CAMINOS: Focused on Justice for Genocide in Guatemala

By Hayden Gore

 

On April 20th, nearly 100 protesters attended a downtown rally organized by the Denver Justice & Peace Committee to urge the Guatemalan government to move forward on the genocide cases against ex-military dictator Ríos Montt and his high command. DJPC's rally coincided with similar events at Guatemalan consulates across the country in coordination with Amnesty International's National Day of Action.

 

Since the rally, the FRG Party has registered Ríos Montt's candidacy for the Guatemalan Congress with the Supreme Electoral Tribunal in what the Prensa Libre referred to as record time. In public statements, Ríos Montt has tried to project a blithe indifference towards the charges against him. Recently, he dismissed them as the political machinations of “the communists and anti-communists that failed to take over the country in 1982,” when he was de facto president of Guatemala. Despite his apparent lack of concern about the charges, he is clearly aware of the importance of gaining parliamentary immunity to protect himself from prosecution.

 

A recent opinion piece in the Prensa Libre questioned whether or not the congressional seat will guarantee Ríos Montt the immunity he is seeking. The article referred to a statement by the former dean of the Rafael Landívar University law school that parliamentary immunity was never intended to have a retroactive effect. If the law is applied correctly, it protects congressmen only from prosecution for crimes committed during their time in Congress and has no bearing on their legal standing for past crimes.

 

The international Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide supports this position. According to the Genocide Convention, states have a positive obligation “to prevent and to punish” genocide “whether committed in time of peace or in time of war.” Guatemala ratified the convention on January 13, 1950, more than 30 years before Ríos Montt took control of the country by military coup. DJPC is working to see that not another 30 years pass before justice is brought about.