GUATEMALA
Republic of
Guatemala
Head of state and government:
Álvaro Arzú Irigoyen
Capital: Guatemala City
Population: 11.2 million
Official language: Spanish
Death penalty:
retentionist
A commission of enquiry into past
human rights violations established under the 1996 Peace Accords
published its report in February. It concluded that official forces
and their civilian adjuncts had been responsible for the vast
majority of the gross abuses committed during Guatemala's
bitter civil conflict. All but a handful of those responsible
continued to evade justice. Attempts to address impunity for past
human rights violations were hampered by the intimidation of
victims, witnesses and judicial personnel involved in human rights
prosecutions and in the exhumations of mass clandestine graves, and
by widespread judicial corruption. A number of abuses which
occurred after the Peace Accords also remained unresolved. By the
end of 1999, death sentences had been imposed on at least 32
people, including some who reportedly suffered from mental
impairment, after trials which fell far short of international
standards of due process. No executions were reported. Security
officials reportedly used high crime rates as a pretext to harass,
intimidate, torture and extrajudicially execute political opponents
and to obstruct human rights monitors and others inquiring into
past violations. Frustration at crime levels led to an increase in
lynchings of suspected petty criminals, some allegedly instigated
by the security forces. In 1999, 72 lynchings were officially
recorded; the true number was believed to be much higher. The
general lawlessness was fuelled by the easy availability of
unregistered small arms, allegedly illegally imported and sold by
criminal rings which included military and police
officials.
Background
The 1996 Peace Accords —
negotiated over several years under the aegis of the UN and agreed
by the government and the former armed opposition, the National
Guatemalan Revolutionary Unity (URNG) — formally ended the
civil conflict which had raged over a period of more than three
decades. Following the Accords, the armed opposition was largely
demobilized and the overall rate of abuses declined significantly.
However, there were occasional reports that small groups of genuine
or purported former members of armed opposition groups carried out
acts of aggression or intimidation in the countryside.
The Accords agreed in principle a
number of far-reaching measures, many relevant to human rights
protection; the magnitude and complexity of these measures meant
that the Accords and the gains attained under them remained
vulnerable. In May a number of proposed constitutional reforms,
aimed at formalizing key military and judicial reforms agreed in
the Accords, were rejected in a national referendum.
In December the UN Mission in Guatemala
(MINUGUA) judged that the government's serious shortcomings in
implementing the Accords had weakened efforts to ensure respect for
the rule of law and citizens' rights. By the end of 1999 the
provision in the Accords calling for the disbanding of the
Presidential High Command, which serves as the army's high
command, had still not taken place, owing to "insufficient
funds."
However, other provisions in the
Accords were implemented. In December the military announced a new
military doctrine which it said reflected its new role in a
democratic society at peace, and an Indigenous Women's Defence
Agency was inaugurated. Also in December, a law went before
Congress to establish a Peace and Harmony Commission, as
recommended by the Historical Clarification Commission established
under the Accords.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the sale
of children, child prostitution and child pornography found in July
that child prostitution and trafficking in children were major
problems. In November, the Latin American Institute for the
Prevention of Crime described violence against women as a grave
problem.
Impunity
The Historical Clarification Commission
report, the result of 18 months of investigation involving 42,000
victims of human rights violations, was made public in February.
The Commission recognized the responsibility of the military and
its civilian adjuncts for the vast majority — 93 per cent
— of the atrocities committed during the years of civil
conflict. It also found that in four specific areas, the army's
counter-insurgency campaign had perpetrated genocide against
indigenous people, who made up 83 per cent of the victims. The
Commission also pointed to the role played by the US Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA) in these violations. Data obtained in
1999 by human rights groups under the US Freedom of Information Act
confirmed that as early as the 1960s, the USA had formulated,
encouraged and helped implement a counter-insurgency strategy which
relied on clandestine actions by "death squads", made up
of police and military agents but wearing plain clothes in order to
maintain "government deniability", to eliminate suspected
"subversives". During a visit to Central America in
March, US President Bill Clinton made an unprecedented apology for
US involvement in "the dark events" of Guatemala's
tragic conflict.
Progress in human rights cases
In November the third trial of former
civil patrol leader Cándido Noriega resulted in his
conviction for human rights violations in the early 1980s against
indigenous villagers of Tululché, El Quiché
department, including extrajudicial executions, torture and mass
rape. His lawyers appealed against the verdict and 220-year
sentence. Throughout the proceedings, survivors, witnesses,
judicial personnel and staff of the Guatemalan Bishops'
Conference (CONFREGUA), involved in the case were intimidated and
threatened. In May, indigenous CONFREGUA lay worker Juan
Jeremías Tecú who accompanied and interpreted for the
indigenous witnesses, was seized for several hours, beaten and
threatened with death.
In September, the government finally
paid compensation to the family of 13-year-old street child
Nahamán Carmona López who died in 1990, after being
savagely kicked by four policemen. The officers served only half of
their 12-year prison sentences.
In December the Inter-American Court of
Human Rights ruled that there was significant evidence that five
street youths who "disappeared" from the centre of
Guatemala City in 1990 had been seized, tortured and murdered by
identified members of the National Police without regard for
detention procedures specified in Guatemalan legislation and that
the Guatemalan state had not fulfilled its responsibilities to
protect the victims and investigate their deaths.
In December in Spain, Nobel Peace Prize
winner Rigoberta Menchú filed charges against eight former
Guatemalan officials for genocide, state terrorism, torture and
extrajudicial executions, carried out while they were in office.
