Victims and human rights activists cheered when, on January 26, a Guatemalan court charged Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt with genocide and crimes against humanity. The decision to bring the 85-year-old former dictator to trial is the latest stage in a long odyssey, stretching back to the early 1980s, when Guatemala experienced the bloodiest repression of its thirty-six-year civil war. During Ríos Montt’s rule (1982–83), soldiers under his command—many of them US-trainedand -equipped—applied a scorched-earth policy to annihilate indigenous villages in the Mayan highlands where guerrilla insurgents were based.
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The Ríos Montt case is also making the US government a little nervous. WikiLeaks cables and unclassified documents indicate that the US government had information on the abuses taking place yet still supported the regime (in 1982 President Ronald Reagan famously complained that the dictator was “getting a bum rap”). Current US Ambassador Arnold Chacon brushed off the case, telling our delegation that most people he’s spoken with would prefer to look forward. The State Department would like to see restrictions on military aid lifted as it promotes the Central American Regional Security Initiative, a counternarcotics aid plan that would significantly increase the US presence in the region.
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More here.