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Mock trial convicts Guatemalan generals
News From Indian Country
By Albert Bender
December 15, 2001

As the witness tensely clutched the podium and spoke in a voice tightly choked with emotion relating the massacre of his hometown, many in the audience were moved to tears.

The witness was Sabino Perez, a Maya Indian survivor describing in graphic detail the slaughter of his relatives and neighbors during the Guatemala War Crimes Tribunal held at Fisk University in Nashville on Oct. 13.

"There were so many dead people that the blood was running in streams" said Perez, spokesperson for the Association in Defense of Human Rights in the Ixcan (ADDHAI).

During the military dictatorships of Generals Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt, hundreds of such massacres were carried out by the Guatemalan military, resulting in the annihilation of over 440 Maya communities, villages and towns and a death toll of over 150,000 Indigenous men, women and children. The massacres ended only with the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996. Perez was one of a handful of eyewitness survivors.

The Guatemalan War Crimes Tribunal, a mock trial proceeding, charged Generals Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt, under international law, with Crimes against Humanity, Genocide, Sexual Violence: Systematic Rape and Torture. The Tribunal consisted of a judge/moderator, prosecutor and jury. No defense of the accused could be found.

Perez recounted the Sunday morning of March 16, 1982, when the Guatemalan Army rolled into his hometown of Cuarto Pueblo and without saying a word began soaking all three churches in the town with gasoline and setting them afire. All inside the wooden buildings - men, women, children and elderly - were burned alive.

At the same time, other soldiers went to the town market, which heldabout 2,000 persons and began rounding them up and taking them to a field outside the town where the Army had started large bonfires. The soldiers then began killing the townspeople - again men, women and children - by first
cutting out their eyes and their tongues and then cutting off their hands and feet and tossing the limbs into the fires, then throwing their bodies into theflames. Hundreds were killed in this manner, Perez stated.

He then related that the Army kept alive all captive females between 12 and 25 years of age and repeatedly mass raped them. At the end of nine days the soldiers killed all the women and girls and left the area.

"For everyday of my life it seems like all this happened yesterday" stated a visibly upset Perez. "It's what I live, what I see, what I suffer. If I get killed when I return to Guatemala, I've left my words behind."

Perez was referring to the death threats that he and 49 other witnessesand their families had received since the filing of the genocide cases in theGuatemala courts against Lucas Garcia and Rios Montt.

He stressed the need for letters to be sent to Guatemalan PresidentPortillo urging the enforcement of the Peace Accords. He also spoke of the need for international observers in the country to ensure violence does not erupt again.

Other witnesses were Pauluu Karmakefego ???f the International Network ofSmall Island States and Non-Governmental Organizations and Indigenous People (INSIN), Carrie Ferrence of the Network In Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (NISGUA), and Melba Checote-Eads of the Native American Gathers
Fellowship.

These witnesses spoke of how U.S. corporations, in particular Mobil Oil,instigated atrocities because these energy companies want the oil-rich Guatemala Indian lands; the plans of the Bush administration to rearm the Guatemalan military; and of the historic parallels between the struggle of the Indigenous people of Guatemala and the Native people of the U.S.

The jury, composed of both Native Americans and non-Indians, found the generals guilty of the charges and further recommended that the rank and filesoldiers who carried out the orders should also be charged.

The Tribunal is part of an international effort to support Guatemalan lawsuits brought by the Maya massacre survivors.

Article copyright News From Indian Country.