Guatemala Hands Over Key File In Army Genocide Case

Source: Reuters

Published: Apr 23, 2010
Guatemala Hands Over Key File In Army Genocide Case
by Sarah Grainger

Guatemala's government handed over a military document on Thursday containing evidence soldiers massacred villagers during the country's civil war which could help prosecute top officials for genocide.

A copy of a military file dating from the 1980s, complete with maps, telegrams and hand-written patrol reports about an operation known as "Plan Sofia," was mailed anonymously to President Alvaro Colom last year. Colom's government verified its authenticity and passed it to the attorney general's office, which has a long-running case against the Central American country's former dictator, Efrain Rios Montt, accusing him of ordering the murder of thousands of civilians. The document was also turned over for use in a parallel case in Spain, brought by Mayan human rights activist Rigoberta Menchu, which accuses Rios Montt of carrying out genocide during his 1982-83 rule.

~snip~
"These documents paint a picture of command responsibility," said Andrew Hudson of the Washington-based group Human Rights First. "When put together they show Rios Montt and the top commanders were aware of and were directing a policy which the United Nations says constituted genocide," he told Reuters.

Colom pledged to address war-time abuses after taking office in 2008. His uncle, Manuel Colom Argueta, was a prominent leftist politician killed by a military ambush in 1979 at the height of Guatemala's 1960-1996 civil war. He promised to open sealed military archives that date back to 1954, when a U.S.-backed coup toppled Guatemala's democratically elected president, despite the army's claims that opening the files would threaten national security.


Read more: http://www.postchronicle.com/news/breakingnews/article_212297503.shtml?ref=rss

This guy tried to ethnically cleanse the Mayan population, and I think that this document is proof of that.

K&R.

"Twenty-eight years ago, survivors couldn’t risk funerals or even discuss the crime. They couldn’t return to the frontier village of Las Dos Erres, which they had hacked out of the forest, planting crops and fruit trees in a back-breaking, doomed bid to rise from the peasantry. Entire families had been buried — some alive — in a dry well, mothers raped and hurled onto their wounded children below in about 18 hours of systematic savagery.

Now, after 16 years of investigation hindered by stonewalling in the courts, prosecutors, activists and victims are mounting a reinvigorated effort to bring to justice those who carried out the murders. It would be a landmark case in a country where hundreds of wartime massacres have gone unpunished. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights, a branch of the Organization of American States, in November ordered Guatemala to perform the exhumation and restart a long-stalled prosecution. Two members of the notorious Guatemalan special forces, the Kaibiles, are in jail, another is out on bail and 14 more are wanted."

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/the-americas/100427/guatemala-exhumation-las-dos-erres

to over 200,000 Guatemalan citizens since Eisenhower and the CIA threw over their democratically elected beloved Presidengt Arbenz in 1954.

The massacre at Las Dos Erres happened under the sponsorship of Ronald Reagan and his Christian fundamentalist preacher/mass murdering political ally, Efraín Ríos Montt, whose daughter, a Guatemalan Congresswoman, Zury Ríos Sosa, is married to a U.S. Republican Illinois Congressman, Jerry Weller.

http://images.usatoday.com.nyud.net:8090/news/_photos/2004/11/21/guatemala-wedding-inside.jpg

US Republican Rep. Jerry Weller, Zury Ríos Sosa, daughter of Guatemalan genocidal monster.

http://www.rnw.nl.nyud.net:8090/data/files/images/lead/dos%20erres%C2%A9guatemala.gob_.gt_.jpg

Las Dos Erres, Guatemala mass grave.
Anyone wanting, needing to start filling in some of the enormous blank spots in the information we should have been able to learn about through our own corporate media should take the time to read the article you've posted.