Historic Guatemala Dictator Conviction Thrown Out for Now

Up to 1,500 protestors gathered in Guatemala City and surrounding Latin American countries on Friday to condemn the Guatemala Constitutional Court’s decision to annul the trial of former Guatemalan military president José Efraín Ríos Montt.

On May 10, Ríos Montt was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in ordering the deaths of 1,771 people of the Ixil Maya ethnic group while in office from 1982-'83. The court sentenced the ex de-facto president to 80 years imprisonment.

However, 10 days later, the Guatemala Constitutional Court reversed the decision by a 3:2 ruling panel, citing procedural errors during the trial. At issue was the fact that Ríos Montt was briefly left without legal representation after his defense team walked out of the court in protest of " illegal proceedings." At that time, the court held, the trial should have been halted.  

As a result, the court ordered a suspension of the trial pending a resolution of the legal challenges raised by the defense, setting aside the guilty verdict and ruling that the trial would begin from the point it stood on April 19.

Amnesty International said it was a "devastating blow for the victims of the serious human rights violations committed during the conflict,” the BBC reported.

Similarly, Diana Duarte of MADRE told AlterNet that the move was a slap in the face for indigenous rights activists and victims who had faced genocide and crimes against humanity and spent years fighting to obtain justice.

“There was a moment when the verdict was handed down that we felt that impunity had not prevailed, that people would obtain justice. Unfortunately that moment was short-lived and turned around in a matter of days,” Duarte said.

The monumental trial of Ríos Montt sets a precedent as the first time an ex-head of state has faced genocide before a national court rather than an international tribunal. Over Guatemala’s 36-year bloody civil war, some 200,000 people were killed with Montt’s time in power described as the most violent period. The decision came 30 years after the crimes had been committed and 13 years after the case was first brought forward for investigation.

While legal proceedings continue, the annulment has placed the entire trial in jeopardy and raised questions about whether there is any real hope for democracy in an already weakened legal system. The judicial reasoning for the annulment is also unclear and confusing even for Guatemalan legal experts, fueling further speculation over the real impetus for the sudden overturn of the decision.

According to International Crisis Group’s (ICG) Mary Speck, based in Guatemala, the full implications of the case are still unknown at this stage.

“The ambiguity around the decision leads to speculation about the real motivations of the case and that is damaging. In order to move forward, the decision needs to be clear – this is essential for transitional justice,” Speck told AlterNet.

Equally puzzling is why the court ordered that the same trial court reconvene to consider the case when this undoubtedly increases the risk of further interruptions should either legal team object on the basis of bias. Questions of fact are also in dispute, with two judges offering very strong dissenting opinions.

Judge Chacon, in his dissent, openly criticized the court’s decision as disproportionate, declaring that there was nothing that rose to a level of a constitutional violation that justified an annulment given that the trial court had already issued a sentence. The judge condemned the actions of Ríos Montt’s defense attorney as “ intentionally obstructionist” and went so far as to say that there was no justification for the Constitutional Court to blame the trial court judges when their actions did not invoke anything that suggested a lack of impartiality.