Mary Jo McConahay writes in the National Catholic Reporter on the trial of former Gen. Manuel Benedicto Lucas García on charges of genocide. Lucas has already been convicted of crimes against humanity, for the massacre of more than 1,200 Indigenous Ixil Maya people between 1978 and 1982, a period when his brother Romeo Lucas García was in power. What is of interest is that the case came to court due to the efforts of the Santiago de Guatemala Archdiocese.
Women in bright red native dress testified for hours to brutal murders of loved ones as a landmark trial began here against former Gen. Manuel Benedicto Lucas García, architect of a counterinsurgency campaign in a war where some 200,000 persons, mostly unarmed Maya, were killed or forcibly disappeared in the 1980s.
The case against Lucas has arrived in court due to the efforts of the Santiago de Guatemala Archdiocese.
“I heard them crying out — my mother crying out,” said Maria Torres, now 75. Torres said she hid in 1981 when soldiers entered the family house at dawn, raped her mother and slayed her siblings, whom she named slowly at the prosecutor’s request.
Sitting before three judges protected by a shield that gave them a hazy look, and a larger-than-life wall projection of Lucas, who was participating from another location, the witness’s shoulders began to shake. The men tied up her father, a member of Catholic Action, she said, then knifed him in the throat.
The charge against the 91-year-old Lucas — genocide — makes this one of the most important judicial events in the country’s history. The plaintiffs, the archdiocese’s Human Rights Office and a victims’ rights group, the Association for Justice and Accountability, say that Lucas was criminally responsible for a project to eliminate part of the Maya people in the western highland region known as the Ixil Triangle.
You can read the full piece, with links and photos, here, Guatemala Archdiocese a force behind genocide trial of retired general.
Categories: Genocide, Guatemala, Human Rights, Indigenous peoples, Justice, Military, Racism, Solidarity in Action, Violence
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