War criminals convicted of extrajudicial killings, torture and sexual slavery could soon walk free if Guatemalan lawmakers sanction a blanket amnesty for crimes committed during the 36-year armed conflict that left 200,000 people dead or disappeared.
The Guatemalan Congress is to vote this week to reform the national reconciliation law and give absolute impunity for crimes against humanity, including genocide, rape and forced disappearance. The law currently exempts only political crimes and has been regarded as a beacon for postwar justice since coming into force alongside the 1996 peace accords.
The new initiative is backed by former army generals angered by a wave of prosecutions that has resulted in the convictions of at least 33 military officers and militia members since 2008. One former guerrilla leader has also been convicted of human rights abuses.
If approved, all the convicts, and those held on remand awaiting trial would be free within 24 hours; pending trials would be canceled and ongoing investigations shelved.
UN Human Rights Commissioner Michelle Bachelet condemned the move as a “drastic step backwards for the rule of law and victims’ rights.”
The vote takes place as beleaguered Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales, backed by a powerful network of military and economic elites, continues efforts to oust the UN-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) and sabotage the constitutional court.
The timing is no coincidence, said Jo-Marie Burt, a political science professor at George Mason University.
“This push is part of a broader effort by a coalition of military, business and political interests not just to stop CICIG, but to end all investigations into organized crime, human rights violations and corruption in order to reassert their total dominance in Guatemalan politics and society,” she said.
CICIG does not investigate historical crimes, but has helped weed out corruption from the courts and attorney general’s office, which are also now under attack.
Amnesty supporters said that prosecutors have unfairly targeted security forces over leftist guerillas. However, 93 percent of human rights abuses were committed by US-backed government forces, compared with 3 percent by guerrilla groups, the postwar Commission for Historical Clarification said.
The felons who would benefit from the amnesty include top-ranking generals from the bloodiest period of the counterinsurgency war when rural indigenous communities and urban social activists were mercilessly persecuted.
Among them are Benedicto Lucas Garcia, the former head of the armed forces, and Manuel Callejas y Callejas, the former intelligence chief, who are serving 58 years for crimes against humanity, the 1981 forced disappearance of 14-year-old Marco Antonio Molina Theissen and aggravated sexual assault against his older sister, Emma Guadalupe.
Garcia is also accused of crimes against humanity at the Creompaz military base, where 550 bodies were exhumed from mass graves.
“The total amnesty violates our right, and that of the Guatemalan people, to justice and the truth. It would thwart the hopes of victims to have a little peace in our souls,” said the eldest sibling, Lucrecia Molina Theissen.
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