Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Notes on Syria

President Obama is due to speak tonight on Syria and it is unclear what he will say but it is safe to assume that the President will assume that he has the right to bomb Syria if he wants to.

It's a prerogative that all US presidents assume, the right to kill any foreigner anywhere.   It is never in question.  The only matters debated: which foreigners shall we kill, for what purpose?



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Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Follow Guatemala's Lead: Convene a Genocide Case Grand Jury.

A Guatemalan court has ordered a criminal investigation of all others involved in the Rios Montt crimes.

It won't be easy.  Prosecutors and judges will be risking their careers and lives.  Witnesses will know that they might die if they come forward to give evidence.  

But Guatemalans have already shown great courage in advancing the Rios Montt case.  It's time for Americans to do the same and convene a US grand jury on Guatemala.

US prosecutors could aid law enforcement in two fundamental ways: first, with information and second, if warranted, with indictments.

The US, which supported Rios Montt's army, has vast stores of information.  

It should all be turned over to the prosecutors in Guatemala.  

A proper disclosure would include still-classified White House, Pentagon, NSA, CIA and State Department documents, as well as US intercepts of communications among General Rios Montt and his army.

It's important to remember that at the time of these crimes, as now, the US was not a mere outside observer: it was a full-fledged participant. 

US bombs were dropped from US-supplied aircraft on fleeing Mayan villagers.  US personnel were present in Guatemala, training and giving advice to the Rios Montt army.  US personnel were inside the G-2, the notorious military intelligence and targeting unit.  The CIA carried many top Guatemalan army commanders on its payroll.  

And Rios Montt, as he was committing the crimes, got political support from President Reagan, personally.  

So the US has responsibilities here, moral and political but also legal.

The US should now confess to Guatemalan law-enforcement.  

It should tell them everything: what it knew, what it did, who it paid.

And the US should also indict and try any current or former US official who was accessory or accomplice -- or worse -- to the Rios Montt crimes.

And, of course, it should also be ready to comply with its responsibilities by being willing to extradite any US officials charged in Guatemala.

US prosecutors have an obligation to take these steps.   

This case involves crimes of the highest magnitude.

US law enforcers who step forward might indeed run some career risk.

But unlike so many Guatemalans so far, they can be pretty sure they'll live.


Allan Nairn


(For some references re. the US role see posts of April 18 and May 9, 2013)


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Monday, May 13, 2013

Additional Evidence on Perez Molina


General Otto Perez Molina, the President of Guatemala, didn't want his name coming up during the Rios Montt trial. (See post of April 18).

But one witness implicated Perez Molina in the atrocities, and today's Wall Street Journal notes that additional testimony may be available.

Nicholas Casey reports: "Another witness in the [Rios Montt genocide] trial, a Mayan peasant named Tiburcio Utuy, also testified in a separate investigation against Mr. Rios Montt in Spain that Mr. Perez Molina ordered him to be tortured in the 1980s.  Mr. Utuy wasn't asked about Mr. Prez Molina in the Guatemala trial because the current president wasn't the trial's focus... 

In a 2010 article* about human rights crimes related to torture accusations against Mr. Perez Molina during 1982 and 1983, The Wall Street Journal interviewed six other villagers from towns he commanded who accused him and soldiers he commanded in killing civilians whom the witnesses said had nothing to do with rebels.  Among those who named Mr. Perez Molina in the killings were two of the men he commanded at the time." (Nicholas Casey, "Guatemala Genocide Case Pressures Leader," The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2013). 

Rios Montt is in prison but those who carried out his plan are still free.  

If serious investigations are permitted, there will be no shortage of evidence.


Allan Nairn


*The Wall Street Journal has corrected its piece to note that the witness article ran in 2011, not in 2010.


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Still Alive

One of the many profound ramifications of the genocide conviction of Rios Montt is that there is now new incentive for additional witnesses to come forward.

It's one thing to risk your life when the chance of justice seems remote, but it's another when it starts to look like a fair hearing might indeed be possible.

After Judge Jazmin Barrios delivered the verdict in the Rios Montt trial, the Maya Ixil survivors in the audience -- many of whom had given testimony -- stood up, crossed their arms across their chests, and bowed to the court, saying "Thank you."

Any uncaught murderer watching that had to feel a sudden chill.

