Guatemala’s violent present
From LeMonde Diplomatique 09/13/2006
http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/
By Paola Ramírez Orozco-Souel
The law has supposedly been pursuing the former Guatemalan dictator General Efraín
Rios Montt since the return of civilian rule to his country in December 1985 and
certainly since the peace agreements that ended the armed struggle 11 years
later. But he has never been caught, despite the outstanding accusations against
him.
The accusations are extreme. A lawyer’s report quoted in the New York Times on
13 March 1983, when Rios Montt was in power, said: “We were told again and
again of government soldiers, in uniform, arriving at a village, rounding up men
and women and shooting them. But they don’t waste bullets on children. They
pick them up by the feet and smash their heads against a wall. Or tie ropes
around their necks and pull them until they are strangled. We heard of children
being thrown in the air and bayoneted.”
In response, Rios Montt was quoted as saying: “We are not applying a scorched
earth policy, but a scorched communists policy.”
In December 1999, exasperated with the inertia of the Guatemalan authorities,
the Rigoberta Menchu foundation, named after the Nobel-prize winning Guatemalan
campaigner, invoked universal jurisdiction (1) to charge Rios Montt in a Spanish
court with genocide, torture and crimes against humanity.
This led to a lengthy debate among the Spanish legal authorities, culminating in
September 2005, when the constitutional court authorized proceedings to begin
against him and fellow dictator Oscar Humberto Mejía, and five other generals.
As a signatory to international agreements protecting the rights of individuals
and collectives, Guatemala was obliged to allow a Spanish judicial commission,
led by investigating judge Santiago Pedraz, to visit the country.
Fears that Guatemala was incapable of bringing human rights abusers to justice
were confirmed. Pedraz arrived on his visit this June; six days later
Guatemala’s constitutional court forbade him to gather witness accounts and
blocked the interviews that he had scheduled. The investigation was effectively
suspended. This clear obstruction led Pedraz to issue international arrest
warrants against the former generals when he returned to Spain.
This was announced on 7 July and shook the Guatemalan political and legal
establishment. Under the warrants the generals’ assets and bank accounts can
be blocked (2) and they risk arrest and extradition to Spain if they leave
Guatemala, although there is no reason to suppose they are about to take that
risk.
After a visit in May, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights,
Louise Arbour, described Guatemala as “one of the most violent countries in
the region . . . Where impunity is the rule for past violations, it should come
as no surprise that it also prevails for current crimes”.
During Guatemala’s civil wars, from 1960 to 1996, military and armed civilian
groups waged violent campaigns against indigenous peoples and political
opponents; an estimated 200,000 were killed. Failure to punish those responsible
has reinforced a culture of impunity in Guatemalan society, and it is estimated
that 97% of all current murders go unpunished.
Violence against Guatemalan women gets less media attention than the notorious
crimes against women in the sprawling metropolis of Ciudad Juarez, on Mexico’s
border with the United States (3). Nevertheless they are beaten, tortured,
mutilated, raped and killed: 2,200 have been murdered since 2001,299 in the
first six months of this year (4). The rising rate of violent death affects men
too. Battles between armed street gangs (maras) are on the rise, as is the
killing of street children by “social cleansing” groups who are in the pay
of people anxious to protect their property.
People are now more inclined to take justice into their own hands and dispense
it lethally. According to police statistics, murders in Guatemala rose from
4,346 in 2004 to 5,338 in 2005, an increase of 23% in a population of 12 million
(5).
Though the security forces are not behind all the violence, their reluctance or
inability to solve crimes is tantamount to consent. When they are called in to
investigate murders of women they usually shelve the cases quickly and often
claim that the victim had been involved in organized crime or prostitution and
had got what she deserved. In little-policed areas, local people make the law by
lynching presumed culprits: more than 400 cases, leading to 200 deaths, were
recorded between 1996 and 2000.
All this happens against a backdrop of extreme poverty that affects 75% of the
population. The government’s current economic policy is likely to worsen
matters and is especially hard on women. They are the main source of labor for
the “maquilas”, the factories that produce consumer goods mainly for foreign
companies, and they work more than 70 hours a week in conditions that flout the
labor laws (6).
The current president, Oscar Berger, elected in January 2004, is defiant in the
face of discontent. This March his government approved the signing of a free
trade agreement with the US without debate. Yet the population strongly opposed
the measure, rightly fearing it would worsen matters since the deal will permit
multinational companies to exploit Guatemala’s natural resources without
constraint. A concession law will allow state assets and public services to be
sold to private firms. Four days after the agreement was signed, a demonstration
against the measures was violently suppressed after a daylong general strike and
a fortnight of protest.
Given rising poverty, crime, drug trafficking and mafia activity, Guatemala
barely seems to have a state, in the sense of an entity that protects citizens
and their rights. Its record must surely count against its candidacy for a
temporary seat on the UN Security Council (7). Yet that candidacy currently has
full and vocal backing from the US and discreet approval from the European
Union.
Translated by Gulliver Cragg
(1) A controversial principle in international law whereby states claim
Jurisdiction over people whose alleged crimes were committed outside the
boundaries of the prosecuting state, regardless of any relation with the
prosecuting country. The state bases its claim on the grounds that the crime
committed is a crime against humanity, which any state is authorized to punish.
(2) Plus former Guatemalan president, Fernando Romeo Lucas (1978-82), also
subject to a warrant. He is said to have died in Venezuela but the Spanish court
is unsatisfied with the proof.
(3) See Sergio González Rodriguez, “Mexico: the city of deaths denied” in
Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, August 2003.
(4) Amnesty International report, No protection, no justice – Killings of
women in Guatemala, London, 2006.
(5) Ibid.
6) See “Burglary/Intimidations”, FIDH, 6 June 2006,
http://www.fidh.org/article.php3? Id_article=3385 (in Spanish only). See also
“The Struggle for Justice”, FIDH, 13 March 1999,
http://www.fidh.org/article.php3? Id_article=1888
(7) Five of the Security Council’s 10 temporary seats are to be renewed in
September for a period of two years. One of these should go to a Latin American
country.
Paola Ramírez Orozco-Souel is a journalist
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