7 November 2011, NYT: Former General Elected President of Guatemala
4 December 2009, NYT: Court Papers Detail Killings by the Military in Guatemala
JAN. 22, 2012
In Guatemala, Former Dictator Is Told to Appear in Court
By ELISABETH MALKIN
MEXICO CITY -- A Guatemalan judge has ordered a former military dictator, Efrain Rios Montt, to appear in court on Thursday, the first step in a process that could lead to his being tried on genocide charges and to a reopening of the darkest chapter in Guatemala's brutal 36-year civil war.
During General Rios Montt's 17-month rule in 1982 and 1983, the Guatemalan Army pursued a scorched-earth campaign in the Mayan highlands that included massacres that are regarded as among the most horrific in the war. To flush out small bands of leftist guerrillas, soldiers entered Indian villages and hunted down their inhabitants, slaughtering men, women and children indiscriminately.
Survivors' groups have sought justice through the courts for more than a decade, but only in the last year have prosecutors begun to bring cases to trial against high-ranking military officers. Mr. Rios Montt had immunity from prosecution because he was elected to Congress in 2000, but that immunity ended this month when his term in office expired.
A lawyer for him told the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre that his client would appear to hear the prosecutor's charges. "We are sure that there is no responsibility, since he was never on the battlefield," said the lawyer, Gonzalo Rodriguez Galvez.
In past interviews, Mr. Rios Montt has said that he never ordered massacres. But military documents have shown [1] that the military was operating under a rigid chain of command and that reports from the field went right up to top commanders.
A United Nations-backed truth commission set up after peace accords were signed in 1996 found that some 200,000 people had been killed or had disappeared during the civil war, and that government forces committed 626 massacres in indigenous villages over 36 years. The military's actions in the Ixil triangle of El Quiche department, where the Maya-Ixil population were the targets, amounted to genocide, the commission found.
A trial of Mr. Rios Montt, 85, would pose a test for the new government of President Otto Perez Molina, [2] a former general who took office Jan. 14 promising an "iron fist" policy against drug and gang violence in the country.
Mr. Perez Molina was a midlevel commander in the Ixil region during Mr. Rios Montt's rule but has said that he was involved in rebuilding the terrorized region. Mr. Perez Molina's actions during that time have never been fully investigated, and human rights groups have been unable to find proof he ordered troops to commit atrocities.
The president has promised to support Guatemala's attorney general as her office continues to build human-rights cases.
Two retired generals who were members of Mr. Rios Montt's high command were arrested last year on war crimes and genocide charges. In November, the court found that another figure from that time -- Gen. Oscar Humberto Mejia, who was Mr. Rios Montt's defense minister and then deposed him in a coup -- lacked the capacity to stand trial.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/04/world/americas/04guatemala.html
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/world/americas/guatemala-runoff-vote-draws-the-unimpressed.html