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Justice is Bittersweet as Killers are Sentenced for 1982 Massacre in Guatemala, June 16, 2008

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AdvocacyNet
News Bulletin 143
June 16, 2008
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June 16, 2008, Salamá, Guatemala: The five former paramilitaries shuffled into the courtroom in this small country town, convicted of participating in one the most notorious massacres in Guatemala's 36-year-long civil war. Now they awaited a sentence.
 
The hearing, which took place on May 28, has been graphically portrayed in the blogs of Heidi McKinnon, a Peace Fellow from The Advocacy Project (AP). Ms McKinnon is volunteering this summer with the Association for the Integral Development of the Victims of Violence in the Verapaces, Maya Achí (ADIVIMA), a group which represents massacre survivors and brought the charges.
 
The Río Negro massacre occurred after an indigenous community at Río Negro refused to relocate and make way for the Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam, a massive government energy project supported by The World Bank. After 74 villagers were killed in February 1982, most of the men fled to the hills. Early on March 13, 1982, army soldiers and a civil patrol from the nearby village of Xococ arrived at Río Negro, and murdered 177 women and children. Many of the victims were raped and tortured.
 
The participation of Maya Achí villagers from Xococ in the killing was typical of the way neighbors turned against neighbors in Guatemala's brutal conflict. But it also gave the recent hearing a distinctly local flavor.
 
About 60 relatives of the accused men attended the May 28 sentencing: "They made menacing comments under their breath as we walked the gauntlet and entered the compound," Ms McKinnon writes. "When the families entered the courtroom, no one sat near me for obvious reasons."
 
The sentence was issued quickly and each of the five men each received 780 years in prison - 30 years for each of the 26 identified victims of the massacre. They will each serve 30 years, as all sentences run concurrently in Guatemala. The sentences bring to eight the number of individuals who have now been jailed for the Río Negro massacre, and the new verdict represents a vindication for the persistence of ADIVIMA and the relatives of those who died. "Justice was served," said Juan de Dios García, the Director of ADIVIMA.
 
Ms McKinnon agreed: "What I witnessed was a historic event in Guatemala. It was a victory for every survivor." But she also concedes that the victory was bittersweet: "When you are seated a few feet away from a murderer who is over 70, speaks no Spanish and has trouble even walking, it can make one pause and wonder whose definition of justice is being served by such a sentence. Who is more culpable, the man who pulled the trigger or the man who bought him the gun and told him who he should kill if he wanted to stay alive and keep his family safe?"
 
To date, neither the ranking officer who ordered the Río Negro massacre nor any soldiers have been tried, although there is an order for capture outstanding on an army colonel who participated in the violence.
 
Still, the verdict in Salamá could help ADIVIMA pursue a larger case against the Guatemalan government in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, an independent arm of the Organization of American States tasked with protecting human rights. The Commission accepted the Rio Negro case in March 2008, and ADIVIMA's legal team submitted additional findings last week. ADIVIMA is negotiating with the Guatemalan government to get reparations for those in Rio Negro and 27 other villages destroyed by the Chixoy dam project.
 
ADIVIMA is currently involved in seven other legal cases, and coordinates at least one grave exhumation each month. More than 4,500 people were killed in the Rabinal region between 1981 and 1983, almost all of them indigenous Maya Achí. According to the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification, about 200,000 people died in the country from 1960 to 1996. State forces committed more than 90 percent of executions and forced disappearances.
 
AP has followed the Chixoy case since 2000 when it helped Carlos Chen, one of ADIVIMA's founders, to make the case for relatives at The World Bank in Washington. AP writer Peter Lippman visited Guatemala to report on the case, and AP has since recruited five Peace Fellows to help ADIVIMA's advocacy, including Ms McKinnon.

• Read Heidi McKinnon's blog.
• Read more about the Chixoy Dam project and Río Negro massacre.
• Learn more about ADIVIMA.