Guatemalans continue to seek justice 25 years after the end of the civil war Crimes Against Humanity News

San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala – Julia Poyon was three years old when Guatemalan soldiers broke down her family home door and took her father away. Decades later, Poyon says his only vague memory is of a happy night before the 1981 kidnapping.

“One night we went to church and I remember he carried me on his shoulder,” Poyon told Al Jazeera. “I remember he was wearing a hat. I don’t remember his face. “

Felipe Poyon Saquiquel was a Mayan Kaqchikela farmer and catechist who lived in a village near San Juan Comalapa, 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Guatemala City.

When he was taken out of bed by the military on May 8, 1981, his wife was told he was only being questioned. Poyon Saquiquel knew otherwise. “Take good care of our children,” he told his wife as he walked out the door, according to Poyon’s mother.

Never seen before, he became one of them approximately 45,000 people disappeared Between 1960 and 1996 he was in the civil war between the Guatemalan military and the left-wing guerrillas.

Wednesday marks the 25th anniversary of the end of the 36-year-old armed conflict, but the struggle for truth, justice and reparation, led by indigenous peoples who make up most of the war’s victims, remains a new challenge and reaction.

“We are still seeking justice,” Poyon said after a ceremony in June at a former military base in San Juan Comalapa, where the memorial to the victims of the forced disappearances now stands. There, the remains of 220 people were found in clandestine graves exhumations 2003-2004.

Conflict

The armed conflict in Guatemala has killed at least 200,000 people, including more than 600 massacres documented across the country.

More than 80 percent of the victims were indigenous Mayan civilians, and the military was responsible for more than 90 percent of the atrocities, according to a truth commission backed by the United Nations, and state officials also concluded. acts of genocide.

As part of the peace process, Congress passed the National Reconciliation Act in mid-December 1996 to extinguish criminal liability for many political and common crimes committed on all sides in the context of the conflict. But the amnesty provisions of the law explicitly excluded genocide, torture, and compulsory disappearance, as well as any other crime that was not prescribed by national or international law.

One month later, on December 29, 1996, the peace agreements included commitments to truth and justice, as well as to addressing the root causes of the conflict, including systemic racism and other long-standing differences.

But these issues are as present as ever in the Central American nation, with relatives of the missing and human rights leaders celebrating peace agreements earlier this month.

“Compliance with peace agreements is fundamental to addressing the remaining structural problems in the country,” Mika Kanervavuo, a representative of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Guatemala, said on December 15.

Judging authors

The perpetrators of the atrocities of the conflict have come to justice over the past decade, however, with the forced disappearance of former high-ranking military officials on trial for sexual violence and other crimes against humanity. Others are on trial, including for genocide.

In 2013, former military dictator Efrain Rios Montt was convicted of genocide. The sentence was overturned and he died again before the end of the partial trial, but a court case He promised in 2018 that the military had committed genocide under his command.

Another landmark case has been brought forward this year when 11 former military men were arrested in May for crimes against humanity, murder, enforced disappearances and other crimes documented in the “Diario Militar”, the death squad newspaper.

Military Intelligence File Filtered in 1999 documented 183 cases of enforced disappearances Between 1983 and 1985. Most of the victims were student organizers, union leaders, guerrilla team members or sympathizers, writers and other dissidents. In many cases, the details of the dossier ended with “300”, the execution code.

“Thinking differently in those years was considered criminal here in Guatemala,” said Maria Elisa Misa, whose military father killed her mother, mother and aunt in the 1980s.

Gustavo Adolfo Meza Soberanis, the father of the Mass, appears in the diary of the death squad. A 26-year-old doctor who was assisting and caring for guerrilla members was abducted on September 7, 1983, just a few months after Mass. No remains have been found.

“People told me about my father, his sense of humanity was very awake. He was always someone who fought for the less fortunate, ”said Al Jazeera Mass, a member of the missing children’s HIJOS movement.

Amnesty Bill

Mass and other relatives of the victims were celebrating when a judge ruled that he would try the accused, but a reaction had already begun.

A week and a half after the initial arrests of the death squad newspaper, nine members of the ultra-conservative Valor Party presented a bill to release all former military and paramilitary patrols convicted or convicted of crimes during armed conflict.

Zury Rios, the daughter of former dictator Rios Montt, is the party leader. He was elected to the presidency of Valo in 2019, but was banned from running for office by relatives of those who took power by force because of a constitutional ban. A court allowed him to file in 2015, but he is expected to try again in 2023.

The party’s amnesty bill was unveiled on September 22 on the floor of Congress and sent to parliamentary committees for consideration. In practice, there is no set deadline for bills to be put to the vote.

“What they are looking for is impunity,” said Feliciana Macario, one of the coordinators of the National Platform for Victims of Armed Internal Conflict, led by Indigenous Peoples. “What they want to do now is legalize crimes against humanity through an amnesty.”

Relatives of victims of conflict-related killings and disappearances protested outside the Guatemalan Congress against the 2021 amnesty bill. [Sandra Cuffe/Al Jazeera]

In the proposed preamble to “Peace and Reconciliation,” lawmakers argued that there had been no genocide in Guatemala and that forced disappearances, torture, and other crimes against humanity should not be excluded from the National Reconciliation Amnesty provisions. Law.

“I believe that when peace agreements were signed and we had the tools to seek justice, we felt peace in our hearts. But now, seeing these attitudes, we feel sad because it is difficult to see this path to justice, “Macario told Al Jazeera.

The fight continues

A similar amnesty bill was introduced in 2017, but it sparked protests, legal challenges and international alarm as it progressed in 2019. The Constitutional Court eventually ruled in favor of the victims and human rights groups and ordered Congress to reject and repeal the bill.

New, and in several controversial cases, the Constitutional Court judge sat for five-year terms earlier in the year, however, and the current court president was the 2019 Vice Presidential candidate for the Valor Party.

Independent judges and prosecutors have been threatened and harassed in Guatemala, and several have fled into exile this year.

In October, Hilda Pineda, head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights, which has been leading major civil war cases for the past decade, was moved to a new office to prosecute crimes against foreign tourists. The move was one of 11 simultaneous appointments aimed at strengthening the organization and its effectiveness, the Attorney General said at the time.

But the National Platform of Organizations for Victims of Armed Conflict and human rights groups have condemned Pineda’s transfer, saying it has undermined cases of crimes against humanity. A lawsuit was filed last month challenging the transfer.

“I think so as a relative [of victims], all the moments we have experienced have given us the strength to move forward and continue to fight for justice, ”Macario said. “We’re going to keep going, we’re going to stand up, and we’re going to keep fighting.”