Thursday, January 18, 2007

Guatemala

From the Miami Herald:

GUATEMALA CITY -- Former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt announced on Wednesday that he plans to run for Congress in Guatemala's September elections, which could make it harder to prosecute him on charges of violating human rights during the country's 36-year civil war.

Ríos Montt said he would not run for the presidency -- he ran in 2004 and came in third -- but expressed confidence he would win a congressional seat. Members of the country's Congress enjoy immunity from prosecution unless they are suspended from office by a court.

It would be truly disgusting if he won. Coincidentally, I’ve been reading the book When States Kill to review it for a journal, and one of the chapters (by M. Gabriela Torres) is an interesting though very sobering analysis of cadaver reports in Guatemala in the 1980s. The government used the announcements of discovery of bodies to instill more fear into the population and to send messages about what might happen to anyone who opposed the dictatorship. Ríos Montt, who was in power only about 16 months (in 1982 and 1983), was one of the most vicious. In that short time, there were over 12,000 politically motivated murders and disappearances.

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