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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