Testimony through the graves of Guatemala

On June 2, 1982, armed members of the Guatemalan military walked into the village of Pambach. They separated men from the women and children, then took about 80 men from the village down into the valley. They told the women that the men were being conscripted to serve in the military and would be back in two years.

Later that day, the same group of men were taken to a forest near the town of Tactic where they were butchered -- bludgeoned, beaten, stabbed -- and left as a carpet of corpses on the forest floor.

The next day, the military returned with trucks and moved 84 corpses to Military Zone 21 military base. Unknown to them, one man had survived the massacre despite near fatal wounds. He eventually made his way back to Pambach and broke the news to the women that they would never see their menfolk again. And indeed they never did. They were the latest "disappeared."

The old military base still exists today. It is now a U.N. Peacekeepers training base, run by the Guatemalan military. It is also home to 533 corpses of Guatemalan "disappeared" who did not in fact disappear. They were murdered in cold blood then buried at the base away from prying eyes, but now the evidence is speaking from the grave.

Fredy Pecerelli is a forensic anthropologist who, with his team of experts, has been scouring the countryside of Guatemala for hard evidence of atrocities committed during the civil war from 1960-1996. At its height in 1982, Pambach was one of many Mayan villages accused of supporting guerillas, and purged -- which often meant the wholesale slaughter of its men, women and children.

Sifting through the 533 corpses at the U.N. training base, 49 bodies have been positively identified by Pecerelli's team, 13 from the village of Pambach.

After extensive forensic tests, six of the corpses were being returned to their families 32 years to the day since they were forcibly removed and murdered. Small wooden coffins were loaded into a flatbed truck. Each contained the lab remains of one victim. The truck set off for Pambach. I was in the next vehicle with Fredy. A backup vehicle followed as we wound our way through steep hills in pouring rain, a six hour funeral cortège high into the hills.

Clouds drifted across the landscape occluding the peaks. Deep mud and drizzle dampen the dirty school where six sparkling varnished coffins adorned with flowers are lined up. The schoolyard is full as 250 family members await the arrival of their loved one's remains.

They had done this once before, when the first six identified corpses were returned. There was an air of procedure and expectancy about the ceremony, but it was not religious or liturgical; it was more like a wedding or bar mitzvah -- a mic, a band, expectant relatives. But there was also sorrow clinging to the families like the clouds hugging the hills.

A sudden commotion caught my attention at the end of the courtyard. Standing there were what looked like a military commander in fatigues and a red beret. Closer examination revealed teenagers with fake blood and wooden guns wearing former U.S. Army issue combat wear. It was the beginning of a memorial play, in which children from the local school became perpetrators and victims as they re-enacted the events of 32 years ago. It was chilling to see grandchildren of the disappeared dressed to kill or waiting to be killed.

"They need to learn and this is a good way," says a woman in her 40s.

Large candle flames wafted in the breeze as brightly clad Mayan women with babies strapped to their backs listened as older family members gave their eulogies to their long lost dead.

None of this would be happening at Pambach without the work of Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG), which began over 20 years ago by Pecerelli. It is tough work, digging through corpses and confronting the past they reveals. There are few people in power today in Guatemala who will gain from FAFG's painstaking work and so support is hard to come by. It is easier to forget after all.

No one is immune. Perez Molina, the current president of Guatemala was in a senior intelligence role in the Kaibile -- the special forces responsible for murders similar to those at Pambach among the 200,000 mainly Mayans whowere murdered by the military.

"We can only dig where the prosecutor allows us to," says Pecerelli, pointing out that the exhumations are not for memorial purposes -- they are all criminal investigations. FAFG is interested in ending impunity and meticulously document the evidence as a part of the judicial process.

There have been some judicial victories. In 2013, former Guatemalan president, Efrain Rios Montt who oversaw the most brutal phase of the genocide from 1982 to 1983, was convicted for the crime of genocide. While there have been setbacks, the fact remains that Guatemala was the first state in the Americas to allow a former head of state to stand trial for genocide.

"It was in part the excellent forensic expert witnesses of FAFG who had painstakingly pieced together the evidence that led to a successful conviction," points out New York human rights lawyer, Scott Greathead, who is traveling with us. In addition to evidence produced in Guatemala, U.S. filmmaker Pamela Yates interviewed Montt during the crisis, provided the outtakes. Montt confirmed on camera that he was in control of the military, thereby confirming line of command to the state-sponsored murder that happened at villages such a Pambach.

The speeches in the compound ended. Flowers and candles were passed around. Men from each family stepped forward and lifted the large shiny coffins onto their shoulders, small coffins with human remains are hoisted onto single shoulders; others carried bouquets. One by one, the families formed their own cortège on foot and streamed out of the compound splitting in several directions, with one family snaking up hill and another winding down into the sodden valley.

A crowd gathered at each house for a wake with a difference. In the dimly lit wooden two roomed house 50 people squeezed in, passing chicken soup and tamales as the small coffin with the remains returned from the lab and the shiny new coffin were both opened. The family watched on transfixed, as the lab technician performed her final act with bones she had already handled scores of times. First she laid a silk lining in the coffin. She then placed a pillow where the head would rest, then she took brown envelopes each containing bones, shoes, tattered clothing. Piece by piece she placed the skeleton in its position, a pair of wrinkled decayed shoes neatly placed where feet would have been. She wrapped the white silk lining over the skeleton, then the shiny lid was gently closed.

After 32 years, six more of the disappeared are finally home tonight.

Thursday 05 June 2014

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-d-smith/testimony-through-the-gra_b_5441536.html

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Group helping families of Guatemala's wartime missing returns to LA

When a federal court in Riverside sentences an accused Guatemalan war criminal on immigration fraud charges next month, onlookers will include members of a forensic anthropology team from Guatemala.

Their goal: connect with members of Los Angeles' Guatemalan immigrant community and collect their DNA in hopes of identifying some of the long-unidentified dead from that country's civil war, which ended in 1996 after 36 years of conflict.

Members of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation were last in Los Angeles in October. That's when Jorge Sosa was convicted on charges that he omitted information on his U.S. citizenship application about his involvement in the Guatemalan military during the war.

Sosa, who is to be sentenced Jan. 13, is a former member of an elite unit involved in a notorious 1982 massacre that nearly wiped out the entire village of Dos Erres. He stands to lose his U.S. citizenship and eventually be deported to Guatemala to stand trial for his alleged crimes there.

For Fredy Peccerelli, a forensic anthropologist who directs the non-profit foundation, the closely-followed Sosa trial has provided a way to connect with Guatemalan immigrants who lost – and never found – family members during the war.

“It is important that they understand that they are entitled to know the truth about what happened," Peccerelli said. "That is something that a lot of people have forgotten throughout the years.”

Since 2004, the Guatemala-based group has been exhuming and identifying the bodies of desaparecidos - the disappeared - excavating clandestine mass graves and military sites. Of the estimated 200,000 people who lost their lives during the war, about 45,000 simply vanished, most of them kidnapped by Guatemalan military.

The non-profit NGO receives U.S. and international funding. In 2008, they began collecting DNA from family members with missing relatives in Guatemala. So far they’ve identified more than 3,000 bodies, almost 250 through DNA.

They now hope to expand their reach into the United States. In October, Peccerelli and a technician collected five DNA samples in L.A. In January, he and two technicians plan to come armed with a hundred DNA kits.

In anticipation of their trip next month, they've been working with community groups in Los Angeles to set up meetings and appointments here.

Rosa Posadas heads a Guatemalan immigrant group in L.A. and is among those helping spread the word. She said at least being able to bury a missing loved one provides survivors with a measure of comfort.

“Spiritually, it helps," Posadas said in Spanish, "because being able to have a loved one buried in a holy place at least provides some sort of satisfaction. At least, for our customs – to be able to leave them a flower, to at least be able to speak with them, although we know their souls are in the air, but that their remains are there.”

Peccerelli, who grew up in New York after his own family fled the war, said some family members of desaparecidos are reluctant to come forward because they're still not ready to accept the loss, even decades later.

“You actually only begin to look for your loved one among the dead when you decide to give a DNA sample," he said. "Every single one of these family members still hopes today, even though it is very improbable, that their loved one is alive.”

But he says the likelihood is that they aren’t.

Peccerelli said he's become aware of another need for closure among Guatemalans after meeting with immigrants here last fall, one that has little connection to the long-ago war.

"We have encountered that a lot of their loved ones are disappearing en route to the United States today," he said.

To that end, he hopes to expand the DNA bank to the families of missing migrants, both in Guatemala and the United States, and make that data available to authorities in hopes that more families can find answers.

Saturday 28 December 2013

http://www.scpr.org/blogs/multiamerican/2013/12/27/15482/group-helping-families-of-guatemala-s-wartime-miss/

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Guatemalans use portraits, museum to seek missing

As darkness fell over the peeling colonial houses of Guatemala City, eight young men and women crept through the streets carrying buckets of glue and photocopied pictures of people who'd been missing for decades.

They gathered at the foot of a house stained grey by car exhaust. One man smeared cheap white paste across the base of the nearest wall. A young woman stuck up dozens of handbills with the portraits of the disappeared — a wrinkled woman in a Mayan head wrap, a man wearing the broad lapels favored in 1980s Guatemala. Spray paint hissed as another woman wrote "No Amnesty, No Pardon" in big red letters alongside the portraits of the disappeared. In less than five minutes, the eight were gone, moving quickly to avoid the police.

