Benedicto Lucas García, a parachutist trained by France and the United States, was an iconic leader of the Guatemalan counterinsurgency. Decades after the horror, as some of the remaining Maya Ixil victims made the trek from the mountains of Quiché to Guatemala City to demand accountability for when Benedicto’s troops razed their villages, they found a justice system in ruins. The old retired general was about to launch his last counteroffensive in a trial collapsing from within.
Roman Gressier and Yuliana Ramazzini write in El Faro about the trial of Benedicto Lucas García, charged with committing acts of genocide against the Maya Ixil population in the highlands. In addition to writing about the the murderous counterinsurgency career of the general, they cover some of the inherent challenges in finding justice for 40 year old crimes in a judicial environment very much antagonistic to justice for serious human rights abuses.
February 16, 1982, Batz Chulultze’ hamlet, Chajul. At nine in the morning, a dozen dark spots dot the horizon. Gaspar Mendoza Ijom, the father of Engracia Mendoza Caba, an eight-year-old girl, grows frightened.
“Why are you counting the helicopters? That’s bad luck,” he scolds the children.
Today, he will be murdered by the Guatemalan Army. He will die from a straight shot to the head in front of his daughter. Decades later, Engracia will recall her reply:
“We’re just counting them. It’s like counting the birds.”
These are turbulent months. The Mendoza family fled the center of Chajul, one of three Maya Ixil municipalities in the deep, forested highlands of Guatemala, and settled in Chulultze’, a commune of seven families in seven small huts in the most rural neck of rural Chajul. They fled repression in the town center, where the Army assaulted and disappeared many people they knew, many of whom were also fleeing themselves.
That is why, as the helicopters circle back over the village in the late afternoon, their fear turns to haste. The neighbors’ calls are urgent: Return home, make food, and get ready, because we may have to leave all at once.
They prepare to flee from their own flight, deeper into the depths of the mountains.
One of Engracia’s sisters, seeing the helicopters return, puts into words what everyone already senses.
“They came back to kill us.”
CIA operatives in Guatemala have come to the same conclusion. Less than two weeks earlier, in a report classified as “top secret” and dated February 5, 1982, they describe an imminent danger: “The Guatemalan military’s plans to begin sweeps through the Ixil Triangle area, which has the highest concentration of guerrillas and sympathizers in the country, could lead not only to major clashes, but to serious abuses by the armed forces.”
They are right: The horror of Engracia, of her family, of her village, is about to begin in earnest.
Forty-two years later, Engracia Mendoza will join dozens of Ixil survivors on their journey to Guatemala City from their hamlets and villages to inscribe their memories in the judicial record. Midway through 2024, they will testify in a trial against the man who commanded the assassins of thousands of civilians in dozens of villages in the early 1980s: the nonagenarian former general Benedicto Lucas García, younger brother of then-dictator Romeo Lucas García and architect of the counterinsurgency in early 1982 in Guatemala, at the height of the country’s war against communism. Benedicto will be accused of perpetrating, as Chief of the Army General Staff between mid-1981 and early 1982, a genocide against the Ixil, one of two-dozen Maya peoples in Guatemala.
The witnesses will recall the day when the Army, under Benedicto’s command, arrived in their community to burn, rape, and murder. They will have waited decades. They will point to the general.
You can read the full article, with photos and links, here The Massacre of a Trial for Genocide.
Categories: Culture, Genocide, Guatemala, Human Rights, Impunity, Indigenous peoples, Justice, Military, Racism, Violence
Guatemala Solidarity Network 
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