His victims are safely dead and gone.  

But those who know what he did?  Still alive.


Allan Nairn


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Saturday, May 11, 2013

A Formal Legal Mandate for a Criminal Investigation of Guatemala's Current President, Perez Molina

General Efrain Rios Montt has been found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.  He has already begun his "irrevocable" sentence of 80 years in prison.  

The court that convicted Rios Montt has also ordered the attorney general to launch an immediate investigation of "all others" connected to the crimes.


This important and unexpected aspect of the verdict means that there now exists a formal legal mandate for a criminal investigation of the President of Guatemala, General Otto Perez Molina.

As President, Perez Molina enjoys temporary legal immunity, but that immunity does not block the prosecutors from starting their investigation.

Last night, in a live post-verdict interview on CNN Espanol TV, Perez Molina was confronted about his own role during the Rios Montt massacres.

The interviewer, Fernando del Rincon, repeatedly asked Perez Molina about his filmed interviews with me when he was Rios Montt's Ixil field commander.

At that time, Perez Molina, operating under the alias "Major Tito Arias," commanded troops who described to me how, under orders, they killed civilians.

At first, Perez Molina refused to answer, then CNN's satellite link to him was cut off, then, after it was restored minutes later, Perez Molina replied that women, children and "complete families" had in fact aided guerrillas.

Offering what appears to be a rationale for killing families may not be a sufficient defense.   

But that is up to Perez Molina.

He too deserves his day in court.


Allan Nairn 



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Thursday, May 9, 2013

The Guatemala Genocide Case: Testimony Notes Regarding Rios Montt


By Allan Nairn


The case against General Rios Montt has included vast amounts of evidence.

My notes for my own scheduled testimony (for what happened see post of April 18) included the following observations:

When Rios Montt seized power on March 23, 1982, he immediately seized control of and transformed army operations.

He cut back on the urban assassinations, which had become counterproductive, and increased the massacres of the rural Mayans, the army's main "internal enemy." 

He took a sweep tactic that had been pioneered by General Benedicto Lucas Garcia and made it a systematic strategy, applied across the Northwest Highlands.

A CIA report observed of Benedicto's -- later Rios Montt's -- method:  "In mid-February 1982 the Guatemalan army reinforced its existing force in the central El Quiche department and launched a sweep operation into the Ixil triangle.  The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and eliminate all sources of resistance.  Civilians in the area who agree to collaborate with the army and who seek army protection are to be well treated and cared for in refugee camps for the duratiion of the operation."

In practice, the civilians in the camps were often survivors of army massacres who were subject to vast coercion including execution, torture,  rape, forced labor, and forced service in the "civil patrols."

Colonel George Maynes, the US military attache in Guatemala, told me that he and Benedicto Lucas had developed this sweep tactic and that Rios Montt had expanded it.

A US Green Beret, Captain Jesse Garcia showed me how, under Rios Montt, he was training Guatemalan troops in the techniques of how to "destroy towns." (Allan Nairn, "Despite Ban, U.S. Captain Trains Guatemalan Military," Washington Post, October 21, 1982, page 1).

The Guatemalan Catholic Bishops Conference reported in a May 27, 1982 pastoral letter:  "Numerous families have perished, vilely murdered.  Not even the lives of the elderly, pregnant women or innocent children have been respected ... Never in our history has it come to such grave extremes.  These assassinations fall into the category of genocide."

In an interview in the palace that May I asked Rios Montt about killing civilians.  He said: "Look, the problem of the war is not just a question of who is shooting.  For each one who is shooting there are ten who are working behind him."

Rios Montt's senior aide and spokesman, Francisco Bianchi, who was sitting next to him, amplified: "The guerrillas won over many Indian collaborators.  Therefore, the Indians were subversives, right?  And how do you fight subversion?  Clearly you had to kill Indians because they were collaborating with subversion.  And then they would say, 'You're massacring innocent people.'  But they weren't innocent.  They had sold out to subversion."  (Allan Nairn, "Guatemala Can't Take 2 Roads," The New York Times, op ed, July 20, 1982).

I visited the Ixil zone in September, 1982, arriving first in Nebaj.  The towns and much of the Ixil area were under army occupation.  

A foreign health worker said 80% of the people were malnourished.  Many were dying of hunger, measles, and tuberculosis.

