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A banner being held aloft comparing two dictators.
Supporters of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt may have thought the retired general was off the hook when Guatemala’s Constitutional Court threw out Rios Montt’s 2013 war crimes conviction. If they did, they were wrong. In a gutsy move by a special High Risk Tribunal, Rios Montt has been put back on trial in Guatemala City. It is believed to be the first time anywhere in the world that a head of state is being tried for genocide and crimes against humanity by a domestic court, as opposed to an international tribunal.
The ninety-one-year-old Rios Montt was diagnosed with senile dementia in 2015, allowing a Guatemalan court to pronounce him mentally incompetent to stand for trial. As a result, although he can be found guilty of war crimes, he cannot be sentenced. Nonetheless, human rights activists in Guatemala and outside the country see the case as a landmark human rights case with global implications.
Guatemala established its High Risk Tribunals in 2009 to handle cases like genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity while preserving the independence of the proceedings and protecting the judges, prosecutors, and defendants involved. Another High Risk Tribunal delivered guilty verdicts against two low-level army soldiers in the 2016 Sepur Zarco case, covered by The Progressive, but those verdicts have passed muster with the Constitutional Court. In the Rios Montt retrial, the High Risk Tribunal is arguably pushing back against what many human rights activists in Guatemala and outside the country have seen as political interference by the higher court in vacating the 2013 Rios Montt conviction.
In a country still haunted by its violent past, with a still highly visible right wing, the Rios Montt retrial is indeed high risk.
Rios Montt is facing charges of war crimes in connection with his 1982-1983 reign as Guatemalan head of state, when the dictator oversaw the bloodiest period in Guatemala’s 1960-1996 civil war. In 2013, he was found guilty and sentenced to eighty years in prison, but only days later Guatemala’s Constitutional Court set aside the verdict, citing procedural errors. In an interview with The Progressive, Jo-Marie Burt of the Washington Office on Latin America, called the court’s action an “illegal due process violation.”
Burt also laments the absence of the United States in the Rios Montt proceedings, saying she would like to see the country. put on trial for its “important role” in massive human rights violations under Rios Montt. “But I think that’s up to us,” she said.
Since 2013, Rios Montt's retrial has been repeatedly delayed by defense challenges to, among other things, the presence of then-presiding Judge Jeannette Valdes, who had written a thesis on the issue of genocide. While the Rios Montt defense was successful in removing Valdes from the case, most of its other objections have been dismissed out of hand.
Because Rios Montt has been found mentally incompetent, he is entitled to a closed-door trial, which his defense team has opted for, and he is allowed to skip the proceedings, as he did on the October 13 opening day. The court has appointed Rios Montt’s son and daughter his legal representatives and they have assembled a team of three defense lawyers. While Rios Montt is not required to attend the proceedings, his daughter, Zury Rios, must be there. The former dictator was originally tried with his former intelligence chief, Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, who was found not guilty in the 2013 trial. This time around, the two are being tried separately.
Rios Montt rose to power with two other generals in a 1982 military coup. After a few months, he forced out the other generals and assumed control of the country. The self-proclaimed evangelical Christian went on to wage a brutal scorched-earth campaign against a guerrilla insurgency. According to a 1999 United Nations truth commission, the campaign of terror, which Rios Montt called “beans and guns,” completely destroyed more than 600 villages, many of them burnt to the ground. Amnesty International estimated that 10,000 indigenous Guatemalans were killed by government forces from March to July 1982 alone, and another report put the total 1982 death toll at more than 35,000.
The Ixil Maya people, in an area known as the Ixil Triangle, were hit particularly hard. According to the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission, 70-90 percent of Ixil villages were destroyed between 1981 and 1983, and 5.5 percent of the Ixil population was killed, all by government forces. It is for the killing of 1,771 Ixil Maya, the displacement of 29,000 more, and rape and torture, all connected to fifteen particular massacres, that Rios Montt is now being tried.
The Rios Montt trial is one of several high-profile human rights cases to come out of Guatemala in the last two years, and there is considerable overlap among the cases. Presiding over Rios Montt’s 2013 trial was Judge Yassmin Barrios, one of three judges who presided over last year's Sepur Zarco case, another landmark High Risk Tribunal trial in which two former Guatemalan army officers were convicted of enslaving indigenous women for purposes of sex and labor. In the first Rios Montt trial, Judge Barrios ordered Rios Montt defense attorney Francisco Garcia Gudiel removed from the courtroom after Gudiel repeatedly attacked Barrios’s role in the proceedings.
“We asked that ambassador Tom Robinson come here, because if the Guatemalan army was guilty, it was at the instruction of the United States.”
One current member of Rios Mont’'s defense team, prominent Guatemala City attorney Moises Galindo, also defended one of the two Sepur Zarco defendants, but it is unlikely Galindo will remain on the Rios Montt defense team, as he was arrested October 5 and charged with money laundering. Galindo has also been implicated in the illegal appropriation of Defense Department funds.
In the Sepur Zarco trial, Galindo called for then U.S. Ambassador Todd Robinson to testify about the extent to which any Sepur Zarco atrocities might have been the direct result of the Reagan-era “National Security Doctrine” that drove U.S. policy in Central America during Rios Montt’s rule. In a late 1982 visit to Guatemala City, Reagan famously said Rios Montt was getting “a bad rap” in the media.
In an interview after the Sepur Zarco convictions, Galindo told The Progressive, “So we asked that ambassador Tom Robinson come here, because if the Guatemalan army was guilty, it was at the instruction of the United States.” Sepur Zarco happened under Rios Montt's rule.
Another hole was torn in Rios Montt's defense when high-profile attorney and reputed chief Rios Montt legal strategist Francisco Palomo was killed in a dramatic Guatemala City street assassination that was caught on video.
The trial is expected to last several months. But the Montt family’s legal woes won't be over with completion of the Ixil case. Rios Montt is also facing charges in the the chilling 1982 Dos Erres massacre, in which more than 200 indigenous Maya were slaughtered in one day by the Guatemalan army. Four soldiers have already received Dos Erres sentences totaling more than 12,000 years. There is an unusually large amount of evidence in the Dos Erres case, and to read details of the case is to get a real taste of the terror that was visited upon hundreds of villages throughout Guatemala under the rule of Rios Montt.
Lawrence Reichard is a freelance journalist who splits his time between Maine and Latin America.