History will still remember Rios Montt as the first former leader convicted of genocide in a national court

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I am teaching a course entitled Human Rights in Latin America this semester. I tried to make it less Cold War heavy but I'm pretty sure that I failed. One of the books that I am using for the course is Sonia Cardenas' Human Rights in Latin America: A Politics of Terror and Hope. It gives a good, basic overview of human rights related to the Cold War but less to other human rights issues that are only tangentially related to the second half of the twentieth century. In some ways, the text is a little more basic that what I would like but many of the students are coming into to the class not having taken a political science or Latin America class before. Therefore, it might be pitched at just the right level.

While reading the book this week, I was struck by something that Cardenas said about Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (177).

Pinochet was not extradited to Spain or ever sentenced in Chile, but it would be misguided to assume that the case waged against him had no repercussions. It challenged impunity for human rights crimes, both by lifting a wall of silence in society and showing the possibilities of legal prosecution.

If there is any poetic justice in Pinochet having died on International Human Rights Day, it is this: Pinochet may not have been punished for his crimes, but the atrocities he committed turned him into a global symbol of a dictator on trial: even national leaders can be pursued for crimes against humanity. 

While I am somewhat pessimistic that a Guatemalan court will once against find Efrain Rios Montt guilty on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, the aborted sentence of the former leader still has contributed to furthering the cause of justice for victims of the repression and the genocide.

They have shared their suffering with their fellow Guatemalans and the world. Prosecutions against other Guatemalans involved in human rights atrocities continue. We are still talking about the suffering in Guatemala. And, finally, history will still remember Rios Montt as the first former leader convicted of genocide in a national court.