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Guatemala’s Verdict a Victory for Military Accountability
But Obstacles to Justice Remain
(Washington D.C., October 4, 2002) The decision to convict a senior military officer for the 1990 killing of Myrna Mack is an important step toward accountability in Guatemala, Human Rights Watch said today. It is the first time that a senior officer has been found responsible for planning human rights violations committed during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996.


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Annals from the Bureaucracy of Death
HRW Commentary, May 1999

Información sobre Guatemala en español



“The struggle for accountability in Guatemala has scored an important victory. At long last, one of the officers who used terror as a tactic during Guatemala’s war has been brought to justice.”

José Miguel Vivanco
Executive Director
Americas Division
Human Rights Watch


 
“The struggle for accountability in Guatemala has scored an important victory,” said José Miguel Vivanco, executive director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch. “At long last, one of the officers who used terror as a tactic during Guatemala’s war has been brought to justice.”

A three-judge tribunal sentenced Col. Juan Valencia Osorio to 30 years for his role in planning the killing. The tribunal acquitted Valencia’s co-defendants Gen. Augusto Godoy Gaitán and Col. Juan Guillermo Oliva Carrera. Human Rights Watch has not yet had the opportunity to review these rulings.

Mack, an anthropologist, had been studying the army’s mistreatment of displaced rural communities when she was attacked in front of her Guatemala City office on September 11, 1990. Stabbed 27 times, she bled to death in the street.

Police initially informed Mack’s relatives that she had died in a traffic accident. Later, they suppressed a 60-page report by their own investigators that concluded it had been a political killing and linked the military to the crime. Only after Helen Mack, Myrna’s sister, intervened did the case move forward.

Army sergeant Noel Beteta was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 25 years in 1993. At the time of Mack’s murder, Beteta served in the presidential security unit (Estado Mayor Presidencial), under the command of the three officers convicted today. The unit was responsible for numerous human rights violations during the war, according to a U.N.-sponsored truth commission report issued in 1999. Last year, three veterans of the unit were convicted in the 1998 assassination of Bishop Juan Gerardi, who was bludgeoned to death with a cement block two days after he released the Catholic Church's report on wartime abuses, titled "Guatemala: Never Again."

Myrna Mack was only one of 200,000 people killed during the country’s 36-year internal conflict, which ended in 1996. Like Mack, the vast majority of these were civilians killed by state forces. Only a handful of these cases have been addressed by the Guatemalan justice system and with very mixed results. (For information on other cases currently being pursued, please see Guatemala Mission Findings)

The history of the Mack prosecution illustrates the daunting obstacles that Guatemalans face seeking accountability for human rights abuses. One is the use of threats and violence to intimidate justice officials, witnesses and lawyers. In the Mack case, one police investigator who initially gathered the incriminating evidence was murdered in 1991. Two other investigators and three witnesses also received threats and fled the country. In August 2002, Roberto Romero, a lawyer acting for the Myrna Mack Foundation, reported receiving death threats and having his Guatemala City home shot at.

Another obstacle is the refusal of the Guatemalan military to cooperate with civilian justice system. In the Mack case, the military refused to supply justice officials with requested documentation and actively obstructed the investigation by submitting false information and doctored documents.

A third obstacle is the ability of defense attorneys to engage in dilatory legal maneuvering. This problem is compounded by the routine failure of justice officials to abide by legally mandated deadlines in responding to legal pleadings. In the Mack case, the defense’s delaying tactics forced the prosecution to drag out 12 years.

“The fact that even one officer was convicted is a testament to the extraordinary courage and perseverance of Helen Mack,” said Vivanco. “Yet if the many thousands of other victims are going to obtain justice, Guatemala will have to work much harder to remove the terrible obstacles she was forced to overcome.”