Their loved ones were just a few of the 45,000 people who disappeared during Guatemala's 36-year civil war, virtually all at the hands of soldiers and allied paramilitaries seeking to wipe out a Marxist guerrilla movement. Almost all the victims are believed to have been killed, often after being raped, tortured, or both, then buried in mass graves, ditches and wells. Many were hurled from helicopters into the sea or volcanic craters. In total, at least 200,000 people were killed during the war.

Yet with fewer than 1,000 of the missing found, five successive right-wing Guatemalan governments have resisted local and international pressure to launch a full-scale effort to find and identify the rest.

Now, a handful of Guatemalans have launched homegrown attempts to draw attention to what human rights groups and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights call a deplorable lack of official action in the face of one of the worst unresolved cases of human-rights violations in the 20th century.

A month ago, about 20 relatives of the disappeared started nighttime forays through the streets of Guatemala City, pasting up tens of thousands of photos of the disappeared, most simple portraits copied from passports and other official documents.

Paulo Estrada was a year old when his father, a university student, disappeared in 1984. A military document leaked to human rights groups in 1999 said that he had been killed, but it didn't say where his body was left.

"I didn't even know him," Paulo Estrada said as he traveled the city pasting up photos of his father and other missing people on a recent Saturday afternoon. "But yes, I want to know where he is and what they did to him."

Families of the disappeared and slain have also built the Museum of the Martyrs and the Union, Student and Popular Movement of Guatemala, whose grand name belies its humble setting — a 30-by-18-foot garage and four small rooms in a converted single-family home.

In Guatemala's only monument to the disappeared, the remains of industrial union leader Amancio Villatoro lie on a red cloth in a glass case, surrounded by photos of him with his family. A member of the guerrilla wing of the Guatemalan Workers Party, he was kidnapped on Jan. 30, 1984, by men in plainclothes. His remains were found in a rural military outpost 27 years later.

Samuel Villatoro, the dead man's son and director of the museum, started weeping as he described how his father was held and tortured for 57 days, according to leaked military documents.

"We don't want to close this story by burying him," said Villatoro, who was eight when his father disappeared. "There's still no justice."

Some of the self-styled activists say they believe they can pressure the state to look for the missing. Others acknowledge that their efforts are unlikely to prompt action.

The activists say government action isn't the main goal, and that they mainly want to remember their loved ones, and force others to remember them, in a country that often seems determined to forget.

The Guatemalan government did not respond to several requests to comment on the topic.

The country's aggressive attorney general has prosecuted several high-ranking officials on war-crimes charges. But the highest-ranking, former dictator Jose Efrain Rios Montt, saw his conviction annulled this year in a high court decision that many saw as a sign of the lingering influence of the wartime military and its backers.

Estrada and his companions say they have posted 5,000 photos since they started about a month ago.

"We want to tell a story that's denied," said Eduardo Hernandez, whose family was one of the few to find the remains of their loved ones. His relatives found the bodies of his mother, grandmother and two uncles outside Guatemala City soon after they disappeared in 1984.

"This type of activity has been like therapy for us. People stop and ask us who these people in the photos are and we tell them our story. It's our way of easing the pain that lingers because of the absence of our loved ones."

In Nov. 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled against Guatemala in the disappearance of 26 people named in the leaked military files. The government has not complied with any of the terms of the court's ruling, including launching a search for the victims as quickly as possible, and building a park or plaza in the memory of the disappeared, where the families could gather to remember their loved ones.

The amateur museum, which opened last year, also contains tributes to Felix and Cesar Augusto Estrada Mejia, brothers, students and members of a guerrilla faction. Felix vanished in 1984, his killing registered in the leaked military document. Cesar Augusto disappeared in 1990 without a trace.

Their brother, Salomon Estrada, who works at the museum, said its purpose is "to remember them, to say that they existed and their relatives still want to know where they are."

A short distance away, the photo-posters gathered for a beer at the end of a night in which they plastered some 1,500 portraits on city walls.

As they planned their next outing, organizer Francisco Sanchez said they would have to keep moving quickly to avoid being hassled by police enforcing anti-graffiti and vandalism laws.

But even some police officers have been touched by the group's efforts, Sanchez said.

"We tell our story to some police and, believe it or not, they are moved and end up agreeing with us," he said.

Friday 15 November 2013

http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2013/11/15/3317079/guatemalans-use-portraits-museum.html

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Guatemala case casts spotlight on indigenous group

Life for the indigenous Ixil Mayans in the mountains west of Guatemala City is worn and static like an old photograph.

Seventeen years after the end of a civil war that saw hundreds of their villages razed and thousands of their loved ones killed, the Ixil people still live in mud-and-wood houses in the most rugged and isolated parts of northwestern Guatemala. Most of them have no drinking water, paved roads or basic services such as health and education.

Largely ignored by authorities for centuries, the Ixil came under the spotlight after a Guatemalan court found former dictator Efrain Rios Montt guilty of genocide on May 10 for the scorched-earth policies used against the Ixil during his 17 months in power in the 1980s.

The conviction was annulled 10 days later following a trial that did nothing to change their lives of the Ixil people.

Byron Garcia, a social anthropologist who has worked in the area for a decade, said Ixil Mayans live in the same poverty as always.

"People have been relegated to less productive places, places where you can't grow food, to the mountains made of stone," Garcia said. "The young people who can, sow plots of land. And when they can't, they migrate."

Feliciana Cobo was 8 when soldiers attacked her village. She and her family separated and ran into the mountains, where they hid for several days with nothing to eat.

Cobo said her mother was killed when the army bombed the village and surrounding area, and her grandmother died later after growing sick from the cold and bad living conditions. Her family eventually lost their land and their poverty deepened.

Now a single mother of three children, the 40-year-old Cobo borrows electricity from a neighbor and supports her kids by washing the clothes of neighbors and weaving garments to sell.

"I grew up during the civil war and I don't know how to read or write. I didn't go to school," Cobo said. "All I know is to weave."

Forensic experts are now exhuming bodies from the cemeteries that the Ixil people created to bury loved ones who died of starvation, hypothermia and disease - as well as munitions - while they hid from the soldiers in the mountains.

"I helped exhume my mother," Cobo said. "I don't know if it was the smoke or the impact of the bombs planes were dropping on us but we all left running and when we got back together, my mother had already died."

Garcia, who now lives in the Guatemalan capital, said that victims feel a need to tell their stories, to be heard, to be indemnified, to find the bodies of their loved ones and be able to bury them.

Cobo said she doubts justice will be done, but is glad some fellow Ixil Mayans could travel to Guatemala City to tell their stories at the trial.

"We're not inventing the dead," she said.

Wednesday 3 July 2013

http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/07/03/3007192/guatemala-case-casts-spotlight.html

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8 Bodies Found in Guatemala Clandestine Grave

Forensic experts say they have discovered eight bodies in a clandestine grave in western Guatemala that dates back to 1982, when former Gen. Efrain Rios Montt was ruling the country amid a civil war.

Guatemala's Forensic Anthropology Foundation director Jose Suasnavar says the excavation in the village of Laguna Burra was conducted at the request of an organization called Oxlajuj Ajpop.

Oxlajuj Ajpop representative Flor Gonzalez says witnesses approached the group with information of several massacres in 1982. She says witnesses told them soldiers kidnapped people in the state of Quiche and then brought them to neighboring Huehuetenango state, where they were killed and buried.

Gonzalez says the group has also requested excavations in Paquish, another village in Huehuetenango where other clandestine graves are believed to be located.

Thursday 2 May 2013

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/bodies-found-guatemala-clandestine-grave-19094667#.UYLHEzRzA34

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Doubt cast over Guatemala ex-dictator's genocide trial

The trial of a former dictator accused of genocide has divided the country and pitted judge against judge, becoming the biggest test yet of Guatemala's fragile justice system.

Until a few days ago, a panel of judges was nearing a verdict in the trial of Efraín Ríos Montt, who ruled Guatemala for 17 months in 1982 and 1983.

He is accused of ordering the massacre of hundreds of indigenous Mayans in this highlands region during military campaigns against leftist guerrillas. Mr. Ríos Montt maintains he is innocent.

Last week, another judge issued a surprise ruling to nullify the trial on technical grounds. That sparked a fight with the trial's presiding judge, who refused to accept it and insisted the case would go on. This week, the country's top court was weighing in as the final arbiter, with a decision likely in coming days.

The uncertainty has stirred anxiety in Guatemala, where the trial has conjured anew memories of the Cold War-era civil war that claimed some 200,000 lives over 36 years.

Perhaps as important, experts say, the case is testing Guatemala's ability to try war-crime cases.

"There are islands of democracy here, but it remains a sea of impunity," said Anita Isaacs, a political-science professor who studies Guatemala at Haverford College, near Philadelphia.



The current president, Otto Pérez Molina—himself a former commander under Mr. Ríos Montt—had been accused during the trial of also having committed war crimes, something he vigorously denies.



Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department on Tuesday said it was sending a top war-crimes diplomat, Stephen Rapp, to visit alleged victims in the case.

