"With the Death Squad Dossier, I understood that Guatemala is designed for impunity"

[Judi Lynn]

Monday, April 10, 2023
José Luis Sanz / Washington
Leer en español

Since November, Miguel Ángel Gálvez has been living out of a suitcase. In the hotel room that serves as his home for the week, the coffee pot has been placed on the floor, next to the bed, to make more workspace on the desk. When I arrive for our interview, he shuffles a stack of papers and moves them from the small table to improvise a place for us to talk. This is what exile has meant for him: always improvising, always adapting. And always keeping busy. He spends nearly every day denouncing persecution against him and his fellow judges. Nearly every day, he breaks down while talking about his and his country’s plight.

Prior to his exile last November, Gálvez, 64, was the judge of the historic “Death Squad Dossier” enforced disappearance case. In his career he also sent former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt to trial for genocide, imprisoned ex-President Otto Pérez Molina on charges of corruption, and handled a major government corruption case implicating banks, construction companies, and the media. He was preparing to retire when he found himself in the judicial crosshairs of the very apparatus of corruption he had been attempting to dismantle and was forced to flee the country. By then, the daughter of Ríos Montt, Zury Ríos, was leading the polls in her bid to become president of Guatemala.

Gálvez speaks about the situation plainly and with unmediated dignity, without hiding his pain or holding back his vulnerability. “Exile hits so hard because you’re already experiencing it even before you leave,” he says. “It’s like if a doctor tells you what day you’re going to die. There are times when you start to think that maybe it was a mistake to believe in the justice system at all.”

He blames his departure on a diffuse “them,” encompassing the current government, the private interests that supports it, its enablers in the justice system, and above all, the military, which he says has once again taken control of the country’s institutions to procure impunity. For ordering military officers to trial, “they” have forced him to flee his country, Gálvez says. On March 20, speaking before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, he warned the Guatemalan representatives: “I hold you responsible for anything that happens to me, not only to my own wellbeing, but also to the wellbeing and safety of my family in Guatemala.”

Two weeks ago, Gálvez came to Washington, D.C., to testify in person before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and meet with U.S. officials. Gálvez says that those meetings made clear that the United States has no interest in taking tougher actions against the officials who are turning the country into a kingdom of impunity and corruption: “The U.S. already has so few allies in Central America, and they don’t want to lose Guatemala.”

More:
https://elfaro.net/en/202304/centroamerica/26801/with-the-death-squad-dossier-i-understood-that-guatemala-is-designed-for-impunity

[Judi Lynn]

1. Guatemala's Death Squad Dossier Case Being Dismantled By Corrupt Political-Legal Systems

4 APR 2023 | COMMENTARY

by Jo-Marie Burt and Paulo Estrada

For decades, survivors and the families of the victims of the Death Squad Dossier case have been demanding truth and justice. After years of no answers about the perpetrators or the whereabouts of their loved ones, who were arbitrarily detained, tortured, killed or disappeared between 1983 and 1985, the tail end of Guatemala’s 36-year internal armed conflict, a pathway to justice opened: in May 2021, eleven retired military and police officials were arrested. The detention of four others, including one civilian, followed. The families dared to hope that, at last, they might see justice done. But with an increasingly co-opted justice system and a majority of judges exiled or beholden to mafias and corrupt politicians, that hope is fading fast.

The Death Squad Dossier, or Diario Militar case, is the most important transitional justice case in Guatemala since the 2013 Maya Ixil genocide trial. It involves the forced disappearance, extrajudicial execution, arbitrary detention, torture and sexual abuse of at least 195 Guatemalans during the military government of Humberto Mejía Víctores (1983-1986).

One of Guatemala’s most well-known and respected judges, Miguel Ángel Gálvez, formerly of High Risk Court “B,” presided over the preliminary phase of the case. He broke new ground in 2016 when he seized critical military documents relevant to it. He began hearing the evidence against the first suspects and, in May 2022, ordered nine of them to trial. The evidentiary phase was filled with devastating accounts. The judge heard the testimonies of women who were children at the time the security forces came to their homes searching for their parents, and who were brutally raped. He heard how six of the 131 victims of forced disappearance were later found at the Comalapa military base, in 2011.

Among those Judge Gálvez sent to trial were senior military officials who had deep connections to present-day criminal networks. Men like retired general Marco Antonio González Taracena, who at the time of his arrest was the vice president of the Association of Military Veterans of Guatemala (Avemilgua), an organization of military hardliners that has staunchly opposed criminal prosecutions of war crimes and that has sought to impose an amnesty that would bring an end to all accountability efforts for wartime atrocities. González Taracena, who died shortly after he was ordered to face trial on June 14, 2022, has also been linked to the organized crime syndicate known as La Cofradía, or The Brotherhood.

More:
https://www.wola.org/analysis/guatemala-death-squad-dossier-case-dismantled-corrupt-political-legal-system/

[Judi Lynn]

2. National Security Archive : GUATEMALAN DEATH SQUAD DOSSIER

Internal Military Log Reveals Fate of 183 "Disappeared"
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 15
Posted – May 20, 1999

Washington, D.C., May 20, 1999 – The Guatemalan military kept detailed records of its death squad operations, according to a document released by four human rights and public interest groups today. The army log reveals the fate of scores of Guatemalan citizens who were "disappeared" by security forces during the mid-1980s. Replete with photos of 183 victims and coded references to their executions, the 54-page document was smuggled out of the Guatemalan army’s intelligence files and provided to human rights advocates in February, just two days before a UN-sponsored truth commission released its report on the country’s bloody 35-year civil war.

Representatives of the National Security Archive, the Washington Office on Latin America, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Human Rights Watch disclosed the document at a noon-time press conference on Thursday, May 20, at the National Press Club, calling it "the only known record of its kind." The logbook covers death squad activity by Guatemalan intelligence units during an 18-month period between August 1983 and March 1985. A two-page excerpt appears in the June 1999 issue of Harper's Magazine.

"This chilling document is the death squad equivalent of an annual productivity report, an account from inside the secret files of Guatemala’s killing machine," said Kate Doyle, an analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America and director of The Guatemala Project at the National Security Archive, located at George Washington University. "It is absolutely unique -- a rare glimpse of organized political murder from the perspective of the perpetrators who committed it."

Throughout the war, the Guatemalan military used abduction, torture and assassination in their counterinsurgency campaign against the Guatemalan left. By the time the government and the guerrillas signed the peace accord in 1996, some 160,000 people had been killed and 40,000 "disappeared" -- 93 percent at the hands of the Guatemalan security forces, according to "Guatemala: Memory of Silence," the report of the Historical Clarification Commission.

More:
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB15/