Guatemala City – Nobel Peace Prize winner for 1992, Rigoberta Menchu, said Tuesday that the ex-army officers opposed to a Spanish court investigating the charge of genocide she brought against them should defend themselves in court and “cease their threats against us.”
The former officers, the Guatemalan Indian leader said at a press conference, “should defend themselves in court instead of threatening us.”
Menchu was responding to the warning issued Monday by the Military Veterans Association of Guatemala (Avemigua) that the continuation of the Spanish court’s trial of eight high-ranking officers accused of genocide “could bring about a tragedy.”
“These are threats and intimidations that make us fear for the safety of the witnesses and plaintiffs,” Menchu said.
Retired Gen. Jose Luis Quilo Ayuso, president of Avemigua, said Monday that the case before Spain’s National Court “is nothing more than political and legal persecution brought by groups associated with the old guerrilla groups who want the war to go on.”
“We don’t want to stir things up where it’s not advisable, but this case can bring about a tragedy. Our message is not something out of the past but rather something real,” the military chief said.
But Menchu said, “If they have a truth to defend, let them do it before the courts, let them go and give their version of what happened, because threats are not a defense.”
Moreover, she said that “crimes of genocide, torture, massacre, forced disappearances – for which the ex-officers are being tried – are not local crimes but international crimes. They are offenses against humanity that can be judged in any part of the world, and Spain is one of the countries that can impart universal justice.”
The judge of Spain’s National Court, Santiago Pedraz, who arrived in Guatemala last Saturday, is waiting for a court of jurisdictional conflicts to resolve the legal technicality that kept the defendants from being questioned on Tuesday.
The case before the Spanish court has been pressed for six years by Menchu against the high-ranking officers whose military regime came to power through a coup, Gen. Jose Efrain Rios Montt (1982-1983) and Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores (1983-1986), as well as against the retired officers Gen. Benedicto Lucas and Gen. Angel Guevara, and the former chiefs of what was then the National Police, Pedro Garcia Arredondo and German Chupina.
She also brought a case against ex-President Romeo Lucas Garcia (1978-1982), who died in Venezuela a month ago, and ex-Interior Minister Donaldo Alvarez, a fugitive from justice since December 2004.
As well as the crimes against humanity with which they are charged, the accused must also answer for the attack by Guatemalan security forces in January 1980 on the Spanish Embassy in which 37 people died including three Spaniards, as well as for the murder of four Spanish priests in the 1980s.
