Guatemala City – Spanish National Court Judge Santiago Pedraz left Guatemala on the weekend without being able to interview soldiers and civilians being investigated by the court for genocide, officials close to the judicial process announced Sunday.
Pedraz, who arrived in Guatemala on June 24, had been scheduled to leave Guatemala on Tuesday, but he moved up his departure because he recognized that it would be impossible to hold the hearings, a humanitarian activist who is a plaintiff in the suit told EFE.
He had been waiting for the Constitutional Court to resolve a legal technicality that kept the defendants from being questioned on Tuesday, June 27. That court had issued a provisional protection order for former strongman Jose Efrain Rios Montt, who had presented a motion to avoid the questioning.
Pedraz did not speak to the press before his departure and merely reported that he would continue investigating the case. It is not known whether another questioning session will be scheduled or whether the jurist will return to Guatemala.
The genocide case before the Spanish court has been pressed for six years by Nobel Peace Prize winner for 1992, Rigoberta Menchu, against the high-ranking officers whose military regime came to power through a coup, Gen. Rios Montt (1982-1983) and Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores (1983-1986).
Also accused in the case are the retired officers Gen. Benedicto Lucas and Gen. Angel Guevara, as well as 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.
Menchu, said at a June 27 press conference 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.”
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.”