In recent weeks, dozens of people took the witness stand to recall military campaigns, which they said included villages burned to the ground by soldiers and dozens of abductions and killings.

Mr. Ríos Montt gave a full-throated defense of his de facto presidency, arguing that his targets were armed leftist guerrilla groups, not civilians. He had no knowledge of the worst events, his attorneys said.

The case centers on the killings of hundreds of civilians in an area called the Ixil Triangle, where the main town of Nebaj is surrounded by mountains that were inhabited by guerrilla fighters in the 1980s.

Mr. Ríos Montt entered office in 1982 after a coup and vowed to stamp out the guerrilla presence in Nebaj and surrounding towns.

He was a controversial figure both then and now, feared by rebels and many indigenous people but supported by others who felt he was turning the tide in Guatemala's long war.

Last week, a team of forensics experts began an exhumation of victims killed during Mr. Ríos Montt's tenure at a military base on the outskirts of Nebaj. Signs along the road offer Guatemalans free services for DNA testing on the remains of loved ones recovered from clandestine graves as a means of positively identifying the bodies.

Approached by a reporter during the trial, Mr. Ríos Montt declined to comment. But his attorney, Francisco Palomo, said Mr. Ríos Montt could not be held accountable for the actions of his soldiers at the time.

Mr. Palomo said that while villages had been burned and civilians were killed by soldiers during Mr. Ríos Montt's tenure, it didn't qualify as genocide and happened without his client's knowledge.

"Just as the president of the United States might not know the specifics of what his troops have done…he didn't either," Mr. Palomo said.

Guatemala's Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, who brought the case to trial, had called the decision last week to annul the case illegal and said that she was confident of getting a conviction.

She says two military documents entered into evidence showed that Mr. Ríos Montt had knowledge of civilian massacres and suggest that they came at his orders.

"They used the words 'extermination' and 'liquidation' in their documents" when referring to the Ixil people, Ms. Paz y Paz said. "This is a strong case."

Mr. Ríos Montt's trial was many years in the making.

Charges were first brought to a Spanish judge in Madrid in 1999 by Rigoberta Menchú, an indigenous activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Ms. Menchú's father was killed by authorities while hiding in the Spanish Embassy in 1980 when Mr. Ríos Montt was a high-ranking military official.

In a recent interview, Ms. Menchú said she took the case to Spain "because here in Guatemala they didn't try war crimes." That case remains in court.

But as the investigation in Spain developed, so did Guatemala's attempts to build its own institutions.

In late 2006, it established the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, known as the CICIG in Spanish, a joint venture with international prosecutors and judges sponsored by the United Nations.

The CICIG's mandate—to specifically target top-level Guatemalan officials who had escaped prosecution—was a major step in clearing the way to begin war crimes trials in the country, said Ms. Isaacs, the political-science professor.

U.N. jurists also trained many of the Guatemalan prosecutors who are now involved in Mr. Ríos Montt's case.

Mr. Ríos Montt, who had returned to political life as a congressman in the 1990s, was at first shielded from prosecution under Guatemala's immunity laws.

But when his term ran out last year, prosecutors filed the charges against him.

Residents interviewed in Nebaj recently described some brutal scenes from those years involving villages destroyed and relatives lost after the arrest by soldiers.

Nicolás Corio, a community organizer who was 10-years-old when Mr. Ríos Montt took office, remembered his village being bombed by government aircraft. He said soldiers later arrived, burned the villagers' homes, destroyed corn crops and killed livestock.

Elena de Paz, 42, who testified during the trial, said soldiers abducted her mother in 1983 and she never heard from her again. Her grandparents and father had previously disappeared in military custody, she said.

"I am the only one who survived," she said, standing near the remnants of a bomb dropped in 1983. "There are people who say [Mr. Ríos Montt] is old, let him out. But he still can think, and he knows he's guilty."

Mr. Palomo said that contrary to the trial testimony, Mr. Ríos Montt still enjoys support in Nebaj. His political party, the Guatemalan Republican Front, still garners many votes there, as it did during Mr. Ríos Montt's long term in the Congress, although he never represented the area personally.

"If it were true that the military had been so bad, would they still vote for him years later?" he said.

Wednesday 24 April 2013

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323551004578437013856080192.html

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The long arc of justice in Guatemala

Thirty years ago, a "scorched earth" counterinsurgency strategy in the Quiche region of Guatemala left 1,771 Maya Ixil dead, tens of thousands displaced, and ruptured the social fabric of the community. This ruthless campaign of state repression was carried out by General Jose Efrain Rios Montt during the darkest chapter of the 36-year conflict, in which 200,000 Guatemalans died, the vast majority of whom were indigenous Mayans, and another 50,000 disappeared. Today, despite a pervasive culture of impunity in Guatemala and a veil of silence still surrounding those years, Rios Montt and Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, his chief intelligence officer, are being prosecuted in Guatemala for genocide and other crimes against humanity, a day many never thought would come.

The selection of intrepid Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz in 2010 ushered in a new era in Guatemala's struggle against impunity. Long accused of atrocities, Rios Montt enjoyed immunity from prosecution as a member of Congress for 20 years, but was charged shortly after his departure from office in 2012. His prosecution sets a historic precedent for the people of Guatemala and the global community, representing the first time a head of state stands trial in a national court for the crime of genocide.

At the front of the cavernous courtroom, three judges sit closely together, occasionally huddled in conference, along a substantial wooden bench that stretched the length of the courtroom. On the wall above hangs the Guatemalan coat of arms: crossed rifles to signify defence of territory, swords emblematic of honour, and the date of Guatemalan independence from Spain etched across a scroll upon which a quetzal is perched, all against a backdrop of bay leaf branches symbolising victory. These lofty symbols however are imbued with a more ambiguous meaning to the vast majority of Guatemalans.

One of the most savage periods in the internal conflict occurred after the bloodless coup that installed General Rios Montt as military leader on March 23, 1982. During his 17 month tenure, Rios Montt escalated and systematised a reign of terror initiated by his predecessor Lucas Garcia. By the time Rios Montt was deposed in a subsequent military coup, a grisly trail of blood laid bare his ruthless counterinsurgency strategy of murdering of men, women, children, the frail, and the elderly, accompanied by the calculated destruction of the fabric of their ancestral communities.

Unable to easily crush the small armed insurgency and the widespread popular movement among many of Guatemala's marginalised people that seemed to escalate along with the repression, Rios Montt developed a new strategy to crush the guerrillas: "If you cannot catch the fish, you must drain the sea". Based on the manipulated assumption that sympathetic indigenous populations provided logistical and ideological support for the insurgents, Rios Montt set out to decimate those communities. This strategy was developed and implemented with both tacit and overt US support: training in counter-insurgency tactics at the School of the Americas, and intelligence and military aid and assistance. Ronald Reagan continued to provide support to the Guatemalan military even after widespread reports of atrocities, claiming that "President Ríos Montt is a man of great personal integrity, and commitment... I know he wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice".

Documents declassified during the late 90s, however, prompted then US President Bill Clinton to apologise. Recognising the evidentiary weight and power of both the declassified documents that contained categorical evidence of US complicity in the atrocities and the UN Historical Clarification Commission's nine-volume report, Clinton stated, "It is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong." Some critics denounced the apology as hollow and misleading for failing to acknowledge that American support for Guatemalan military repression was an intentional effort to advance its own political and economic interests, despite the unspeakable and incalculable suffering it engendered.

After the conflict's end, the Historical Clarification Commission concluded that the military was responsible for 93 percent of the deaths, and that in four areas, the State of Guatemala committed genocide against its indigenous Mayan population. The Recovery of Historical Memory report [SP] of the Catholic Church echoed those findings. The department of Quiche was home to the Maya Ixil, considered by the military to be courageous and recalcitrant, and unusually resistant to dispossession from their ancestral lands. The military concluded that the insurgents had succeeded in the complete indoctrination of the Ixil, enjoying the support of 100 percent of the population in that area, though the reality was far more complicated and nuanced. Unable to easily suppress the resistance, the military fixated on the annihilation of the "internal enemy" through killing zones, a strategy documented by witnesses and memorialised in detailed military plans, including Operation Sofia.

'Scorched earth'

In the early days of the genocide trial, survivors of Rios Montt's "scorched earth" policy testified in harrowing detail about the abuses they suffered and the horrors they witnessed. Supporters populated the court to bear witness to the testimony of their companions, mere yards from the man accused of devastating their communities. Experts testified about their painstaking forensic work that documented causes of death and helped grieving families reclaim and rebury their loved ones. After weeks of gut-wrenching testimony, the next phase of the trial centred on demonstrating the carefully designed military plan of the Guatemalan military to "exterminate the subversive elements" of the Ixil. To achieve that goal, the military killed men, women, children, infants, aged and infirmed people, and deliberately ruptured the fabric of their communities by burning crops, slaughtering animals, destroying cultural artifacts and severing sacred spiritual connections to their ancestral lands.

The past was inextricably linked to the present, when Hugo Ramiro Leonardo Reyes, a former army mechanic, testified by video from an undisclosed location, fearing reprisal. The witness elicited audible gasps from the audience by implicating sitting president Otto Perez Molina in the crimes committed in Quiche in 1982, when he served as a field commander. This echoed other accusations from human rights groups that Perez Molina was complicit in war crimes in that region. These allegations are substantiated by a video of Major Tito, the nom de guerre of Perez Molina, standing over the bodies of guerrillas who witnesses say were tortured before being summarily executed in Nebaj in 1982. Perez Molina confirmed to the Prensa Libre in 2000 that Major Tito was his pseudonym, though he later denied the connection.

