Brave prosecutors in Guatemala are trying to enforce accountability for government-sponsored rapes, tortures and murders in the 1980s, a time when President Reagan and his administration were complicit in the atrocities but remain respected U.S. figures, as Allan Nairn explained to Dennis J Bernstein.
By Dennis J Bernstein
Comedian-turned-politician Jimmy Morales, who was sworn in as Guatemala’s president on Jan. 14, appears to have close ties to some of the country’s most notorious death squad leaders responsible for killing thousands and uprooting tens of thousands of indigenous people from the Guatemalan highlands and the rest of the country in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, on Jan. 6, eight days before the Morales swearing in, Guatemalan police arrested some 18 former military officers for crimes committed during Guatemala’s 36-year “death squad” war from 1960 to 1996 that is estimated to have killed a total of 200,000 people. Included in the sweeps were some of the key participants in the dirty war, including Manuel Benedicto Lucas Garcia, the brother of Guatemala’s military dictator from 1978 — 1982, Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia.
President Ronald Reagan meeting with Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt.
The dramatic arrests came as the retrial of another former head of state, Efrain Rios Montt, is scheduled to begin in late January. However there have been repeated delays in the rehearing of the genocide case against Rios Montt who was found guilty in 2013 but his conviction was overturned by Guatemala’s Constitutional Court.
I spoke about issues with Allan Nairn, the George Polk Award-winning investigative reporter and human rights activist who has done extensive reporting on the Central American death squads and the U.S. support for them. Nairn was scheduled to testify at the first trial of Rios Montt, but was prevented by the judge.
DB: Let’s start with Rios Montt and work our way forward, to the present. Rios Montt and Rodriguez Sanchez, they were tried in 2013; Montt was convicted. What was he convicted of?
AN: Well, Rios Montt was convicted of genocide, and he was sentenced to 80 years in prison. His intelligence chief, Rodriguez Sanchez, was…