Mass grave prompts criminal probe in Guatemala

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Evening Echo

Mass grave prompts criminal probe in Guatemala

20/10/2007 - 8:43:29 AM

The discovery of 74 skeletons in a mass grave in Guatemala have prompted the start of a criminal investigation against a former army colonel who ran the military outpost where the remains were found, victims said today.

Juan de Dios Garcia, director of a Mayan human rights association, said his organisation filed the complaint against Colonel Jose Antonio Solares Gonzalez, the latest in a string of high-ranking military officers accused of carrying out mass killings during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war.

While some of the complaints have been investigated, none have resulted in convictions, mostly because of an inefficient justice system that allows for unending appeals.

Solares’ whereabouts was unknown. The Guatemalan army said he retired in 1996 and left no forwarding address.


Read more: http://www.eveningecho.ie/news/bstory.asp?j=287270262&p=z87z7yyz5&n=287271205

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[Judi Lynn]

1. This man was involved in the infamous Rio Negro Massacre

Survivors search for peace, justice
at Guatemala massacre burial sites

The region of Rabinal, Guatemala, was devastated during the 36-year civil war. Estimates say that up to a fourth of its primarily indigenous population was killed during the civil war, the majority in the early 1980s under the brutal reigns of military dictators Efraín Ríos Montt and Romeo Lucas Garcia.

At the epicenter of directing the massacres, torture and disappearances of thousands of indigenous people from Rabinal was a military base which was finally closed down in December 2003. Decades later, family members are still searching for the bodies of their loved ones that disappeared during the 1980s.
(snip)

In addition, some of the perpetrators whose arrest warrants for the massacre were issued over a year ago have still not been caught in order to stand trial for the Rio Negro massacre. Three former civil defense patrollers are still free, as well as Captain Jose Antonio Solares Gonzalez, the military commander in charge of the Rabinal base. According to many witnesses, Capt. Solares was responsible for ordering and directing the massacre of Rio Negro.
(snip)

http://www.uusc.org/info/article052804.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Río Negro Massacre
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Río Negro massacre)•

In 1978, in the face of civil war, the Guatemalan government proceeded with its economic development program, including the construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. Financed in large part by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, the Chixoy Dam was built in Rabinal, a region of the department of Baja Verapaz historically populated by the Maya Achi. To complete construction, the government completed voluntary and forcible relocations of dam-affected communities from the fertile agricultural valleys to the much harsher surrounding highlands. When hundreds of residents refused to relocate, or returned after finding the conditions of resettlement villages were not what the government had promised, these men, women, and children were kidnapped, raped, and massacred by military officials. More than 440 Maya Achi were killed in the village of Río Negro alone, and the string of extra-judicial killings that claimed up to 5,000 lives between 1980 and 1982 became known as the Río Negro Massacres. The government officially declared the acts to be counterinsurgency activities.

Political and legal implications
At the time of the massacres, Guatemala had ratified the American Convention on Human Rights, Article 4 of which protects the right to life and bars extra-judicial killings. In ratifying the Convention, however, Guatemala expressed a reservation with regard to paragraph 4 of Article 4, arguing that “the Constitution of the Republic of Guatemala, in its Article 54, only excludes the application of the death penalty to political crimes, but not to common crimes related to political crimes.” This loophole allowed Guatemala to avoid official condemnation from the IACHR for imposing the death penalty on those who act against the government. Therefore, since the massacres were committed against citizens engaged in “counterinsurgent” activities, the IACHR could not hold the Guatemalan government accountable for its actions.
(snip)

As COHRE cites, the accountability of the States making up the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank is supported by the International Law Commission (ILC) of the UN General Assembly, which has indicated in Article 1 of the provisionally adopted Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations that States may be responsible for internationally wrongful acts of international organizations. Article 3 adds, inter alia, that an internationally wrongful act has occurred "when conduct consisting of an action or omission: (a) is attributable to the international organizations under international law; and (b) constitutes a breach of an international obligation."
(snip)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%ADo_Negro_massacre

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



March 3, 2006

Accountability for International Development Banks and their Sponsors
The Pending COHRE Petition for Atrocities in Guatemala
By Bret Thiele and Mayra Gomez

~snip~
The Chixoy Project and the Massacre and Displacement of Maya-Achi Peasants

Man by Rio Negro

Credit: Bret Thiele

In the early 1980s the Government of Guatemala was involved in one of the most brutal phases of an already brutal war against the majority of the Guatemalan people. At that time, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank partnered with the Government of Guatemala to fund the construction of the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam, a project that would greatly benefit many of the military leaders who owned vast tracks of land in the area. The first phases of the dam project involved displacing Maya-Achi peasants from the reservoir basin in which they had lived for generations. The displacement of the village Rio Negro was carried out through a series of brutal massacres, all under the financial support and supervision of the two banks.

Legal Responsibility of States as parts of the World Bank and IADB
In addition to the Government of Guatemala, the COHRE petition joined the States with human rights obligations under the Inter-American Human Rights system which were Directors of the two banks and held disproportionate voting power, in particular the United States.
(snip)

http://nlginternational.org/news/article.php?nid=8

[Critters2]

2. 1982...So this happened under the regime of my congressman's

father-in-law. Makes me sick.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Lucky you to have Jerry Weller as your Congresscritter. Or maybe not! That's one creepy marriage.

