In Guatemala, justice and truth have not been served

Two weeks ago, the Guatemalan Constitutional Court took a landmark decision.

José Efraín Ríos Montt, the former de facto President-come-dictator of Guatemala who ruled the country for over a year from 1982 to 1983, was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity and was sentenced to 80 years in prison. The Court determined that Ríos Montt was "responsible for the massacre of 1,771 people, the forced displacement of 29,000, and the subjecting of the Ixil to conditions designed to destroy it". It deliberated that during his time in office, Ríos Montt had orchestrated a genocide against the Guatemalan people and specially the Ixil, the indigenous group which mainly resides in the mountains of western Guatemala.

Ríos Montt had masterminded the genocide, unleashed upon the Ixil a massacre at the hands of the army, and justified it all claiming that he was fighting an insurgency and the threat of communism. In the mind of this sadistic, racist ruler the so-called "enemies of the state" had to be obliterated, and therefore he not only allowed, but promoted the carnage which was unleashed against the Ixil by the military and most horrendously its "elite" troops, the kaibiles.

For the full length of Ríos Montt's 'administration', the Ixil were prosecuted and their communities were shattered to pieces. Women were systematically raped and killed, children were shot, had their hearts taken out alive or were burned to death. Pregnant women were killed by extracting the fetus out of their bodies and leaving them to bleed to death. The desecrated villages were burnt to the ground to make sure that no one survived. Under the orders of Ríos Montt, the Ixil endured this campaign of terror which wiped out hundreds, not to say thousands of Ixil and other Guatemalans.

Despite the blatant and widely-known murderous acts that Rios Montt committed against the Guatemalan people, he walked free for a long while. In the 1980s, and amidst the environment of the so-called Cold War, Ríos Montt was free-handed. Fearful about the "spread" of communism, the American countries sat idle while the people of Guatemala was prosecuted and killed. Then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan --whose administration financially and logistically supported the brutal regime of Rios Montt-- declared that he was being given a 'bum rap' by its critics. Meanwhile, Mexico, which had already helped around 180,000 Guatemalans escape to safety, kept quiet about Ríos Montt's atrocities under the ignominious Doctrina Estrada -a policy of no invervention in the domestic affairs of foreign countries.

Ríos Montt eventually stepped down, but he gained prosecutorial immunity. The president who made an inferno out of Guatemala even secured a safe haven for himself at the Guatemalan Congress and no court was able to put him on trial --until 14 January, 2012 when his immunity expired.

Twenty years passed since he committed these crimes. Two weeks ago, the Constitutional Court could have delivered justice. The ruling would not have brought back to life all the people who died at the hands of Ríos Montt, his army and the kaibiles, but the decision could have been a first bold step towards the closure of a very dark chapter of Guatemalan history. It would have demonstrated that in the face of despicable evil, justice can still prevail. And more importantly, it could have reminded us that justice and truth are best served and defended not through the rule of force, but through the rule of law.

Yet, the ruling was contested by some sectors of the Guatemalan society which would like to focus on the future of Guatemala at the expense of its past and, most importantly, its people. And today, despite all the evidence, the Constitutional Court overturned its historic decision. The pressure from these powerful sectors was intense. And instead of siding for truth and justice, the Constitutional Court ceded to these pressures. 

In the end, in Guatemala, injustice and lies have prevailed.