Victims included four of her relatives; four Spanish Roman Catholic
priests; and 37 others, both Guatemalan and Spanish nationals, who
died during an attack on the Spanish embassy by the Guatemalan
security services in 1980. Among those named in Rigoberta
Menchú's lawsuit was retired General Efraín
Ríos Montt, the country's leader during the most brutal
phase of the army's counter-insurgency campaign in the early
1980s. He was elected to Congress in the 1999 elections and will
serve as its President.
Set-backs in human rights inquiries
Investigations into many past human
rights abuses were slow. In the few cases where individuals were
convicted, the sentences passed usually failed to reflect the
gravity of the offence or were overturned on appeal.
* In
August, 25 soldiers were convicted in connection with the
extrajudicial executions of 11 returned indigenous refugees,
including two children, in Xamán, Alta Vera Paz, in 1995.
The commanding officer and 10 soldiers in his squad were found
guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to five years'
imprisonment. Fourteen others convicted of complicity to
manslaughter were sentenced to four years' imprisonment. The
sentences were commutable to fines of five quetzales (US 5 cents)
per day. Fifteen other soldiers involved in the action were
acquitted. After appeal, 10 soldiers were sentenced to nine
years' imprisonment for homicide and three additional years,
commutable at the same rate, for bodily harm. The commanding
officer was acquitted and released. A request by the Public
Prosecutor that the acquittal decisions be set aside was pending at
the end of 1999.
US human rights groups published
material which they claimed recorded the activities of a Guatemalan
military unit responsible for the kidnapping, torture and execution
of suspected left-wing political activists. The document,
reportedly sold to them by a low-ranking Guatemalan military
official, listed 183 people allegedly seized between 1983 and 1985.
According to the published material, several had been released
after they agreed to act as army spies. The majority, however, were
listed as secretly killed in custody. Much of the information
accorded with AI's records for that period, but the Guatemalan
military denied the document's authenticity. Some Guatemalan
human rights groups initiated legal proceedings based on the
document and prosecutors from the Public Ministry were assigned to
investigate these cases. Local human rights groups believed some of
the victims were clandestinely buried at the old Military
Polytechnic, now the new National Civil Police Training Institute.
Exhumations began in 1999, but the Institute's director, a
police inspector, who requested them received death
threats.
Proceedings against several former
armed opposition leaders for ordering the killings of former
supporters during internal disputes, also remained pending at the
end of 1999.
The unsolved murder of Bishop
Gerardi
Bishop Juan José Gerardi,
Coordinator of the Archbishop's Human Rights Office (ODHA) was
brutally beaten to death outside his home in 1998, two days after
presiding over the public presentation of the report of the
Guatemalan Roman Catholic Church's Inter-Diocesan Recuperation
of the Historical Memory Project (REMHI) concerning the civil
conflict. Despite a tremendous and sustained public outcry in
Guatemala and abroad, the case remained unresolved. Four people and
a dog were arrested at various points in connection with the case,
but none remained in custody at the end of the year. A number of
people involved in the case, including members of ODHA's staff,
two former judges, a prosecutor, a witness and a member of the
Presidential High Command who accused colleagues of involvement in
the murder, fled abroad after death threats.
Possible 'disappearance'
Carlos Coc Rax, an indigenous peasant
leader and father of nine, went missing in April in circumstances
suggesting he may have "disappeared". He had led local
Kekchí villagers in El Estor, Izabal department, in trying
to protect their plots of land against encroachment by local
landowners and in protesting against the policies of the local
subsidiary of a Canadian mining company which held a concession in
the area.
Death penalty
At the end of 1999, some 32 people were
on death row. Lack of adequate legal representation and lack of
respect for international standards of due process were concerns in
virtually all of their cases. In several cases, people condemned to
death appeared to be suffering from mental impairment.
* One of those closest to execution at the end of 1999
was Kekchí-speaking peasant Pedro Rax Cucul, condemned to
execution by lethal injection for a homicide carried out in 1996.
He was found wandering around the day after the machete murder with
the arm of the victim in the bag in which he carried his salt and
tortillas. Doctors found him to be suffering from paranoia, and he
was being treated in the course of 1999 in a mental hospital.
However, the judge handling his case said his behaviour "fell
within normal parameters", and that the execution should
proceed. An alternative proposal was that he be kept under
psychiatric observation until such time as his mental faculties
were judged to have been restored, at which point he would be
executed.
Administration of justice
In March MINUGUA found that inadequate
recruitment, selection and training, exacerbated by a lack of
effective internal disciplinary mechanisms and the reintegration of
former police and army personnel into the new police force were
undoubtedly factors in continuing human rights abuses.
In August the UN Special Rapporteur on
the independence of judges and lawyers reported that corruption,
lack of resources, threats and intimidation still prevailed in the
judicial system. Many prisoners remained in detention without trial
for long periods, in overcrowded conditions; corruption and
drug-trafficking were rife in prisons and inmates were sometimes
the victims of "social cleansing."
AI country reports and visits
Reports
• Guatemala: To the dead we owe
the truth (AI Index: AMR 34/007/99)
• Guatemala: Words are not enough
(AI Index: AMR 34/008/99)
• Guatemala: Exhuming the truth
for justice (AI Index: AMR 34/023/99)
• Guatemala: Making human rights
an electoral issue (AI Index AMR 34/035/99)
Visits
AI delegations visited Guatemala in
March and June. An AI Guatemala Trial Observers Project sent
lawyers to trials arising from 1982 massacres at Tululché
and Agua Fría, El Quiché, and Río Negro, Baja
Vera Paz.
 guatemala_2000.pdf |
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