Developments in Guatemala trial of Rios Montt

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — In 1999: Guatemalan non-governmental organization Association for Justice and Reconciliation files a complaint against army officials, including former Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, saying they're responsible for killings of thousands of Ixil Mayans during country's 36-year civil war. Victims try for years without success to get courts to act against military officers.

___

In 2010: Guatemala's Supreme Court creates "high-risk courts" to try genocide, crimes against humanity, organized crime, other high profile crimes.

____

In 2011: Attorney General's office asks Supreme Court to transfer complaint against army officers to newly created "high-risk courts." Guatemala's top court agrees.

____

September 2011: Judge Carol Patricia Flores charges retired generals Hector Mario Lopez Fuentes, Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez and Luis Enrique Mendoza with genocide. Rios Montt, their former superior, is also accused but cannot be charged because he has immunity from prosecution as congressman.

____

November 2011: Lopez Fuentes' defense asks that Judge Flores recuse herself from case, claiming she is biased against him. Judge ignores petition and continues case. Defense files an appeal with another court.

____

January 2012: Rios Montt loses immunity after his term as congressman ends. That same month, he is called by Judge Flores to testify is charged with genocide. He posts $80,000 bail to continue process outside prison.

____

February 2012: An appeals court rules for Lopez Fuentes' defense and asks Judge Flores to recuse herself from case, which is transferred to Judge Miguel Angel Galvez Aguilar.

____

January 2013: After case is delayed by hundreds of defense appeals, Judge Galvez orders Rios Montt to stand trial and sends case to a three-member tribunal comprised of Judge Yassmin Barrios as president, and Judges Pablo Xitumul and Patricia Bustamante.

____

February 2013: Rios Montt's defense wins an appeal to add evidence to case. Appeals court never informs Judge Galvez of resolution.

____

March 13, 2013: An appeals court rules Judge Flores should take over case but she's never informed of resolution.

____

March 19, 2013: Trial against Rios Montt and Rodriguez Sanchez begins.

_____

April 3, 2013: Constitutional Court orders Judge Galvez to add new evidence in case, saying Rios Montt's defense won an appeal. Galvez says he's no longer in charge of case because an appeals court ordered Judge Flores to take it.

____

April 9, 2013: Constitutional Court, ruling on appeal by Rios Montt's defense, orders Judge Barrios to send case to Judge Flores so she can incorporate new evidence.

____

April 18, 2012: Judge Flores announces case should go back to where it was in November 2011, before Rios Montt was charged with genocide.

____

April 19, 2013: Tribunal in charge of Rios Montt's trial suspends trial and asks Constitutional Court to decide whether it should continue.

____

April 22, 2013: Constitutional Court again orders Judge Flores to add new evidence in case.

____

April 26, 2013: Judge Flores incorporates new evidence and sends case back to tribunal.

____

April 30, 2013: Genocide trial against Rios Montt resumes after 12-day suspension amid appeals.

____

May 7, 2013: Closing arguments begin.

____

May 9, 2013: Rios Montt testifies for first time during closing arguments, avoiding being questioned by prosecutors and declaring himself innocent.

____

May 10, 2013: Three-judge panel finds Rios-Montt guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.

View the original article here

Top court sends Rios Montt trial to new judge

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Guatemala's highest court on Tuesday ordered that the genocide trial against one of the Central American country's former dictators be taken over by a judge who wants the proceedings to go back to square one.

A spokesman for the Constitutional Court, Martin Guzman, said the case of Efrain Rios Montt now goes back to Judge Carol Patricia Flores, who last week ordered that the proceedings start over at a point before the retired general was charged with genocide.

Rios Montt, 86, is accused of responsibility for the deaths of 1,771 Mayan Indians killed during military offensives by the dictatorship that he headed from March 1982 to August 1983. The operations, during a U.S.-backed war against leftist guerrillas, were part of a "scorched earth" campaign aimed at wiping out support for the rebels.

