Photo caption: Guatemalan Army Soldiers at Finca La Perla, in the Ixil region, 1982. Many people displaced due to the scorched earth policies of the Guatemalan military, came here. Credit: Jean-Marie Simon

Photo caption: Military occupation of the Guatemalan highlands, 1982. The 1998 Truth Commission concluded that the Guatemalan Army committed genocide against the Mayan population. Credit: Jean-Marie Simon

Photo caption: The recently discovered Archives of the Guatemalan National Police that detail forced disappearances and murders of opponents to the military dictatorship. Over 80 million police documents were uncovered here. Credit: Dana Lixenberg

Granito: In Context

POV

12 years ago

Guatemala's Recent History

In January 2012, after 30 years of impunity, former Guatemalan general and dictator Efraín Ríos Montt was indicted by a Guatemalan court for crimes against humanity. Against all odds, he was charged with committing genocide in the 1980s against the country's poor Mayan people.

Back in 1982, a young first-time filmmaker, Pamela Yates, had used her seeming naïveté to gain unprecedented access to Ríos Montt, his generals and leftist guerrillas waging a clandestine war deep in the mountains. The resulting film, When the Mountains Tremble (released in 1983), revealed that the Guatemalan army was killing Mayan civilians. As Yates notes in her extraordinary follow-up, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, Guatemala "never let me go." When the Mountains Tremble became central to her life again 30 years later, when a Spanish lawyer investigating the Ríos Montt regime asked Yates for her help. She believed her first film and its outtakes just might contain evidence that would allow charges of genocide to be brought under international law.

Granito spans 30 years and portrays seven protagonists in Guatemala, Spain and the United States as they attempt to bring justice to violence-plagued Guatemala. Among the twists of fate:

A 22-year-old Mayan woman, Rigoberta Menchú, the storyteller in When the Mountains Tremble, goes on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 and then initiates the court case against Ríos Montt that eventually leads to the use of Yates' footage as evidence.
A guerrilla commander, Gustavo Meoño, who authorized Yates' filming with the insurgents in 1982, becomes a key player in uncovering the mechanisms of disappearances and state terror.
Naomi Roht-Arriaza, the young press liaison in Guatemala who helped arrange Yates' filming with the guerrillas in 1982, becomes one of the key international lawyers working on the genocide case.
Fredy Peccerelli, the head of the Guatemalan forensic anthropology team assigned to unearth evidence of the vast killings, repeatedly viewed When the Mountains Tremble while growing up.

Granito is a film about a film and that film's remarkable afterlife for a filmmaker, a nation and, most dramatically, as evidence in a long struggle to give a dictator's victims their day in court. It is an inside, as-it-happens account of the way a new generation of human rights activists operates in a globalized, media-saturated world. Granito shows how multiple efforts -- the work of the Guatemalan and international lawyers, the testimony of survivors, a documentary film, the willingness of a Spanish judge to assert international jurisdiction -- each become a granito, a tiny grain of sand, adding up to tip the scales of justice.

Even after Ríos Montt was deposed and a tenuous democracy restored in Guatemala in 1986, he and the generals continued to enjoy wealth, status and freedom to participate in politics. In 1999, a United Nations-sponsored truth commission concluded that genocide had been committed by the government, and that same year Bill Clinton, then president of the United States, declared that U.S. support for military forces and intelligence units that engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong. Even the Guatemalan generals, who claimed that overzealous field commanders were to blame, admitted that crimes had occurred.

Dedicated Guatemalan activists, victims and lawyers took great risks, working for years to bring cases of human rights violations committed during the civil war to justice in the national courts. But the justice system was weak and the cases languished, with little action beyond cursory investigations by prosecutors.

A new dimension emerged: the growing movement to assert international jurisdiction in cases of human rights abuses, the commitment of activists -- and the persistence of memory in film. In Yates' When the Mountains Tremble and its outtakes from 1982, Ríos Montt repeatedly guarantees that atrocities could not be taking place because he is in total command. Yet Yates' recorded footage of a military-conducted tour, which the army hoped would depict its successful war against guerrillas, appears instead to show the result of a mass murder of unarmed civilians.

Fast-forward to recent years, when lawyers and plaintiffs were seeking an international indictment in Spain, whose National Court has led the way in such cases. An international indictment comes into play only after local courts fail to act, and no one expected much from the Guatemalan judicial system. And then this past January -- one year after Granito's premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival -- Ríos Montt was indicted in Guatemala for genocide, in what can only be described as a stunning precedent for that country.

In 1999, Nobel Laureate Rigoberta Menchú filed a lawsuit in Spanish Supreme Court against six Guatemalan military leaders (including Efraín Ríos Montt) and two police officials linked to killings in Guatemala during that country's civil war.

In June 2006, Spanish Judge Santiago Pedraz went to Guatemala to begin an investigation into the genocide case, but he was repeatedly obstructed, making it impossible for him to gather testimony. He returned to Madrid and issued international arrest warrants for the eight military leaders and police officials named in Menchú's lawsuit.

