Justice Eludes Guatemala Five Years After the Peace Accords.

"Without justice, there can be no real peace in Guatemala." These are the words of exiled Mateo Pablo, the survivor of a 1982 army massacre of 76 indigenous Mayans, now resident in Quebec. Pablo returned recently to his highland village of Petanac, Huehuetenango, to witness the exhumation of those slain, including his first wife, a 21-day old son and another child, as documented in Mary Ellen Davis' eloquent documentary, The Haunted Land, showing in Montreal from January 18-31 (www.cinemalibre.com). In June 2001, along with the 12 other survivors of the Petanac massacre, Pablo filed a collective lawsuit for genocide against former general Efraín Ríos Montt, today the President of Guatemala's Congress.

Five years after the negotiated conclusion of a 36-year-old civil war, a peace process supported by Canada and the international community, Guatemala has barely inched forward in the prosecution of the perpetrators of 669 massacres in Mayan villages. Six hundred and twenty six of these massacres were the work of the armed forces, according to the Commission for Historical Clarification (Truth Commission) and Guatemalan human rights groups. Although the 1996 peace accords included an amnesty agreement for political crimes, it specifically excluded crimes of genocide and torture, which apply in the massacre cases. Today, human rights abuses continue, and are primarily directed at those who seek to recover the country's historic memory, literally digging up the crimes of the past, and struggling for an end to the impunity of the military.

Throughout the last year, Rights & Democracy has supported the work of human rights organizations whose workers brave threats and intimidation to work for a peace based on justice for the 200,000 victims of the civil war. The case of Matilde González Izás of the Association for the Advancement of Social Sciences (AVANCSO) is one example. Ms. González has been researching the armed forces' continued manipulation of two highland communities through the presence of former paramilitary civil patrollers. Last October, burglars broke into her home, stealing only her personal computer and photographs related to her field work. Days later, Ms. González, on leaving the AVANCSO office, was followed by at least seven vehicles, including a taxi, for 15 minutes. Rights & Democracy's President Warren Allmand wrote on November 1, 2001 to Guatemalan President Alfonso Portillo to urge an investigation and protection for Ms. González.

Matilde González Izás' work follows on from that of her murdered predecessor, Myrna Mack Chang, stabbed to death outside the AVANCSO offices in 1990. After intense international pressure, in 1993 army Sargeant Noel Beteta Álvarez was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment for the crime. But additional evidence, including testimony from Beteta, indicated that the latter acted on the orders of three higher ranking military officers, retired General Edgar Augusto Godoy Gaitán, Colonel Juan Valencia Osorio, and Lieutenant Colonel Juan Guillermo Oliva Carrera. The three former officers were subsequently formally accused in the Guatemalan courts of ordering the crime, and the case was also taken on by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. In September 2001, Rights & Democracy contributed $7,500 to the Myrna Mack Foundation (www.myrnamack.org.gt) towards legal expenses in the Myrna Mack case. In Guatemala, the case is currently held up as the courts consider the latest appeals filed by the defence.

The Myrna Mack case is considered one of Guatemala's high profile test cases, where the plaintiffs are struggling against the determination of a powerful sector to protect the accused military criminals. This has been recognized by international organizations. In January 2000, Param Coomaraswamy, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, denounced the conditions of impunity in Guatemala and the government's lack of will to deal with it. Mr. Coomaraswamy documented the assassinations of at least nine lawyers between October 2000 and February 2001. More recently, the prosecutor and the judge working on the case of the 1998 murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi had to flee Guatemala in fear for their lives. Bishop Gerardi was assassinated two days after the publication of the Catholic Church's report on wartime abuses, 'Guatemala: Never Again, which exposed the armed forces' responsibility in the vast majority of past violations.

In the current climate, jurists are increasingly calling on the international community to apply universal jurisdiction in the prosecution of human rights abusers following on from the legal precedents set by Judge Baltasar Garzón in the Spanish courts' attempted prosecution of former Chilean general Augusto Pinochet. The Rigoberta Menchú Foundation has attempted to do just this in Spain's National Court where the Nobel Peace laureate filed suit against eight Guatemalan officers, including three former military heads of state, Generals Efraín Ríos Montt, Oscar Mejía Victores and Fernando Romeo Lucas García. The cases involved are some of the key human rights abuses of the war, including the 1980 massacre of indigenous protestors occupying the Spanish embassy, including Menchú's father Vicente Menchú. However, in 2000, the Spanish courts ruled that the Guatemalan judiciary is capable of prosecuting the case, and threw it out of the Spanish courts. The Rigoberta Menchú Foundation has appealed against the Spanish decision, and on July 5 Rights & Democracy made a symbolic contribution of $500 to the legal costs. (www.rigobertamenchu.org)

To coincide with the release in Canada of Mary Ellen Davis' film The Haunted Land, January 15th 2002, Rights & Democracy has added its name to a statement calling for justice for the perpetrators of genocide crimes. Rights & Democracy has also called on the Canadian government to continue its support for the Guatemalan peace process, by holding the Guatemalan government to the commitments it made in the peace process, by continuing to provide aid and technical assistance to groups working for justice and compensation for the victims and their families. Also in the interests of combating impunity, Canada should maintain its past financial support for the activities of the Projet Accompagnement Québec Guatemala, an organization that has provided a presence of international volunteers accompanying Guatemalan human rights workers under threat.