José Castallón abandonó su país en 1986 para evitar servir en la milicia guatemalteca. Jose Castallon fled his home country in 1986 to avoid serving in the Guatemala military. Good Samaritan Resource Center, Sunday May 12. Photo Alejandro Galicia

Emerging as the first former Latin American head of state to be convicted of genocide in his own country, Efraín Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison on counts of genocide and crimes against humanity.

However, in a May 20 ruling, the country’s Constitutional Court overturned the conviction and voided all the proceedings going back to April 19, when one of the presiding judges suspended the trial because of a dispute with another judge over who should hear it.

It is unclear when the trial might restart.

Montt’s conviction was the state’s first official acknowledgment that genocide occurred during the general’s reign in 1982-83. For many, the May 10 conviction was a step towards healing the psychological wounds from one of Latin America’s bloodiest civil wars.

Community members, activists, students, refugees and lawyers gathered in San Francisco’s Good Samaritan building at Potrero and 24th streets on May 12 in a public forum to bring awareness to the crimes committed against the indigenous Ixil people, and celebrate the victory.

Victor Carrillo, who lived through the genocide and now resides in San Francisco, expressed the sense of relief he felt after Montt’s conviction.

“It is not just the judging of a person, just a general being judged … you judge a history of oppression … that is what you are judging,” he said.
District 9 Supervisor David Campos, who is of Guatemalan descent, attended the forum.

“It is important to remember and recognize what is happening,” Campos said in an opening statement to the group.

Campos touched upon the symptoms of genocide and how civil wars affect people in immeasurable ways.

“This migration we have seen from the country, like Guatemala, is born from this violence, economic violence, discrimination and lack of human rights that has occurred,” Campos said. “We are here because of that history.”

Victor Carillo gives testimony of his life in Guatemala and why he had to flee his homes. Good Samaritan Family Resource Center, Sunday May 12. Photo Alejandro Galicia

Hunger, systematic rape and forced displacements were all used as tools of war against the Ixil people, for whom merely being a member of the indigenous group was a “mortal offence” in the military government’s pursuit of left-wing guerrillas, according to a piece by BBC News correspondent Will Grant.

A U.N. truth commission said state forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93 percent of the killings and human rights violations that it documented, committed mostly against indigenous Maya. Indigenous groups make up about half of the population in Guatemala.

Almudena Bernabeu, an international lawyer and head of the transitional justice program at the Center for Justice and Accountability in San Francisco, spoke during the forum.

“For those who don’t believe in human rights, this was a great victory,” Bernabeu said. “[The genocide] was the norm for so many years and it has finally reached the international spotlight.”

Over the past decade, courts and prosecutors in a number of Latin American countries have pushed forward with investigations and prosecutions in cases involving the disappearance, murder and torture of political opponents under former regimes.

In Argentina, as of 2013, over 1800 people had been held for trial in cases arising from the war of the 1970s. Many of the accused are now being tried in trials involving dozens of defendants and hundreds of victims and witnesses.

According to a briefing from World Politics Review: “In Chile, 800 state agents have been or are being tried in 1,342 cases for killings, forced disappearance or torture during the Pinochet dictatorship. Of these, 250 have already been convicted, although few are actually serving time in prison. In Peru, former President Alberto Fujimori was convicted of both human rights and corruption-related crimes, and several of the top army members are also in jail. … Investigations and prosecutions for crimes committed by former governments are also ongoing in Uruguay, Colombia, Ecuador and Brazil.”

The forum at the Good Samaritan ended as speakers and audience members gathered on the stage. As a united community, they chanted, “What did we want? Justice! What did we get? Justice!” Even though the conviction has been annulled, community members still feel as though their cries have been heard.