The trial against Rios Montt and Jose Rodriguez Sanchez, 68, a former high-ranking member of the military chiefs of staff, had been nearing closing arguments last week when Flores intervened.

Flores had handled the case in its pre-trial stage, but was taken off the case in February 2012 by an appeals court after the defense filed a complaint saying she was biased against the defendants. She was reinstated last week by the Constitutional Court, then ruled that all actions taken in the case since she was first asked to step down in November 2011 were null.

Neither Rios Montt's lawyers nor attorneys for the plaintiffs returned calls from The Associated Press seeking comment on Tuesday's action.

Many speculated that Flores' ruling was politically motivated in the much-disputed trial, which is the first genocide case against a former president in Latin America. In weeks of testimony from dozens of victims, soldiers and experts, even current President Otto Perez Molina had been implicated in the massacres.

The move caused an international outcry. Before the high court's decision was announced Tuesday, the United Nations special adviser on the prevention of genocide, Adama Dieng, urged Guatemalan authorities to bring justice for the victims and their families.

"I appeal to judicial authorities to act responsibly and to prevent any interference, obstruction or manipulation of justice, which would seriously undermine the credibility of the justice system in Guatemala," Dieng said in a statement.

"The victims of the atrocities committed during the civil war in Guatemala, as well as their families, have been waiting many years for justice. I hope they don't have to keep waiting. Justice delayed is justice denied."

About 500 Ixil Mayan Indians arrived in the capital to show their support in favor of Rios Montt in buses with banners that read "Do not shame the Ixil with that idea of genocide, because that's a lie."

The demonstrators arrived from Nebaj in the state of Quiche, an area where some of the worst massacres were carried out by the army.

The trial against Rios Montt started in March after courts dealt with more than 100 complaints and injunctions filed by the defense. Since then, the court has heard the harrowing testimony of dozens of people who survived the military offensive.

View the original article here

Canada's accused cannibal killer ordered to stand trial: CBC

(Reuters) - A Canadian man accused of murdering and dismembering a Chinese student, eating parts of the corpse and posting an online video of the crime will stand trial for first-degree murder, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp reported on Friday.

Montreal Judge Lori Renee Weitzman ruled there was enough evidence for the case against porn actor Luka Rocco Magnotta to go ahead, the CBC said.

Magnotta, 30, is accused of killing Jun Lin in May 2012, posting a video on the Internet of the stabbing death and defiling the body and eating parts of it. He has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder, indignities to a body and publishing obscene materials.

Weitzman made her decision on Friday at the end of a pre-trial hearing that was subject to a publication ban. A trial date will be set on April 29 and the CBC quoted prosecutors as saying the trial would likely start next year.

Magnotta was arrested in Germany last June after an international manhunt. Lin's hands and feet were mailed to the offices of political parties in Ottawa and schools in Vancouver.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren in Ottawa; Editing by Peter Cooney)

View the original article here

Guatemala war trial puts past closer to president

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — Guatemala's struggle to deal with the war crimes of the past, including bringing an aging former dictator and his officers to justice, has taken a sharp turn to the present.

A mechanic testifying at the genocide trial of ex-strongman Efrain Rios Montt, now 86, became the first person to directly accuse current President Otto Perez Molina of ordering pillaging and executions in the 36-year civil war, which killed a total of 200,000, mostly indigenous Maya.

Such rumors and accusations had surfaced about Perez before, but without proof or formal charges. He has called Thursday's testimony "lies."

But the national talk continued Monday, four days after Hugo Reyes told a stunned courtroom: "The soldiers, on orders from Major 'Tito Arias,' better known as Otto Perez Molina ... coordinated the burning and looting, in order to later execute people."

Prosecutor Orlando Lopez said Reyes' testimony is 100 percent credible, but he has to study the accusations before he can say whether they would result in criminal action against Perez.

"Right now I'm focused on the Rios Montt case," Lopez said Monday. "I don't know what will happen after that."

