One of CLDC’s former undergrad interns who is now attending law school at UVA, and has law clerked for us this past year, is witnessing an international war tribunal. She recently sent us an update via email that we thought folks would be interested in:
“We flew into Guatemala City on Sunday night. We had what must have been the smoothest traveling experience I have ever had- not a single glitch. We met our taxi driver at the airport and were transported to the posada where the group is staying.
For visual effect, imagine a bright yellow low lying building with white trim and a stuccoed outside, tucked behind razor wire fencing on the top (this is Guatemala City after all). Walk indoors to half-museum, half hotel. There are Mayan artifacts strewn about the interior the way that an old woman displays knick-knacks and spoon collections. Every surface is covered. The entire inside is open, with lush tropical plants reaching sky high and small trees indoors. There are three resident turtles that wander amidst the carved stone statutes of Incan gods. There’s a hammock, of course.
We are the only people at the hotel, and the group is wonderful. We have several professors of human rights law, several more practitioners, and a sizeable contingent of immigrant justice advocates. We were the only law students for the first two days, but now there are two third year students from Berkeley here as well. They are whip-smart and studied in Guatemala for a year during the truth commissions.
Our teams mandate is to witness the genocide trial of General Rios Montt. Montt was the head of state during the most severe years of a 35 year civil war in Guatemala (which I call a dirty war). During that time hundreds of thousands, if not more, people were killed by the government. The indigenous populations in the highland regions were especially targeted in a scorched earth campaign. They called it “draining the ocean from the fish”. Meaning, if you kill all the civilians, the guerillas don’t have anyone to support them. The government used a ruthless policy of killing every man, woman and child- raping the survivors, killing all the animals, burning the villages and the crops. There was a systematic policy to destroy the indigenous cultures, particularly that of the Ixil indigenous group because they were seen as “difficult”- ideologically independent and resistant to psych-ops and government propaganda.
It is important to recognize, and own, the fact that the United States was completely aware of these policies and was financing them. It was during the cold war, and the US financed and trained the militaries in all the dictatorships in latin america during this time period because they were afraid guerilla groups were communists and posed an ideological threat to the United States. What that means is that when I am sitting in trial hearing about genocide, as an American, I look down at my hands and see blood. That’s why I’m here.. and that’s why this is so important for Americans to be involved. We owe them that much.
This is the first time that a national court has been responsible for trying war crimes of genocide, ever. Guatemala has probably the most corrupt government/media/court power structure I have ever witnessed, and there is a lot of speculation that the trial is a tactic by Montt to “clear his name” so he can go back to politics (he just finished a term as a congressperson) instead of having to go up to the international courts, which would be more likely to convict. We will see where it goes.
We were in trial all day yesterday, for nine hours. I am exhausted and pounding caffeine (sorry, Doc). My spanish is good but not good enough. So I’m struggling. But it is a good and worthy struggle. This being my second time sitting twenty feet from someone responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, I found myself strangely with the urge to throw spit wads at him all day. He’s less frail than Mladic, but also more composed. We heard expert testimony for the prosecution, including a fantastic professor from the USA that studied the displacement and humanitarian impacts of the war.
The strangest thing was probably the visibility of corruption and disrespect in the court room. The propaganda against the trial has been enormous here. Sunday’s main paper had a 20 page insert called “the farce of genocide in Guatemala” that was a long, rambling indictment of members of the human rights community, calling them (and the guerrillas during the war) responsible for the massacres and displacement. I have never in my life seen propaganda like this- it’s incredible. It’s contained full-on threats against the opposition. The most intense thing was that the man that financed it (and started the Institute Against Terrorism, which is the genocide-denier organization with military ties that put out the pamphlet) sat in court reading the pamphlet so that the press could take pictures of him. He did this DURING TESTIMONY in the front row, ten feet from the crowd of indigenous folks who were there to watch the trial and were all survivors or families of victims. There was also a big show of armed force in the court room- many soldiers with huge weapons surrounded the entire courtroom.
Today I will be working on some work for the blog, which you should follow for info on the trial. It is at http://nlginternational.wordpress.com
We will be visiting the forensic archives this afternoon and visiting trial tonight.
As for how I’m feeling- Overjoyed, overwhelmed.. wishing I was more useful. In some ways I feel like my entire career trajectory until now has led me to this type of work. I studied human rights and US interventionism in Latin America as part of my undergraduate degree. I became passionate about human rights by channeling my disgust and rage at the United States government into the one way I thought I could be useful- trying to hold the accountable ones accountable. But even then, I feel as though this is a career of trying to pick up the pieces, trying to pluck drops of blood up off the grass. What angers me still is that only Montt is on trial. What angers me is that law is such a conservative construct- that true accountability cannot be found in a courtroom. What angers me is that Reagan, Obama, Bush, Clinton, and every other head of state responsible for massacres- and let’s be straight here, financially responsible is still responsible, since it could not have happened without them- is not on trial. That most Americans, probably most of you even, walk around each day and do not see the blood on that soaks our flag, our way of life, our privilege, our “security.” Rios Montt was a tool- he was a tool of the oligarchy, or imperial and colonial financial interests- a tool of the first/third world dynamic. And we, as much as the rich of Guatemala, benefited and continue to benefit from the slaughter of humans, and children.
I want to work in this field. I am planting seeds to return to Guatemala or to Honduras in the winter of 2013 to work for a month in human rights and to bring my spanish back up to par. How could I not? This has been my passion for so many years, I refuse to let the shelter of my new shiny professional career distract me from it. The people I have been meeting are so inspiring, it would be such a pleasure to give them even a tiny bit of my time and brains.
I hope you are all well and I love you all. I will be writing a blog post about US responsibility for the genocide soon, so keep look for it if you want.