The US supported brutality was contextualised by various witnesses as occurring in the panic after the Cuban Revolution and the Cold War, when the US was particularly apprehensive about the geopolitics of the hemisphere. The US-sponsored coup in 1954 overthrew democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz, whose incipient agrarian reform efforts inflamed US concerns that Guatemalan land reform would compromise US military and political hegemony and private commercial interests in the region. Many analysts condemn the US's "wretched record of military cooperation" that led to deadly state repression against its own people throughout Central America during that era, a charge that continues to this day.

The defence endeavoured to exculpate Rios Montt on several substantive grounds, and engaged in an orchestrated strategy to delegitimise the trial. Denying that genocide occurred, defence witnesses attributed many of the atrocities to the insurgents themselves, while other deaths were characterised as unintentional collateral damage in the internal conflict for which Rios Montt bears no responsibility. Moreover, the defence argued that groups were targeted for ideological reasons, and politically motivated repression does not constitute genocide. The defence further claimed that Rios Montt did not exercise command responsibility over those on the ground in Quiche and elsewhere, and that he was unaware of and could not control rogue members of the military who perpetrated massacres. Rios Montt's own words, memorialised in an interview by Pamela Yates in 1982, came back to haunt him: while the notably less vigorous Rios Montt sat passively at the defence table, a younger, smiling and animated version played on a screen above his head, confidently declaring in response to a question of his control that "if I can't control the Army, then what am I doing here?"

A protracted trial

Amplifying the voice of the victims is important and meaningful, and their testimony has reinvigorated a historically stunted national dialogue about the dark side of Guatemala's recent past. But progressive elements of Guatemalan society are not sanguine about the transformative potential of a conviction. Survivors, lawyers, judges, witnesses and human rights defenders continue to receive threats. A conviction would clearly not be the end of the tortuous legal road on which this sordid story has travelled. Even before the trial's inception, defence attorneys have engaged in dilatory tactics and have been carefully laying the groundwork for multiple avenues of appeal, voicing their objections at every stage of the proceedings and engaging in a what critics characterise as a deliberate campaign to undermine the legitimacy of the trial. The appeals process could easily outlast an ageing Rios Montt's natural life, and would certainly endure past Paz y Paz's tenure as Attorney General.

Despite international condemnation of the genocide and the recent publicity engendered by the trial, many Guatemalans are either unaware of or deny that genocide occurred, including President Perez Molina and members of the business elite. Some who were hopeful that the public spotlight of trial would advance truth, memory and justice are sobered by the tenor of the regressive discourse it has generated. As we sat in the courtroom, the founder of the Foundation Against Terrorism was surrounded by press photographers, posing with a copy of the 20 page document he paid to distribute in the national newspaper that day. Replete with photographs, the gruesome document presents a starkly different narrative of the past, accusing the insurgents and their supporters of committing the atrocities and inflaming an already bitterly divided populace. The next day's newspaper sported a full page advertisement, decrying the trial and accusing survivors and their advocates of polarising the country and rubbing raw old wounds, a narrative many feared would incite violent reprisals. A reckoning will not come easily to Guatemala.

Some people believe that irrespective of the trial's outcome, members of ravaged Ixil communities have finally been provided with a public forum to recount their excruciating truths and honour the memory of their dead. As I sat with a group of massacre survivors around a long table draped with traditional artisanal cloths, my belief in the importance of reconciliation was deepened. The group thanked us for accompanying them in their struggles, told us they drew strength from our solidarity, and shared their stories of profound sorrow and incalculable loss. We absorbed their anguish and horror, and were humbled and inspired by their fortitude, dignity, faith and steely determination to unearth truth, preserve memory and seek justice, to honour the dead and to ensure that history never repeats itself. As tears trickled down my cheeks, a soft-spoken man across the table held my gaze, and with the poignant gesture of a gentle nod and a subtle smile, conveyed his appreciation that we had come to bear witness and affirmed our shared humanity.

The survivor's unwavering faith in ultimate justice would be tested only hours later, when the judicial process took a turn that shocked even hardened observers. The initial judge to hear the charges had just annulled the proceedings, a decision poised to cost survivors and their lawyers even more time and strain already depleted financial and emotional resources. When Judge Jazmin Barrios indicated that the proceedings would continue, prompting defence attorneys to stage a theatrical walkout, in violation of their professional and ethical responsibilities.

At the much anticipated session in court the next morning, an unflappable and resolute Judge Barrios electrified the packed courtroom as she read her eloquent and impeccably supported legal arguments, declared her commitment to uphold the rule of law, and vowed that the trial would continue. Given the legal and political manoeuvring, Judge Barrios suspended the proceedings pending a final decision from the Constitutional Court. Court observers erupted into elated applause, and gathered outside to march to the Constitutional Court, amid the rhythm of drums and banners of solidarity proclaiming that "We are all Ixils". In a process marked by irregularities and setbacks, it is hard to predict what comes next. But one thing is clear: justice may be delayed yet again, but the resilient survivors, fiercely determined lawyers and their supporters will continue to wage this struggle.

No panacea, but cathartic

While symbolically important, no one believes that Rios Montt's ultimate conviction would be a panacea. Guatemala faces seemingly insurmountable challenges, and a guilty verdict would not curtail the violence plaguing the country, nor dismantle the country's deeply entrenched structural inequality, legendary impunity, endemic racism, pervasive and severe poverty, corrupt institutions, ongoing land rights struggles, femicide, targeted killings of community leaders, or mayhem attributed to drug trafficking and gangs. But truth, collective memory and healing are essential for survivors of atrocities and for the country as a whole, as societies that do not reckon with a violent past will continue to suffer from its enduring legacy.

It is remarkable that survivors who lost everything but their humanity somehow possess the grace, courage and unshakable faith that despite everything, justice will be served. For a country with a notoriously corrupt judicial system, Judge Barrios is an inspiring beacon of integrity, impartiality, independence and professionalism. The next weeks will be perilous for human rights defenders, survivors and their supporters, as threats to unleash violent reprisals intensify. In these harrowing times, the accompaniment and solidarity of the international community can make a measurable and meaningful difference for the morale and safety of these brave and irrepressible souls.

The arc of history is long in Guatemala, but perhaps the survivors will be vindicated in their unwavering belief that charges against Rios Montt will bend the future towards justice.

Monday 22 April 2013

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/04/2013422115046800678.html

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Guatemala confronts a dark chapter

The soldiers killed Jacinto Lopez's teenage daughter Magdalena by repeatedly stabbing her in the neck.

Then they shot and killed his sons, 13-year-old Domingo and 10-year-old Pedro.

His in-laws were not spared. Barely anyone in the village was.

These atrocities which took place in the remote Guatemalan town of Santa Maria Nebaj in July of 1982 have never been described in a courtroom.

Until now.

For the first time Lopez has shared his terrifying story in the nation's highest court.

And for the first time "anywhere in the world," according to the United Nations, a former head of state is being tried for genocide by his own nation's justice system. That man is Efrain Rios Montt, an ex-military dictator who ruled Guatemala from 1982 to 1983.

"They killed my family and destroyed our crops," Lopez testified. "They took even my cows."

The attack against the Lopez family was just one of countless assaults in the early 1980s during the war between the Guatemalan government and leftist rebels.

The military used the rebel threat as a guise to exterminate rural Ixil Mayan villages accused of harboring insurgents, prosecutors say. According to prosecutors, the campaign led to the genocide of more than 1,700 Ixil Mayans.

Previous accusations of genocide, such as in Rwanda or against Serbia, have been presided over by international judges. The Guatemala attacks are considered by many experts as the only incident of genocide in the Western Hemisphere during the modern era.

The trial reignites debate over the United States' controversial pro-government policies in the region during the 1980s. It also offers a fascinating look in real time at how a nation is choosing to face its own demons. Painful public testimony could help heal the national betrayal reflected in the faces of many Mayan victims.

Lopez, now 82 years old, is among dozens of witnesses who have testified at the trial being heard by the nation's three-judge Supreme Court.

Guatemala begins first genocide trial

Rios Montt, 86, is accused of authorizing a military strategy so brutal that it was labeled "scorched earth." His attorneys say that the former dictator did not order any of the atrocities.

The United States stands accused in the court of public opinion. Critics say Washington turned a blind eye to the abuses, and worse. The Reagan administration claimed violence was decreasing during Rios Montt's tenure, and in 1983, lifted a U.S. arms embargo. But there are bookends for this dark chapter of Central American history. More recently, the United States has pushed for Guatemalan judicial reform that has made this trial possible.

Horrific memories

For generations the Ixil have lived in mountainous villages in the country's northwest, mostly isolated from the rest of Guatemala and the world. According to the country's 2002 census, Guatemalan Ixil number around 95,000, less than 1% of the nation's population.

They still speak primarily the Ixil language, and most of the witnesses called to the stand so far have spoken through a translator. The horrific stories that more than 70 prosecution witnesses have revealed so far have been hard to hear in any language.

