The photo depicts victims of Sepur Zarco war crimes at trial. By Manuel De Jesus Castillo Paiz.
A frail, elderly woman in traditional dress gingerly approaches the witness chair and sits down next to her translator. She speaks only Q’eqchi’, no Spanish. She’s no more than five feet tall and weighs less than 100 pounds; her face is almost completely covered with a colorful Q’eqchi’ scarf. Like other witnesses at the Sepur Zarco war crimes trial in Guatemala City, she is afraid of retaliation. Court security is tight, with three security perimeters outside the courtroom and soldiers with automatic weapons inside.
The witness sits upright in her chair and speaks quietly into a microphone. Her testimony is harrowing. She tells how, in 1982, her daughter Dominga Coc, age twenty, and two granddaughters, ages four and seven, went down to the village river to wash clothes; they didn’t come back. Soldiers from the Sepur Zarco barracks abducted them and pressed the daughter into slavery for the purposes of sex and labor. Years later, the witness identified her daughter’s clothing beside partially decomposed and unidentifiable adult remains. No trace of her granddaughters has ever been found.
In 2014, two former Guatemalan soldiers were arrested for these disappearances and for the sexual enslavement of twelve women in the village of Sepur Zarco, in the hot, steamy, lowland Department of Izabal. The crimes were committed during Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war, which ended in 1996. It was the first time ever that sexual war crimes were tried in a national, domestic court, as opposed to an international tribunal. And on February 26, 2016, the soldiers were convicted and sentenced: 120 years for former Lieutenant Colonel Esteelmer Reyes Girón and 240 years for former Military Commissioner Heriberto Valdez Asij.
The case was tried by a three-judge panel—Guatemala doesn’t have jury trials. And the soldiers were prosecuted by a combination of the Public Ministry and three nonprofits: the National Union of Guatemalan Women, Women Transforming the World, and Colectivo Jalok U, an indigenous women’s collective.
One woman who testified via videotape told of being raped daily for six months by five different soldiers. Other victims told of fleeing into remote, uninhabited mountains with nothing but their children and the clothes on their back after their homes and all their possessions were burned by the army. Some stayed in the mountains for years and saw their children die of hunger and exposure.
Much of the prosecution’s testimony was videotaped before the trial, for fear that some witnesses might die before it took place; one did. The defense objected to the use of videotape, but the court heard from expert witnesses who said it would be traumatic for victims to have to tell their stories again in open court, especially given their cultural backgrounds and the sexual nature of the crimes.
The moment the Sepur Zarco verdict was announced, the Guatemala City courtroom—packed with hundreds of observers, media and human rights activists from as far away as France—erupted into a chant of “Justicia!” The atmosphere was electric. Judge Iris Yassmin Barrios Aguilar managed to regain control of the courtroom, but as she proceeded to sentencing more chants broke out. “Mi corazón es Sepur Zarco!” (My heart is Sepur Zarco!) And “Sí, se pudo!” (Yes, it could be done!) There was singing, and crying. It was a turning point in Latin American human rights history.
Throughout the trial, the eleven surviving victims and Dominga Coc’s mother sat behind the long prosecution table, shrouded from head to toe in traditional Q’eqchi’ dress. For four weeks of trial testimony, they were a quiet, dramatic presence and, when the verdict and sentences were read, they silently raised their arms in joy and to thank the court. They had waited thirty-four years for this moment. Some minutes later, when they filed out of the courtroom, a particularly loud chant of “Sepur Zarco!” went up, and it lasted until the last Q’eqchi’ woman had left the room.
Nobel laureate and Guatemalan human rights activist Rigoberta Menchú, who attended parts of the trial, calls the verdicts a victory for women around the world. “No longer will there be impunity for war crimes against women,” Menchú says. “Now there is an avenue for recourse.”
And in a phone interview from Washington, D.C., Kate Doyle of the National Security Archive refers to the Sepur Zarco verdict as “groundbreaking” and “an extraordinary model for countries struggling with problems of repression.” In a recent conference on torture in Mexico, Doyle says, Mexicans were asking why they couldn’t do what Guatemala has done. As she puts it, “Countries throughout the region are admiring Guatemala.”
