Guatemala is on the cusp of commemorating its 200th anniversary of independence from Spain, and its twenty-fifth anniversary of the peace accords that ended the country’s thirty-six-year war. Yet the Guatemalan military and its supporters have sought to obtain a blanket amnesty for war crimes, with the far-right Valor political party presenting the latest proposed law to the Guatemalan congress in June 2021.
The proposal would modify the country’s national reconciliation law to exempt crimes against humanity. But this proposal goes against a February 2021 ruling from the country’s Constitutional Court.
“We cannot make a clean slate because it would be to say as if nothing has happened here, but no, thousands of Guatemalans were disappeared and killed.”
“Amnesty is invalid,” Maynor Alvarado, a lawyer with the Guatemalan human rights organization Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo, tells The Progressive. “It cannot be applied to crimes against humanity.”
In 2009, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled that amnesty could not apply to cases of war crimes.
The return of the proposed amnesty for war crimes comes as a blow to families who continue to search for their loved ones, especially the Indigenous victims of the war.
“Amnesty for the military is nothing more than impunity,” Victoria Tubin, the daughter of one of the victims of the campaign of forced disappearances in the 1980s, tells The Progressive. “[Amnesty] is as if to say that ‘you Indigenous people do not matter.’ That we do not value the same as the rest of the population. It is racist.”
The Guatemalan civil war left 200,000 people dead, 45,000 disappeared, and more than one million displaced between 1960 and 1996. According to the United Nations-backed Truth Commission, the military was responsible for 93 percent of all war crimes. Only 3 percent could be attributed to the guerrillas, and the remaining 4 percent were undetermined.
As part of the counter-insurgency campaign, Guatemalan military officers carried out widespread massacres and a campaign of forced disappearances. While the United States maintained an arms embargo during the late 1970s and early 1980s due to human rights violations, there was still high-level training for military officials occurring at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas—first in Panama and then in Fort Benning, Georgia, and through U.S. allies such as Colombia, Argentina, and Israel. The Reagan Administration lifted the embargo in 1983.
The vast majority of all victims—83 percent—were Indigenous Maya. The United Nations and the Catholic Church Truth Commissions determined that acts of genocide had occurred.
Congressional allies of the Guatemalan military have sought blanket amnesty for soldiers accused of war crimes, since the prosecution of military officials began in 2008. The most recent legislation was first promoted by Fernando Linares Beltatrana in 2017, following the successful prosecution of former military leaders for war crimes.
Human rights advocates continue to express concern over these efforts.
“We cannot make a clean slate because it would be to say as if nothing has happened here, but no, thousands of Guatemalans were disappeared and killed,” Jordán Rodas, the country’s human rights ombudsman, tells The Progressive. “Today, the former soldiers can legally defend themselves, something that thousands of Guatemalans did not have access to.”
The latest proposed amnesty comes as attorneys from Guatemala’s public prosecutors office pursue charges against six former high-level soldiers for the Diario Militar, or Military Diary, case, which documents the systematic disappearance, torture, and murder of 183 guerrilla sympathizers, students, union activists, writers, and others who were declared enemies of the state between 1983 and 1985. The document was leaked in 1999.
“This represents hope for the advancement of justice for the families of the victims,” Alvarado says. “It is a hope for them to know what happened to their family members and where they are.”
The trial began on June 23 in the Military Hospital in Guatemala City, where several of the more elderly accused are being treated. The first day of the trial, soldiers blocked credentialled journalists from entering, asking them what their political leanings were.
In the past decade, former soldiers have increasingly faced criminal prosecution for war crimes. These prosecutions come after the Inter-American Court of Human Rights decided in 2009 that Guatemala’s amnesty declared in 1996 did not apply in serious war crimes.
There have been several high-profile prosecutions of former Guatemalan military officials. In 2011, four soldiers were sentenced to more than 6,000 years in prison for massacring more than 200 campesinos in the village of Dos Erres in the Department of Petén, and two other soldiers were convicted in 2012 and 2018 for their part in the same massacre.
In 2013, former general and dictator Efraín Ríos Montt was convicted and sentenced to eighty years in prison for committing genocide against the Ixil Maya people, but the conviction was quickly annuled a week later. In 2016, two military officials were convicted and sentenced to 120 and 240 years in prison each for forcing fifteen women of the Seper Zarco village into sexual slavery.
Other cases are currently moving through the courts, including one against a former soldier for the massacre of 201 people in the village of Dos Eres in 1982; the prosecution of former soldiers in a forced disappearance; a case against former soldiers for the forced sexual slavery of Achi Mayan women; and the ongoing genocide charges against against former General Luis Enrique Mendoza García and charges of genocide against dictator General Romeo Lucas García. Ríos Montt died in April 2018.