They started raping me ... I don't know how many took turns ... I lost consciousness.

"I was 12 years old," said one woman, whose identity was protected by the court. "They took me with the other women and they tied my feet and hands. They put a rag in my mouth ... and they started raping me ... I don't know how many took turns. ... I lost consciousness ... and the blood kept running. ... Later I couldn't even stand or urinate."

Stories about rape were so widespread that the trial set aside an entire day of testimony just for rape victims.

Their shocking stories prompted many of the hundreds of Guatemalans sitting in the courtroom to use their hands to cover their mouths. The powerful proceedings often wrapped the courtroom in profound silence, only to be broken by the sound of sobbing.

Pedro Chavez Brito was 6 or 7 years old when the military attacked his village in November 1982. Soldiers killed his mother, he told the court. In a frantic bid to escape, he hid with his pregnant sister and her two children among the family's chickens.

It didn't work.

When soldiers found them, they lashed Chavez's sister to the stairs of their home, he testified. The soldiers then set the house on fire, killing her and her two children, Chavez testified. Seven other family members may have died in the fire, he said.

Chavez, like many other survivors, lived to share his story because he fled into the unforgiving mountains.

That's how Maria Cruz Raymundo and her family escaped, too. But conditions there were so harsh that her husband, daughter and son starved to death, she told the court.

More than 100 witnesses have taken the stand so far -- a marathon of gruesome stories.

Another witness, Nicholas Bernal, testified that he, too, escaped to the mountains.

Bernal told the court he had watched soldiers kill his neighbors and then rip out their hearts and burn their bodies.

Each passing day of the trial reveals similar nightmarish stories. Human rights organizations such as the Center for Legal Action in Human Rights and Association for Justice and Reconciliation are broadcasting the trial live on the Internet. In addition, the U.S.-based Open Society Justice Initiative is providing daily summaries on a dedicated website. Testimony in this report is culled from all these sources and state news media.

Shifting U.S. behavior

When Rios Montt assumed power in a coup in 1982, Guatemala was already in the throes of a violent civil war that would last 36 years. The insurgency, and extrajudicial killings by the military, had been going on for two decades as part of the broader conflicts between leftist rebels and hardline governments across the region.

By the time a peace accord was reached in 1996, an estimated more than 200,000 perished.

Rios Montt faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity connected to his 16 months as dictator. He is being tried together with his then-chief of military intelligence, Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez.

Sanchez is accused of designing and executing the army's strategy.

When Rios Montt became president, human rights violations had already prompted the United States to cut off aid to the Guatemalan government. But a political scandal in the U.S. in the 1990s revealed that in fact the CIA continued to provide money to Guatemalan military intelligence sources for years during the civil war.

Now declassified secret CIA cables indicate that the United States had knowledge of the atrocities being committed against the Ixil Mayans, but did little about it, according to Victoria Sanford, director of the Center for Human Rights & Peace Studies at the City University of New York.

"At best they chose to look away, but often they were covering it up," Sanford said.

In one CIA document, from February 1983, the agency reports to Washington that an increase in violence against civilians is due to "right-wing violence."

But the U.S. ambassador at the time added a note to that same memo with a distinct explanation: "I am firmly convinced that the violence described ... is government of Guatemala ordered and directed violence."

Another CIA memo shows the U.S. government may have had knowledge of the violent tactics being employed against the Ixil Mayans.

"When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed," the 1982 document states. "The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is (pro-rebel) has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."

Critics blame the United States, in its anti-communist zeal, of standing by during these atrocities by denying them and lifting the arms embargo. Then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan went as far as to say that Rios Montt was being given a "bum rap" by critics. At the same time, the United States was backing other strongmen in Latin America against leftists.

But if the United States deserves criticism for remaining quiet during Rios Montt's rule, it also should be credited for supporting Guatemalan efforts to put the former dictator on trial, said Anita Isaacs, a professor of political science at Haverford College whose research focuses on Guatemalan politics.

"This trial wouldn't be occurring were it not for the role played by the United States pushing for reform in Guatemala's judicial system," she said.

In her view, the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala from 2008-2011, Stephen McFarland, was "single-handedly" responsible for shifting the country's perception of the United States from meddling to supportive.

McFarland listened to survivors' stories of the civil war and attended hearings in support of the victims, she said.

The trial

The historic nature of the trial isn't lost on the nation's public, although some say too much time has passed for the process to be fair.

Even the current President Otto Perez Molina, a former general who once commanded troops in the Ixil lands, has said he believes there was no genocide. Instead, some see the attacks as a kind of national defense campaign.

The Guatemalan military viewed the Ixil Mayans as rebel collaborators who threatened the government.

This view is shared by protesters with military ties who have stood outside the courthouse, holding signs demanding respect for the military and a fair trial. One demonstrator, Victor Manuel Argueta, told the state-run AGN news agency that the soldiers are "proud of what we did during the civil war."

The army in the early 1980s, he said, "was dedicated to defending the people from those who wanted to usurp power." The trial, he said, is nothing more than a "political lynching."

U.S. declassified documents repeated the Guatemalan military's assertion that the Ixil were protecting the rebels.

But dozens of studies by anthropologists have indicated that it was much more complex than that, said Kate Doyle, director of the Guatemala Documentation Project at the National Security Archive, a leading research institute.

Some Ixil Mayans joined the guerrillas as combatants and others provided food or protection, but still others were unconnected with the rebels. Some even actively opposed the rebels, she said.

Since the trial began, Rios Montt has fired his attorneys and then rehired them.

Defense attorneys have argued there's no evidence proving that Rios Montt ordered any of the abuses.

His lawyers have repeatedly and unsuccessfully demanded that the chief judge recuse herself. They say the judge violated Rios Montt's rights by pressing on with the trial when his attorneys were not prepared.

A victory, no matter the outcome?

The victims' stories are haunting, and the desire for justice strong, but the task of proving genocide isn't easy.

Prosecutors must prove the attacks targeted a specific ethnic group with the intention of destroying it, said Naomi Roht-Arriaza, a law professor at the University of California Hastings College of Law.

To convict Rios Montt, prosecutors must also convince the judges that he was responsible.

What's at stake is less clear. The genocide charges are without precedent. If Rios Montt and Rodriguez Sanchez are convicted, their maximum possible sentences are unknown.

In 2011, a Guatemalan court sentenced four soldiers to 6,060 years in prison each for their role in the 1982 massacre at Dos Erres, a village where 201 were killed. Thirty years for each death. A fifth soldier was sentenced to the same last year. The unheard of sentences were for crimes against humanity, not genocide.

Given Rios Montt's age, many assume that he will serve little, if any, time in prison if convicted.

For the moment, legal observers say the trial itself stands as a huge triumph.

A national conversation

So many of the Ixil Mayans have described their ordeals using the same phrase: They said the army treated them "like animals."

These heart-wrenching revelations, said Roht-Arriaza, allow victims a very important opportunity.

Finally, they can acknowledge in a public courtroom the horrors they experienced so many years ago.

Several witnesses said they do not seek revenge, but simply want to be "liberated" by having their stories etched in the official record.

They must "make public what they may have kept inside," Roht-Arriaza said. "It opens up the nation to conversation. It lets people see that the justice system works."

Looking into the eyes of some of the victims in the courtroom, it's hard to know if they reflect pain or faith or peace -- or the relief of a weight lifted.

As the witnesses detail their horrifying stories, Rios Montt sits just a few feet away, expressionless. Listening.

As Isaacs put it, this "in itself is a form of justice."

Thursday 11 April 2013

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/11/world/americas/guatemala-rios-montt-trial/

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UN High Commissioner for Human Rights hails start of genocide trial in Guatemala

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on Monday welcomed the ground-breaking trial of Guatemala’s former head of state and former head of intelligence, due to begin on 19 March, and urged the authorities “to take all necessary measures to ensure that judges, prosecutors, lawyers and others involved are protected from intimidation and reprisals.”

The trial of Guatemala’s former head of state Efraín Ríos Montt, and former head of intelligence José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, for genocide and crimes against humanity is set to start on Tuesday, after the Constitutional Court rejected a writ of protection (‘amparo’) filed by Ríos Montt’s defence lawyers that cited a 1986 amnesty law.

"I welcome the beginning of this historic trial, and I hope that it will signal arrival of long-awaited justice for thousands of victims of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity committed during the murderous 36-year conflict in Guatemala," Pillay said. “I also commend the decision of the Constitutional Court – genocide and crimes against humanity should never be covered by amnesties. Along with war crimes, these are among the gravest crimes known to mankind.”

“This is the first time, anywhere in the world, that a former head of State is being put on trial for genocide by a national tribunal,” she said. “Until quite recently, no one believed a trial like this could possibly take place in Guatemala, and the fact that it is happening there, 30 years after the alleged crimes were committed, should give encouragement to victims of human rights violations all over the world.”

The High Commissioner called on the authorities to uphold their responsibility to guarantee a fair and independent trial.

"The principles of independence of the judiciary imply that judges must be protected from undue influence, inducements, threats or interference, in order to ensure the proper enforcement of justice, with full impartiality and transparency, and due process," Pillay said.