Rios Montt's senior commander on scene was a man who called himself Major Tito Arias, but who was actually Otto Perez Molina, the current president of Guatemala.

Subordinates of Rios Montt and Perez Molina described how they tortured and killed civilians.  The soldiers and officers described a strategy that centered on emptying and massacring entire villages.

They said they would kill a quarter to a third of the people, place a quarter to a third of them in camps, and the rest would flee to the mountains where, if the army found them, they would shoot them on sight.

The soldiers said they were still in the midst of intensive sweep operations.

They also said they were under a strict chain of command that placed only three layers of responsibility between themselves and Rios Montt.  In the words of Lieutenant Romeo Sierra at La Perla they were "on a very short leash."

A number of soldiers named specific towns and villages in which they had committed massacres.

One, a corporal named Felipe, in Nebaj, listed Salquil, Sumal Chiquito, Sumal Grande and Acul.

His account was consistent with that of a man from Acul who spoke in secret and described an April massacre in which he said the army shot 24 civilians.  He said the soldiers shot them in the head after sorting villagers into two groups, one of which the soldiers said they would "send to Glory" and the other "to Hell."  He said: "They said that they were executing the law of Rios Montt."

The descriptions of the massacre strategy from soldiers and civilian survivors were consistent.  They also meshed with accounts that I heard elsewhere in the Mayan zones.

(Much of the following text is drawn from Allan Nairn, "The Guns of Guatemala: The merciless mission of Rios Montt's army," The New Republic, April 11, 1983, and from my work in the 1983 documentary film "Skoop!" also known as "Deadline Guatemala" and "Titular de Hoy," done with Jean-Marie Simon and directed by Mikael Wahlforss, EPIDEM Scandinavian TV):

Just outside Nebaj, more than 2,500 campesinos had been resettled on an army airstrip. "They didn't want to leave voluntarily," explained Corporal Felipe, who manned a .50 caliber machine gun in the Nebaj church belfry. "The government put out a call that they would have one month to turn themselves in," he said, referring to a nationwide order from Rios Montt.  "So now the army is in charge of going to get all the people from all these villages."

Sergeant Miguel Raimundo, who was guarding a group of 161 suspected guerrilla collaborators (which included 79 children and 42 women), said, "The problem is that almost all the village people are guerrillas." According to camp records, they had been rounded up in sweeps through the villages of Vijolom, Salquil Grande, Tjolom, Parramos Chiquito, Paob, Vixaj, Quejchip, and Xepium. 

Sergeant Jose Angel, who commanded a La Perla platoon explained:"Before we get to the village, we talk with the soldiers about what they should do and what they shouldn't do. They all discuss it so they have it in their minds. We coordinate it first—we ask, what is our mission?"

Lieutenant Sierra had noted that the sweep commanders had hourly radio contact with headquarters.  He said the superior officer "knows everything.  Everything is controlled."  All field actions had to be reported in the commanders' daily "diary of operations" which was reviewed and criticized in monthly face-to-face evaluations.

Sergeant Jose Angel explained the village-entry procedure: "One patrol enters the village from one point, on another side another patrols enters. We go in before dawn, because everyone is sleeping. If we come in broad daylight they get scared, they see it's the army, and they run because they know the army is coming to get them,"

Rios Montt's army had a clear policy about the meaning and consequences of such behavior. "The people who are doing things outside the law run away," sergeant Jose Angel said. "But the people who aren't doing anything, they stay." He said he had seen cases where "lots of them ran, most of a village. They ran because they knew the army was coming."

Sergeant Miguel Raimundo cited three cases where villages fled en masse. "All the villages around here, like Salquil, Paob, or here in Sumal, they have a horn and there's a villager who watches the road. If the soldiers come, he blows the horn. It's a signal. They all go running."

The soldiers explained that they routinely killed these fleeing, unarmed civilians.

I asked Corporal Felipe how the villagers react when the troops arrive.

"They flee from their homes. They run for the mountain."

"And what do you do?"

"Some we capture alive and others we can't capture alive. When they run and go into the mountains that obligates one to kill them."

"Why?"

"Because they might be guerrillas. If they don't run, the army is not going to kill them. It will protect them."

"Among those you have to kill, what kind of people are they? Are they men or women?"

"At times men, at times women."

