Guatemala City, where the Legislature has voted unanimously to strip Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina of immunity from prosecution, clearing the way for his arrest. The ruling echoes the decision of Guatemala’s Supreme Court last week and makes it possible to prosecute Pérez Molina as part of a corruption investigation that’s sparked protests calling for his resignation. Pérez Molina is now prohibited from leaving Guatemala, and a warrant could be issued for his arrest.
Allan Nairn talking:
people were cheering, they were crying, setting off fireworks. This is an example for the world. This is a general we’re talking about, one of the U.S.-backed generals who carried out the massacres that devastated the Mayan population of the northwest highland. I met him in the highlands as he was doing that, and his troops described how they strangled, executed civilians and threw them into mass graves. He then became president. Prior to that, he was placed on the CIA payroll. And now he’s going to be treated like a common citizen, and perhaps a common criminal. He could be taken at any moment by the authorities.
Last night after the verdict, I walked by the Casa Presidencial, the presidential house—it’s the White House of Guatemala—and spoke to a soldier outside who is a member—a corporal of the presidential guard. And I asked him how his unit would react if the Ministerio Público, the justice department, comes and tries to arrest the president, Pérez Molina. And he said they would not resist. They would take their orders from the Ministerio Público. This is remarkable, looking at Guatemalan history, because outside—that very building that we were standing outside of was for years the national torture chamber of Guatemala. People would be dragged there if they criticized the army, if they criticized the rich, if they were seen as being too close to the organized indigenous population, and they would be chopped up, they would be electroshocked. Their bodies would be thrown by the roadside with their hands cut off. This work done by the—what’s called the Archivo and by the G-2, the military intelligence service, that had actual American CIA agents placed inside it. And now, soldiers from the presidential guard, from that very place, are saying they’re not going to stop one of the generals who carried out those atrocities being arrested.
His arrest, though, would only be on corruption, but it opens the door to bringing him to trial for the mass murders that he helped preside over while carrying out the program of genocide of General Ríos Montt. But there’s still a long way to go. It was big surprise that Congress stripped his immunity. The unanimous vote was in some ways deceptive, because the big blocs in Congress which are controlled by the oligarchs, the drug traffickers and the army, did not want to strip him of immunity. They don’t want to open the Pandora’s box of looking into the crimes of the army and the oligarchy. But they felt such massive public pressure, that in the end they felt they had no choice.
Corruption has kicked open the door. Now, what could follow is mass murder, a prosecution for mass murder. Just about everyone I talk to on the street raises that issue. And under Guatemalan law, an ordinary citizen can go to a court and file a criminal case. And now that Pérez Molina has been stripped of immunity, anyone can step forward and file criminal charges against him for the slaughter in the Ixil zone in December of ’82, when slaughter that occurred, and I was there talking to Pérez Molina and talking to his—talking to his troops. So that now becomes a possibility.
if that goes forward, and part of it is dependent on the action of state prosecutors—if the state prosecutors go forward, I would also urge them to look at charging not just Pérez Molina, but also his U.S. sponsors, the Americans who worked as military and intelligence liaisons with the Guatemalan army as they were murdering civilians, and also high American officials who set the policy in Washington. They can be charged as accomplices to murder. As President George W. Bush said, if you arm a terrorist, if you fund a terrorist, you are a terrorist. I think President Bush had a point, and that he should be subject to that same rule, that same principle, and that now that Guatemala has kicked open the door, set an example for the world, this trail of blood can be followed wherever it leads, including back to Washington.
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Allan Nairn, journalist and activist. He has covered Guatemala since the 1980s.
— source democracynow.org