Noting a recent wave of intimidation and attacks against journalists, judicial personnel and human rights defenders, including the killing in February of a lawyer working on corruption cases, the High Commissioner urged the authorities “to take all necessary measures to ensure that judges, prosecutors, lawyers and others involved may carry out their functions without fear for their life, integrity and security, or those of their families. The protection of all those involved in this crucial case is essential, if the rule of law is to be seen to be respected, and truth and justice are to prevail in Guatemala.”

Monday 18 March 2013

http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=13155&LangID=E

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Earthquake Death Toll Climbs After Additional Bodies Discovered in Guatemala

Guatemalan emergency agencies recovered two bodies that had been buried in rubble since the powerful earthquake that struck the country last week, bringing the official death toll from the disaster to 44, authorities said Tuesday.

The latest victims were found in two communities in San Marcos province, the region most affected by the magnitude-7.2 temblor that struck the Central American nation last Wednesday.

Participating in the recovery efforts are dozens of soldiers and firefighters as well as residents of the San Marcos communities.

Besides the 44 fatalities, the quake left 9,414 houses damaged and forced thousands of people into temporary shelters.

Authorities have still not tabulated the economic losses from the earthquake but President Otto Perez - who is visiting the affected areas - said on Tuesday that an estimate could be in hand by next Friday.

The government decreed a state of emergency in eight of the country’s 22 provinces to facilitate the sending of aid to the affected zones and the process of reconstruction. Last week’s earthquake was the strongest to hit Guatemala since the Feb. 4, 1976, magnitude-7.5 temblor that claimed the lives of more than 25,000 people and caused millions of dollars in damage.

Thursday 15 November 2012

http://www.hispanicallyspeakingnews.com/notitas-de-noticias/details/earthquake-death-toll-climbs-after-additional-bodies-discovered-in-guatemal/19838/

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Hope fades after Guatemala earthquake

There is little chance of finding anyone else alive under the rubble, Guatemalan officials say.

At a 7.4 magnitude, Wednesday's earthquake was the strongest quake to hit the country in more than 30 years, and left 52 people confirmed dead, with dozens more missing, and several thousand homeless, displaced, or without power.

The tremor hit off the country's Pacific coast on Wednesday, leaving many villagers near the Mexican border trapped under rubble, as homes and cars were crushed.

Subsequent landslides blocked roads, making both evacuation and rescue efforts more difficult.

"I talked to rescue workers this afternoon who said they have switched their operations from attempts to find people alive to trying to find those who have died and trying to recover their bodies," said Al Jazeera's Rachel Levin.

"There is little hope here that they will actually find any more survivors. That's the mood here and also throughout other parts of this state, San Marcos, the largest, most populated state in Guatemala with a little over a million people.

"The president did come here yesterday to give his support to people, but people in the community here are saying that they actually haven't seen much help from the government - it's really their neighbours, people from nearby towns, that are pitching in to help out these people in any way that they can."

President Otto Perez said the government would pay for the funerals of all those killed in the mountainous San Marcos region.

"It's very sad to meet people here who are waiting to find their families who are still buried," he said on Wednesday. "It's really a tragedy and we will do all we can to help the families that are suffering."

Hitting 42km below the surface, it was the strongest earthquake to strike the Central American nation since 1976.

In San Cristobal Cochu, ten members of the Vasquez were killed after the rock quarry where they worked collapsed during the earthquake. Only the family's oldest son, 19-year-old Ivan, survived.

Justo Vasquez, his wife Ofelia Gomez, six children and two nephews died in the rubble.

On Thursday, dozens of neighbours and friends came to the Vasquez family home to pay their respects, filing past the ten wooden caskets in the living room.

"I feel sad, because I knew them and the children shouldn't have died like that," said Antonioa Miranda, a neighbour and the children's nursery school teacher.

Mourner Siomara Alfaro added: "You start to let your imagination go. At that moment, what desperation they felt at that moment to save their lives - but they couldn't, it was too quick."

The death toll is still expected to rise, as at least 22 people remain missing.

The quake struck 32km below the surface, 24km off the coastal town of Champerico, 160km southwest of Guatemala City.

In Guatemala City, volunteers were gathering aid and supplies to send to the affected region, where an estimated 1.2 million Guatemalans were affected.

Julio Franco, a volunteer from Aero Club Guatemala, formed a team with many other volunteers in the nation's capital, gathering together aid packages that were about to be flown out to San Marcos.

"We are loading the planes with blankets which we know are needed by our brothers and sisters in San Marcos, and also some medication to treat emergencies," he said.

Friday 9 november 2012

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2012/11/20121193586994133.html

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Bodies of family found amid Guatemala ruins's ruins

The 10 members of the Vasquez family were found together under the rubble of the rock quarry that had been their livelihood, some in a desperate final embrace, others clinging to the faintest of dying pulses.

As Guatemalans sought yesterday to pick up the pieces after Wednesday's 7.4-magnitude earthquake, one family's tragic story came to symbolize the horror of a disaster that killed 52 people and left thousands of others huddling in the cold shadows of cracked adobe buildings, most without electricity or water.

Neighbors came to pay their respects. They filed past 10 wooden coffins in the Vasquez family living room, and contemplated the unspeakable future that awaits the family's only surviving son. Justo Vasquez, his wife, Ofelia Gomez, six children and two nephews died.

Only the eldest son, Ivan, 19, survived. He had stayed in the house when the rest of his family went to the quarry, taking care of last-minute details for his accounting degree -- the first in his family to have a professional career. His father had been saving for a party to celebrate his Nov. 23 graduation.

"He died working," sister-in-law Antonia Lopez said. "He was fighting for his kids." Hundreds of villagers in the humble town of San Cristobal Cucho ran to dig the family out after Guatemala's biggest quake in 36 years. When they uncovered some of the children, one body still warm, two with pulses, they were in the arms of their father, who had tried to shield them from a falling mountain.

The death toll was expected to rise as 22 people remained missing, President Otto Perez Molina told a news conference.

Perez said the powerful quake, felt as far as Mexico City, 600 miles away, affected as many as 1.2 million Guatemalans. More than 700 people were in shelters, with most opting to stay with family or friends, he added.

"They have no drinking water, no electricity, no communication and are in danger of experiencing more aftershocks," Perez said. There had been 70 aftershocks in the first 24 hours after the quake, some as strong as magnitude 5.1, he said.

Friday 9 November 2012

http://www.newsday.com/news/world/bodies-of-family-found-amid-guatemala-ruins-s-ruins-1.4203232

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Guatemala quake toll rises as search for survivors continues

Rescue workers today carted out dead bodies found under rubble in the aftermath of Guatemala's most powerful earthquake in decades, while others cleared wrecked cars and collapsed buildings as they searched for survivors.

Most of those killed by yesterday's 7.4-magnitude quake were crushed under debris in San Marcos state, a mountainous region near the Mexican border. Nearly two dozen people were still missing and President Otto Perez forecast the death toll would climb from 52.

But in a glimmer of hope, emergency workers said they pulled seven people alive from rubble at a construction site on the outskirts of San Marcos city.

Lying in a hospital bed in obvious pain, Jesus Ramirez recounted how he had tried to rescue his nieces and was trapped.

"My mother shouted to me to go and see my nieces," he said. "I wanted to pull them out, but couldn't, because the wall of my house fell on them and on me too.

"I lost my leg, they amputated it."

His mother and two nieces were later found dead.

On the outskirts of the city of San Marcos, rescuers stepped up efforts at a collapsed construction site. Emergency workers in white hard hats used tractors and trucks to shift debris blocking roads. Cars were crushed, highways were peppered with gaping cracks and modest homes had crumbled.

"The people of San Marcos are in deep mourning," said Wilfred de Leon, one of whose relatives was buried by rubble and feared dead.

The quake destroyed roads and forced evacuations as far away as Mexico City. It was the strongest to hit the Central American nation since 1976, when a 7.5-magnitude quake killed more than 20,000 people.

"Sadly, we expect the number [of dead] to keep rising," President Perez told a news conference in Guatemala City. He said 22 people were missing and around 200 injured.

Hundreds more were living in shelters.

Help has poured in from as far afield as Taiwan, including 44 tonnes of humanitarian aid destined for San Marcos.

Perez was set to fly to Quetzaltenango - the country's second largest city - to survey nearby damage later in the day. He said nearly 3000 people had been evacuated from their homes, while more than one million have been affected by the quake.

"Reconstruction will not be easy, because there are homes that are uninhabitable," Perez said, adding that the government had set aside US$60 million (NZ$72 million) for rebuilding.

He announced a state of emergency in four of the country's 22 states - San Marcos, Quetzaltenango, Quiche, and Huehuetenango.

Local Red Cross chief Carlos Enrique Alvarado said yesterday that 75 homes were destroyed in the city of San Marcos alone and authorities said damage to the prison forced them to transfer 101 inmates to another jail.

Perez, who announced three days of national mourning, said he was suspending all vacation time for more than 25,000 members of the national police force, who are being enlisted in rescue and cleanup efforts.

Authorities have distributed 16,000 emergency rations and mobilised more than 2000 soldiers to help with the rescue effort.

The quake's epicentre was 42 km below the surface, according to the US Geological Survey. It was felt in El Salvador and more than 1,223km away in Mexico City, where some people also fled offices and homes.