"In which villages has this happened?"

"Oh, it's happened in lots of them. In Acul, Salquil, Sumal Chiquito, Sumal Grande."

"In those villages, about how many people did you kill?"

"Not many, a few."

"More than ten? More than twenty? More than a hundred?"

"Oh no, about twenty."

"In each village?"

"Yes, of course. It's not many. More than that were captured alive."

Sergeant Jose Angel recalled a similar experience in the village of Chumansan in the province of Quezaltenango. "When we went in, the people scattered," he said. "We had no choice but to shoot at them. We killed some. . . . Oh, about ten, no more. Most of them got away."

After tracking and shooting the unarmed civilians who fled in fear, the army dealt with the unarmed civilians who remained in the village.

First, Sergeant Jose Angel explained, "We go into a village and take the people out of their houses and search the houses." 

Among the items the soldiers looked for were suspiciously large stocks of grain or beans. The army took what it could use and burned the rest. 

Next, he said, "You ask informers who are the ones that are doing things, things outside the law. And that's when you round up the collaborators. And the collaborators—you question them, interrogate them, get them to speak the truth. Who have they been talking to? Who are the ones who have been coming to the village to speak with them?"

The soldiers often went in with target lists of "collaborators."  The lists were provided by G-2, the military intelligence service headed at that time by General Rios Montt's co-defendant, General Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez.

The interrogations were generally conducted in the village square with the population looking on. 

I asked Jose Angel how he questioned people. He replied, "Beat them to make them tell the truth, hurt them."

"With what methods?"

"This one, like this," he said as he wrapped his hands around his neck and made a choking sound. "More or less hanging them."

"With what?"

"With a lasso. Each soldier has his lasso."

The day before, in Nebaj, an infantryman who was standing over the bodies of four captured guerrillas demonstrated the interrogation technique he had learned in "Cobra," an army counterinsurgency course for field troops.  [Another soldier said the guerrillas, who had set off a grenade, had been "presented" to Perez Molina for interrogation, "But they still didn't say anything, for better or for worse."]

"Tie them like this," he said, "tie the hands behind, run the cord here [around the neck] and press with a boot [on the chest]. Knot it, and make a tourniquet with a stick, and when they're dying you give it another twist and you ask them again, and if they still don't want to answer you do it again until they talk." 

The sergeants and infantrymen of Nebaj and La Perla said the tourniquet was the most common interrogation technique.  They said that live burial and mutilation by machete were also used.

The soldiers said they expected those they questioned to provide specific information, such as the names of villagers who had talked with or given food to guerrillas. Failure to do so implied guilt, and brought immediate judgment and action. 

"Almost everyone in the villages is a collaborator," said Sergeant Miguel Raimundo. "They don't say anything. They would rather die than talk"

When I asked Miguel Raimundo about the interrogation method, he replied: "We say, if you tell us where the guerrillas are, the army won't kill you. . . . If they collaborate with the army, we don't do anything."

"And if they don't say anything?"

"Well, then they say, 'if you kill me, kill me—because I don't know anything,' and we know they're guerrillas.  They prefer to die rather than say where the companeros are."

According to Sergeant Jose Angel, it was common for suspected collaborators to be pointed out, questioned, and executed all on the same day.

Explaining how he extracted information so quickly, he said, "Well, they don't talk like that voluntarily. You just have to subdue them a little to make them speak the truth."

After the interrogations had been completed, the patrol leader would make a speech to the survivors gathered in the village square.

"We tell the people to change the road they are on, because the road they are on is bad," said Jose Angel. "If they don't change, there is nothing else to do but kill them."

"So you kill them on the spot?"

"Yes, sure. If they don't want the good, there's nothing more to do but bomb their houses."

Jose Angel said that in Solola and Quezaltenengo he had participated in operations of this kind in which more than 500 people were killed

He and other soldiers said that smaller villages were destroyed with Spanish, Israeli, and U.S.-made grenades. Boxes of these grenades could be seen stacked in the Nebaj ammunition dump. 

The soldiers said they also used a 3.5-inch U.S.- made shoulder-held recoilless rocket that was designed as an antitank weapon but is effective against people and straw huts. At the La Perla headquarters, one such launcher was sitting next to boxes of "explosive projectile" rockets from the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant.

