[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 136 (Tuesday, September 30, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1929-E1930]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
HUMAN RIGHTS IN GUATAMALA
______
HON. EDOLPHUS TOWNS
of new york
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Mr. TOWNS. Mr. Speaker, on July 14, Guatemalan Constitutional Court
justices made history by declaring null and void two previous court
rulings banning infamous former dictator Efrain Rios Montt from seeking
presidential office. Efrain Rios Montt, the retired brigadier general
and current head of Guatemala's national legislature, has been
universally condemned for waging a ``scorched earth'' campaign against
indigenous Mayan civilians during his 1982-1983 presidency. Some of the
worst abuses in Guatemala's brutal 36-year civil war occurred during
Rios Montt's rule. Wisely enough, the drafters of Article 186 of
Guatemala's 1985 Constitution engrossed a ban to prevent leaders
responsible for staging military coups from ever again seeking the
Guatemalan presidency. Yet Rios Montt, who came to power through just
such a coup in March of 1982, recently obtained a favorable ruling from
Guatemala's highest court despite this earlier provision. He managed
this by using his influence to pack the court with additional members
who were personally loyal to him. In addition, he sought to legitimate
his candidacy by claiming that the 1985 Constitution cannot be applied
retroactively to actions taken three years before it was enacted.
The State Department repeatedly has stated that Rios Montt's
continued involvement in Guatemalan politics is an obstacle to
effective U.S. relations with that country. In fact, events would seem
to indicate that Rios Montt's candidacy is an equal threat to domestic
stability within Guatemala; a number of weeks ago, mass protest in
support of the ex-dictator's candidacy, clearly manipulated by Rios
Montt and other leaders of his party, turned violent as mobs rushed
into government buildings and seized them, including the Supreme Court.
Since the Bush administration is so concerned with human rights in
Iraq, what about Guatemala? Regional alliances such as the proposed
U.S.-Central American Free Trade Agreement are bound to be jeopardized
by Rios Montt's self-serving insistence on seeking the presidency, even
at the country's democratic prospects. We as a body must strive to
understand the potential implications and the high costs of Rios
Montt's continued involvement in Guatemalan politics if we are to
accelerate our steps towards the goal of promoting effective relations
with the Central American region.
On September 15, the United States recertified Guatemala, reversing a
decision made in January due to the country's consistently poor efforts
to stem the northward flow of narcotics that end up in our streets.
Circumstances, however, suggest that the recertification was motivated
not so much by any improvement in Guatemala's drug interdiction
efforts, but by the Bush administration's ceaseless search for the
expansion of free trade, even if it costs the U.S. hundreds of
thousands of solid jobs. The Bush administration, eager to enact its
Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) proposal, seems to have
been responding to certain pressures to renew Guatemala's certification
whatever its justification; twenty-one of our esteemed colleagues took
the principled step of writing to the White House and saying that they
would not vote for CAFTA without such recertification, and Guatemala,
home to Central America's largest population and most formidable
economy, would not likely approve the trade agreement if it remained
decertified. This leads one to wonder, then, what the certification
process and the war on drugs are really about, as the controversial and
inequitable specter of free trade has clearly taken precedent.
The following very timely memoranda on Guatemala's many problems were
authored by Molly Maas and Jessica Leight, research associates at the
highly respected Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs
(COHA), a non-partisan organization that has long been committed to
addressing issues associated with human rights, democracy and economic
justice throughout the Western Hemisphere. COHA has been referred to by
Senator Edward Kennedy in the Congressional Record as ``one of our
Nation's most respected bodies of scholars and policymakers.''
Rios Montt Declared Eligible To Run in Guatemala's Upcoming Election
(Jessica Leight and Molly Maas)
On Tuesday, July 14, one of the most brutal dictators in
modern Guatemalan history, General Efrain Rios Montt, was
declared a legitimate candidate for the November presidential
elections by the country's highest court. Since Guatemala
gained its independence from Spain in 1821, this largely poor
Central American nation has suffered under a series of
foreign rulers and pathological homegrown despots. Yet,
arguably, none of its leaders have been more infamous than
Rios Montt, who seized power in a 1982 coup and presided over
an unremittingly harsh dictatorship for eighteen months until
a counter-coup installed General Oscar Humberto Mejia
Victores as the country's military leader. Today, Guatemala's
official Commission for Historical Clarification labels
atrocities committed under Montt's regime as ``genocide,''
and impartial observers argue that the ex-dictator was
responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in the
country's 36-year civil war, including tortures, massacres,
the destruction of hundreds of indigenous communities, and
illegal detentions and murders of human rights advocates and
indigenous leaders.
