Mary Sanchez: A Guatemalan tyrant, in old age, faces justice at last

Mary Sanchez: A Guatemalan tyrant, in old age, faces justice at last
Published: March 29, 2013 Updated 14 hours ago

By MARY SANCHEZ — The Kansas City Star

In a courtroom in Guatemala City, a gray-haired man sits passively through the trial of the century for the Central American country.

At 86, the former dictator Gen. Efrain Rios Montt has escaped this criminal scrutiny for decades. Now, along with another notorious general, Jose Mauricio Rodriguez Sanchez, he stands accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. Specifically, of orchestrating the murder of nearly 1,800 indigenous people and the forced displacement of 29,000 more. The tallies are an astounding amount of suffering for his 17-month reign in the early 1980s.

Since mid-March, dozens of Ixil people, indigenous Mayans, have taken the witness stand to describe the Guatemalan military's campaign of extermination against them. They tell of watching families burned alive as their homes were torched, of beheadings and body parts thrown into rivers. Women were raped before being shot to death, and toddlers were hacked up with machetes.

Most North Americans are unaware of the trial, and of the man at the center of it. Sadly, that's not surprising. Most of us were oblivious when the atrocities occurred. And we remain unmoved by the fact that U.S. military shipments helped Rios Montt inflict his scored earth campaign.

More:
http://www.islandpacket.com/2013/03/29/2441757/mary-sanchez-a-guatemalan-tyrant.html#storylink=cpy