F'or larger operations, Jose Angel said, patrols called in army planes and helicopters to bomb the villages. The helicopters were U.S.-manufactured Hueys and Jet Rangers.   The bombs included U.S.-made 50-kilogram Ml/61As, twelve of which were stacked in the base munitions dump in Nebaj. 

Lieutenant Cesar Bonilla, the officer in charge of the Nebaj airstrip resettlement camp said the helicopters were especially useful for catching villagers by surprise.

"When you go in on foot they see the patrol three kilometers away and know you're coming. But with air transport, you land different units in the area, all the units close in rapidly, and the people can't go running away."

Bonilla said that this type of operation could only be executed by several helicopters at once. "With just one helicopter you scare them away and there's no control." 

The United States Congress' temporary refusal to sell spare parts had grounded much of the fleet, so Lieutenant Bonilla was encouraged by reports that the Reagan Administration was considering changing the policy. 

"That would be wonderful," he said. "With six helicopters, for example, the airborne troops would land all at once before they could make a move. The nicest, the ideal, the dream, would be a surprise: suddenly, pow! Helicopters with troops!" As he spoke, he made machine-gun noises and waved his Israeli Galil rifle toward the refugee shacks. "Ta, ta, ta, ta, ta! All at once from the air! Pow! No escape routes. That would be ideal."

The day before this conversation, a family in Bonilla's camp -- interviewed in their shack outside the view of soldiers -- described such an assault on their village. "Two times they came there in helicopters," said one of the men. "They would come in and land and the people would retire and they would always kill a few. They flew over, machine-gunning people from the helicopter." The family said that five were killed in the strafing.

After the torture, the executions, and the burning, strafing and bombing, the next stage of the sweep was to chase the fleeing people through the hills.

"Up here there aren't any villages anymore," said Sergeant Jose Angel, speaking of the patrol areas around La Perla. "There used to be, but then the soldiers came. We knew that such and such a village was involved, so we went to get them. We captured some and the rest of the people from the village ran away. They're hiding in the mountains. Now we're going to the mountains to look for them."

Major Tito -- Otto Perez Molina -- the commander of the Nebaj base, said in mid-September that 2,000 people from the area of Sumal Grande had fled to the mountains and would be pursued by foot patrols and helicopters.

Sergeant Jose Angel said his platoon went on such operations frequently. I asked Jose Angel what his troops did when they found refugees.

"At times we don't find them. We see them but they get away."

"But when you do find them, what do you do?"

"Oh, we kill them."

"Are they a few people or entire villages?"

"No, entire villages. When we entered the villages we killed some and the rest ran away,"

Under the policy of Rios Montt's army, a civilian found outside the army-controlled towns could be in mortal danger.

"We know the poor people from close up and far away," said Sergeant Miguel Raimundo. "If we see someone walking in the mountains, that means he is a subversive. So we try to grab him and ask where he's going; we arrest him. And then we see if he is a guerrilla or not. But those who always walk in the mountains, we know they are guerrillas. Maybe some of them will be children, but we know that they are subversive delinquents. I've been walking in the mountains for a year now, and just in the mountains, one by one, we've captured more than 500 people."

Sergeant Miguel Raimundo also explained that under the army's assumptions a civilian could also be in danger if they never went anywhere: "A woman told me yesterday that the soldiers kill people, that the soldiers killed her husband. But I told her that if the soldiers killed her husband it was because he was a guerrilla. The soldier knows whom to kill. He doesn't kill the innocent, just the guilty. And she said, 'No, my husband wasn't doing anything.' So I said, 'And how do you know it was nothing? How do you know what he was doing outside?' 'No,' she said, 'because he never went anywhere,' 'Yes,' I said, 'That's because he was a collaborator,' "

It was clear from discussions with these soldiers inside the Ixil zone that, under their orders from Rios Montt and their commanders, including Perez Molina, all civilians were potential targets.  Indeed, they were the principal targets.

Lieutenant Romeo Sierra, who directed the sweeps through his patrol area of 20 square kilometers and 10,000 people, told me that thousands of civilians were displaced but that "in the time I've been here [two-and-a-half months] no subversives have fallen. Lots of unarmed people, women refugees, but we haven't had actual combat with guerrillas."  

Lieutenant Sierra also said that "human rights" was an "enemy concept."  In his army training he had been taught that it had been developed "by international Communism."



