Guilty! Ríos Montt convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity

You mean Rios Montt didn't get a "bum rap"?

http://crookedtimber.org/2013/05/11/ronald-reagan-efrain-rios-montt-is-t...

Friendly dictator number nine

Quote:

President Reagan claimed Mont was given "a bum rap" by human rights groups, and that he was cleaning up problems inherited from his predecessor, General Romeo Lucas Garcia. Ironically, Garcia had given $500,000 to Reagan's 1980 campaign, and his henchman, Mario Sandoval Alarcon, the "Godfather" of Central American death squads, was a guest at Reagan's first inaugural celebration. Sandoval proudly calls his National Liberation Movement "the party of organized violence."
Mont simply moved Garcia's dirty war from urban centers to the countryside "where the spirit of the Lord" guided him against "communist subversives", mostly indigenous Indians. As many as 10,000 Indians were killed and over 100,000 fled to Mexico as a result of Mont's "Christian" campaign.

Guatemala, Ríos Montt and the infamous School of the Americas still in business

Quote:

Horrific as Ríos Montt’s crimes are, we should bear in mind that his policies were fundamentally in line with those of the Guatemalan officials running the country both before and after his term in office, as well as in close conformity with Washington’s longstanding goals for the region.  During World War II, U.S. State Department planners wrote frankly of the “problem,” as they saw it, with “the other American republics,” which were “manifesting an increasingly strong spirit of independence and jealous insistence on complete sovereignty.”  This nuisance presented difficulties in light of, say, Washington’s efforts to ensure it would be granted “long-term rights for the use…of certain naval and air bases in the other American republics,” and its wish “to maintain the economies” of Latin American nations in accordance with its principles—“quite apart from equity, it is to the selfish interest of the United States” to do so, planners emphasized.

And where are the usuals referring to everything and anything unAmerican as 'conspiracy theory'? Hello? Anyone? Anyone at all?

Fidel Rizzo: I'm walking here! I'm walking here! And don't wink at me, youre makin me laff damnit.

 My article on the ICC is Here

Thanks, Fidel.  Of course Montt was trained by the USA who supported the coup against Arbenz in the 50's.  Clinton did apologize.

My ariticle, ICC-Global Injustice, which Cy Gonick accepted for Canadian Dimension is, I hope, at http://web.ncf.ca/aw916. 

They decide the appeal 10 days after the conviction?  What a joke.

NDPP wrote:

Reinventing Guatemalan History  -  by Stephen Lendman

http://sjlendman.blogspot.ca/2013/05/reinventing-guatemalan-history.html

"History reinventors support despots."

"She[Mary O'Grady WSJ columnist on Latin America] claimed testimonies of survivors and prosecution experts didn't prove genocide. "The absurdity of this has not been lost on many Guatemalans," she said.  "Ixil people and others from the region…view…Montt as a hero," she claimed. Some hero! Over 70,000 corpses on his watch prove otherwise. So do around 200,000 throughout decades of conflict.

Sickening. And U.S. governments supported the genocidal fascist regimes with financial aid, weapons, and training for right wing death squads there at the infamous school of the Americas. They slaughtered over 200, 000 Guatemalans the majority of them indigenous people. This was U.S. imperialism at its most racist and genocidal right here in this very hemisphere at a time lapdog newzies published scathing attacks on East Germans who ordered shootings of a few thousand other Germans for climbing over a wall  - a wall few people in the west understand even today why it was built.

This article discusses how the confiscation of land and the means to survive by agribusiness is leading to a different form of genocide than that practised by Rios Montt, but genocide nevertheless. Its done by the same elite behind Rios Montt's genocide and overturned conviction. 

Quote:

In a historic decision this May, Guatemala’s Supreme Court of Justice sentenced former dictator General Ríos Montt to 80 years in prison for the genocidal massacres of indigenous people in the 1980s. Many Guatemalans hoped that the judicial process against the top criminals of the country’s “dirty war” would finally bring justice—but ten days after the decision, the Constitutional Court reversed the judgment.

But while the Guatemalan people protest this violation of the rule of law, the processes of genocide initiated 30 years ago by Ríos Montt’s massacres continue today by other means.

In the last decade, the expansion of oil palm plantations and sugarcane production for ethanol in northern Guatemala has displaced hundreds of Maya-Q´eqchi´ peasant families, increasing poverty, hunger, unemployment and landlessness in the region, according to a new Food First report by Alberto Alfonso-Fradejas, “Sons and Daughters of the Earth: Indigenous Communities and Land Grabs in Guatemala.”

There is a tremendous contradiction here: at the same time that the ex-General Ríos Montt is convicted for genocide, the Guatemalan government allows the oligarchy, allied with extractive industries, to displace entire populations without any care for the human cost; and in many cases, these land grabs result in the murder and imprisonment of rural people who resist the assault. The genocide against the indigenous peasant population in Guatemala no longer has the face of a military dictatorship supported by the United States—now it is the corporations, the oligarchy and the World Bank who push peasants off their lands.

In today’s Guatemala, land and resource control is increasingly in the hands of a small oligarchy of powerful families allied with agri-food companies. At the center of this power are: fourteen families who control the country’s sugarcane-producing companies (AZAZGUA); five companies controlling the national production of ethanol; eight families that control the production of palm oil (GREPALMA); and members of the Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations (CACIF). Together these powerbrokers are accumulating land and wealth with the support of investment from international institutions such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (BCIE). The convergence of multiple global crises—finance, energy, food and environment—has directed corporate investment into land-based resources such as agrofuels, minerals, pasture and food. The situation in Guatemala is extremely violent, due to the global trend in which agrarian, financial and industrial interests are grabbing control of peasant lands and resources.

In many ways, land grabbing is a new form of genocide. Ricardo Falla’s study “What Do You Mean There Was No Genocide?” analyzes the definition of genocide and its characteristics. According to Falla, of the five acts that define genocide, two were most prominent in Guatemala: “the massacre of the members of a group,” and “the intentional subjection of a group to living conditions which will lead to their total or partial physical destruction.” The first genocide was against the Ixil peoples during the reign of Ríos Montt. The second genocide is enacted today through the privation of the Q´eqchi´ peoples’ means of survival through land grabs. Hundreds of families have been displaced; they do not have land on which to produce food or live, and they are denied their cultural and community identity. These conditions undermine their ability to survive, and lead to their displacement, and in many cases death. ...

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/29