| THE GHOST OF GUATEMALA'S PAST (PART 1) |
| Written by Maria Elena Salinas |
| Monday, August 04 2003 |
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| Efrain Rios Montt wants to be president of Guatemala. The 77-year-old former general and dictator believes he is the only person who can find solutions to the poverty and corruption affecting his country's poor Mayan majority. That thought, however, makes most Mayans in Guatemala -- and human-rights activists worldwide -- cringe with fear. They have not forgotten that it was precisely Rios Montt who was in power when tens of thousands of people were killed simply because of their ethnicity.
"El general," as he is known in Guatemala, won a legal battle in the country's highest court in his third bid for the presidency. Even though Guatemala's Constitution does not allow someone who took power by force to be president, the Court of Constitutionality agreed with Rios Montt's argument that the prohibition should not apply to events that took place before the Constitution was drafted in 1985. While the former dictator's followers believe he is a guarantee of security in a country riddled with crime, many Guatemalans are haunted by his brutal past.
The civil war in Guatemala was one of the bloodiest in Latin America. An estimated 200,000 people died or disappeared during the 36-year conflict; 90 percent were killed by military forces. Of those killed, 83 percent were indigenous Mayans. Human-rights groups attribute the most disturbing atrocities to Rios Montt, who took power in a coup in March of 1982 and was overthrown by another dictator 18 months later.
Survivors and witnesses describe scenes straight out of a horror movie: Military forces wiped out hundreds of towns and villages, killing people indiscriminately. They shot them, hacked them to death, drowned or beheaded them. In some villages, they separated the men from the women and children, then they shot the men, raped the women and beat the kids and the elderly to death. In at least one case, they locked women and children in a church before burning it down, with them still alive inside.
In 1990, after I walked into Rios Montt's house in Guatemala City for an interview, he asked, jokingly, "What are you going to ask me, how many people I killed?" He was, of course, being facetious, but when I did ask the question, his face distorted into an angry grimace. "I am not the monster people think I am. We did not kill anyone, we only eliminated the support base of the guerrillas."
To him and his army of thugs, the support base of the leftist guerrillas was made up of any civilians who might in some way have helped, fed or supported the rebels. It did not matter if they were innocent, indigenous Mayans. In the minds of Rios Montt and his cohorts, if they lived in poor, rural areas, they must be communists. It was a strategy known as "scorched earth policy" but described by Rios Montt as "scorched communists policy."
It is not only horrifying that these events took place, it is appalling to think that Rios Montt has even a chance of becoming president. The Guatemalan Republican Front -- the political party that he founded and named himself president of for life -- holds the presidency of the country and the majority in Congress. Rios Montt himself is head of the National Congress. With that kind of power, it is not unusual that the court -- packed with his sympathizers -- approved his candidacy.
Rios Montt's political future is intimately tied to his military past. It is yet to be seen whether Guatemalans have such a short memory that they would elect a man with such bloodstains in his past to lead the country. The U.S. State Department says relations with Guatemala would suffer under a Rios Montt presidency. It's a very different position from the one the United States held in the past, when President Ronald Reagan called Mr. Rios Montt "a man of great personal integrity."
Footnote: In the second part of this column, I will focus on the role the United States played in the rise of the dictator Rios Montt and in Guatemala's past. |
