At first glance the death sentence by lethal injection imposed on October 13th, 1999, in the case of three civil patrollers convicted of murder for their participation in a Guatemalan army orchestrated massacre in 1982 might suggest that Guatemala’s newly reconstructed legal system is finally functioning. However, the conviction raises more questions than it answers. Among them, the chilling effect this conviction will have on the collection of evidence for future prosecutions of military officials as well as the propensity of the Guatemalan state to exterminate Maya peasants for political expediency.
On March 13, 1982, as the army and civil patrol came closer to Rio Negro, the men fled because just a few months earlier 70 men from Rio Negro had been massacred by the same army and civil patrol from Xococ. The women and children remained in the village because the army had only ever looked for men, not women and children. These 70 women and 107 children were gathered into one large group and ordered to hike up a nearby mountain with the armed men. The women were ordered to dance with the soldiers “like you dance with the guerrilla.” Forensic analysis of the remains showed that the women had been strangled, stabbed, slashed with machetes, and shot in the head. Forensic analysis also revealed that many of the women had received severe beatings to the genital area as evidenced by numerous fractured pelvises including that of Marta Julia Chen Osorio who was nine months pregnant at the time of her death. All the women, including the little girls were buried naked from the waist down.
Fourteen adolescent girls were separated from the group and set aside for mass rape following the killings of their mothers, brothers and sisters. After the mass rape, the girls were stabbed and macheted to death. The majority of children died from having their heads smashed against rocks and tree trunks.
Eighteen children survived because the patrollers from Xococ who had killed their families decided to take these children home in slave-like conditions. The patrollers never imagined that 17 years later these same survivors would testify against them in a court of law. Jesus Tec was 10 years old and carrying his 2 year-old brother in his arms. One of the defendants in the current court case grabbed the baby by the ankles and pulled him from Jesus. “I begged him not to kill my brother,” Jesus testified during the court proceeding. “But he broke his head on a rock.”
Jesus was one of the survivors of the massacre because the civil patroller, who killed his baby brother, decided to take him home as a slave. The Rio Negro case was initiated in 1993 when massacre survivors including Jesus, denounced the massacre to authorities in Salama, the departmental capital of Baja Verapaz. The survivors asked for an investigation of the civil patrollers from Xococ, the platoon of 40 soldiers from the Rabinal army base, and the intellectual authors.
Of the more than 50 forensic exhumations of massacres carried out to-date, the Rio Negro case is the first to reach trial. The October 13th verdict was the second time the three military commissioners from Xococ have been found guilty in this case; the first conviction was nullified on procedural grounds earlier last year.
During this recent court proceeding, prosecutors called military officers to the witness stand. One witness was General Benedicto Lucas Garcia who served as army chief of staff during the reign of his brother General Romeo Lucas Garcia who ushered in the epoch known as La Violencia. Credited with designing the “scorched earth” campaign and trained by the US Army School of the Americas in combat intelligence and high military command, Benedicto testified that the civil patrols were his idea and that he had personally reviewed the patrols in Salama in 1981. (This would be the same year that a US State Department document classified as secret stated that General Romeo Lucas Garcia believed that “the policy of repression” was “working.” A conclusion based on a definition of a “successful” policy of repression as one that led to the “extermination of the guerrillas, their supporters and sympathizers.”) Entering the courtroom as the grand populist, Benedicto waved and shook hands with everyone including the prosecutors, the defense, the judges and the defendants. When asked about the Rio Negro massacre, he pled ignorance. When asked if he had ordered it, he gasped as if in shock and said, “That , that ...would be... a crime against humanity.”
Another witness was General Otto Erick Ponce, previously a commander of the Rabinal army base and vice-minister of defense in 1994 -- the same year that, as we entered our fourth month of an exhumation in a Rabinal village, the army gathered 2,000 local Achi peasants from 19 villages in a meeting at the Rabinal army base and declared: “The anthropologists, journalists and internationals are all guerrilla. You know what happens when you collaborate with the subversives. The violence of the past will return. Leave the dead in peace.”
Deja los muertos en pas hijo de puta (“Leave the dead in peace son of a whore”) was a threat received that same week at the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman. General Ponce refused to provide the court with names of ranking officers at the base and indeed denied that the civil patrols had ever existed.
Witnesses for the defense argued that the defendants “were not military commissioners,” had “never been in the civil patrol,” that “there had never been a civil patrol in Xococ” and that the defendants “did not even know what a civil patrol was.” Further, they argued that the day of the massacre, the defendants “had been planting trees in a reforestation project.” As for the Rio Negro children, they had “gone voluntarily to Xococ to live.” Amongst the extensive evidence against the defendants were official documents with signatures of the military commissioners with their titles and photographs of the same with other Xococ patrollers carrying army-issue weapons.