Years after he had been ousted from power, I interviewed Rios Montt again.  I asked Rios Montt -- a firm believer in the death penalty -- if he thought that he should be tried and executed for his role in the Mayan massacres.

The general leapt to his feet and shouted:  "Yes!  Try me!  Put me against the wall!," but he said he should be tried only if Americans were put on trial too.  (See Allan Nairn, "C.I.A. Death Squad: Americans have been directly involved in Guatemalan Army killings," The Nation, April 17, 1995.)

Specifically, Rios Montt cited President Reagan, who, in the midst of the killings, had said that Rios Montt was getting "a bum rap" on human rights. 

Rios Montt, for his part, had said: "It's not that we have a policy of scorched earth, just a policy of scorched communists."




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Guatemala: The decisive moment has arrived.


The next 12 to 36 hours will be crucial for the Rios Montt genocide trial.   

The trial was suspended on April 18 after intervention by Guatemala's President and death threats by army associates against judges and prosecutors.


But the backlash against the suspension was intense and the army appears to have retreated. 

At this moment, the trial is again going forward.  Closing statements have begun.  

Unless the trial is stopped by violence or politics it could reach verdict soon, even today. 

But the hours between now and verdict-time will be long.   Many bad things could happen.   

If anyone wants to weigh in against murder, the time to do so is now. 


Allan Nairn



NOTE TO READERS: News and Comment is looking for assistance with translating blog postings into other languages, and also with fund raising and distributing the blog content more widely. Those interested please get in touch via the e-mail link below. NOTE TO READERS RE. TRANSLATION: Portions of News and Comment are now available in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, French, German, Russian and Spanish translation (click preceding links or Profile link above) but translation help is still needed -- particularly with older postings, in these and all other languages. NOTE TO READERS RE. POTENTIAL EVIDENCE: News and Comment is looking for public and private documents and first-hand information that could develop into evidence regarding war crimes or crimes against humanity by officials. Please forward material via the email link below. Email Me

Friday, April 26, 2013

On the Margins of the Law -- But Inside the Palace


Is it possible for the Rios Montt trial to be revived?

"Here it is possible for a burro to fly."  It all depends on the pressure/ politics.

That is the view of a senior official who prefers to speak off the record given what he describes as the delicacy of the situation.

If the almost-concluded genocide trial is not permitted to reach a verdict "It will demonstrate that the army and the powerful don't have to account to anyone" and that there exists "a group that lives on the margins of the law but is still able to take the big decisions for the country."

On the margins of the law -- but inside the palace.

Killing-off the case, he says, would recall the adage attributed to the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz: "'To my friends, what they desire.  To my enemies, the law.'"

He adds that such a move by the rulers would say to Guatemala's majority "that no institution will listen to them, that they are not citizens, that the constitution is not for them, that the law will never serve them."

It would indeed be such for Guatemala.

But that is also what is being said daily in every country around the world where local and foreign officials complict in mass killing have yet to be arrested and tried.


Allan Nairn 



NOTE TO READERS: News and Comment is looking for assistance with translating blog postings into other languages, and also with fund raising and distributing the blog content more widely. Those interested please get in touch via the e-mail link below. NOTE TO READERS RE. TRANSLATION: Portions of News and Comment are now available in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, French, German, Russian and Spanish translation (click preceding links or Profile link above) but translation help is still needed -- particularly with older postings, in these and all other languages. NOTE TO READERS RE. POTENTIAL EVIDENCE: News and Comment is looking for public and private documents and first-hand information that could develop into evidence regarding war crimes or crimes against humanity by officials. Please forward material via the email link below. Email Me

General Perez Molina is Tito.


General Otto Perez Molina, the President of Guatemala, surprised many yesterday by finally admitting verbally that he is in fact Major Tito, who I met and interviewed on film in 1982.

It was an application of the politician's tactic of getting out in front of a damaging story to frame it in their own way, in this case trying to move focus from the fact that he was field commander during the Rios Montt massacres to the minor, innocuous fact that while doing so he used a pseudonym to, he said, protect his family.

Protecting one's family is admirable but it was unfortunately not an option for the many thousands of defenseless civilians massacred by Rios Montt's -- and Perez Molina's -- army. 