Friday 9 November 2012

http://tvnz.co.nz/world-news/guatemala-quake-toll-rises-search-survivors-continues-5206709

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Guatemala earthquake: 48 dead, residents fear aftershocks

Guatemalans fearing aftershocks huddled in the dark and frigid streets of this mountain town wrapped in blankets early on Thursday, while others crowded inside its hospital, the only building left with electricity after a powerful earthquake killed at least 48 people and left dozens more missing.

Crews worked through the night in San Marcos, searching rubble for survivors and more dead following the magnitude 7.4 quake that struck on Wednesday near Guatemala's border with Mexico.

In the town of San Cristóbal Cucho, firefighters picked at a collapsed house trying to dig out 10 members of one family, including a four-year-old child, who were buried, fire department spokesman Ovidio Perez told the radio station Emisoras Unidas.

Volunteers carrying boxes of medical supplies began arriving in the area in western Guatemala late on Wednesday.

Eblin Cifuentes, a 26-year-old law student, and a group of his classmates already were collecting medical supplies as part of a school drive to provide aid for the only hospital in San Marcos, a poor, mainly indigenous mountain area of subsistence farms. When the quake hit, the group decided to bring everything they had collected.

"Thank God nothing happened to us and that's why we have to help out," Cifuentes said.

The quake caused terror over an unusually wide area, with damage reported in all but one of Guatemala's 22 states and shaking felt as far away as Mexico City, 600 miles (965 km) to the north-west.

It hit hardest in San Marcos, where more than 30 homes collapsed and many of the colourful adobe buildings in its centre were either cracked or reduced to rubble, including the police station and the courthouse. The tore a large gash in one of the streets. Hundreds of frightened townspeople stayed in the open, refusing to go back inside after more than five strong aftershocks shook the area.

President Otto Pérez Molina said that 40 people died in the state of San Marcos and eight more were killed in the neighbouring state of Quetzaltenango.

Hundreds of people crammed into the hallways of San Marcos' small hospital after the quake seeking help for injured family members. Some complained they were not getting care quickly enough.

Ingrid Lopez, who bought in a 72-year-old aunt whose legs were crushed by a falling wall, said she had waited hours for an X-ray.

"We ask the president to improve conditions at the hospital," she said. "There isn't enough staff."

More than 300 firefighters, police officers and civilians dug desperately at a half-tonne mound of sand at a quarry trying to rescue seven people believed buried alive. Among those under the sand was a six-year-old boy who had accompanied his grandfather to work.

"I want to see Giovanni! I want to see Giovanni!" the boy's mother, 42-year-old Francisca Ramirez, frantically cried. "He's not dead. Get him out."

By Wednesday night, firefighters had dug out two bodies from the quarry, including Giovanni's.

Pérez flew to San Marcos to view the damage in this lush mountainous region of 50,000 indigenous farmers and ranchers, many belonging to the Mam ethnic group.

"One thing is to hear about what happened and another thing entirely is to see it," the president said. "As a Guatemalan I feel sad ... to see mothers crying for their lost children."

Pérez said the government would pay for the funerals of all victims in the region.

Efrain Ramos helped load a tiny casket carrying the body of his six-year-old niece from San Marcos' morgue to a waiting pickup truck.

"The little girl died when a wall fell over her," a shocked Ramos told a reporter. He said the girl was playing in her room when the quake hit.

Sobbing uncontrollably, the girl's mother hugged the coffin wrapped with white lace and tulle.

Ramos said the family would escort his niece Rosa's body back home for a viewing.

The quake, which was 20 miles deep, was centred 15 miles off the coastal town of Champerico and 100 miles south-west of Guatemala City. It was the strongest earthquake to hit Guatemala since a 1976 temblor that killed 23,000.

Officials said most of 100 missing were from San Marcos, where people farm corn and herd cattle, mostly for their own survival.

Hospital officials in San Marcos said they had received 150 injured.

Pérez said more than 2,000 soldiers were deployed to help with the disaster. A plane had made at least two trips to carry relief teams to the area.

Thursday 8 November 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/08/guatemala-earthquake-victims-fear-aftershocks

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Ten dead in 'intense' 7.4 Guatemala earthquake

A 7.4-magnitude earthquake has struck off the coast of Guatemala, killing "around 10" people, causing panicked evacuations as far as Mexico City and a tsunami alert in El Salvador.

The victims died in the Guatemalan town of San Pedro Sacatepequez, some 250 kilometres west of the capital Guatemala City.

"Reports from colleagues in the area indicate that there are around 10 dead," firefighters' spokesman Sergio Vazquez said.

Communication was difficult in the area because phone lines fell and several places were without power, Vazquez said.

The Guatemalan national disaster response agency (Conred) had confirmed only one death.

In El Salvador, the president ordered people in a coastal area to evacuate their homes over fears of a potential tsunami.

The US Geological Survey said the quake struck some 24 kilometres south of Champerico, Guatemala and 163 kilometres west-southwest of Guatemala City. The depth was 41.6 kilometres.

The Mexican Seismological Service said nine aftershocks followed the quake, which it put at a magnitude of 7.3, some 68 kilometres southwest of Ciudad Hidalgo in the state of Chiapas.

The quake was strongly felt in Guatemala City and southern Mexico, prompting scenes of panic across the region. People streamed out of homes, schools and office buildings as far north as Mexico City.

"We just had an earthquake," Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard wrote on Twitter.

"It was intense in a good part of the city,'' he said, adding later that the quake did not cause any damage in the sprawling metropolis of 20 million people.

One Mexico City metro line was briefly suspended but Ebrard reported moments later that the system was back running normally.

Buildings were also evacuated in the southern Mexican states of Oaxaca and Chiapas, without reports of damage or victims.

"I was scared. It was horrible," Uvita Mena, who lives in the Chiapas town of Tuxtla Gutierrez, told AFP.

The USGS had initially measured the quake at 7.5 magnitude.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was no destructive widespread tsunami threat, but Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes ordered evacuations in Puerto de la Libertad and other western coastal towns.

"This country is constantly exposed to threats ... and this time the threat is a tsunami on the Salvadoran coast, especially the western beaches,'' Funes said.

The Salvadoran Environment Observatory issued a tsunami alert for the west coast departments of Ahuachapan and Sonsonate.

"We are not talking about a tsunami of a large magnitude," observatory spokeswoman Daysi Lopez said, adding that it would be very localized.

The event came two months after a 7.6-magnitude earthquake rocked Costa Rica, without causing any casualties or injuries.

Wednesday 7 November 2012

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10845880

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Chixoy Dam-Rio Negro Massacres: Justice Delayed 30 years and Counting

As part of an all night Mayan ceremony (March 13-14, 2012), a Mayan priest reads off, page after page, the names of each and every one of the close to 450 Mayan Achi children, women and men from the remote village of Rio Negro, victims of the 1982 "Rio Negro massacres."

Along with a delegation of Americans and Canadians, I have come here to spend the night and participate in commemoration activities on the 30th anniversary of the March 13, 1982 massacre of 177 children and women, this being the second of four large scale massacres in 1982 carried out in conjunction with the Chixoy Dam "development" project.

PROFITS & IMPUNITY FOR THE WORLD BANK & INTER-AMERICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK

From 1975-1985, the World Bank (WB) and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) spear-headed this "development" project, investing 100s of millions of dollars into the Guatemalan military regimes of those years. The 1982 Rio Negro massacres (February 12, March 13, May 14, September 18) were planned and carried out by the military regime, forcing local "civil defense patrols" to do most of the brutal killing, so as to forcibly (and obviously illegally) evict the Rio Negro villagers, and some 25 other remote villages up-river from where the Chixoy Dam wall was built. The massacres were, in effect, the eviction of the Rio Negro village and sent a message to all other villages that if they did not clear out, ... !



Early in the evening, Juan de Dios (on the left) and Carlos Chen help prepare the monument, altar and place of the commemoration. This is the very spot where the bodies of 177 children and women were dumped by the soldiers and patrollers after brutally killing them (strangling some, smashing children against the rocks, beating some to death, raping young women and girls before killing them, etc).

Since 1993, Carlos Chen has been at the forefront of courageous and tireless efforts for truth, memory and justice. In 1993, the original exhumation team (the EAFG) carried out a mass grave exhumation at this site. Carlos lost his first wife (pregnant at the time) and two young children in the massacre that took place at this spot. Since 2005, Juan de Dios has spearheaded, with Carlos, the Chixoy Dam reparations and justice campaign, with the group COCAHICH (Coordinator of Chixoy Dam harmed communities).



Just after mid-night, a Mayan priest initiates the Mayan ceremony part of the commemoration activities that will continue until 6am. Through the night, hundreds of surviving family and community members (young and old) of the victims of the Rio Negro massacres cry and talk with their dead loved ones, talk, eat and laugh, commemorating the names and lives of the victims of the Chixoy Dam "development" project.

"No more violence against humanity."

In early 1983, the Chixoy Dam basin was filled and the dam soon after began to operate. Years later, the Guatemalan regimes paid back the loans plus interest to the WB and IDB - both made profits.