Perez said he researched Reyes' record with the Defense Ministry and the mechanic wasn't in Nebaj, the base in western Quiche state where soldiers operated at the same time as Perez.

"I have nothing to hide. I did not participate in a single situation where someone died that was my responsibility," Perez told reporters on Friday. "I'm not going to deny that I was in Nebaj; it's true. But I was there to rescue the civilians, combat the armed guerrillas and help the civilians."

The testimony is shaking up Guatemala's attempts to settle its past. A U.N. truth commission said state forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93 percent of the killings and human rights violations that it documented. Yet until now, only low or middle-level officials have been prosecuted for a war that ended in 1996.

Rios Montt is the biggest by far, on trial along with his former head of intelligence, Jose Sanchez, in connection with the deaths of 1,771 Mayan Indians during the military dictatorship he headed from March 23, 1982, to Aug. 8, 1983, during which he led a U.S.-backed counterinsurgency against guerrillas.

Perez, who retired as a general, made his military career as an intelligence specialist, one of the most influential sections of the army. He helped negotiate the 1996 peace accords and emerged as one of the moderate military leaders. He easily won the presidency in late 2011 from voters tired of the lack of law and order in a country run by gangs and drug traffickers, and has long insisted there was no genocide.

His election more than a year ago was criticized at the time as a return to the military rule of Guatemala's past. But Perez has since been credited with not standing in the way of efforts to prosecute accused leaders such as Rios Montt, the first former president in Latin America to be tried on genocide charges.

But now the testimony is leading to him.

"This is the second time the name of Otto Perez Molina has come up in the courts," Guatemalan Nobel Peace laureate Rigoberta Menchu said Monday, noting that the first time was in a Spanish National Court in another case against Rios Montt. "It's important that the courts see all the evidence, judge the reality and determine what happened ... that the executive branch doesn't interfere just because the president is linked to the process."

Reyes, 47, who says he was a mechanic in an engineering brigade in the area where atrocities were carried out, told the court that Perez, then an army major, ordered soldiers to burn and pillage during Guatemala's war with leftist guerrillas in the 1980s.

He said he knew the top commanders because of his work in maintenance in Nebaj.

Perez wrote in a 2000 opinion piece for the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre that he used the nickname "Tito."

He wrote in that column that as a major he arrived in Nebaj in 1982 and spent nearly a year there, "an experience that left an inerasable fingerprint on my personal and professional life." Perez said he was the commander of a team fighting in the Ixil Triangle as part of the Task Force Gumarkaaj.

According to prosecutors, the task force acted on plans set out by military leadership that included orders to attack and remove "noncombatant civilian populations." Court documents say that all Maya Ixil were declared internal enemies.

Perez is also named in documents pertaining to "Operation Sofia," a report from the field to military superiors about soldiers' actions at the time. His name is handwritten on one page. The Rios Montt defense has said the documents are not original and therefore not valid.

The Defense Ministry said that during Rios Montt's government, Perez was an outstanding staff officer at a military institute and a battalion commander in an entirely different part of the country.

Reyes testified that soldiers tortured and executed the Ixil believed to be guerrillas. He said that women, children and the elderly were among the executed. He claimed that sometimes the soldiers would throw the victims' babies alive into the mass graves and bury them with their dead mothers.

Dozens of victims have testified since the trial started March 19 of surviving rapes, massacres and other atrocities.

The military offensives were part of a brutal, decades-long counterinsurgency against a leftist uprising that brought massacres in the Mayan heartland where the guerrillas were based.

The Rios Montt trial already is transcendental for Guatemala, said Marcie Mersky, director of the New York-based International Center for Transitional Justice.

"This is the first time we have encountered a genuine trial under due process of international law," said Mersky, who is attending the trial.

Guatemalan human rights activist Helen Mack said people need to keep in mind that this trial is against Rios Montt.

"But new information has come out, and the court needs to determine if there is sufficient evidence to open an investigation," Mack said. "They have to determine where Otto Perez Molina was in the chain of command to determine if he was effectively responsible."

