One of the victims testifying before the judge, with the support of a psychologist and a translator. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 28 2012 (IPS)

“In the garrison they had rooms where they would rape us; sometimes there were three, four or five soldiers,” Rosa Pérez*, one of the women used by the Guatemalan army as a sex slave during this country’s civil war, testified in court.

With her face covered, and with the support of a psychologist and a translator, a crying Pérez told a court hearing this week that members of the army kidnapped her husband and turned her into a sex slave and servant in the Sepur Zarco military garrison in the municipality of El Estor in the northeastern province of Izabal.

She and 14 other Q’eqchi Maya Indian women who were subjected to sexual and labour slavery between 1982 and 1986 testified at a preliminary hearing held this week in a court in the Guatemalan capital.

Charges have been brought against 37 members of the military in the case.

“Go to the garrison, the soldiers need someone to wash their clothes, cook their beans, and make them coffee,” Peréz said she and the other women were told by military commissioner Miguel Ángel Caal.

She said they did not imagine the appalling treatment and abuse that they would suffer for so many months in the military garrison.

“They told me that if I didn’t let them, they would kill me, and they put a gun to my chest” while she was raped by different soldiers after washing their clothes and cooking and serving their meals from six in the morning, she added.

“Once I gathered my courage and went to complain to the lieutenant, and he told me that maybe I had got them used to doing that,” said Pérez, who miscarried as a result of the constant sexual abuse.

She also said that before she was taken to the garrison, the soldiers had kidnapped her husband, the father of her three children. She knew nothing about his fate until his remains were found decades later.

Some 200,000 people – mainly Maya Indians in the country’s highlands – were killed and 45,000 were forcibly disappeared in Guatemala’s 1960-1996 armed conflict. The bodies were buried in secret mass graves, unmarked graves in cemeteries, or on the grounds of military installations, according to the Historical Clarification Commission.

In its 1999 report, that U.N.-sponsored truth commission found the army guilty of over 90 percent of the deaths, and reported that one out of four victims of the human rights abuses were women.

Hunger kills in the mountains

One of the most devastating testimonies was given by Juana Morales*, who told the hearing that she and her three children fled into the mountains in 1982 from San Marcos, a community on the border between Izabal and the neighbouring province of Alta Verapaz.

Morales said a group of soldiers came to her home, took away her husband – she still doesn’t know what happened to him – and then raped her.

“They put a gun to my chest and raped me. Three of them did it, the rest just watched. One of my kids, who was four years old at the time, was with me, and screamed when he saw what they were doing to me,” she said.

To save her own and her children’s lives, the Q’eqchi woman went into hiding in the nearby mountains. “We had nothing to eat, we had no tortillas, and my kids started to get sick,” she said.

“My daughter told me we should go back home, saying ‘there are chicken eggs on the table there’,” Morales said between sobs. One by one, her three children starved to death in the mountains.

After living in hiding in the forest for six years, she returned to San Marcos one day, but her home and her belongings were no longer there. “I had two houses, but they had burnt them down. I had nothing left.”

Lucía Morán, with Women Transforming the World, a local non-governmental organisation, told IPS that with this case, “Guatemala is setting a historic legal precedent for humanity, because a national court has never heard cases of rape and sexual slavery.

“Sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war, and it wasn’t until the 1990s, in the international tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda, that justice began to be done in these cases,” she said.

The activist pointed out that between 1982 and 1988 there were no armed clashes between the army and the guerrillas in the so-called Franja Transversal del Norte (northern transversal strip), where these communities were situated. But the army set up the garrison in Sepur Zarco to protect the economic interests of large landowners and the mining and oil industries.

In a 1982-1983 scorched-earth campaign, at least 440 villages were razed to the ground, and the inhabitants killed.

“That’s when they started making lists, to track down peasant leaders who were fighting for legal title to their land,” she said, adding that the husbands of the 15 women who testified at this week’s hearing were all rural activists, and were all forcibly disappeared.

Another of the victims described how she was raped and forced to work as a servant in
Sepur Zarco.

“I was sexually abused by five soldiers every day. I was there for six months, every other day,” said Marta López*, who had to leave her eight children home alone while she worked at the garrison from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

But before that, soldiers had come for her husband. “In 1982, the military came to our house and took him away, killed him, and dumped him in a pit,” she said.

The army’s version of events

As the women testified, former army reserves sergeant Ricardo Méndez Ruiz admitted that “the army committed abuses during the conflict,” but said “the guerrillas did too.”

He argued that “justice should be the same for everyone.”

In 2011, Méndez Ruiz, a businessman, brought legal action against 26 people for his 1982 kidnapping by left-wing guerrilla groups. Today he is a spokesman for the defence of the military personnel accused of civil war-era human rights violations.

“It is clear that the witnesses that the Public Ministry (office of the public prosecutor) is providing and the plaintiffs are people with very low levels of education. They don’t even have any idea of exact dates, which makes you think they may have been manipulated,” he told IPS, referring to the women who testified.

Méndez Ruiz has repeatedly claimed that the work of the prosecutor’s office is “biased” and is being used “to wreak vengeance on the army.”

And in this case, he said, the interest is also “for money.”

“On other opportunities, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights has condemned the Guatemalan state to pay millions in reparations, which I’m sure go into the pockets of the plaintiffs,” he said.