Allan Nairn


NOTE TO READERS: News and Comment is looking for assistance with translating blog postings into other languages, and also with fund raising and distributing the blog content more widely. Those interested please get in touch via the e-mail link below. NOTE TO READERS RE. TRANSLATION: Portions of News and Comment are now available in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, French, German, Russian and Spanish translation (click preceding links or Profile link above) but translation help is still needed -- particularly with older postings, in these and all other languages. NOTE TO READERS RE. POTENTIAL EVIDENCE: News and Comment is looking for public and private documents and first-hand information that could develop into evidence regarding war crimes or crimes against humanity by officials. Please forward material via the email link below. Email Me

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

If Enough Forces Weigh In, the Trial Can Resume.


The mechanism for reviving the genocide trial of Rios Montt is and has to be political.  Technical legal merits have less than almost nothing to do with it.

The outside judicial decision that was the instrument for stopping the trial just short of verdict has been laughed out of court by every serious legal expert who has examined it.

Where to go from here is the choice of the President, General Perez Molina, the institutional army and the death-squad oligarchs.   It's a good bet that at this writing they have not yet reached a full decision.

On the one hand, by killing the case they get to revel in untouchability.  They think they get to say, as their slogan goes, "In Guatemala there was no genocide," to hand out bumper stickers, like this morning, saying "I love the Guatemalan army," and to say, with Rios Montt's daughter, Zury: "God is our attorney."

On the other, they hurl a fragrant wad of spit in the faces of the country's Mayan survivors and those of other reformers everywhere who thought some Guatemalan rules might be changing.

For some of the elite such political expectoration may indeed be enjoyable, but it may not be politically costless.  Even for very rich people wild self indulgence is not always successful.

Specifically, in this instance it can fail if enough Guatemalans protest and if enough of the foreigners who were piously celebrating this progress in the world power system now just as energetically hold culpable the rulers who went out and killed it.

As the Guatemalans rulers making the decision right now behind closed doors somewhat anxiously know, the decisive foreigners include the US White House and Embassy which backed the Rios Montt slaughter but this time around were backing his trial.

There's nothing new in that.  The US routinely abandons its former footmen.  See Ferdinand Marcos, Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Moammar Qadaffy.

In this case, the understanding all over Guatemala including inside the palace was that if Perez Molina allowed the hand-cleansing trial, the US -- at that time on Hillary Clinton's authority -- would respond with still more military/ "anti-terror"/ "anti-drug" aid.

The Americans thought they had a deal, but now they don't.   Will the US just let it slide?   They certainly might.  For the US, the trial was just an ornament, something to point to and say, when needed: 'See?  We're actually pro-human rights.'  

They saw no danger that the example would spread, that US DA's would start indicting Bushes (or worse).  

So it was a nice cheap fillip, but now Perez Molina and co. have made things complicated.

This is the kind of second-tier decision that US Congress members have the power to shape.

If enough forces weigh in, the trial can resume.   

If not, the local killers chuckle.


Allan Nairn





NOTE TO READERS: News and Comment is looking for assistance with translating blog postings into other languages, and also with fund raising and distributing the blog content more widely. Those interested please get in touch via the e-mail link below. NOTE TO READERS RE. TRANSLATION: Portions of News and Comment are now available in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, French, German, Russian and Spanish translation (click preceding links or Profile link above) but translation help is still needed -- particularly with older postings, in these and all other languages. NOTE TO READERS RE. POTENTIAL EVIDENCE: News and Comment is looking for public and private documents and first-hand information that could develop into evidence regarding war crimes or crimes against humanity by officials. Please forward material via the email link below. Email Me

A Little Too Close to the Bone


Military terror dictatorships are stupid, fragile systems.  

They survive by total suppression.  

And since total-anything is hard to maintain they are vulnerable in the long run.

That's one reason why rich, dominant people all over have been learning for decades now that simply shooting others in the head is not the only way to maintain privilege.   

Democratic free elections work too, so long as you're free to pick candidates and issues and purchase ads and influence.   And a free press can work nicely as well so long as you're free to own the presses.

So you have a proliferation of non-dictator regimes in which working people are still underpaid or starving and those on top are still meritlessly rich beyond the dreams of any type of necessity.

But since such regimes are also democratic and their press is free, they escape destabilizing quantities of condemnation for freedom-of-expression or human rights abuses.  

