IN GUATEMALA, FORMER DICTATOR IS TOLD TO APPEAR IN COURT

New York Times, January 22, 2012, By ELISABETH MALKIN

MEXICO CITY - A Guatemalan judge has ordered a former military dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, to appear in court on Thursday, the first step in a process that could lead to his being tried on genocide charges and to a reopening of the darkest chapter in Guatemala's brutal 36-year civil war.

During General Ríos Montt's 17-month rule in 1982 and 1983, the Guatemalan Army pursued a scorched-earth campaign in the Mayan highlands that included massacres that are regarded as among the most horrific in the war. To flush out small bands of leftist guerrillas, soldiers entered Indian villages and hunted down their inhabitants, slaughtering men, women and children indiscriminately.

Survivors' groups have sought justice through the courts for more than a decade, but only in the last year have prosecutors begun to bring cases to trial against high-ranking military officers. Mr. Ríos Montt had immunity from prosecution because he was elected to Congress in 2000, but that immunity ended this month when his term in office expired.

A lawyer for him told the Guatemalan newspaper Prensa Libre that his client would appear to hear the prosecutor's charges. "We are sure that there is no responsibility, since he was never on the battlefield," said the lawyer, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gálvez.

In past interviews, Mr. Ríos Montt has said that he never ordered massacres. But military documents have shown that the military was operating under a rigid chain of command and that reports from the field went right up to top commanders.

A United Nations-backed truth commission set up after peace accords were signed in 1996 found that some 200,000 people had been killed or had disappeared during the civil war, and that government forces committed 626 massacres in indigenous villages over 36 years. The military's actions in the Ixil triangle of El Quiché department, where the Maya-Ixil population were the targets, amounted to genocide, the commission found.

A trial of Mr. Ríos Montt, 85, would pose a test for the new government of President Otto Pérez Molina, a former general who took office Jan. 14 promising an "iron fist" policy against drug and gang violence in the country.

Mr. Pérez Molina was a midlevel commander in the Ixil region during Mr. Ríos Montt's rule but has said that he was involved in rebuilding the terrorized region. Mr. Perez Molina's actions during that time have never been fully investigated, and human rights groups have been unable to find proof he ordered troops to commit atrocities.

The president has promised to support Guatemala's attorney general as her office continues to build human-rights cases.

Two retired generals who were members of Mr. Ríos Montt's high command were arrested last year on war crimes and genocide charges. In November, the court found that another figure from that time - Gen. Oscar Humberto Mejía, who was Mr. Ríos Montt's defense minister and then deposed him in a coup - lacked the capacity to stand trial.