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 



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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


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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





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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.



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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 




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Saturday, April 20, 2013

Lack of Respect


You walk up and shoot someone in the head.  Years later the surviving daughter approaches you.

She asks you to admit what you did was wrong.  You laugh at her and keep moving.

No answer, no admission.  

The survivor isn't asking for much, but even that you make a point of denying her.

That's one aspect of what is happening in Guatemala.  Not just murder but a topping of arrogance.

Generals and presidents are forgiven murder all the time.  It's part of our pre-civlized order.

But insulting other people?  

That is generally considered to be socially less acceptable.

Murder's a little hard to process, it's too enormous for the human soul.

But lack of respect is another matter.

Has anyone ever forgiven it?


Allan Nairn




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Thursday, April 18, 2013

BREAKING NEWS: The Genocide Trial of General Efrain Rios Montt Has Just Been Suspended: A firsthand behind-the-scenes account of how Guatemala's current President and threats of violence killed the case.


By Allan Nairn
Guatemala City
April 18, 2013


For a while it looked like Guatemala was about to deliver justice.

But the genocide case against General Efrain Rios Montt has just been suspended, hours before a criminal court was poised to deliver a verdict.

The last-second decision to kill the case was technically taken by an appeals court.  

But behind the decision stands secret intervention by Guatemala's current president and death threats delivered to judges and prosecutors by associates of Guatemala's army.

Many dozens of Mayan massacre survivors risked their lives to testify.  But now the court record they bravely created has been erased from above.

The following account of some of my personal knowledge of the case was written several days ago.  I was asked to keep it private until a trial verdict had been reached:


"It would be mistaken to think that this case redounds to the credit of Guatemala's rulers.

It was forced upon them from below.  The last thing they want is justice.  

But they agreed to swallow a partial dose because political forces were such that they had to, and because they thought that they could get away with sacrificing Rios Montt to save their own skins.

I was called to testify in the Rios Montt case, was listed by the court as a 'qualified witness,' and was tentatively scheduled to testify on Monday, April 15.  But at the last minute I was kept off the stand 'in order to avoid a confrontation with the [Guatemalan] executive.'

What that meant, I was given to understand, was that Gen. Otto Perez Molina, Guatemala's president, would shut down the case if I took the stand because my testimony could implicate him.

Beyond that, there was fear, concretely stated, that my taking the stand could lead to violence since given my past statements and writings I would implicate the 'institutional army.'

The bargain under which Perez Molina and the country's elite had let the case go forward was that it would only touch Rios Montt and his codefendant, Gen. Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez.   The rest of the army would be spared, and likewise Perez Molina.  

On that basis, Perez Molina, it was understood, would refrain from killing the Rios Montt trial case, and still more importantly would keep the old officer corps from killing prosecutors and witnesses, as well as hold off any hit squads that might be mounted by the the oligarchs of CACIF (the Chambers of Agriculture, Commerce, Industry and Finance).  (Perez Molina has de facto power to kill the case via secret intervention with the Constitutional and other courts.)

This understanding was seen as vital to the survival of both the case and those involved in it.   Army associates had already threatened the family of one of the lead prosecutors, and halfway through the trial a death threat had been delivered to one of the three presiding judges. 

In the case of one of those threatened a man had offered him a bribe of one million US dollars as well as technical assistance with offshore accounts and laundering the funds.  All the lawyer had to do was to agree to stop the Rios Montt case.

When that didn't work, the angle changed: the man put a pistol on the table and stated that he knew where to find the lawyer's children.

But so far no trial people had actually been killed.  Though things were tense, the bargain was holding. 

But to the shock of many and to world headlines in a press that had long under- and mis- reported Guatemala's terror, everything changed on April 5 when Hugo Ramiro Leonardo Reyes, a former army mechanic, testified by video from hiding that Perez Molina had ordered atrocities.

Testifying with his face half-covered by a baseball cap he recounted murders by Rios Montt's army and then unexpectedly added that one of the main perpetrators has been Perez Molina who he said had ordered executions and the destruction of villages.

This had occurred, he testified, during the massacres around Nebaj when Perez Molina was serving there as Rios Montt's field commander in 1982-83.

As it happened, I had also been there at that time and had encountered Perez Molina who was then living under the code name Major Tito Arias.

I had interviewed him on film several times.  On one occasion we stood over the bodies of four captured guerrillas he had interrogated.  Out of his earshot, Perez Molina's subordinates told me how, acting under orders, they routinely captured, tortured, and staged multiple executions of civilians.