Menchú, in a post-trial interview, says officials in the United States bear some blame for Sepur Zarco. “They supported the army, they knew exactly what was happening here, and they did nothing,” she says. “They knew of the brutality. This is documented. So there is a responsibility that the United States has to assume.”
Doyle agrees. “The U.S. was very much present at the creation of this killing machine,” she says, referring to the Guatemalan military. “The U.S. helped fund it for years. That’s just what turned Guatemala into this death camp that it became in the 1980s.”
In the trial, defense attorney Moisés Galindo also raised the issue of U.S. involvement in the war, which claimed an estimated 200,000 lives and saw the massacre and burning of entire villages. In his closing argument, Galindo denounced the court for refusing to call current U.S. Ambassador Todd Robinson to testify about U.S. national security doctrine that Galindo says laid the foundation for the war’s brutality.
Galindo is a familiar figure in Guatemala, having also represented former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt in his 2013 war crimes trial. Well dressed and well spoken, with a commanding voice, Galindo cuts an impressive figure, but Judge Barrios Aguilar had little patience when Galindo repeatedly posed questions to witnesses that had already been asked and answered. And Galindo has his own legal problems, having been accused of embezzlement and tampering with documents in his former role with the Ministry of Defense.
Ríos Montt was in power during the 1982-1983 Sepur Zarco events, and Galindo became Ríos Montt’s attorney after his first lawyer, Galindo’s law partner, was assassinated on a Guatemala City street. Ríos Montt, now eighty-nine, was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity by the same three-judge Court of High Risk that tried Sepur Zarco—but the conviction was overturned on appeal.
“This happened within the politics of national security,” Galindo says in an interview, “implemented by the Guatemalan army in which the people were considered an internal enemy.” He adds: “If the Guatemalan army was guilty here, it was at the instruction of the United States, so the government of the United States should be seated here.”
Sepur Zarco wasn’t simply an incidental occurrence in a nationwide scorched-earth war. It was part of a much larger effort to achieve the systematic theft of Q’eqchi’ ancestral lands.
It began when local men started to organize to resist land-grab efforts by Guatemalan elites. In chilling trial testimony, survivors told of how the army was called into Sepur Zarco and men began to disappear. One by one they were called to seemingly innocent meetings in a school and elsewhere to discuss the land disputes, and one by one they vanished, leaving their wives that much more vulnerable to what was to come.
No direct evidence was presented that the Guatemalan military used rape as an intentional weapon of war, but the prosecution and the court both said the systematic rape served to destroy the social fabric of Sepur Zarco, and with it the village’s will to resist the theft of its land.
Guatemala’s rightwing establishment has taken a keen interest in Sepur Zarco. Outside the Palace of Justice a banner hung for days declaring there had been no genocide in Guatemala, only terrorists financed by, among others, Norway, Canada, Holland, and the Vatican. The Sepur Zarco sentencing was conspicuously attended by Ricardo Méndez Ruiz, founder of the Foundation Against Terrorism, a rightwing organization that denies the Guatemalan genocide and supports Ríos Montt. Standing up, almost alone, in the middle of the courtroom throughout the long reading of the verdict and sentencing, Méndez Ruiz was there to give the court a stark and chilling reminder that not everyone agreed with the Sepur Zarco verdicts.
Five days after the February 26 verdicts and sentencing, the court—one of three special courts established to handle wartime cases—ruled on victim compensation. It awarded much of what the prosecution requested, including a public health clinic with psychological services, especially for adolescents, to be built in Sepur Zarco; improvements to Sepur Zarco area schools; state production of a documentary video on Sepur Zarco; translation of trial proceedings into all of Guatemala’s twenty-four official indigenous languages; and the creation of a national day recognizing victims of domestic and sexual violence, and sexual slavery, on February 26, the day of the Sepur Zarco verdict.
In addition, each victim was awarded about $100,000 in a country where the minimum wage is less than $4,000 a year. But the money is to be paid by the defendants, and actually getting it will be a tough fight.
One thing the court did not do, however, was to order the restoration of stolen lands. “That was very disappointing,” Menchú says, “because that is what started all of this in the first place.”
Lawrence Reichard is a freelance journalist reporting from Guatemala.
From the May issue of the magazine.