During the trial, relatives of the Rio Negro victims held marches demanding justice and placed banners in front of the tribunal. These relatives filled the courtroom throughout the trial. Achi from other Rabinal communities also attended the trial -- especially those hoping to have their massacre cases heard in court. Civil patrollers from Xococ demonstrated for the release of the military commissioners.
The criminal court proceeding in Salama was marked by death threats to survivors and witnesses, a military officer defiantly raising his right hand in a salute reminiscent of Nazi Germany as he was sworn in, the relocation of defendants to prevent the possibility of a mob’s “liberating” them from jail, and the clearing of the courtroom on several occasions due to threats of violence.
The ambient violence which marked this trial is not unique to legal attempts to prosecute perpetrators of human rights violations in Guatemala. On October 7, as the trial in Salama proceeded, Celvin Galindo, the prosecutor investigating the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi, resigned and fled to the United States following numerous death threats. Indeed, since March, a second judge assigned to the Gerardi case and two key witnesses have also fled the country after receiving death threats.
In 1994 when I first interviewed massacre survivors in Rabinal and asked them what they wanted from the exhumation, I was told collectively by 24 widowers that they wanted “revenge.” In 1998, after much community reflection on collective trauma, healing and truth, the same Achi told me they wanted the intellectual authors to be punished, but not their neighbors who participated in the massacres. They did not want their neighbors to go to jail because “jailing my neighbor will only create more widows and orphans. More widows and orphans will not help anyone.”
As the court proceedings dragged on last year with the intellectual authors mocking the legal process and local perpetrators threatening survivors and witnesses, Rio Negro survivors did not express the generosity of forgiveness. They demanded the dismantling of impunity in which the local perpetrators have lived and requested application of the death penalty. Taking into account the violence of the accused, the magnitude of the crime and the opinion of the survivors, the prosecutor, who is personally opposed to the death penalty, requested this maximum sentence. Despite the volatile and tense atmosphere in Salama and elsewhere, the three judges in the Rio Negro trial distinguished the court proceeding by demonstrating objectivity and equanimity in their efforts to discover the truth about the massacre. This alone has given many Guatemalans the hope that justice, which has generally been a privilege of the powerful, may now be within the reach of the poor and the indigenous.
Still, the image of justice emerging from this verdict is skewed, regardless of one’s moral position on the death penalty. The massacre was committed by civil patrollers from the neighboring village of Xococ under army order. The Civil Patrols themselves constituted an integral part of the army’s counterinsurgency campaign. Forced participation in the civil patrols often took the form of torturing, assassinating and massacring innocent people under army order. Those civil patrollers who refused to comply were always tortured and often killed. It is within this context that civil patrollers from Xococ committed the Rio Negro massacre -- which was but one of the 626 known massacres committed by the Guatemalan army in the early 1980s.
Arguing against those who might believe in a fundamental essence of brutality in human beings, Holocaust survivor Primo Levi wrote that “the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities, many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence” (1986:87).
Writing about the Jewish prominents who violated their own within the German Lager, Levi wrote:
...if one offers a position of privilege to a few individuals in a state of slavery, exacting in exchange the betrayal of a natural solidarity with their comrades, there will certainly be someone who will accept. ... the more power he is given, the more he will be consequently hateful and hated. ...he will be cruel and tyrannical, because he will understand that if he is not sufficiently so, someone else, judged more suitable, will take over his post. Moreover, his capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the oppressors, will double back, beyond all reason, on the oppressed; and he will only be satisfied when he has unloaded on to his underlings the injury received from above (91).
Indeed, the victims of the Xococ civil patrol were not limited to Rio Negro, just as Xococ was not the only civil patrol to commit crimes against humanity. In a 1983 armed confrontation between the guerrilla and the Xococ patrollers, 26 insurgents were killed. Ten of the dead insurgents were from Xococ. The same day as the guerrilla attack, the families of the 10 dead Xococ insurgents were taken from their homes and tortured. The widows of the dead men were held in a house converted into a jail and gang raped by military commissioners and patrollers for several weeks until local clergy were able to convince the army commander to stop this violence against the widows.
In December 1982, in Cucabaj, a village of Santa Cruz del Quiche, the Cucabaj civil patrollers were forced under army order to kill members of their own patrol. One of the patrollers recounts, “They made us kill our brothers, this we can never forget... This is worse than if the soldiers had killed us because we always have this painful memory in our thoughts” (CEH T-VII, p.131).
