Guatemalan Right-Wing Dictator & Reagan Buddy Convicted of Genocide

A generation late, general and dictator Montt has finally been convicted for his crimes against Guatemalan ethnic minorities in a small but significant step in the long process of creating new standards of international law that will hold leaders responsible for abuse of power. Impunity for state leaders who abuse power only leads to further abuse. Indeed, one could see the history of the last two centuries as fundamentally the tortured process of moving from the concept of elections to the elimination of slavery to decolonization to the Nuremburg Trials to the dissection of CPSU abuse of power by Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov to the indictment of Pinochet in Spain to the trial of Milosovic to the rejection of South African and Israeli apartheid to the war crimes tribunal in Malaysia that resulted in the conviction in abstentia of Bush and Cheney, living former leaders of a reigning superpower.

From that perspective, the conviction of Montt by courts in his own country is an historic message to dictators and a gentle warning to superpower patrons as well. Progress seems agonizingly slow, but viewed over the last century, we do seem to be making progress toward the ideal of making leaders take responsibility for their behavior. That said, the smooth way in which Reagan, Kissinger, and company evaded responsibility for the years of terror in Latin America, the refusal of Obama to hold Bush and Cheney responsible for both the invasion of Iraq and the way the war was conducted (Fallujah, torture, etc.), and the effective impunity given to the bankers and mortgage company magnates who gave us the Recession of 2008 show how far we have yet to go.

I would hypothesize that over the long run, the legal position of impunity for leaders is more significant than most of the military victories and defeats that make the headlines.