Source: Human Rights Watch
Former Head of State Charged With Genocide
(Washington, DC) – A Guatemalan judge’s decision to try the former de
facto head of state, Efraín Ríos Montt, for genocide and crimes against
humanity is a major step forward for accountability in Guatemala, Human Rights Watch said today.
Ríos Montt has been under house arrest since January 2012, when the
Attorney General’s Office charged him with ordering the killings of more
than 1,700 Mayan people in Guatemala during the years he was de facto
head of state (1982-1983). The judge, Miguel Ángel Gálvez, also ordered a
former general, José Rodríguez Sánchez, to stand trial for his alleged
role in these crimes.
“Until recently, the idea of a Guatemalan general being tried for these heinous crimes seemed utterly impossible,” said José Miguel Vivanco,
Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “The fact that a judge has
ordered the trial of a former head of state is a remarkable development
in a country where impunity for past atrocities has long been the norm.”
A United Nations-sponsored Commission on Historical Clarification
estimated that as many as 200,000 people were killed during Guatemala’s
internal armed conflict (1960-1996) and attributed 93 percent of the
human rights abuses it documented to state security forces. It concluded
that the military had carried out “acts of genocide.”
In 1996, at the end of the armed conflict, a Law of National
Reconciliation established an amnesty for “political crimes” committed
by both sides during the armed conflict, but explicitly excluded
genocide, torture, enforced disappearances, and crimes that are not
subject to statutes of limitation under international law.
In May 2012, Ríos Montt was also charged with murder and crimes against
humanity in a separate case for his role in a 1982 massacre in the town
of Dos Erres, in the Petén region, in which soldiers murdered more than
250 people, including children. In March, a former member of army
special forces, Pedro Pimentel Ríos, was sentenced to 6,060 years in
prison for his role in the Dos Erres massacre. In 2011, four other
former soldiers received similar sentences for their involvement in the
killings.