To date, the WB and IDB publicly deny any responsibility for the brutal repression and illegal forced evictions; no justice has been done for the Rio Negro massacres; no reparations or compensation have been made to the 32 Mayan villages that suffered, in various degrees, the harms and violations caused by the Chixoy dam project. Today, most of the survivors live in various conditions of poverty and extreme poverty.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

http://rightsaction.org/action-content/chixoy-dam-rio-negro-massacres-justice-delayed-30-years-and-counting

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Guatemalan ex-soldier jailed for 6,060 years over Dos Erres massacre

Pedro Pimentel Rios is fifth member of elite military force to be imprisoned for role in killings of 201 people in 1982

A former Guatemalan special forces soldier has been sentenced to 6,060 years in prison for his role in the killings of 201 people in a 1982 massacre.

Pedro Pimentel Rios was the fifth member of the elite military force to be sentenced to 6,060 years or more for what became known as the Dos Erres massacre after the killings in the northern Guatemala village during the 1960-96 civil war.

The sentence handed down by a three-judge panel is largely symbolic since under Guatemalan law the maximum time a prisoner can serve is 50 years. It specified 30 years for each of the 201 deaths, plus 30 years for crimes against humanity.

Pimentel Rios, 54, is a former instructor at a training school for the military force known as the Kaibiles. He lived in Santa Ana, California, and worked in a clothing factory for years until being detained by immigration authorities in May 2010. He was extradited to Guatemala last year.

The civil war claimed at least 200,000 lives, with the country's US-backed army being responsible for most of the deaths, according to the findings of a truth commission.

In December 1982, several dozen soldiers stormed Dos Erres, searched homes for missing weapons and systematically killed men, women and children. Soldiers bludgeoned villagers with a sledgehammer, threw them down a well, and raped women and girls before killing them, according to court papers filed in a case brought by US prosecutors against another former kaibil.

Pimentel denied being present at the massacre, saying he left the area in November 1982 to prepare enrolment papers for the US military training centre at the School of the Americas in Panama.

Guatemala opened an investigation into the killings in 1994 and unearthed 162 skeletons. Several years later, authorities issued arrest warrants for 17 kaibiles but the cases languished.

In August 2011, a Guatemalan court sentenced each of three other former special forces soldiers to 6,060 years in prison for the massacre, and sentenced a former army second lieutenant to 6,066 years.

The ruling comes as Guatemala seeks to clean up atrocities from the civil war in which nearly a quarter of a million people died or went missing.

In January, courts opened a trial against the former dictator Efrain Rios Montt who ruled the country for 17 months during the war's bloodiest period from 1982-1983.

Montt, denied amnesty by a judge last month, faces charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. He is accused of ordering the killings of at least 1,700 innocent Mayan people during a government crackdown on leftist insurgents. Montt appealed the amnesty decision to Guatemala's constitutional court and is awaiting a verdict.

His defence lawyers have said the 85-year-old did not control battlefield operations and that commanders were responsible for making decisions in their own posts.

Tuesday 13 March 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/13/guatemalan-ex-soldier-jailed-dos-erres?CMP=twt_gu

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The XX files: The hunt for victims of Guatemala's 36-year war

The discovery of a vast hidden archive may finally bring closure to those whose relatives 'disappeared' after being detained by the police or military.

Alejandra Garcia's most treasured memento of her father is a faded, black-and-white photo from 1984. A handsome 27-year-old, in jeans and a check shirt, he grins contentedly while holding his wife, Nineth, who in turn is cradling their newly born first child.

Not long after the portrait was taken, Alejandra's father, Fernando, disappeared. On 18 February, he failed to turn up to a celebration at the family home in Guatemala City. Nineth spent days frantically searching the local streets. But he was never seen again.

At the time, Guatemala was in the throes of a 36-year civil war which ranks as one of the most brutal conflicts of the 20th century. More than 200,000 people died, from a population which at the start of hostilities was about four million. Roughly 80 per cent of the casualties were suspected left-wing dissidents. Many were executed, without trial, by soldiers or police officers loyal to the country's ruling military junta.

Fernando Garcia, a student activist whose only crime was taking part in several demonstrations against the government, was one such victim. In the days after his disappearance, witnesses came forward to claim he had been snatched off the streets by men who appeared to be out-of-uniform police officers. Then he was bundled into an unmarked pick-up truck and driven away.

It has been 28 years since Fernando went missing, and almost 16 years since peace accords which turned Guatemala into a functioning, if somewhat troubled, democracy. But Alejandra and her family are only now on the verge of nailing those responsible. Hector Bol de la Cruz, the country's former police chief, is about to face a belated trial for ordering his detention and apparent killing.

The charges against Bol de la Cruz, now 71, represents a landmark moment in Guatemala's long-running effort to draw a line under its past. In a country which remains hobbled by corruption, with a track record of treating dishonest officials with impunity, he becomes the first police chief to ever be prosecuted for his actions.

"I think about how my dad would feel," Alejandra said, with regard to Bol de la Cruz's imminent trial. "He would be happy to finally see a little bit of justice in this country."

The forthcoming prosecution stems from a remarkable detective story which began by accident in 2005, when investigators looking into an explosion at a dilapidated munitions dump near Guatemala City stumbled upon a series of vaults holding a vast collection of official documents and photographs.

The paperwork alone ran to about 80 million pages. Much of it had been soaked by rainwater from leaky windows. But it soon became clear that it represented a large portion of the National Police Force's official archives relating to the civil war.

This was a surprising and potentially game-changing discovery. During the 1996 peace process, the National Police Force had angrily denied the existence of a formal record of its operations. Since the hidden archive suggested otherwise, human rights groups in 2005 began the laborious process of sifting through the paperwork for clues that might help bring about prosecutions.

Seven years on, their work is starting to bear fruit, with records being cross-checked with evidence from the cemetery where security forces often dumped bodies in mass graves, identifying them as "XX". So far, families of some 45,000 of the "disappeared" have asked for information which might relate to their loved ones. Searching for it is gradually becoming easier, thanks to an online database created by the University of Texas at Austin, which currently holds about 12 million of the documents.

Although some of the war's victims were guerrillas killed in combat, many were civilians put to death for simply being suspected of harbouring sympathy for the revolutionaries. The exact circumstances of their deaths are now starting to emerge.

Fernando Garcia is a case in point. Shortly after he went missing, Bol de la Cruz claimed to know nothing of his disappearance. But documents from the archives reveal that in early 1984, he signed a letter praising a senior officer called Jorge Gomez for ordering the arrest of "subversive criminals" on 18 February, in the exact location where Mr Garcia went missing.

Records show that Mr Gomez ordered a patrol car with four officers to monitor the street where Mr Garcia vanished. Those arrested were never seen again. Two of the policemen were prosecuted in 2010, and sentenced to 40 years in prison, largely thanks to the archive; the others have been declared fugitives.

Human rights groups now hope the archive can be used to establish that knowledge of unlawful killings ran to the top of Guatemala's police force. "These documents have been fundamental," said Alejandra Garcia, now a 29-year-old attorney.

Lawyers for Bol de la Cruz, who ran the force from 1983-1985, are currently trying to prevent one of the judges in the 2010 trial from presiding over his case. The former police chief continues to protest his innocence.

If cases like this begin to stick, then it could prove awkward for senior figures in government. In November, the country elected as its new president Otto Perez Molina, a retired, right-leaning general who served during the civil war as head of military intelligence.

Molina has always denied any involvement in war crimes and has publicly stated he will do nothing to impede any prosecutions related to the era. But rumours about his past persist. One case the President will no doubt be keeping a close eye on is the murder trial of Efrain Rios Montt, who (backed by the Cold War-era US) was the country's leader during 1982 and 1983, when some of the worst atrocities of the civil war were committed.

Last month, it emerged that Montt will be tried for genocide and crimes against humanity for allegedly ordering his army to massacre indigenous Mayans suspected of supporting left-wing guerrillas. Prosecutors accuse Montt of "planning, designing and overseeing the military counter-insurgency plans against the indigenous population," and say they have documents to prove it. Lawyers for the former president deny responsibility, saying he was "never on the battlefield".

Molina, as a senior officer in the army, very much was on the battlefield during Montt's reign, however. Only time will tell whether his name will crop up in this, or any of the wave of other trials related to Guatemala's bloodiest era.

Timeline: In the wars

1960 Guatemala's brutal 36-year civil war begins as battles between left-wing guerrillas and government military forces escalate.

1982 A military coup sees General Efrain Rios Montt installed as dictator. He is overthrown in another coup led by General Mejia Victores and an amnesty for guerrillas is declared.

1984 Fernando Garcia, a 27-year-old student activist, disappears on 18 February. He is never seen again. In 2012, former police chief Hector Bol de la Cruz stands trial for masterminding the kidnapping.

1989 Civil-war death toll reaches 100,000 and 40,000 are missing.

1993 President Jorge Serrano Elias resigns after his authoritarian measures spark protests.

1996 Alvaro Arzu is elected president. He purges senior military officers and signs an agreement with the rebels, finally ending the civil war.

1999 Security forces were behind 93 per cent of all civil-war atrocities, according to a UN-backed report.

2004 The state pays $3.5m to victims of civil war, after admitting guilt in several human-rights crimes.

2006 A Spanish judge issues an arrest warrant for Montt.

2009 An ex-paramilitary officer is the first to be jailed for civilian disappearances during the civil war.

2012 A court rules that Montt will face trial on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Friday 10 February 2012
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-xx-files-the-hunt-for-victims-of-guatemalas-36year-war-6699789.html

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