By Tito Drago
MADRID, Feb 28 2002 (IPS)

Guatemala is controlled by a “corporate mafia state” in which certain transnational firms “collude with the police, military and common criminals,” said the human rights watchdog Amnesty International in the Spanish capital Thursday.

Investigator Tracy Ulltveit-Moe, of the United States, in her presentation of the report “Guatemala: Lethal Legacy of Impunity”, stated that past human rights violators in the Central American country continue in power, despite the fact that formal democracy was restored two decades ago.

The document on impunity and new human rights violations was co- presented in Madrid by the head of Amnesty’s Spanish office, Esteban Beltrán, Guatemalan government prosecutor Celvin Galindo, and Denise Becker, survivor of a 1982 massacre in which her parents were killed.

Guatemala’s bloody 36-year civil war ended in 1996, when a peace accord was signed between the government and the insurgent National Guatemalan Revolutionary Union after negotiations that began in Madrid nine years earlier. An estimated 200,000 people, mainly civilians, died in the armed conflict.

Beltrán said that Guatemala appears in the world news when it suffers natural disasters, like Hurricane Mitch in 1998, but not for the ongoing human rights violations occurring there, something that requires maximum attention today.

Ulltveit-Moe stated that Guatemala is different from other Latin American countries that had military dictatorships, like Chile or Argentina, because those responsible for human rights violations continue in power.

Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, dictator in 1982-1983, “the period of greatest intensity of massacres,” has been accused of genocide by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, and is currently president of Guatemala’s Congress, said the researcher.

Amnesty’s report documents the impunity of the 1998 assassination of Bishop Juan José Gerardi, director of the Archbishop of Guatemala’s Human Rights Office.

Galindo, special prosecutor in that investigation, said Thursday that he and a dozen others working on the case were forced to flee the country in 1999 because they were receiving death threats.

Nine witnesses who remained in Guatemala were assassinated, he said.

The text also outlines the lack of justice in the assassination of business executive Edgar Ordóñez Porto, whose body was found mutilated in 1999. The victim’s brother and business partner blames the crime on members of the military whose economic interests were threatened by the small refinery that the family had recently started.

That case, says Amnesty, is a clear example of human rights violations committed “in the context of the so-called ‘corporate mafia state’, in which certain economic actors, including subsidiaries of some multinational corporations, collude with sectors of the police and military and common criminals.”

“The mass slaughter of thousands of indigenous people and the gross human rights violations suffered by many more in the context of counter-insurgency operations have never been properly tackled, and those responsible at all levels are still walking free and continuing to wield power in today’s Guatemala,” says the London- based human rights organisation.

Such impunity “sends a message to those in power that they can literally get away with murder, and paves the way for renewed abuses.”

Massacre survivor Becker spoke in Madrid Thursday in a faltering voice, in English because after the incident she was adopted by a U.S. family. “I even lost my mother tongues,” Spanish and the indigenous language Achí, she said.

Becker’s named used to be Dominga Sic Ruiz. She was nine when in the Achí village of Río Negro she witnessed the murder of her parents at the hands of government soldiers and paramilitary troops, who then led 177 women and children into the mountains, where they were massacred.

She hid among the trees, and could hear the gunshots, she said.

Becker is now married and has two young children. She returned to Guatemala in 2000 to search for surviving relatives and to demand justice.

“For Guatemala to finally be able to leave behind its terrible past, addressing the legacy of impunity for past and present human rights violations is key,” says Amnesty.

“Until the Guatemalan judiciary undergoes a root and branch reform process to bring it into line with international standards, and until a clear message is sent that no human rights abuses will be tolerated or remain unpunished, there can be no real and lasting peace in Guatemala.”

The organisation’s recommendations include the full implementation of the aspects of the 1996 Peace Accords referring to human rights and the rule of law, including measures to establish the fate of the “disappeared”.

Amnesty also calls for “establishing an effective protection program for judicial personnel and witnesses involved in anti- impunity cases,” and “guaranteeing the safety of human rights defenders.

Further recommendations include “ensuring that law enforcement agencies abide by international human rights standards…, and that all ‘death squads’, private armies and paramilitary forces are disbanded and those members responsible for human rights violations are brought to justice.”

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