It tells you all you need to know about him and his politics.



Zury Rios Sosa and Jerry Weller at their wedding in Antigua

AP Photo ⁄ Rodrigo Abd
Illinois Republican Jerry Weller is one of the most powerful men in Congress when it comes to Latin America. His wife is the most powerful woman in Guatemala’s controversial FRG party.
By Frank Smyth
August 25, 2006

JERRY WELLER WAS running for his sixth term as congressman from Illinois’ 11th District in July 2004 when he announced that he was engaged to Zury Rios Sosa, an outspoken third-term legislator in Guatemala’s congress and the daughter of former dictator General Efrain Rios Montt. “I am thrilled to have found my best friend and soulmate,” Weller stated in a press release. “Our love knows no boundaries.” In the same release Sosa said, “With Jerry, I am starting an eternal springtime. I admire his character, his commitment to his responsibilities, and his honesty.”

Their mutual admiration notwithstanding, the announcement raised a red flag. Weller, who would be the first congressman ever to marry a member of a foreign national legislature, sat on the International Relations Committee and its western hemisphere subcommittee--would his votes be influenced by Sosa?

In a July 12 editorial the Chicago Sun-Times said, “The problem is the image it conveys to our Latin American neighbors, who are critical enough of our policies without concerns about how a vote might have been influenced by a committee member’s wife.” The following day the Bloomington Pantagraph, the biggest paper in Weller’s district, ran an editorial that said, “Any time an elected U.S. representative privy to confidential information is intimately involved with a central figure in a foreign government--and one whose father has been accused of genocide within that country--there should be concern. . . . There are some boundaries that elected representatives have to draw in the name of U.S. security. We can’t say Weller has crossed that line, but he’s sure tiptoeing down it.”
(snip/...)

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/jerryweller/




On edit, adding exerpt on Ronald Reagan & Efraín Ríos Montt:

But another, more significant, little-mentioned tendency of the ex-President was his fondness for genocidal murderers. I do not use the term "genocide" lightly.

Take Guatemala. That nation's official Historical Clarification Commission charged its own government with a campaign of "genocide" in murdering roughly 200,000 people, mainly Mayan Indians, during its dictatorial reign of terror. The commission's nine-volume 1999 report singled out the US role in aiding this "criminal counterinsurgency." The violence in Guatemala reached a gruesome climax in the early eighties under the dictatorship of the born-again evangelical, Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt. Nine hundred thousand people were forcibly relocated and entire villages leveled. As army helicopters strafed a caravan of 40,000 unarmed refugees seeking to escape to Mexico, Reagan chose that moment to congratulate Ríos Montt for his dedication to democracy, adding that he had been getting "a bum rap" from liberals in Congress and the media. His Administration soon provided as much aid to the killers as Congress would allow.
(snip/...)

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20000327/alterman

[subsuelo]

3. "Solares’ whereabouts was unknown." Yeah, right.

[Peace Patriot]

5. The slaughter continues. FIFTY political candidates, their family members or

campaign aids have been assassinated in the CURRENT election campaigns, in Guatemala, which features a presidential runoff campaign between a center/left candidate, Alvaro Colom (a liberal sort, somewhat in the vein of Bill Clinton, though less enamoured of "free trade") and a real winger, Otto Perez Molina, former head of military intelligence, who says he will increase the police budget by 50% and re-institute the death penalty. Guatemala is pretty much a lawless country, where the rightwing paramilitary mass murderers of the 1980s have become the drugs/weapons gangs of today. Their lawlessness provides the fascist Perez Molina with a fear-based campaign issue, and it is unknown who is doing all the political assassinations, but we can guess that it is mostly leftists who are being killed. That is the rightwing M.O. in Guatemala. Anybody gets in your way, whack 'em.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6986834.stm

It is the kind of atmosphere that Reaganites and Bushites thrive in, and that they have created wherever they have interfered--in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and perhaps most tragically (and certainly most bloodily) in Guatemala, and in other Latin American countries, under Reagan, and in Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Haiti and (likely) Guatemala, and other countries, under Bush. Massive looting (both of local people and of US taxpayers), torture, murder, collapse of civil order, chaos, fear, vast suffering--all the better to loot everything in sight, in the initial chaos, then to install fascist dictatorships for long term looting and oppression. It appears that this same M.O. is at work in Guatemala, currently, and the Bush Junta no doubt has its fingers in it, and may even be directing it. They are desperate to retain some client states in Latin America, as the region, as a whole, is undergoing a vast, peaceful, democratic rebellion against U.S. and global corporate predator interference and domination. The Bush Junta is also into big drug and weapons trafficking, through client gangs. This is what THEIR "war on drugs" is all about--profiting from the cocaine trade to the south and the heroin trade in Asia, and arming all parties, but especially rightwing governments and thugs.

I hope Guatemala is able to elect Colom, and start down a better path. But with all those Mayan voters and activists slaughtered in the 1980s--200,000 of them!--and they and the children they didn't have missing from the electorate--I am not very hopeful. One day Guatemala WILL join the Bolivarian Revolution--it is an unstoppable revolution, a movement whose time has clearly come--but it may be a particularly difficult transition for Guatemala, as it will be for Colombia.