media-alliance.org/article.php?id=530

[Judi Lynn]

8. Evidence hearings begin in Guatemala genocide case

Evidence hearings begin in Guatemala genocide case
The Associated Press
Posted: 01/31/2013 06:24:42 PM PST
February 1, 2013 2:25 AM GMTUpdated: 01/31/2013 06:24:42 PM PST

GUATEMALA CITY—A judge has begun accepting testimonies, documents and other evidence in the genocide case against former military dictator Jose Efrain Rios Montt.

Judge Miguel Angel Galvez on Thursday opened hearings allowing the presentation of evidence in the case against Rios Montt, who is accused of ordering the murder, torture and displacement of Mayan Indians after he seized control of the government in a March 1982 coup.

Galvaz had ruled on Monday that Rios Montt could be tried by a three-judge panel on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for the killing of 1,771 indigenous Ixiles in a "scorched earth" campaign aimed at wiping out support for leftist guerrillas when he was president in 1982-1983.

The United Nations says more than 200,000 people were killed during the 1960-96 civil war.

http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_22494046/evidence-hearings-begin-guatemala-genocide-case

(Short article, no more at link.)

[Judi Lynn]

10. Wading uncharted waters: The trial of Rios Montt

Wading uncharted waters: The trial of Rios Montt

The events in Guatemala are exceptional because they are happening at home, in the nation where the crimes occurred.

Last Modified: 04 Feb 2013 10:48

When a judge ruled last week that former general and Guatemalan head of state Jose Efrain Rios Montt will, finally, stand trial for the crime of genocide, the news resounded profoundly at home and abroad. These events in Guatemala mark the first time a national court, anywhere, prosecutes its own former head of state for the crime of genocide.

Several international courts established in the last 20 years have prosecuted people involved in genocide. The events in Guatemala are exceptional because they are happening at home, in the nation where the crimes occurred.

Rios Montt, 86, is the latest of several ex-officers in Guatemala to face the law concerning crimes committed during the country's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996. His arrest in January 2012 - the judge ordered the former army general confined to his home - represented an extraordinary break with impunity in the Central American country; the decision this to proceed with the trial, despite attempts to have the charges dropped, is of even greater significance. No ranking officer has been held responsible for the violence in which some 200,000 people, almost all civilians, lost their lives.

The Rios Montt trial is also an important development in an evolving arena of international human rights.

Aside from a few problematic cases, genocide has been prosecuted in international jurisdictions. In Ethiopia, for example, a former dictator was tried for genocide in absentia. In Iraq, a purportedly "national court", heavily influenced by the United States, then occupying the country, convicted and executed "Chemical Ali". The Nuremburg trials of Nazis in the aftermath of the Holocaust were conducted by a multinational body composed of the allied powers and formally prosecuted crimes against humanity. Rwanda has had genocide trials for its nationals, but none of such high stature.

More:
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/20132364350499257.html