In its comprehensive investigation, the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) found that 18 percent of human rights violations were committed by civil patrols. Further, it noted that 85 percent of those violations committed by patrollers were carried out under army order (CEH T-II,p226-227). It is not insignificant that the CEH found that one out of every ten human rights violations was carried out by a military commissioner and that while these commissioners often led patrollers in acts of violence, 87 percent of the violations committed by commissioners were in collusion with the army (181).
In 1995, there were 2,643 civil patrols organized and led by the army. In August of 1996 when the demobilization of civil patrols was begun, there were some 270,906 mostly Maya peasants registered in civil patrols(234). This is significantly less than the one million men who were organized into civil patrols in 1981 -- one year before the Rio Negro massacre. Taking into account the population at the time and adjusting for gender and excluding children and elderly, this means that in 1981, one out of every two adult men in Guatemala were militarized into the army-led civil patrols (226-227).
Like recent genocides in other parts of the world, the systematic incorporation of civilians in murderous army operations complicates prosecution of perpetrators in many ways because it shifts a seemingly black and white act of wrong into what Primo Levi called “The gray zone.” One lesson of the recent conviction and sentencing of the patrollers in Guatemala is that if civilians evade certain death under military regimes by acquiescing to army orders to commit acts of violence, the democratic state that follows will kill them, albeit through a civilian court, for following the orders of the previous regime.
This is not to suggest that civilians who participated in crimes against humanity should not be tried for their crimes. The point here is that to focus on the least powerful perpetrators in the military regime ultimately protects the intellectual authors. The conviction of the civil patrollers in Xococ is a Machiavellian judgment which ultimately protects the army. What civil patroller will now come forward as a material witness to identify army perpetrators in light of the Rio Negro precedent?
In the 1980s, the Guatemalan state massacred Maya communities in the name of anti-communism. At the close of the 20th century, the Guatemalan state must find more effective forms of redress for the massacre survivors and victims than the prosecution of low-ranking military commissioners. If the Guatemalan state is serious about constructing rule of law, it must begin by prosecuting the intellectual authors who continue to live with impunity in Guatemala. By demonstrating that the rule of law extends to the powerful as well as the poor, the Guatemalan state would take a large step toward constructing a viable democracy.
An Achi woman who survived an attack by the Xococ civil patrol in her village of Santo Domingo told me “I complain to god and pray that one day the guilty will pay for what they did.” An Achi man from another village who accompanied me, later commented, “She isn’t demanding that they ask forgiveness. Perdon (forgiveness) is not in our linguistica. This idea of forgiveness comes from the NGOs.” He went on, “The guilty can say, ‘We did these bad things under someone else’s order, forgive me.’ But this perdon has no meaning for me because there is no perdon in Achi.”
Where we might use “forgive” in English or “perdon” or “disculpe” in Spanish, the Achi say “Cu-yu la lu-mac” which in Spanish is translated as “Aguantame un poco,” in English roughly “tolerate me a little.” Perhaps if the intellectual authors of massacres and other crimes against humanity are brought to justice, the survivors will again find the generosity and strength to tolerate the guilty among them.
For several years, Jesus was beaten, mistreated and lived under constant threat of death with the man until an elder sister was able to obtain legal custody - in itself a risky proceeding at the time. As an adult Jesus organized La Coordinadora de Viudas y Huerfanos (The Coordinating Committee of Widows and Orphans) in Rabinal.
Among the weapons of the dead, there were no machine guns. There were 2 carbines, 2 revolvers, one Winchester rifle and 2 handmade rifles of wood with gun powder packed in the firing tube
Each civil patrol (depending on its size) was headed by one to four military commissioners (like the three military commissioners who headed the Xococ patrol). Indeed, in our forensic work, we have encountered many perpetrators who would like to confess their crimes to their communities and would accept whatever punishment the community might mete out.
Community mobilization around truth and memory has opened political and social space which, in turn, has initiated the process of resolution and reconciliation of the armed conflict within Rabinal. This political opening and unfolding of public space generates a meaningful Peace Process from the individual, to the community, to the nation. Revealing and reflecting upon the true responsibilities and motivations of these crimes, as in the case of local villagers obligated by army forces to commit crimes against their neighbors, has allowed for public recognition of the violence which opens the way to reconciliation and healing. Each of these discrete actions are the very building blocks for the establishment of rule of law, without which there can be no democracy. Strengthening civil society and establishment of rule of law are key among the indicators to be measured when evaluating the success of Guatemala’s peace process and democratic transition. Recognition of the collective trauma of state violence, community healing, and local participation in legal efforts to institutionalize truth and bring perpetrators to justice are vital elements of Guatemala’s transition from military rule.