By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 22 2004 (IPS)

U.S. and international human rights groups Thursday hailed the Guatemalan Supreme Court’s breakthrough decision this week to reinstate the conviction of a former high-ranking military officer for the 1990 murder of a prominent anthropologist.

The judgement marked the first time that a military officer accused of human rights abuses committed during Guatemala’s 36-year bloody civil war has failed to escape criminal sanction.

The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR), the Centre for Justice and International Law (CJIL), and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) said the court’s decision marked a ”tremendous victory” for the family of the victim, Dr. Myrna Mack Chang, and for all those in Guatemala ”who have challenged entrenched impunity”.

”We hope that this decision marks the beginning of a new period in Guatemala where rights abusers are held accountable for their actions, no matter their positions in previous power structures”, said Neil Hicks, director of LCHR’s human rights defenders programme.

But even as the verdict was being celebrated, the Lawyers Committee and Amnesty International (AI) expressed concern about the fate of another human rights defender in Guatemala, who faces trial this week for criminal defamation.

Bruce Harris, the Latin American director for the children’s rights group Casa Alianza, was set to go on trial Thursday for ”defaming” a prominent Guatemalan attorney by asserting at a 1997 press conference that she exercised ”undue influence” over government officials in facilitating international adoptions of Guatemalan children.

”Mr. Harris is one of the foremost defenders of children’s rights, and it is imperative that he is able to fully exercise his rights to freedom of expression in order to continue his crucial work”, said Hicks, who appealed to Guatemala’s new president, Oscar Berger, to intervene in the case.

London-based AI also expressed ”alarm” about the case, noting that if convicted, Harris could face up to five years in prison.

”We are concerned that the case demonstrates that the use of criminal defamation charges against those who expose human rights abuses and issues of social concern in Guatemala is yet another form of persecution of human rights defenders”, Amnesty said, adding that 18 defenders have been killed in the country in just the past three years.

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Mack case came one month after the San Jose-based Inter-American Court for Human Rights (IACHR) ordered the Guatemalan government to pay more than 600 thousand dollars in damages to Mack’s surviving family members and to establish a scholarship in her name, among other measures.

It was the highest monetary award ever awarded by the court.

The IACHR found the government ignored several provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights, to which it is a party, in its handling of the killing by state security forces.

This week’s decision also came less than two weeks after Berger’s inauguration Jan. 14. His campaign promises to crack down on security institutions suspected of continuing rights violations and to protect efforts to uncover serious abuses committed during and after the civil war, which formally ended with a United Nations-mediated peace agreement in 1996, have been followed by a number of steps that have stoked the hopes of rights activists.

In a surprise move last week, Berger indicated he intended to appoint 1992 Nobel Peace laureate and long-time indigenous activist, Rigoberta Menchu to a government post dealing with the long-stalled implementation of the peace accords.

He has also appointed long-time rights activist Frank LaRue, and a number of his civil-society colleagues, to a presidential commission on human rights.

In addition, global rights groups have long regarded Vice President Eduardo Stein as an advocate for human and indigenous rights.

”There is belief that Berger’s coming to power represents a real opening”, according to Adriana Beltran, WOLA’s Guatemala expert and the author of a recent report titled ‘Hidden Powers: Illegal Groups in Post-Conflict Guatemala and the Forces Behind Them’.

Beltran said she was surprised and very pleased by the Mack decision, which took more than 13 years to reach its conclusion.

”The countless delays and obstacles in the case provide a prominent example of the influence and impunity enjoyed by clandestine power structures in Guatemala”, she told IPS.

Indeed, the Mack case has served in many ways as the ultimate test of military impunity in Guatemala.

Investigations, reports, testimony and court verdicts have established that the U.S.-trained anthropologist was stabbed to death by members of a military death squad while on her way home from work Sep. 11, 1990.

Her work at the time – investigating the destruction and massacre of entire indigenous communities by the military at the height of the civil war from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s – was apparently the motive.

Police initially informed her family that she died in a traffic accident, and later suppressed a 60-page internal report that concluded it was a political killing ordered by a key military intelligence unit, known at the time as the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP).

But through the tenacity of her sister, Helen Mack, as well as other rights activists both in Guatemala and overseas, sufficient pressure was brought to bear on the government that an army sergeant serving in the EMP was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison in 1993.

Further investigation and pressure led to the indictment and trial of two colonels and a general – the highest-ranking officers ever to face trial for human rights abuses in Guatemala.

On Oct. 3, 2002 a Guatemalan criminal court convicted former EMP director Colonel Juan Valencia Osorio for his role in ordering the murder, and sentenced him to 30 years’ imprisonment. It acquitted the two other defendants.

But last May, in a ruling that provoked anger and outrage from rights groups worldwide, an appeals court overturned the conviction.

In this week’s decision, however, the Supreme Court reinstated the conviction after finding that the appeals courts had erred in its reasoning regarding the evidence of the EMP’s role.

An estimated 200,000 people were killed during the civil war, most of them members of the indigenous majority of Guatemala, according to a U.N. Commission that found that the military was responsible for the vast majority of deaths.

Excerpt: