Lawyer speaks out over annulled genocide trial of Guatemalan dictator

A leading Guatemalan human rights lawyer who represented families of the victims of Guatemala’s civil war in the 1980s has called for an international response to the annulled trial of ex-dictator José Efrain Ríos Montt, who was recently declared mentally unfit to be retried on genocide charges.

Francisco Martín Vivar Castellanos, one of the prosecutors involved in the case which found Ríos Montt guilty of genocide in the 1980s, has claimed that the oligarchy of Guatemala are using their resources to ensure that the nation's former dictator does not carry out his sentence.

Time in power

In May 2013, Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison for his role in the deaths of 1,771 members of the Ixil Mayan ethnic group during his time in power in the early 1980s. The genocide conviction against Ríos Montt was later overturned by Guatemala’s constitutional court and last July the 89-year-old former general was deemed mentally unfit to be tried again on genocide charges.

As a result of his ill health, the Ríos Montt trial will recommence on January 11th, 2016 behind closed doors.

Speaking in Dublin, Mr Castellanos highlighted the “brutal violence” suffered by the Ixil people under the rule of Ríos Montt and said the decision to overturn Ríos Montt’s genocide conviction had no legal basis.

He added that the former head of the army in Guatemala, General Hector Mario Lopez Fuentes, who was accused of ordering the killing of more than 300 indigenous Ixil people, had died last month. In 2012 Lopez Fuentes was also declared mentally and physically unfit to stand trial

“The people who have committed this fraud are from the highest court in the country,” he said, referring to the culture of impunity which stems from more than three decades of civil war in Guatemala. “There’s nobody that can actually recognise this fraud in our domestic system and that’s why we’ve now approached the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

“The final verdict of the trial states that they were utterly convinced of the deliberate intention to try to exterminate the Ixil people through mass killings, massacres, torture, massive widespread sexual violence, forced displacement and transferring children from one group to another.

“For all of those reasons beyond a shadow of a doubt there was deliberate intention to destroy to Ixil people,” Mr Vivar Castellanos said at a talk entitled ‘Prosecuting Genocide: The Case for Guatemala’.