The trial witness's broaching of Perez Molina's past evidently angered the President.  He publicly denounced the witness and had him investigated

He then summoned the Attorney General.  The word went forth that if the trial case mentioned Perez Molina again, all previous understandings would be suspended.  Canceling the Rios Montt case would be the least of their worries: there would be hell to pay.

The case went forward as originally agreed with Perez Molina.  My testimony was cancelled, and the court record was kept clear of any additional evidence that could have further implicated the President.

Under Guatemalan law, a sitting President cannot be indicted.  Perez Molina's term ends in 2016. 

This is one small but revealing aspect of the case.  The massacre story is not yet over."


After the above private account was written, Guatemala's army and oligarchy rallied.  They started to feel that they had no political need to sacrifice Rios Montt.  As Perez Molina heard from the elite, his and Rios Montt's interests converged.

On April 16 Perez Molina said publicly that the case was a threat to peace. On April 18, today, the Rios Montt genocide case was suspended.



(Regarding Background Sources: For some of my filmed inteviews with Perez Molina see the documentary Skoop! directed by Mikael Wahlforss.  EPIDEM, Scandinavian television, 1983.  Long excerpts from it, under the title Titular de Hoy, are available on the website of Jean-Marie Simon who was my colleague on the film.  Also see her photographs and narrative in her book Guatemala: Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny, W.W. Norton, 1988.  

For a detailed contemporaneous report of the Rios Montt massacres see my piece in the April 11, 1983 The New Republic, "The Guns of Guatemala: The merciless mission of Rios Montt's army."  The piece quotes some of Perez Molina's army subordinates and briefly mentions him as "Major Tito."  At the time I wrote it and worked on the film I did not know his real name.  

YouTube excerpts from the film went viral in Guatemala during Perez Molina's 2011 presidential campaign.  During the campaign Perez Molina was evasive about whether he really was "Major Tito," though it later surfaced that he had admitted it years before but had then attempted to obscure that admission.

Also see my piece in the April 17, 1995 The Nation, "C.I.A. Death Squad: Americans have been directly involved in Guatemalan Army killings."  The piece reports on US sponsorship of the G-2, the Guatemalan military intelligence unit which picked targets for assassination and disappearance and often did its own killings and torture.   The piece names Perez Molina as one of "three of the recent G-2 chiefs [who] have been paid by the C.I.A., according to U.S. and Guatemalan intelligence sources."  

The piece adds that then-Colonel "Perez Molina, who now runs the Presidential General Staff and oversees the Archivo, was in charge in 1994, when according to the Archbishop's human rights office, there was evidence of General Staff involvement in the assassination of Judge Edgar Ramiro Elias Ogaldez."   

Likewise, at the time of The Nation article I still did not know that Perez Molina was Tito.

For one aspect of the US role in supporting Rios Montt see my Washington Post piece: "Despite Ban, U.S. Captain Trains Guatemalan Military," October 21, 1982, page 1.

After the 1983 New Republic piece the Guatemalan army sent an emissary who invited me to lunch at a fancy hotel and politely told me that I would be killed unless I retracted the article.  The army murdered Guatemalans all the time, but for a US journalist the threat rang hollow.  The man who delivered the threat later became an excellent source of information.) 



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Return of the Dead


One of the extraordinary aspects of the Guatemalan trial of General Efrain Rios Montt is that, unlike Nuremberg and similar proceedings, this is not a case of victor's justice.

 This is not a case of ruling powers setting out to hang the army they defeated, but rather of the defeated -- the dead -- coming back to legally try the victors who killed them.

They were decapitated, strangled, shot in the face, slit open with machetes while pregnant, yet they left enough family and spirit behind to wreak some justice on their killers' commander.

The way this happened is a story for the history books and an inspiration and lesson for those of us still living.

If the trial is allowed to proceed to verdict and Rios Montt is convicted he will go down in memory as a leader of a social regime that won, but also as a common criminal.


Allan Nairn


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Guatemala, the Beginning of Justice



The genocide trial of General Efrain Rios Montt is only the beginning of justice.  Rios Montt was only one player in the slaughter of a quarter million Guatemalans.  All of the other officials involved should also face criminal charges.

One of them, General Otto Perez Molina, Guatemala's current president, was commander in the field during the massacres for which Rios Montt has been indicted.

Another, Ronald Reagan, the prime foreign sponsor of the Rios Montt killings, is of course deceased but many of his top aides are still available.

Bringing Presidents -- and Americans -- to justice may seem like a political pipe dream but that's what they said to the Mayan survivors who first thought of trying Rios Montt.

It took thirty years and much effort and blood but today he faces Guatemalan justice.   How long will it take Americans to reach a comparable level of civilization -- one which would finally enable the US to enforce the law against its own officials? 

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