The Guatemala Genocide Case in Spain

The Spanish national court is a leader in applying the international legal concept of universal jurisdiction, with roots in the U.N. Genocide Convention, which holds that some crimes, such as terrorism and genocide, are so egregious that if they are not tried in the country where they occurred, they may be tried anywhere. A famous example of universal jurisdiction was Israel's decision to try Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961, and the arrest warrant that the Spanish National Court issued for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998.

While the Guatemalan courts initially accepted the warrants of three of the eight officials, even that acceptance was rescinded in December 2007, with the claim that Spain did not have jurisdiction to prosecute Guatemalans.

Judge Pedraz proceeded with the case, however, and the first hearings took place in Madrid on February 4, 2008. Witnesses included survivors, journalists, experts, forensic anthropologists and eyewitnesses of the killings.

Spain has a strong national interest in seeing the perpetrators of the Guatemalan genocide brought to justice. The 1980 assault on the Spanish embassy in Guatemala by the Guatemalan police left 39 people dead; during the course of the civil war in Guatemala, several Spanish priests and religious workers serving in Guatemala were assassinated.

Sources:
» Center for Global Studies:. "Prosecuting Genocide in Guatemala: The Case Before the Spanish Courts and the Limits to Extradition."
» National Security Archive. "The Guatemala Genocide Case."
» International Law Update. "Constitutional Court of Spain Rules That Its Courts May Hear Genocide Cases Even If They Do Not Involve Spanish Citizens, and Holds That Principle of 'Universal Jurisdiction' Takes Precedence Over Alleged National Interests."
» Nairn, Allan. "Guatemalans Seek Redress in Spanish Courts." The Nation, February 25, 2008
» Roht-Arriaza, Naomi and Almudena Bernabeu. "The Guatemalan Genocide Case in Spain." Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies. Center for Latin American Studies, Fall 2008.
» Valladares, Danilo. "Ríos Montt to Stand Trial for Genocide." The Guatemala Times, January 30, 2012.

The Guatemala Genocide Case in Guatemala

Also in 1999, massacre survivors and their Guatemalan legal advisors first brought a criminal complaint against Ríos Montt for genocide in the Guatemalan courts. While the national justice system remained paralyzed in a case that touched the highest echelons of power, people gathered evidence and built the legal case nationally and continued to bring witnesses and evidence, including a number of highly incriminating documents, before the Spanish court. After a long-time human rights activist became Guatemala's attorney general and Ríos Montt lost immunity due to his term in Congress coming to an end, the Guatemalan court finally took action. In January 2012, Ríos Montt was ordered to stand trial in a Guatemalan court on charges of genocide and placed under house arrest with bail set at $65,000.

Filmmaker Pamela Yates filed this report from Guatemala via cell phone on January 26, 2012:

A Dictator in the Dock

A culmination of decades of work by the victims and survivors of the Guatemalan genocide forced former general Efraín Ríos Montt to appear in court Thursday for a hearing to decide whether there was enough evidence to take him to trial on charges of genocide.

The prosecution spent hours presenting overwhelming evidence in the form of military documents, exhumation reports and photos linking Ríos Montt directly to hundreds of deaths and disappearances. Surviving family members, Ixil Maya in traditional dress, crowded the standing-room-only courtroom in stunned silence. Some wept.

Outside the Justice Palace, in an open area now named Human Rights Plaza, hundreds more watched the proceedings on a huge screen.

The defense's case asserted that Ríos Montt did not command his army officers' counterinsurgency campaign and should not be held responsible.

But after hours deliberating, the judge ruled to prosecute Ríos Montt on charges of genocide, and to place him under house arrest with a $65,000 bail set.

The crowd broke out in cheers and sent firecrackers into the air in loud celebration.

This is a huge victory for the victims and survivors of the Guatemalan genocide, human rights defenders and the lawyers' efforts worldwide.

Evidence being used in the case includes hundreds of declassified U.S. and Guatemalan documents that detail the activities of Guatemalan security forces. One of the key pieces of evidence is the 359-page collection of Plan Sofía records, which document the military's use of scorched earth operations in Guatemala's Ixil region and will be used by the prosecution to prove the criminal responsibility of senior government and military officials, including Ríos Montt. The document was smuggled out of a secret military archive and given to Kate Doyle (featured in the film) of the National Security Archive in 2009. After months of analysis and authentication, Doyle turned "Plan Sofía" over to the Guatemalan prosecutors as well as the lawyers in the Spanish case.

Sources:
» National Security Archive. "Operation Sofia: Documenting Genocide in Guatemala."
» North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) , "The Pursuit of Justice in Guatemala" by Kate Doyle
» PBS. "Blog/POV Films."
» Willard, Emily. "Genocide Trial Against Ríos Montt: Declassified Documents Provide Key Evidence." Unredacted, February 2, 2012.