View the original article here

Call for justice opens Guatemala ex-leader trial

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — The trial of Guatemala's former U.S.-backed dictator will offer the victims of the country's decades-long civil war the chance to tell the truth about the devastating conflict, the lawyer for the victims said Tuesday.

Gen. Efrain Rios Montt sat facing a group of victims and their families as his trial opened in a Guatemala City courtroom. His daughter, Zury Rios, sat in the first row, two seats from Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, who was there in support of the victims.

Rios Montt is accused of genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the conflict between the right-wing government and leftist guerrillas, a civil war that left some 200,000 people dead.

"Through this trial the victims can tell you their story, the truth that they've carried for more than 30 years, truth that some officials today want to deny," victims' lawyer Edgar Perez told the judges who will rule on the case.

Moments before the trial began, Rios Montt's legal team quit and was replaced by a new attorney, who filed a series of unsuccessful motions attempting to block the trial on procedural grounds.

Prosecutors acknowledge that there is no smoking gun in the case files, no direct order from Guatemala's then-military dictator to carry out the slaughter of civilians during one of the bloodiest phases of the country's long civil war.

In its absence, prosecutors hope to painstakingly prove through a detailed recreation of the military chain of command that Rios Montt must have had knowledge of the massacres of Ixil Mayan Indians and others in the Guatemalan highlands. Because he held absolute power over the U.S.-backed military government, his failure to stop the slaughter is proof of his guilt, prosecutors and lawyers for victims say.

"No one ever heard a speech in which he said, 'Kill the Ixils, exterminate the Ixils.' Jose Efrain Rios Montt never gave a written or verbal order to exterminate the Ixils in this country," defense attorney Francisco Garcia Gudiel told the court.

Rios Montt seized power in a March 23, 1982 coup, and ruled until he himself was overthrown just over a year later. Prosecutors say that while in power he was aware of, and thus responsible for, the slaughter by subordinates of at least 1,771 Ixil Mayas in San Juan Cotzal, San Gaspar Chajul and Santa Maria Nebaj, towns in the Quiche department of Guatemala's western highlands.

Those military offensives were part of a brutal, decades-long counterinsurgency against a leftist uprising that brought massacres in the Mayan heartland where the guerrillas were based.

Being tried with Rios Montt is Jose Rodriguez Sanchez, 68, a former high-ranking member of the military chiefs of staff.

On Tuesday morning, indigenous activists protested outside in support of the victims. Showing support for the accused outside the court were former members of government-backed paramilitary groups blamed for many of the killings.

View the original article here

Ex-Guatemala strongman on trial after 30 years

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) — There is no smoking gun in the case files, no direct order from Guatemala's then military dictator to carry out the slaughter of civilians during one of the bloodiest phases of the country's long civil war.

In its absence, with trial set to start Tuesday, prosecutors hope to painstakingly prove through a detailed recreation of the military chain of command that Gen. Efrain Rios Montt must have had knowledge of the massacres of Mayan Indians and others in the Guatemalan highlands. Because he held absolute power over the U.S.-backed military government, his failure to stop the slaughter is proof of his guilt, prosecutors and lawyers for victims say.

Survivors and relatives of victims have sought for 30 years to bring punishment for Rios Montt, now 86, who is the first Latin American strongman to stand trial on genocide charges in his own country. For international observers and Guatemalans on both sides of the war, the trial could be a turning point in a nation still wrestling with the trauma of a conflict that killed some 200,000 people.

"So much time has passed and we haven't gotten justice. What I want is that they put him in prison. It isn't revenge; it's justice," said Antonio Caba, who was 11 when soldiers arrived in his highlands village in 1982, killing 95 Mayas and driving countless others into the countryside without food or clothing. His 2-month-old sister and grandmother died of malnutrition.

"I ask him, 'What type of weapon were the children carrying, the women and old people your army massacred?' All we want is justice," said Caba, who is scheduled to testify at the trial.