* The names of the victims have been changed for security reasons.

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Sep 25 2012 (IPS)

Since Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey became attorney general in Guatemala in 2010, a string of crimes involving military personnel who fought leftwing guerrillas, drug traffickers and organised crime have been cleared up.

The mild manner of this 46-year-old doctor in criminal law and human rights contrasts with her determination in carrying out her difficult task, to the extent that in August the U.S. magazine Forbes named her as one of “the most powerful women changing the world in politics and public policy.”

In March, Newsweek, another U.S. magazine, named her, among 12 Latin Americans, one of the 150 most fearless women in the world, and in 2011 she was given the International Crisis Group’s Stephen J. Solarz Award for her work “promoting peaceful, just and open societies in some of the world’s most conflict-affected regions.”

The murder of Argentine singer-songwriter Facundo Cabral is one of the high-profile crimes cleared up under Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

In this interview with IPS, Paz y Paz Bailey described how she has started restructuring the public prosecutor’s office, leading to the handing down of a large number of sentences. In this impoverished Central American country of 15 million people, 98 percent of all crimes go unpunished, according to the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).

Q: Nearly two years after taking office, what do you think has been your greatest success?

A: Building a team to work together, in the attorney general’s office as well as in the different branches of the public prosecutor’s office. That team has allowed things to happen that were previously thought to be impossible, such as clearing up homicides, and pursuing drug traffickers, corruption and so on.

Q: What results do you value the most?

A: Emblematic cases have been solved on the basis of scientific evidence, for instance: the murder of Argentine singer-songwriter Facundo Cabral, the murders of mayoral candidates in San José Pinula, a municipality close to the capital city, and the fraud case involving the mayor of Antigua Guatemala.

Also, over 60 people belonging to Los Zetas (a violent Mexican drug trafficking group) have been sentenced, and extraditable drug traffickers have been arrested, among them many members of the Lorenzana family, as well as Horst Overdick and Juan Ortiz Chamalé.

The justice system had not produced these results in Guatemala before, but now this is happening, and it has also contributed to a 20 percent decline in violent deaths.

In 2009, the year with the highest murder rate, there were over 6,000 violent deaths, equivalent to 46 per 100,000 population, while in 2011 there were 39 per 100,000 population.

The murder rate fell by seven percentage points in that period and has continued to decline.

Q: How have you built your working team?

A: With two basic tools. One is knowledge from the outside of how the public prosecutor’s office works in different instances, such as investigations and diagnoses. And the other is a system of performance evaluation which allows us to assess each person’s work.

Q: Newsweek and Forbes magazines have recognised your work for its fearlessness and achievements. What does this mean to you?

A: The awards are very important because they support not only my action, but our joint action as an institution. One person alone could not do everything that has been done in these two years.

In reality, it is recognition of the work of a team of people. In fact, those who carry out searches or investigations and prosecute cases are a group of prosecutors, men and women.

And that international recognition is echoed in the voices of many Guatemalan citizens who are saying that the work of the public prosecutor’s office has improved. Even people filing charges tell me: I didn’t dare to bring an accusation before, but now I do.

Q: You have successfully prosecuted several military personnel for abuses committed during the 1960-1996 civil war. What outcome do you expect in the case of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983), who is accused of genocide?

A: There are two cases in which genocide charges have been brought, one in Área Ixil, Quiché (a massacre of 371 indigenous people in the west of the country) and another in Dos Erres, Petén (a massacre of 201 people in the north), both of them perpetrated in 1982.

Ríos Montt is being prosecuted for both these cases. The defence lawyers have basically hindered the progress of the trials, rather than present arguments intended to show the innocence of the accused.

This strategy has blocked the Dos Erres case for nearly 10 years. A motion is made and if that doesn’t work, a constitutional appeal is lodged, and so forth.

The inter-American system of human rights has handed down rulings strongly condemning these practices, and there are also judges, both men and women, who refuse to play that game. I hope that now, in the 21st century, we can fulfil the constitutional promise of prompt and effective justice.

Both cases are extremely solid. We expect, of course, a conviction and sentencing.

Q: What would conviction of Ríos Montt mean for the Guatemalan justice system?

A: If there is a verdict of conviction in these cases, as in other instances of particularly violent crimes against life, gender violence or particularly costly crimes like corruption, it sends a signal to society that these things cannot be done, and if they are, there will be consequences in the context of the rule of law, in other words a conviction.

The rule of law is the same for all. It does not matter who the victim is or who the perpetrator, a crime must be punished. Perhaps the only consideration is the gravity of the crime, in making its investigation and punishment a priority.

And in this case, as in others, when we are talking about someone who was head of state, the message of equality before the law is strengthened.

Q: What is your assessment of CICIG’s work?

A: In terms of its work with the public prosecutor’s office, the most important aspect has been the transfer of capabilities in joint cases as well as the strengthening of the crime analysis unit, the financial analysis unit, the department of security and the office of witness protection.

As for the country, it has done away with the sense that the judicial branch was not up to solving certain types of case. CICIG has demonstrated that extremely complex cases can be cleared up with scientific evidence and within the context of the rule of law.

Q: How far will you be able to progress with the fight against impunity during your term of office?

A: The best and most important legacy we can leave is a strategic working method that on the one hand reduces impunity because crimes are cleared up and criminals are punished, while on the other it prevents further crimes being committed.

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