Spanish inquiry into Guatemalan leaders' crimes
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Your support makes all the difference.Baltasar Garzon - the Spanish judge who tried to get General Augusto Pinochet extradited - has turned his attentions to a clutch of former Guatemalan dictators accused of massacres in the Eighties.
Spain's High Court is to investigate allegations of genocide, torture and state terrorism carried out by three former dictators of Guatemala: Efrain Rios Montt, Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores and Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia. The accusations were lodged last December by Rigoberta Menchu, the Guatemalan human rights campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Prompted by Judge Garzon, who transformed international law with his attempt to extradite General Pinochet from Britain to Spain for crimes committed in Chile, the Spanish investigation into Guatemalan abuses could lead to charges and extradition requests for five generals and other senior officials, court sources say.
Throughout the closing stages of the Pinochet affair, Judge Garzon was collecting evidence about Guatemalan atrocities, and Ms Menchu testified before him in Madrid last year. Reports suggest that another judge, Guillermo Ruiz Polanco, will head the Guatemalan inquiry.
Ms Menchu says she brought her case to Spain because of Judge Garzon's determined pursuit of human rights crimes and his insistence that Spanish law allows the prosecution of genocide no matter where it occurs.
"My dream is to stand up in court and defend the truth of my family and my people," said Ms Menchu, an indigenous Mayan who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.
She based her suit on three cases during the Eighties: a military assault on the Spanish embassy in Guatemala in 1980 in which 37 people died, including three Spaniards and Ms Menchu's father; the murder of four Spanish priests; and the torture and killing of other members of her family, including her mother.
"These characterise genocide, terrorism and torture," Ms Menchu's suit stated. Three other officials - a former cabinet minister and two senior police officers - are also accused of involvement.
A Guatemalan truth commission last year blamed the military for more than 90 per cent of all murders, disappearances and other abuses during the country's civil war that ended in 1996. An estimated 200,000 people died or disappeared during the conflict, one of the longest and bloodiest in Latin America, whose origins date from the CIA's overthrow of a democratically elected government in 1954.
Successive Guatemalan dictators were bolstered by vast quantities of US financial and military aid. The notorious Rios Montt, like General Pinochet, became a civilian politician and is currently president of the Guatemalan Congress and leader of the right-wing Guatemalan Republican Front.
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