Rios Montt seized power in a March 23, 1982, coup, and ruled until he himself was overthrown just over a year later. Prosecutors say that while in power he was aware of, and thus responsible for, the slaughter by subordinates of at least 1,771 Ixil Mayas in San Juan Cotzal, San Gaspar Chajul and Santa Maria Nebaj, towns in the Quiche department of Guatemala's western highlands.

Those military offensives were part of a brutal, decades-long counterinsurgency against a leftist uprising that brought massacres in the Mayan heartland where the guerrillas were based.

Prosecutors and advocates for victims have built their case on thousands of green folders stuffed with military documents, victims' testimony and ballistic and forensic examinations of more than 800 sets of human remains, mostly women or children.

"There's an enormous amount of evidence against Rios Montt," said Edgar Perez, a lawyer for the victims. "Obviously, the world has never seen a case in which genocide was explicitly authorized."

Rios Montt's lawyer, Francisco Palomo, disagrees. "The evidence shows that serious things happened, of course. The point here is, who is responsible for those things? We think he's innocent. At the hearings there hasn't been a single fact that links him to it directly."

Being tried with Rios Montt are Jose Rodriguez Sanchez, a former high-ranking member of the military chiefs of staff; Hector Mario Lopez Fuentes, minister of defense under Rios Montt; and Luis Enrique Mendoza, former vice minister of defense who is a fugitive from justice.

The few times Rios Montt spoke during days of pre-trial hearings, he stared straight ahead and addressed the court in a strong voice. But except for denying genocide occurred, he limited his answers to simple refusals to address questions that might incriminate him. He is being held under house arrest.

The most important evidence are the plans for three counterinsurgency campaigns known as Victory 82, Operation Sofia and Firmness 83 and after-action reports linked to mass killings. Almost all of the military plans were classified "secret" but were leaked to victims' lawyers.

The plan for Victory 82 created a force made up of riflemen, paratroopers and combat engineers directed to operate in a part of the highlands known as the Ixil triangle and report its actions to the chief of staff of the army, part of the military leadership along with Rios Montt.

Military experts testifying for the victims have said this description of the chain of command makes it obvious that the military chief of staff and other high commanders including Rios Montt could have halted the massacres.

The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation carried out more than 60 studies to identify some 800 sets of human remains from the area that will be evidence in the trial.

"The great majority of victims were women or children, who suffered violent deaths without putting up a defense. In some cases there were massacres, executions and people dying as they were fleeing, from hypothermia and hunger," said the foundation's executive director, Jose Suasnavar.

Mayas were treated as an internal enemy because they were seen as lending support to the enemy, according to the indictment against Rios Montt.

In the plan's Annex C, the army chief of staff said that "the great masses of indigenous people in the nation's highlands have echoed the proclamations of subversion, whose rallying cries are the lack of land and immense poverty ... they see the army like an invading enemy."

The Operation Sofia file contains direct orders from co-defendant Lopez Fuentes, said Kate Doyle, a senior analyst at National Security Archive, a Washington-based nonprofit group that works to make classified documents public. The plan was leaked to her by an unspecified source in March 2009.

The file includes maps and sketches of sites for operations, internal communications from the operation commander to commanders in the field, hand-written reports on operations and intelligence reports.

The third plan, Firmness 83, describes the training and recruitment of the notorious Civil Autodefense Patrols, which were made up of civilians armed by the military and have been accused of participating in hundreds of slayings alongside the army.

Guatemalan prosecutors have had success using indirect evidence against current and former members of the military.

Three officers were convicted of the 1998 slaying of Roman Catholic Archbishop Juan Jose Gerardi even though it was not proven they were directly involved in the bludgeoning death. Prosecutors showed the actual killers were connected to higher-ups by orders that flowed down the chain of command.

"It's a fact that there are people who plan, people who organize, and people who execute," said Nery Rodenas, director of the Office of Human Rights at the Guatemalan Archbishop's Office.

View the original article here