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Barring hurricanes, landslides and the occasional drug trafficking story, Guatemala doesn’t often reach our newspapers or TV screens. But in spring 2013, this small Central American country made the headlines when it put its former president on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. The charges against General Efraín Ríos Montt and his Intelligence Chief, General Rodríguez Sanchez, were based on a military campaign in 1982-3 that targeted indigenous Mayan civilians. This was not a case of rogue troops, but sophisticated and brutal social engineering thinly masked as counter-insurgency against leftist rebels. Unlike Yugoslavia and Rwanda however, Guatemala was not given an international tribunal, or even a 'hybrid' war crimes court like Sierra Leone or Bosnia. Instead, justice came only 30 years later and from the most unlikely of places: an official state tribunal.
For 59 days, in a vast courtroom a huge audience sat divided like guests at some sinister wedding, surrounded by journalists, film teams, and police guarding the exits with machine-guns. Indigenous survivors and human rights activists crammed down one side, military veterans and their supporters down the other, with the diplomats and VIPs distributed democratically across the front rows. On 10 May, 2013–a sweltering Friday–the president of the three-judge bench, Yasmin Barrios, read the summary of their decision. When she announced that General Ríos had been found guilty and sentenced to 80 years the room erupted in tears, applause and disbelief. Shouting frantically over the noise, and unable to stop the press blocking her view of the general, Judge Barrios had the police block the exits to prevent him from being bundled out of a side door by his supporters. He was transported to Matamoros prison while General Rodríguez left for home, acquitted. This was headline news indeed: the first conviction of a head of state for genocide in credible criminal proceedings. (Ethiopia and Bolivia had done so, but following highly questionable legal proceedings).
