Stephen Kinzer on Glimmers of Hope in Guatemala

Stephen Kinzer has a good read in The New York Review of Books on Glimmers of Hope in Guatemala. I am jealous as to how he is able to weave so much together - from the 1954 coup, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Jacobo Arbenz, the Rios Montt trial, and repression against those who oppose gold mining - into a few short pages. If you've been reading about Guatemala for the last few months, I can't say that there is too much news in the piece.

However, Kinzer does detail some behind-the-scenes moves of those opposed to the Rios Montt trial which I do not think had yet appeared in English.

Leaders of Guatemala’s notoriously reactionary business elite did not seem troubled when prosecutors indicted Ríos Montt for directing a genocidal campaign against the Ixil Maya. He was never part of their inner circle, and they felt no urge to rescue him. As the verdict approached, however, Zury Ríos, the daughter of Ríos Montt and a member of Congress, and several other children of retired military officers met with powerful business leaders. They warned: if you allow Ríos Montt to be convicted, you may be next.

Prominent businessmen had been members of the Council of State, a body Ríos Montt created to help him run the country in the early 1980s. After talking with Zury Ríos and her associates, several of them commissioned a study to determine if they might be held responsible for collaborating with genocide. The analyst they employed told them it was possible. “If you follow the chain of command to the president, the Council of State could also be put on trial,” he told a Guatemalan journalist. “Anyone who collaborated with the army in any way could be forced to answer in court.”

In view of this threat, twelve business leaders, including six former cabinet ministers and two former vice-presidents, issued a declaration asserting, “The charge of genocide is a legal fabrication that has nothing to do with the wish of victims to dignify their lost loved ones.” They followed this with a sustained publicity campaign using the slogan “Guatemala Is Not Genocidal.” President Otto Pérez Molina, a retired general, said former guerrilla leaders should be on trial instead of Ríos Montt because “it was the guerrillas who brought war to the Ixil triangle,” referring to a region where guerrillas hid and many thousands of Indians were killed. But he did not stop the trial from proceeding.

The guilty verdict, which came on May 10, with an eighty-year prison sentence, was a judicial affirmation of Ríos Montt’s role in one of the most murderous military campaigns in Latin American history. An estimated 200,000 people were killed, and a limited United Nations–sponsored commission later concluded that 93 percent of them died at the hands of government forces. Ten days after the verdict was pronounced, the Constitutional Court, citing an error in legal procedure, annulled it. That pleased business leaders who had been members of Ríos Montt’s Council of State. It also calmed the fears of dozens of well-to-do Guatemalans who, during the 1980s, flew combat support missions and carried out bombing raids for the army in their own planes and helicopters.

Of course he has some, but Rios Montt does not have a lot of support in Guatemala. If he did, he probably would not have been put on trial. Even during the course of the trial, few people turned out to support him. There was a lot of coverage in the press supportive of him but not much else. However, as I think that I've mentioned here before, people moved against the trial because a guilty conviction would not have been just about Rios Montt; a guilty verdict would condemn all those who supported him and the military project, to varying degrees, including the US government and evangelical community and the Guatemalan military and economic elite. What CACIF and others feared most was that prosecutors would come for them next.

Did that cause individual members of the Constitutional Court to change their opinions and reverse the ruling? I don't know. I'm still in the camp that they were leaning towards throwing out the conviction for some reason, no mater what.

Kinzer emerges from Guatemala somewhat optimistic.

It is still easy, as it has been for most of the last half-century, to see Guatemala as a dark place with no exit. The deep inequality that has plagued the country since the days of conquest continues. So does the culture of violence that has enveloped Guatemala since the 1954 coup. Yet the opening of the police archive, Ríos Montt’s conviction, and the commemoration of Árbenz can be seen as a historical sequence, testifying to the resilience of a devastated society and offering glimmers of hope that were all but unimaginable just a few years ago.

In 2009, I took part in a discussion where we mostly all agreed that Guatemala would simply muddle along for the next few years. In some ways that has been true especially compared to what has happened in neighboring Honduras. 2009 was a really interesting year - the June coup in Honduras, the Rosenberg murder/suicide in Guatemala, and the election of the FMLN in El Salvador. There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of the region. And Guatemala's actually done a little better than muddle through, that is, until the second half of the year.