rios montt's quest for the presidency
Since his fall from power in 1983, Rios Montt has twice
attempted to run for the Guatemalan presidency, in 1990 and
in 1995. Each time, he has been blocked by the country's
courts on the grounds that Article 186 of the 1985
Constitution forbids the candidacy of all former coup
leaders, a provision that was expressly designed to deter a
presidential bid from Rios Montt. Despite these previous
dismissals, however, the ruling FRG party, which controls the
legislature as well as the presidency, once again nominated
Rios Montt as its presidential candidate this past May, and
the Constitutional Court--the nation's highest judicial
authority--approved his candidacy on July 14. The decision in
this case was blatantly biased, as the current court was
especially expanded, i.e., ``packed'' with Rios Montt
supporters. The president of the Constitutional Court, Mario
Guillermo Ruiz Wong, is the former interior minister of the
current FRG administration of President Alfonso Portillo,
while another justice served as Rios Montt's personal lawyer.
Three of the four judges who voted in favor of the ex-
dictator have links to Portillo's administration.
Following this ruling, a lower court, the Supreme Court of
Justice, issued a contradictory injunction that temporarily
suspended Rios Montt's candidacy. In response, protests
rocked the capital on Thursday, July 24, with thousands of
former beneficiaries of Montt's dictatorship joining more
recent recruits to his rightwing cause in the streets of
Guatemala City. Though FRG leaders and Rios Montt himself
vehemently denied any role in organizing or even encouraging
the demonstrations, the protest was marked by a suspicious
lack of spontaneity. Pro-FRG peasants were trucked in from
across the country by organizers wearing such masks to
conceal their identity, and the entire operation had the mark
of a well-planned and well-orchestrated demonstration of
political intimidation.
Most damning for the FRG and the Portillo administration
was the lack of effort on the part of the police to control
violence by the protesters, as well as the army's refusal to
intervene even after President Portillo announced on radio
and television on Thursday afternoon that he had ordered the
armed forces out ``to guarantee respect of private property
and the physical security of persons, as well as the defense
of human rights.'' Though the demonstrators dispersed after
receiving instructions to do so from Rios Montt on Friday
morning, the capital continues to wait in fear for a return
of the usually armed encapuchados. Perhaps even more
alarmingly, the government's commitment to the preservation
of basic public order, as well as its control over the armed
forces--largely unreformed following decades of unrestricted
and brutal war against the guerrillas--remain in grave doubt.
Having only so recently emerged from forty years of two
devastating civil war which cost upwards of 200,000 lives,
Guatemala seems on
[[Page E1930]]
the point of lurching back into its old habits of blood and
gore, in a new era of mob rule.
u.s. chilly on subject of rios montt
The U.S., along with the United Nations, has been notably
critical of the human rights abuses that continue to plague
Guatemala's fragile democracy. The State Department condemned
the riots and the lack of effort by the authorities to
control the violence. Earlier, State Department spokesman
Richard Boucher had indicated his disapproval of Rios Montt's
candidacy, asserting that should Rios Montt be elected,
``realistically, in light of Mr. Rios Montt's background, it
would be difficult to have the kind of relationship that we
would prefer.'' This followed statements earlier in the year
by U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala John Hamilton that noted a
troubling lack of compliance on the part of the government
with the 1996 UN-brokered peace accord. In an admirable
display of candor about the deteriorating situation in
Guatemala, Hamilton stated that, ``My government shares the
Guatemalan people's concern that today, more than six years
after the end of the armed conflict, there are still serious
violations of human rights.''
It is crucially important that the U.S. maintain this
strong stance in opposition to the candidacy of such a brutal
ex-dictator and avoid the temptation to paper over the crimes
of Rios Montt in order to ensure Guatemala's inclusion in the
upcoming Central American Free Trade Agreement negotiations,
scheduled to be completed by the end of this year. Last
January, the Bush administration announced its decision to
decertify Guatemala for insufficient progress in the war on
drugs. Subsequently, it made use of a ``vital national
interest waiver'' to continue to provide economic aid to the
country in spite of the decertification. While continuance of
such assistance provides some valuable leverage for the U.S.
to exercise, as it seeks to pressure the Guatemalan
government to bring human rights violators to justice, rein
in corruption and ensure an orderly democratic transition
after the November elections, this is the case only if the
White House indicates that it is prepared to advance the
country's democratization. If the White House wishes to
demonstrate that its concern for human rights extends beyond
Iraq, then there can be no more appropriate task than to
facilitate the unhindered operation of justice in Guatemala,
a country that has seen precious little of it up to now.
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