From: McClatchy
Saturday, 11 May 2013 09:15By Tim Johnson, McClatchy Newspapers | Report
The
former Guatemalan military dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt at a hearing
in Guatemala City, January 31, 2013. (Photo: Victor J. Blue / The New
York Times)Mexico City - A three-judge panel Friday
convicted former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt of genocide,
saying his military regime used “extreme terror” in an effort to wipe
out a Mayan minority ethnic group in the early 1980s.
In a packed courtroom in Guatemala City, Judge Yassmin Barrios said
investigators had proven that the regime led by Rios Montt, who is 86,
used starvation, mass homicide, dislocation, rape and aerial bombardment
as tactics to exterminate the Ixil minority, which it believed to
harbor leftist guerrillas.
Barrios gave Rios Montt a 50-year jail term for genocide and an additional 30 years for crimes against humanity.
When Barrios read the sentence, cheers erupted in the courtroom, a sign
of the high emotions surrounding the trial, which deeply divided
Guatemala and drew attention in other Latin American nations with a
history of military dictatorships.
The conviction marked the first time a former Guatemalan military
strongman known for “scorched earth” tactics to eradicate leftist
guerrillas had been found guilty of genocide and ordered to prison.
“The accused, Jose Efrain Rios Montt, had full knowledge of all that was occurring and did nothing to stop it,” Barrios said.
Rios Montt ruled Guatemala from March 1982 until August 1983, one of the
most intense periods of the nation’s civil war, which began in 1960 and
did not end until 1996. An estimated 200,000 people, mostly indigenous
Mayan, were killed in the violence.
“This was the first time that a former head of state has been tried for
genocide in clearly genuine national proceedings. Despite the many
obstacles, its success shows the importance of justice being done
nationally, even when the odds are long. It is a great leap forward in
the struggle for justice in Guatemala and globally,” said David Tolbert,
president of the International Center For Transitional Justice, a New
York-based group that seeks to accountability for mass atrocities.
The hour-long hearing saw Barrios read a summary of the findings against
Rios Montt that was both a chilling recounting of atrocities and at
times a poetic quest to find a way toward justice for one of the most
painful chapters in Latin American history.
“The justices see that the murder of babies and pregnant women was
designed to destroy the Ixil people,” Barrios said, adding that “sexual
violence was a tool to destroy the social fabric of the Ixil.”
The minority, one of the smaller of the 20 or so Mayan groups living in
Guatemala, dwell in a mountainous region known as the Ixil Triangle
several hours from Guatemala City, the capital.
Rios Montt, who forcefully proclaimed his innocence a day earlier in a
finger-wagging speech in the courtroom, evaded trial for much of the
past decade.
It was only in 2012, after Rios Montt stepped down from the legislature,
that his parliamentary immunity ended and the trial could proceed.
Since the trial began March 19, prosecutors brought more than 100
witnesses and experts to the stand, some of them Ixil women who
recounted how soldiers raped them, and left them to watch their children
and relatives be killed.
Rios Montt was charged with the death of 1,771 people and the enforced
displacement of 29,000 others. Also charged was his former chief of
intelligence, former Gen. Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, but he was
exonerated on both counts.
A 5.1 magnitude earthquake shook Guatemala City shortly before the
verdict was handed down, a physical manifestation of the tremors of the
trial, which unnerved the ruling class in Guatemala and cast a harsh
light on President Otto Perez Molina, a former army major under Rios
Montt. MORE
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