Justice for Massacres Pits Neighbor vs. Neighbor

The following post was written by Kenny Dolbashian, UUSC senior associate for planned and major gifts. Dolbashian writes from Guatemala, where he is participating in a UUSC JustJourney.

In March 1982, nearly 200 women and children were massacred in Rio Negro, Guatemala. Now in February 2008, nearly 26 years later, six men stand accused of participating in the killings and are being tried for the crimes. The defendants were not generals or captains or even low-level soldiers of the Guatemalan army. Rather they were members of the "civilian patrol" – an organization of local Guatemalans enlisted involuntarily by the army and government to do the dirty work of genocide.

The trial of the six men, who look more like grandfathers than killers, is playing itself out in a simple courtroom before a three-judge panel and surprisingly little security.

On this day of trial, testimony was given by three witnesses. The first was a 65-year-old man who recounted, through an interpreter of his native indigenous Achi tongue, that his 10-year-old daughter had been kidnapped and killed. He indicated that the civilian patrol and one member in particular had committed the crime. He further stated that the civilian patrol had also burned many houses in the area.

The second witness was Carlos Chen, co-founder of ADIVIMA, a grassroots organization that assists communities that suffered massacres during the civil war in the Guatemalan states of Baja and Alta Verapaz. Carlos, now 52 years old, told of the events of March 13, 1982. He was returning to his house after collecting wood and he could hear his wife yelling, "The military are coming." All of the women and children were being taken to Pacox. From the bushes, Carlos could see the women being shot. He later went and saw the bodies, which included his pregnant wife, his daughter and son, and other family members such as his mother-in-law and sister-in-law, as well as many friends and neighbors. Carlos stated simply that he "wants justice for what happened."

Finally the third witness was a 44-year-old woman who testified in her native Achi tongue through the court interpreter. She told of how the civil patrol came to her home on March 13, 1982, entered and grabbed her. She was stripped of her clothes and although she was not assaulted she was ordered to go to a meeting. They dragged her outside and grabbed a number of other women from other houses along the way. "We were all tied together by lasso, but I kept fainting as I had given birth just three days before." Finally they left her. Later she heard that the women who were taken to the "meeting" had all been killed and many of the children in the village were orphaned as a result. She was able to identify two of the six defendants as being involved in the events she described.

This tragic tale is made all the more so by virtue of the fact that those accused of such atrocities were the neighbors of the victims. This was not a case where the military stormed the countryside and wiped out the community. It was more subtle yet no less devastating.

The civil patrollers were basically conscripted into doing the government and army's business through a program where, to get access to food, locals had to serve in the patrols. Such policies served the army well by breaking the bonds between neighbors and communities and fostering fear and intimidation.

The process of justice for the victims and against the perpetrators – both civilian and military – will likely be long and torturous. Only after justice is achieved can reconciliation take place.