The Financial Times
Friday, October 4, 2002, p. 19

Guatemala wages battle for justice:
The outcome of the first trial of military officers for human rights abuses will be decided this week, writes Sara Silver

As an anthropologist, Myrna Mack Chang knew her research was dangerous. To steel her nerves to make it through the day's field notes - testimonies of fellow Guatemalans who fled from massacres and then returned to army-controlled areas during the nation's civil war - she chain-smoked and sipped from her leather flask.

Sometimes, though, even whisky was not enough to stave off the horror. Like the time the researcher realised she had crossed a bridge over the same surging waters that had carried away the bodies of 100 villagers slashed to death in a 1982 army massacre outside the village of Chajul. The next year, on September 11 1990, Myrna Mack herself was killed, stabbed 27 times by an army sergeant in front of her office.

This week a Guatemalan court is expected to decide whether a retired general and two colonels ordered the murder - making this the first trial of the officers who allegedly masterminded human rights abuses during the 36-year civil war that killed 200,000.

"The army was a state within a state that made and controlled political decisions," says Mack's sister, Helen.

"They keep thinking they did well by defending the nation's security but they don't accept that Guatemala today is still suffering the consequences - we have no leaders, no intellectuals, a culture of mistrust, a fear of speaking."

Once an apolitical accountant, Helen Mack's 12-year battle for justice has already yielded significant victories. She received Sweden's Right Livelihood Award, often called the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize, and used the prize money to start a foundation in her sister's name, which campaigns for judiciary reform in Guatemala.

In November the Inter-American Human Rights Court in Costa Rica will hear a case against the Guatemalan government for failing to provide justice for the Mack family. But for now, Ms Mack is focused on the trial of the three officers, in itself an unprecedented achievement and a test of the democratic transition in Guatemala since its civil war ended in 1996.

Alfonso Portillo, the president, is a disciple of General Efrain Rios Montt, the former dictator who implemented the scorched earth campaign that razed villages suspected of supporting the rebels. His policies displaced 1m Guatemalans and became the subject of Myrna Mack's research into army repression of Mayans returning from zones where all civilians were considered rebel collaborators.

A conviction in this trial, analysts say, could open Gen Rios Montt and other military leaders to future prosecution as the architects of human rights abuses.

Sergeant Noel Beteta, a specialist at the presidential military guard who was sentenced to 25 years for killing Myrna Mack, broke the army's code of secrecy in 1993 to implicate his bosses in a taped confession. Other officers in the presidential military guard - whose elite intelligence service long operated death squads - were last year convicted of killing the Roman Catholic bishop who led Guatemala's truth commission.

During the month-long trial, expected to end this week, Sgt Beteta recanted, claiming he was high on cocaine when the tape was made. He also claimed Helen Mack and another prosecutor had offered him money, drugs and safe passage to the US if he fingered his bosses - Colonel Juan Guillermo Oliva Carrera, Colonel Juan Valencia Osorio and the commander General Edgar Augusto Godoy Gaitan.

This week's closing arguments recapped the core of the prosecution's case - that the presidential military guard is an elite intelligence force that is known to operate death squads. Without access to Guatemalan army files, the prosecution relied on civilian military analysts and declassified US intelligence documents.

"These give a pretty good description of a military institution that doesn't have loose cannons, especially within the intelligence corps," says Kate Doyle of the Washington, DC-based National Security Archive, who testified at the trial on the documents her non-profit group had fought to declassify.

The defence, on the other hand, argues that this case, like other human rights abuses committed during the war, was the result of "excesses of rogue soldiers".

Sources close to the prosecution say that many of those involved with the trial - witnesses, judges and prosecutors - have already arranged to head into exile after the verdict is announced.

Going public has always been dangerous for Guatemalans. As much as her work itself, it was Myrna Mack's determination to publicise her findings among diplomats, refugee agencies, human rights groups and church organisations that made her a target, according to Elizabeth Oglesby, who accompanied her to Chajul and now teaches at the University of Arizona.

"The difference between a US scholar and a Guatemalan one is that in the US you say 'publish or perish'," Myrna Mack once told visiting scholars. "Here we say that if we publish, we perish."