A verdict is expected as early as today in the historic trial against U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the first head of state in the Americas to stand trial for genocide. He is charged with overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala’s Mayan region after he seized power in 1982. ALLAN NAIRN: These massacres were not secret. They were acts of state terrorism where a big part of the point was publicity. When the assassinations were done in the cities, they would often make a point of throwing the bodies in the streets to terrify onlookers. In the massacres in the countryside, the executions would—and torture interrogations would often be carried out in the village square with all the survivors looking on so they would get a lifelong lesson that they would never forget, as they saw their families and their loved ones being strangled and shot in the head. This was all over the newspapers in Guatemala. The Catholic Bishops’ Conference in May of ’82, that same month that I had the interview with Ríos Montt where he talked about 10 civilians for every guerrilla, and his aide said they had sold out to subversion, they had to be killed—the Catholic Bishops’ Conference issued a pastoral letter saying, “Never in our history has it come to such grave extremes. These assassinations now fall into the category of genocide.” And the U.S. was in fact supporting Ríos Montt. The meeting between Reagan and Ríos Montt was very nice for Ríos Montt, because Reagan then came out publicly and said that Ríos Montt was a man of great integrity who was totally devoted to democracy and was getting a bum rap on human rights. Ríos Montt then said, “It’s not that we have a policy of scorched earth, just a policy of scorched communists.” More here.