Article: Massacre Trial

Guatemalan Court Won't Act Vs. Military

Sergio De Leon, Associated Press
Simon Watts, BBC Americas editor

Guatemala City - Guatemala's highest court said Friday it cannot try soldiers charged with participating in a wartime massacre of more than 300 civilians until a separate court determines if the country's postwar reconciliation law bars such prosecution.

The Constitutional Court's decision could affect several similar pending cases, both military defense and human rights lawyers said Friday.

Before a written copy of the decision was obtained by The Associated Press, two court officials along with Edgar Perez, an attorney who has been pressing for the soldiers' prosecution, said the court had effectively dropped charges against the soldiers.

But a review of the ruling showed the court decided that it cannot try the soldiers until the lower court rules. The court's ruling was issued in December but not distributed to the parties involved until Wednesday.

In it, the tribunal argued that it cannot rule on the charges against 17 soldiers because of appeals the defendants filed - one arguing that the National Reconciliation Law precludes their prosecution. An appeals court has not yet issued a ruling on that issue, the decision noted.

The law provides limited amnesty in connection with the country's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996. Until now, the Guatemalan judiciary had interpreted the country's amnesty provisions as not applying to massacres.

Perez, counsel for the civilian Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared, questioned the ruling, saying that the Constitutional Court had previously indicated that actions taken by the lower-court over the massacre case "were in line with the constitution and the federal penal code."
"But now they come around and say that the National Reconciliation Law" has to be considered, he said.

Lawyer Julio Cintron, who has defended military officials in the past, said the court's decision could serve as a precedent for some 20 other pending cases involving victims of alleged massacres.

Miguel Alvizures, director of the nongovernmental Legal Action Center for Human Rights, said the ruling "establishes a disastrous precedent."

Human rights campaigners immediately voiced alarm about the impact of this decision on the investigation of other atrocities.

Coming from the highest court in the land, it is an important precedent, but the same legal issues are being considered by other courts, and there are likely to be appeals.

Hundreds of massacres of civilians took place during Guatemala's civil war, as U.S.-backed military forces sought to weed out rebel forces in the country's isolated highlands. Some 240,000 people were killed or disappeared in the conflict.

The case at hand deals with the 1982 massacre of more than 300 civilians by a military squad specializing in counterinsurgency, in the village of Dos Erres in the country's northern Peten region.

The military accused village residents of being guerrilla sympathizers after they refused to join paramilitary groups to fight the rebels, according to a report issued by the U.N.-led truth commission that was established after the war.

The United Nations report said the commandos raped local women and used hammers for some of the killings.

In a 1994 exhumation requested by the Association of Families of the Detained and Disappeared, forensic anthropologists recovered the remains of 162 people, 67 of which belonged to children under age 12.

Posted by elcanche at February 7, 2005 03:59 PM