AI REPORT 1998: GUATEMALA
(This report covers the period January-December 1997)
There were continued reports of torture, ''disappearances'' and extrajudicial executions by members of the security forces and armed groups reportedly backed by the government. Few of those responsible for past human rights violations were brought to justice; most continued to benefit from impunity. People from many sectors of Guatemalan society, including human rights defenders, continued to be threatened and harassed. Seven people were believed to be under sentence of death at the end of the year; some were at risk of imminent execution.
In December 1996, a Final Peace Accord agreed between the government and the armed opposition Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (urng), Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity, officially ended the civil conflict, which had extended over 36 years. This marked the start of an agreed timetable for bringing into effect all previous agreements between the two parties, negotiated under the aegis of theun over several years. These covered numerous topics including human rights, the identity and rights of indigenous peoples, social and economic issues, procedures for resettling and protecting those uprooted by the armed conflict, the incorporation of the urng into civil society and the role of the army in a democratic society. Prior to the signing of the Final Peace Accord, only the Global Human Rights Accord of 1994 had come into effect and its implementation had been monitored by the un Verification Mission to Guatemala (minugua).
In August the Commission for Historical Clarification, agreed under the accords, began clarifying ''human rights violations and acts of violence… linked to the period of armed conflict''. There was concern that various clauses in the accords on historical clarification and on the incorporation of the urng into civil society, and in the Law of National Reconciliation approved by Congress in December 1996, could be construed so as to virtually assure impunity for the perpetrators of past human rights abuses.
A new police law was passed in February. It did not exclude former security force agents responsible for past human rights violations from joining the new Policía Nacional Civil (pnc), National Civil Police, which began functioning in mid-July. The government failed to dissolve the Estado Mayor Presidencial, Presidential Guard, an army intelligence unit linked to the office of the president. Over the years, this unit had frequently been implicated in human rights violations (see Amnesty International Report 1981) and its dissolution had been called for in the accords.
The justice system remained weak. The closure of military barracks, the formal termination of civil defence patrols, and the fact that the new pnc was not expected to be fully operational until 1999 resulted in parts of the country being left without a police force. High rates of violent crime, including kidnappings, ''social cleansing'', attacks on street children and lynchings were reported. It was often difficult to determine if specific crimes were instigated or carried out with the direct participation, complicity or acquiescence of present or former security force personnel or their civilian adjuncts.
In some areas, people responded to the increasing crime rate by taking the law into their own hands, lynching suspected petty criminals and others. In response, President Alvaro Arzú Irigoyen announced in July that various military bases closed under the previous administration were being reopened to control the violence.
At least 66 people were reportedly extrajudicially executed during the first half of 1997. Among them were Tomás Alonzo Sequen and his son, Roque Jacinto Alonzo Quisque. They were shot and killed in their home by a hooded man in army uniform in March, apparently because of their role as indigenous community leaders in Chimaltenango department. They had also been members of the Permanent National Commission on Land Rights, created by indigenous groups within the framework of the peace accords.
Despite the call in the Socio-Economic Accord for the creation of a new commission to resolve land disputes, on several occasions the government resorted to forced evictions, resulting in several deaths and injuries. In August at least two peasants died while being forcibly evicted from disputed lands in Sayaxché, El Petén department.
Several people were reported to have ''disappeared''. Controversy continued over the ''disappearance'' of Juan José Cabrera (''Mincho''), a former urng combatant, in October 1996. He was allegedly arrested along with Rafael Augusto Valdizón Núñez (''Isaías''), another urng combatant, by the Presidential Guard, which was pursuing those responsible for the abduction in August 1996 of 86-year-old Olga Alvarado de Novella. Several days after the alleged arrests the government and the urng exchanged ''Isaías'' and Olga Alvarado de Novella. No mention was made of ''Mincho'' and both parties continued to deny that he had been captured and even that such a person had existed. In April, a minugua report concluded that both ''Isaías'' and ''Mincho'' had been captured by the Presidential Guard, and that ''Mincho'' had probably been killed at the time of his capture. The government denied these accusations.
There were further reports of torture during the year. In March three trade unionists at an assembly plant in Guatemala department – Eswin Rocael Ruíz Zacarías, Edwin Tulio Enriquez García and Belarnino González de León – were taken from the plant by heavily armed men in plain clothes to a local police station where they were reportedly kicked, beaten and subjected to near-asphyxiation while being interrogated about a robbery at the plant. Those responsible for the torture had not been brought to justice by the end of the year.
