GUATEMALA-HUMAN RIGHTS: U.S. Group Asks Arzu to Rescind Appointment

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May 9 1997 (IPS) - A major U.S. human rights groups is asking Guatemalan President Alvaro Arzu to withdraw the nomination of a former vice president to serve on the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

In a letter to Arzu, New York-based Human Rights Watch says it has “serious reservations” about the candidacy of Francisco Villagran Kramer, who served as Guatemala’s vice-president from 1977 to 1980 under Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia, “because of his high level of political responsibility in a government that systematically violated the most basic human rights”.

It also cited Villagran Kramer’s more recent political alliance with another former military dictator in Guatemala, ret. Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, as well as his recent public positions in favour of expanding the death penalty in Guatemala.

The letter, which was sent to Arzu Thursday evening, says that

Villagran Kramer, who resigned the vice-presidency in 1980 in part to protest killings committed by the Guatemalan army and police, fails to meet the IACHR’s requirement that commissioners “shall be persons of high moral character and recognised competence in the field of human rights.”

The IACHR, along with the San Jose-based Inter-American Court on Human Rights, is established under the American Convention on Human Rights. The Commission, which is part of the Organisation of American States (OAS), has broad jurisdiction to investigate the human rights situations in OAS member states, as well as specific cases that can be brought before it by individuals and non- governmental organisations.

It can also issue “protective measures” urging governments in

countries to protect threatened individuals or groups involved in human rights cases. Still more seriously, it can bring formal cases before the Inter-American Court where it acts as a kind of prosecuting authority in suits involving rights violations for which damages or injunctions are sought.

“The Commission really serves an incredibly important role in

protecting human rights in the Americas,” says Anne Manuel, Associate Director of Human Rights Watch/Americas.

The Commission consists of seven members elected to four-year terms by the OAS member-states. The current Commission, which is chaired by John S. Donaldson of Trinidad and Tobago, also includes members from Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Haiti, the United States, and Venezuela.

No major human rights group has ever protested the nomination of an individual to serve on the IACHR since the Commission’s founding in 1959. In their letter to Arzu, Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth and the director of the Human Rights Watch Americas division, Jose Miguel Vivanco, stressed that they had conducted a thorough review of Villagran Kramer’s career and public statements, including a lengthy meeting with the candidate himself in Washington.

“We sincerely regret having to make such a difficult request to a government which has implemented important human rights measures and has brought to an end the longest internal armed conflict in Central America through peace negotiations,” they wrote to Arzu.

The letter notes that Villagran Kramer ran for office as the running- mate of Lucas Garcia, a former defence minister, in elections that were widely denounced as fraudulent. Their government, according to Human Rights Watch, “brought Guatemala’s horrendous human rights record to a new low, …(as) scores of priests, catechists, indigenous peasants, attorneys, workers, journalists, academics and political figures” were murdered by security forces.

Among the more notorious abuses which took place while Villagran Kramer served as vice-president were the assassinations “in broad daylight in the streets of the capital” of the leading social democratic politicians of the time, Alvaro Fuentes Mohr and Manuel Colom Argueta.

In January, 1980, security forces burned down the Spanish Embassy, which was been occupied by peasant protesters, killing 39 people, including the ambassador and the father of Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum. On May 1, 1980, dozens of participants in another protest were abducted and killed, the same fate that awaited 27 trade union leaders associated with the Coca- Cola plant in Guatemala City six weeks later.

Villagran Kramer provided Human Rights Watch with copies of letters of concern he wrote to various authorities during this period, stressing that he even filed a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the trade unionists. He eventually came to fear for his own life and fled in Sep. 1980 to Washington where he announced his resignation as vice-president.

But that does not excuse his previous behaviour, according to Human Rights Watch. “Whether he participated in decisions to violate fundamental human rights or whether he quietly opposed them, his presence as a civilian vice-president provided an extremely useful appearance of legitimacy to a military government that was quickly becoming an international pariah,” according to the letter.

“It’s like claiming to have a mitigating effect on (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein,” says Manuel.

Also objectionable, according to Human Rights Watch is Villagran

Kramer’s association with Rios Montt, widely considered the most ruthless of the succession of military dictators who ran Guatemala in the early 1980s. His ‘beans and bullets” counterinsurgency campaign resulted in “hundreds of massacres” in the Mayan highlands of the country in 1981 and 1982.

Finally, Villagran Kramer’s support for expanding the application of the death penalty in Guatemala, as well as statements last month in which he accused Guatemalan judges of using the American Convention on Human Rights to evade their responsibility to impose the death penalty, are ‘at odds with the responsibilities he would assume as a member of the

(Commission),” according to the letter.

Villagran Kramer has at least one human rights defender here, however. Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs and a long- time friend of the former vice-president, says Villagran Kramer is “an extraordinary and honourable man who has sacrificed himself for his principles.”

He would be a very good addition to the Commission,” according to Birns.