Efrain Rios Montt, Former Guatemalan Dictator, Convicted Of Genocide -Friday May 10,2013

A Guatemalan court convicted former dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity on Friday May 10,2013 sentencing him to 80 years in prison, the first such sentence ever handed down against a former Latin American leader.

Rios Montt had said he never knew of or ordered the massacres while in power.

It was the state's first official acknowledgment that genocide occurred during the bloody, 36-year civil war, something the current president, retired Gen. Otto Perez Molina, has denied.

A three-judge tribunal issued the verdict after the nearly two-month trial in which dozens of victims testified about mass rapes and the killings of women and children and other atrocities.

The proceedings suffered ups and downs as the trial was suspended for 12 days amid appeals and at times appeared headed for annulment.

Guatemala's constitutional court annuls Rios Montt's genocide conviction - May 20,2013
The constitutional court ruled that the trial should restart from the point where it stood on 19 April.
On 10 May, Gen Rios Montt was convicted (of ordering the deaths of 1,771 people of the Ixil Maya ethnic group during his time in office in 1982-83)and sentenced to 80 years in prison
The ruling throws into disarray the historic trial of Gen Rios Montt.The three-to-two ruling by a panel of constitutional judges annuls everything that has happened in the trial since 19 April
According to the constitutional court ruling, the guilty verdict and the 80-year sentence handed down by Judge Jazmin Barrios on 10 May are therefore now void.




Note

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.

The Guatemalan government, using the Guatemalan Army and its counter-insurgency force (whose members defined themselves as ‘killing machines’), began a systematic campaign of repressions and suppression against the Mayan Indians, whom they claimed were working towards an communist coup.
Their 2-year series of atrocities is sometimes called ‘The Silent Holocaust’.
  

500,000 to 1.5 million Mayan civilians fled to other regions within the country or became refugees abroad


The 1999 UN-sponsored report on the civil war: ‘The Army’s perception of Mayan communities as natural allies of the guerrillas contributed to increasing and aggravating the human rights violations perpetrated against them, demonstrating an aggressive racist component of extreme cruelty that led to extermination en masse of defenceless Mayan communities, including children, women and the elderly, through methods whose cruelty has outraged the moral conscience of the civilised world.’

Throughout the period of the genocide, the USA continued to provide military support to the Guatemalan government, mainly in the form of arms and equipment. The infamous guerrilla training school, the School of the Americas in Georgia USA, continued to train Guatemalan officers notorious for human rights abuses; the CIA worked with Guatemalan intelligence officers, some of whom were on the CIA payroll despite known human rights violations.