Most of those responsible for past human rights violations continued to benefit from impunity. However, proceedings against a number of officials believed to have ordered a number of highly publicized abuses continued their slow progress through the courts. In 1993 a sergeant in the Presidential Guard was sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment for the 1990 killing of anthropologist Myrna Mack. However, the sergeant's three military superiors had still not been brought to justice for ordering her murder (see Amnesty International Reports 1991 to1995). In August the Constitutional Court found that a 1996 Supreme Court decision, which effectively vacated the indictment and all proceedings against the three men, had violated due process and the original indictment and investigation were reactivated. In November, in separate proceedings, the Supreme Court turned down the defendants' appeal against the decision of a lower court which had ruled that they were ineligible for amnesty under the Law of National Reconciliation, as the killing of Myrna Mack was not related to the armed conflict and thus not covered by the law.
Information came to light in July that four police officers who kicked 13-year-old street child Nahamán Carmona López to death in 1990 had been released in 1996 after serving six years of their 12-year prison sentences. The street children's organization which brought the prosecution against the police had not been informed of the releases, as required by law, nor had the compensation awarded at the original trial been paid to the victim's family.
In July the former Minister of the Interior, his Vice-Minister and the former Chief of the National Police – the direct superiors of the police who carried out a crowd control operation which led to the death of student Mario Alioto López in 1994 – were sentenced to prison terms for second degree murder. Mario Alioto López died in police custody after having been shot and then beaten by policemen during a student demonstration. It was the first time that high-ranking government officials had been held responsible for acts carried out by forces formally under their command. However, in October an appeal court overturned the officials' convictions on the grounds that they had not been directly or indirectly involved in the student's death. A policeman who had beaten Mario Alioto López when he was already unconscious was convicted in July; his sentence was subsequently reduced to 10 years' imprisonment for second degree murder, on the grounds that he had not intended to cause the student's death. Two judges who had originally found the senior officials guilty reported that they had received death threats for having made the ruling.
There was some progress in initiating legal proceedings and investigations into some of the worst massacres carried out during the military's counter-insurgency campaign of the early 1980s, such as those at Dos Erres in El Petén department, Cuarto Pueblo in El Quiché department, and Rabinal and Río Negro in Baja Verapaz department. However, those involved in the exhumations of mass burial sites, of which there were an estimated 500 throughout the country, continued to be intimidated, threatened and harassed, apparently by those seeking to prevent responsibility for the massacres from being established, such as former military commissioners and local civil patrol members. The government maintained that both institutions had been disbanded, but former agents of both organizations continued to be named as perpetrators of ongoing abuses.
In September for example, unidenti-fied men repeatedly came looking for
Marlon García, a photographer with the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Team at his hotel in Izabal department. The team had recently begun to exhume a mass grave believed to contain the remains of as many as 100 Kekchí inhabitants of Panzós, Alta Verapaz department, killed by soldiers in 1978, apparently under the orders of a local landowner with whom the villagers were in dispute over land (see Amnesty International Report 1979).
In other areas, including San Andrés Sajcabajá, El Quiché department, where exhumations began in April, members of conavigua, the indigenous widows' organization, were harassed and threatened because they had witnessed massacres in the area or were pressing for exhumations of their relatives from mass graves. Again, the threats were believed to have come from former military commissioners and members of the local civil patrols.
Judicial investigations into the Xamán massacre of 1995 – in which 11 returned refugees, including two young children, were killed by soldiers – were obstructed. Witnesses and lawyers were threatened and evidence was reportedly tampered with (see Amnesty International Reports 1996 and 1997). Inquiries into the death of politician and newspaper publisher Jorge Carpio Nicolle, who was extrajudicially executed in 1993along with three others (see Amnesty International Reports 1994 and1997), also continued to be blocked by judicial manoeuvres and intimidation of judicial personnel assigned to the case.
Seven people, including three former national police officers, were known to be under sentence of death at the end of the year. Manuel Martínez Coronado, sentenced to death in October 1995 for multiple murder, exhausted all legal remedies available to him and was at risk of becoming the first person to be executed by lethal injection in Guatemala. The method of execution was changed to lethal injection following national and international revulsion when Guatemala's first executions in 13 years were broadcast live on Guatemalan television in 1996 (see Amnesty International Report 1997).
In June the Constitutional Court turned down the appeals of three former policemen sentenced to death in May 1996 for murder and attempted murder. A key witness in the case was killed in October, and the public prosecutor handling the case reportedly sought asylum abroad after receiving death threats.
In March Amnesty International called on the un Commission on Human Rights to renew the mandate of its Independent Expert on Guatemala. However, in April, in the context of determined opposition from the government, the Commission decided not to extend the mandate of the Independent Expert.
In April Amnesty International published a report, Guatemala: State of impunity, which included a 35-point program to end impunity and human rights violations. An Amnesty International delegation visited the country and presented the report to Guatemalan human rights groups and officials; representatives of intergovernmental bodies and agencies, including minugua; and to government officials, including the Ministers of Defence and the Interior, the Attorney General and the President of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights. By the end of the year various government officials had failed to fulfil specific undertakings made to Amnesty International's delegation to provide detailed responses to the report.
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