Human rights groups welcome Guatemala genocide ruling

(Vatican Radio) The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has welcomed a ruling against Guatemala’s former head of state, José Efraín Ríos Montt, for genocide and crimes against humanity. Navi Pillay said the ruling made history by making Guatemala the first country in the world to convict a former head of state for genocide in its own national court.
Ríos Montt was sentenced in the first instance to 80 years for his leading role in the killing of over 1,700 people, as well as the forced displacement, starvation, torture, and systematic rape and sexual assault that were deliberately inflicted on Guatemala’s Mayan Ixil communities.
In all, some 200,000 people – the majority of indigenous Maya origin – were killed during the country’s 36-year-long civil war, but the period of Ríos Montt’s rule is considered one of the bloodiest in the conflict.
Among those welcoming the May 10^th decision was CAFOD, the overseas development agency of the Catholic bishops of England and Wales which has been working in Guatemala for over 40 years. Clare Dixon who heads the CAFOD desk for Latin America and the Caribbean told Philippa Hitchen more about the significance of this landmark legal decision…

Listen:


"It's just the first sentencing.....but it is a world record breaking case....there have been other cases where former presidents have been found guilty of crimes against humanity, but never has it happened before in the same country...so it is a huge step forward.

I think it gives great hope to people throughout the region where impunity has been the order of the day......and it's really thanks to the work of the Church, civil society organisations and the different human rights bodies that they've managed to do this almost 20 years after the end of the civil war and 30 years after these terrible crimes took place...

In 1992 I spent several months living with a group of refugees who'd fled their homes in the face of army attacks...I can't tell you just how tragic the stories of these people were......people had witnessed their relatives being herded into churches, churches set fire, terrible massacres with women being killed with babies in their wombs and the babies being torn out and used as footballs....the kind of terrorism that took place in Guatemala really has no parallel in Central America during those decades...

I think there is still enormous polarisation in the country...CAFOD continues to support the human rights centres, the archdiocesan human rights office and all of the efforts of the Church to make this possible...although it's a moment of great tension, it's also a moment of great hope."