Along With the Poor, the Powerful Must Face Prosecution, Too

At first glance, the death sentence imposed Oct. 14 on three Maya peasants in connection with a 1982 massacre orchestrated by the Guatemalan army might suggest that Guatemala’s newly reconstructed legal system is finally functioning. However, the conviction raises more questions than answers.

Among them are the chilling effect this conviction will have on evidence for future prosecutions of military officials and the propensity of the Guatemalan state to exterminate Maya peasants for political expediency while letting higher-ranking army officials go free.

The massacre of 177 women and children in the village of Rio Negro was one of 626 village massacres committed by the Guatemalan army in the early 1980s as Guatemala’s civil war ground on. Many of these atrocities were committed with the assistance of civil patrollers like these three convicted Maya peasants, who were acting under army orders.

Of the nearly 50 exhumations of massacres carried out to date, the Rio Negro case is the first to reach trial. The criminal court proceeding in the rural regional capital of Salama was marked by death threats to survivors and witnesses; the refusal of recalcitrant army officials to cooperate with the judges; a military officer defiantly raising his right hand in a Nazi-like salute as he was sworn in; the relocation of defendants to prevent the possibility of a mob’s “liberating” them from jail; and clearing of the courtroom on several occasions because of threats of violence.

Nor were these activities unique to legal attempts to prosecute perpetrators of human rights violations in Guatemala. On Oct. 7, as the trial in Salama proceeded, Celvin Galindo, the prosecutor investigating the murder of Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi, resigned and fled to the United States after numerous death threats.

Despite the volatile and tense atmosphere in Salama and elsewhere, the three judges on the panel in the Rio Negro trial distinguished this court proceeding by demonstrating objectivity and equanimity. This alone has given many Guatemalans the hope that justice, which has generally been a privilege of the powerful, may now be within the reach of the poor and the indigenous.

Still, the image of justice emerging from this verdict is skewed, regardless of one’s moral position on the death penalty. The massacre was committed by civil patrollers from the neighboring village of Xococ under an army order. The civil patrols militarized Maya communities throughout the country by obligating all men 15 and older to cooperate under threats of torture and death. Like recent genocides in other parts of the world, the systematic incorporation of civilians into murderous army operations complicates prosecution of perpetrators in many ways. For one thing, it shifts a wrong act into what Holocaust survivor Primo Levi called “the gray zone.” It seems that, even if civilians evade certain death by acquiescing to army orders to commit acts of violence, once the fighting is over, they could face the death penalty for following the orders of the previous regime.

We are not suggesting that civilians who participated in crimes against humanity should not be tried for their crimes. Our point here is that to focus on the least powerful perpetrators in the military regime ultimately protects the army. What civil patroller will now come forward as a material witness to identify army perpetrators in light of the Rio Negro precedent?

In the 1980s, Guatemala massacred Maya communities in the name of anti-communism. At the close of the 20th century, we hope the Guatemala can find more effective forms of redress for the massacres’ survivors and victims than only the prosecution of low-ranking civil patrollers.

If Guatemala is serious about constructing a rule of law, it must prosecute the intellectual authors and those who ordered the massacres. By demonstrating that the rule of law extends to the powerful as well as the poor, Guatemala could take a big step toward constructing a viable democracy.