Guatemala: Suppressing Dissent at Home and Abroad
Guatemala: Suppressing Dissent at Home and Abroad
Human rights defenders in Guatemala are facing the worst environment since the civil war.
By Patricia Davis, April 24, 2014.
It’s a rare occasion when the president of a small Central American country tries to get a U.S. Senate aide fired. But Guatemala’s Otto Pérez Molina is not having the typical term.
Pérez Molina presided last year over the sharpest escalation in targeted attacks on human rights defenders since Guatemala’s armed conflict ended in 1996. Attacks on human rights defenders—a term encompassing journalists, judicial workers, unionists, indigenous leaders, and others working for basic rights—increased last year by 126 percent, by far the greatest jump recorded in any year in post-war Guatemala. Eighteen human rights defenders were assassinated, a 72-percent increase over 2012, even as the country’s general murder rate has decreased. Also last year, President Pérez Molina was accused of participating in genocide. A former soldier testifying during the trial of former dictator General Efrain Ríos Montt swore under oath that President Pérez Molina had committed atrocities.
Still, Otto Pérez Molina was hoping that the United States would restore military aid to Guatemala, which has been restricted for decades because of human rights abuses. He achieved a measure of success. The United States recently lifted the outright ban on military aid to Guatemala for the first time in 24 years. The 2014 Appropriations Act instead links any future resumption of military aid to the fulfillment of several specific conditions that the State Department must certify. These conditions include ensuring that the military is cooperating with prosecutions of human rights cases involving current and retired military officers and confirming that the government is taking “credible steps” to compensate communities affected by the government massacre of a Mayan community in the 1980s to make way for the Chixoy dam. International military education and training (IMET) funds also have been held up, pending certification that the Guatemalan army has met key conditions.
Stung by the aid restrictions, Pérez Molina—perhaps inadvertently—gave the U.S. Congress a view into his government’s attitude toward dissent and the methods he uses to try to stifle it. He unleashed a disinformation and character assassination campaign, a tactic his administration is employing ever more frequently. The Guatemalan president’s target: Tim Rieser, majority clerk on the Senate State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee.
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