Read our previous summaries: Day 1, Day 2, and full archive of ongoing live Twitter coverage.Survivor testimony continued on the third day of former dictator Efraín Rios Montt and intelligence chief Rodriguez Sánchez's trial for genocide and crimes against humanity. Hours of intense first-person accounts of violence and endurance left impressions of [...]
Read our coverage on the first day of the trial. The second day of proceedings in the Guatemala genocide case trial opened with unresolved tensions around accused former general Efraín Ríos Montt's legal representation. He started the day once again without any of his previously designated lawyers. Francisco Palomo, who [...]
In the early hours of the morning, a crowd had already begun to form in Guatemala City's Plaza of Human Rights, outside the Supreme Court, where the country's historic first trial for genocide was about to commence. Survivors of genocide and human rights advocates arranged a ceremonial carpet of [...]
For more than a decade, members of the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala have had the honor to walk alongside survivors of genocide in their long struggle for justice. Tomorrow, we will accompany them in the next step on the path of memory, as they stand as [...]
Victoria Sanford is the director of the Lehman College Center for Human Rights and Peace Studies in New York. She is the author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala. In 2012, she testified as an expert witness in the Spanish Tribunal’s genocide case against Guatemalan generals [...]
FIRST TRIAL FOR GENOCIDE STILL SET TO BEGIN MARCH 19 APPEALS COURT'S RULING DOES NOT SUSPEND DEBATE Today, March 11th, we were notified of a constitutional injunction ("amparo") filed by the military officials José Efraín Ríos Montt and José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. [...]
PRIMER JUICIO POR GENOCIDIO CONTINÚA PARA EL 19 DE MARZORESOLUCIÓN DE LA SALA CUARTA NO SUSPENDE DEBATEHoy lunes 11 de marzo fuimos notificados de una acción constitucional de Amparo interpuesta por los militares José Efraín Ríos Montt y José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, acusados de genocidio y delitos contra los deberes [...]
The following is reblogged from UNREDACTED, the National Security Archive Blog. We're posting Kate Doyle's article in full for her first-hand account of the most recent proceedings in the Guatemalan Genocide Trial. Follow the National Security Archive's work here. Rios Montt on trial. Credit: Jorge Dan Lopez/Reuters Guatemala City, [...]
WALKING TOWARD JUSTICE Today Guatemalan society is witness to a historic event. For the first time in our country, a judge has ordered the opening of a trial for the crime of genocide and crimes against humanity. Judge Miguel Ángel Gálvez ordered the opening of the public oral debate [...]
2012 was a very active year for ACOGUATE and the cases in which we accompany witnesses and plaintiffs in search for justice. Human rights defenders working for truth are amongst the most threatened groups, according to the Human Rights Defenders' Protection Unit of Guatemala (UDEFEGUA)[i]. Here are some of [...]
This struggle is everyone's struggle and the struggle of those that have not yet been born. --Board member for the Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR) The genocide cases have moved forward against former General and de facto President Efraín Ríos Montt and two officials under his command, retired [...]
Student Édgar Sáenz Calito was disappeared in June 1981. Photo: http://www.hijosguate.blogspot.com/ Pedro García Arredondo, former chief of the now defunct National Police's infamous Comando Seis was convicted for the forced disappearance of student Édgar Sáenz Calito in June 1981. He was sentenced to 70 years in prison. Investigations by [...]
A personal reflection by Phil Neff, Guatemala Accompaniment Project Coordinator for NISGUAA cold evening fog had fallen over the Plaza of Human Rights outside Guatemala City's Court Tower, where two hundred survivors of massacres perpetrated by the Guatemalan Army waited, exhausted and anxious, for Judge Patricia Flores to deliver the [...]