Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, North America

POLITICS-U.S.: Washington Denounces Likely Guatemalan Candidate

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May 28 2003 (IPS) - Twenty years after being hailed by former president Ronald Reagan as an ally against communist subversion in Central America, former Guatemalan President Efrain Rios Montt is finding himself on the outs with the ”neo-Reaganite” administration of President George W. Bush.

In a highly unusual statement, the State Department warned Tuesday that Washington would find it ”difficult” to maintain good relations with Guatemala if Rios Montt, who was nominated by the ruling Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) party last weekend as its candidate in this year’s elections, were elected.

It was the first time in recent memory that Washington has explicitly denounced the candidacy of a right-wing candidate for a Latin American presidency. Denunciations of left-wingers, particularly in Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and Nicaragua have become increasingly common under the Bush administration.

”We would hope to be able to work with and have a normal, friendly relationship with whoever is the next president of Guatemala,” said spokesman Richard Boucher. ”Realistically, in light of Mr. Rios Montt’s background, it would be difficult to have the kind of relationship we would prefer,” he added.

Of particular concern, according to officials who spoke with reporters after Boucher’s statement, was Rios Montt’s 18-month tenure as president in 1982-1983, when the military under his command carried out a brutal counter-insurgency campaign that included the massacres of tens of thousands of Indians and the destruction of hundreds of their villages.

Washington is hoping that Guatemala’s Constitutional Court will disqualify Rios Montt as it has done twice before on the grounds that the 1986 constitution bans individuals who have taken power by extra-constitutional means in the past from serving as president. Rios Montt seized power in a military coup d’etat against General Romeo Lucas Garcia.

But U.S. officials and independent human rights groups said they fear that the former president’s influence over the courts has grown over the past three years when he served as president of the Congress. That uncertainty has been compounded by statements by President Alfonso Portillo, a protege of Rios Montt, that he did not believe the court would block his mentor’s presidential bid.

Those remarks helped spur the State Department to speak out now, according to sources, in order to make clear to the FRG that bilateral ties would suffer if Rios Montt returned to the presidency.

Bilateral ties are already in the dumps, however, over a range of issues, including corruption, human rights and drug trafficking.

The administration earlier this spring found that Guatemala was not co-operating sufficiently in combating drug trafficking to warrant its certification. Although it decided to waive sanctions, the finding marked an expression of growing anger about Guatemala’s failure to take the problem seriously.

Similarly, the State Department, like most human rights groups, was stunned earlier this month when an appeals court reversed last October’s trials court conviction of a retired colonel for the brutal 1990 slaying of anthropologist Myna Mack Chang.

The conviction had been considered a groundbreaking victory against military impunity for abuses committed during the 35-year civil war that ended in 1996. Mack had been documenting atrocities against Indians during the war when she was killed on orders from the presidential security unit (EMP), an elite military unit that has acted as both an intelligence agency and a death squad.

”We believe that the Guatemalan authorities should continue to pursue justice in this case,” Boucher said after the appeals court’s judgement. ”While we respect the independence of Guatemala’s system of justice, its inability to punish those responsible for Dr. Mack’s murder after more than 13 years is disappointing and undermines the rule of law and the promise held out by the signing of the Guatemala Peace Accords to close a dark chapter in that country’s recent history.”

In a report to Guatemala’s donor countries just a few days after the appeals court decision, Amnesty International (AI) noted that local human rights groups, church officials and the courts themselves had been targets of a rising tide of violence and intimidation in the last two years. ”Between January 2002 and February 2003, the total number of judges and magistrates threatened was 103,” Amnesty said. ”Several have been killed.”

Despite that fact that the EMP was supposed to be abolished under the 1996 peace accords, the group added, its budget had actually increased over the previous year. ”It is unconscionable at a time when Guatemala is suffering from falling coffee prices, drought, widespread hunger, and in some areas, famine, that funds for nutrition should be transferred to the EMP.”

While Rios Montt has not been directly implicated in the recent violence and intimidation, the main targets have been people engaged in uncovering atrocities committed by the army during his rule and throughout the 1980s.

A 1999 report by a United Nations-backed ”truth commission” found that Rios Montt had at the very least condoned massacres by the army, including what it called ”acts of genocide”.

On the basis of its report, 11 Mayan communities launched a lawsuit in 1991 against the former president in order to force a criminal investigation. Another lawsuit against Rios Montt was filed by Nobel Peace Laureate Rigoberta Menchu in Spain.

That Washington now considers the former dictator unacceptable is particularly ironic given the lengths to which the Reagan administration went to support Rios Montt at the height of his counter-insurgency campaign, according to Bill Spencer, director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) here.

Reagan himself met personally with Rios Montt in Guatemala City in 1983, and insisted to reporters afterwards that the Guatemalan leader, an evangelical Protestant, had received a ”bum rap” from the media and human rights groups, who at that time were reporting large-scale massacres by the military in the Mayan Highlands.

After the visit, his administration lifted the ban on U.S. sales of military equipment to Guatemala that had been imposed by Jimmy Carter, claiming that Rios Montt, ”has taken significant steps … in promoting respect for human rights”. It even circulated a study that attempted to debunk Amnesty’s claims that entire villages were being wiped out.

”We wish the State Department had been more critical of Rios Montt back in 1982 and ’83,” said Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch on Wednesday. ”We’re glad that the U.S. government now, in hindsight, recognises the gravity of the abuses that took place 20 years ago,” she told IPS.

WOLA’s Spencer agreed, adding that he hoped Rios Montt would drop or be forced out of the race. ”If everyone’s focused on whether he should be in jail or in the presidential palace rather than on the problems of poverty, injustice and exclusion, that would be a real shame.”