It's beautiful, you have your cake and eat it too, you bask in enlightened acclaim but at the same time you can fly to Rio on a whim while those who work for you have kids who are hungry.   

But one weakness in such regimes from a top-down point of view is that by tolerating some space you run the risk that now and then someone will say or do something that cuts a little too close to the bone.

Such is the effort to finish the criminal trial of the ex terror dictator General Rios Montt, the onetime US protege who once lorded over Guatemala.  

Rios Montt is 86.  He lost power in '83.  

Washington lost use for and washed their hands of him before some current US lawmakers were born, and the Guatemalan elite decided a while ago that it was worth their while to let him hang.* 

But that was before the trial began.  

What came out was not much new.  

But this time as the heroic survivors spoke, their words were being chiseled in stone.

"They killed my father..."

"They burnt our homes..."

"They raped me, one after the other...."

This was no longer policy, it was crime.  A court reporter took everything down.

Unlike much political speech, words in such a setting don't tend to evaporate.   

Thus sanctified on the official record, this commonplace, everyday truth that the rulers were rapists and murderers began emitting an ominous glow.

"This is a very dangerous case, for everyone," says a Guatemalan dissident from a well-off family.

Beyond the dimension of the testimony being official, it was also starting to circulate.   

In some cases it was lodging at the front of people's minds.  The rythm of repetition is powerful.       

"The elite was ready to throw over Rios Montt, but they didn't properly anticipate how things would go.  If you have a month of people talking about massacres and massacres and massacres, and women's bellies being slit open, all of a sudden it dawned on them, even if they were willing to let Rios Montt collapse the information was too much of a cost."

"They can see the political effect.  Its in the air, you can see it online.  They recently concluded: 'God, it's just too much.'"

They stepped in and shut the case down; it's dead, but, for this man and others, not yet finally buried.

In Guatemala, the notion of resurrection matters.   

Even as the army was crucifying the nation, people paused to celebrate Easter.

Sunday of the Resurrection was and is preceded in Guatemala by Holy Monday through Holy Saturday.

Guatemalans, as a people, are not predisposed to rule out comebacks.


Allan Nairn



* Hang figuratively, that is.  Guatemala has de facto abolished the death penalty, unlike the US, China and Saudi Arabia.



NOTE TO READERS: News and Comment is looking for assistance with translating blog postings into other languages, and also with fund raising and distributing the blog content more widely. Those interested please get in touch via the e-mail link below. NOTE TO READERS RE. TRANSLATION: Portions of News and Comment are now available in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, French, German, Russian and Spanish translation (click preceding links or Profile link above) but translation help is still needed -- particularly with older postings, in these and all other languages. NOTE TO READERS RE. POTENTIAL EVIDENCE: News and Comment is looking for public and private documents and first-hand information that could develop into evidence regarding war crimes or crimes against humanity by officials. Please forward material via the email link below. Email Me

Monday, April 22, 2013

A Crossing in the Cuchumatanes


Whatever happens in Guatemala, one of history's rivers has been forded.

In this case it was by people wearing huipiles and being pursued by US aircraft, slogging on as their loved ones fell and reaching the opposite shore by daybreak.

By mounting a domestic criminal trial for genocide against a former state ruler they crossed the threshold into what is arguably a next phase of the human journey up from slaughter -- one marked by actual good-faith efforts to enforce society's murder laws.

Those who have accomplished this are descendants of a long, rich popular tradition, a tradition whose leaders in Guatemala were almost all -- to a man and woman -- assassinated.

But as any smart repressor can tell you, you can kill most but you can't kill all.


Allan Nairn 




NOTE TO READERS: News and Comment is looking for assistance with translating blog postings into other languages, and also with fund raising and distributing the blog content more widely. Those interested please get in touch via the e-mail link below. NOTE TO READERS RE. TRANSLATION: Portions of News and Comment are now available in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Danish, French, German, Russian and Spanish translation (click preceding links or Profile link above) but translation help is still needed -- particularly with older postings, in these and all other languages. NOTE TO READERS RE. POTENTIAL EVIDENCE: News and Comment is looking for public and private documents and first-hand information that could develop into evidence regarding war crimes or crimes against humanity by officials. Please forward material via the email link below. Email Me