Guate: Rios Montt genocide trial / 2nd day of conclusions, Prosecution wraps up

[Catherina]

35. Rios Montt never planned, never organized, never executed, and never supervised any act ...

Rios Montt Trial ?@RiosMonttTrial 10m

Gudiel: #Riosmontt never planned, never organized, never executed, and never supervised any act with the intention of destroying the Ixil

NISGUA ?@NISGUA_Guate 10m

Gudiel: The witnesses know my client b/c of the news or b/c he was President but they never said they knew him personally.

NISGUA ?@NISGUA_Guate 8m

Gudiel mentions protected #GenocideGT witness Ramiro Leonardo Reyes. See here

Excerpt:

The much anticipated testimony of former Kaibil and soldier with the first company of the Army Corps of Engineers, Hugo Ramiro Leonardo Reyes, concluded the protected witness testimonies for the day. Reyes caused a stir in the Guatemalan press after linking current President Otto Pérez Molina, then serving as Major in the Ixil region and known as Tito Arias, to massacres in Nebaj. The President's General Secretary swiftly responded at the day's end, saying that the mention of Pérez Molina was unfounded and blamed the Public Prosecutor for allowing the testimony to reference a 3rd party who has not been named in the case. Leonardo Reyes detailed the activities of kidnapping, torture, extrajudicial execution and rape, with particular emphasis on the mass graves of El Pino (The Pine Tree) and El Roble (The Oak Tree); see our excerpt below.

In those days, we were in the installation of the Army Corps of Engineers, all the officers participated in the executions that took place in El Pino. In El Pino there was no room left to bury people so they went to a place called El Roble to bury the rest of the victims.

The military and the soldiers were under orders from Major Tito Arias, known as Otto Pérez Molina; the general, José Luis Quilo Ayuso and…the commanders of the engineer company coordinated the burning and looting of the people to execute them later...

The trucks transferred the people, took them down from the truck and one by one they went past the officers. They didn’t use weapons to execute them. Many times they were killed by bayonets, to the neck or chest. They went to the extreme that the people stabbed in the chest by bayonet, they pushed them into the hole dug out by the heavy machinery. Then they put back the earth that had been dug out, the machine put the earth over the victims…The trucks sometimes pushed the children still alive in the rebozos of the mothers into the hole.

Can you indicate the clothing worn by these executed victims?

The victims taken to camp were innocent people. People dressed in traditional cloth, white shirts, women with their traditional clothing, barefoot. The men tied by the feet and hands. If they unbound their feet it was only to take them off the trucks. When the young women were taken, they were raped, not necessarily right there. The installations of the engineers, they were provisional but as time passed they began building better buildings and that’s where they raped the young women…

Do you remember whether elderly also died?

Yes sir, there was no forgiveness for the elderly, not for the women and not for the children…

One elderly women whose hair was long, it went down to her waist, she was killed in El Pino. They cut her head off and took it to the officers’ cafeteria. …All the officers cut this elderly women’s head off and brought it to the table. They left her head on the table so all the women who worked in the kitchen preparing food [would see], to provoke a reaction from them, or to scare them, or as a joke.

…There was a pot of coffee so that those of us in service, we could drop by to drink coffee. ...I didn’t have the nerve to drink coffee there because of the head on that table. It is something I cannot forget.

www.nisgua.blogspot.com/2013/04/genocide-on-trial-day-10-expert.html