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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Dr. Armando de la Torre &amp; Steve Hecht</title>
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		<title>Leftist Media Malpractice on Guatemala</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dr-armando-de-la-torre-and-steve-hecht/leftist-media-malpractice-on-guatemala/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=leftist-media-malpractice-on-guatemala</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 25 Jun 2014 04:30:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Armando de la Torre &#38; Steve Hecht]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Court]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guatemala]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Paz y Paz]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234722</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An international news organization turns PR agency for Guatemalan radicals.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/leoncillo-sabino.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234725" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/leoncillo-sabino-450x337.jpg" alt="leoncillo-sabino" width="284" height="213" /></a>Guatemala has lately been a focus of international attention, and the present writers have<span style="color: #fe262c;"> </span>extensive knowledge of the politics of this country.  Even so, we were surprised when we were contacted by a reporter from the McClatchy news organization, which has a wide reach in U.S. news markets.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The reporter, a certain Benjamin Reeves, was based outside the capital, in the tourist enclave of Antigua. He said he was preparing a report on the controversy surrounding Guatemala’s attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, who was facing a reappointment challenge<span style="color: #151606;"> that she eventually lost</span>. As it happens, Paz y Paz has been a huge favorite among activists of the international left—including, most prominently, the Obama State Department. As Mr. Reeves described his dilemma to us, he easily found people to praise Dr. Paz y Paz but could not locate dissenting views, and he feared he was not getting the whole story. He had then learned of us and wanted to know in detail why we felt as we did.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Our surprise stemmed from the fact that, when international media cover Guatemala, they gladly do so in line with what are called progressive viewpoints. This is by now universal; even conservative media like The Wall Street Journal and Fox News have largely bought into the leftist playbook on Guatemala. No journalist anywhere is going to be in trouble for sticking to those views. Quite the opposite: danger lies in going against the canonized version of events, as we ourselves have experienced time and again.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Even so, we decided to work with Reeves. The invitation to speak with a journalist whose work reaches many thousands of people in the U.S. is not something that comes to us every day. So we opened our dossiers to Reeves; we saved him time and legwork. He talked to us with respect, and he promised to let us know when his article was published.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Reeves did not honor his word; it was only afterward that we were able to locate the <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/02/25/219352/guatemala-may-be-about-to-oust.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">article</span></a> he had written with our help. When we read his lead paragraph, we understood that this was not going to be a piece of courageous or insightful reporting: “Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz is a small, soft-spoken woman with the quiet mannerisms of an academic, which she is. But she also displays a dogged perseverance that has made her a champion of human rights and the rule of law. And that may put her out of a job soon.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">This kind of encomium is distressingly typical of how Paz y Paz has been treated by the international press. She exemplifies those political figures who are far more popular outside their country than they are inside it. Indeed, she is the Eddie Haskell of international politics—easy to admire, as long as you don’t look around the sides.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">During her term as attorney general, Paz y Paz had a perfect understanding of her power base. It was the network of international bureaucrats who admired her statistics, and whose satisfaction became her first priority. She had no qualms about monkeying with lawful procedure for the purpose of keeping her statistics and her political profile up to snuff.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In Reeves’s account, Paz y Paz’s “most virulent critics are far right groups that say they promote the rule of law but oppose the application of human rights norms and the prosecution of crimes . . .” The facts we had shown to Reeves gave a strikingly different picture. During Paz y Paz’s tenure, her most determined critics were not rightists. They were people in her own ministry—prosecutors and other officers of the law whom the attorney general had thwarted in their efforts to apply the law fairly.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The norms of law enforcement did not support the attorney general’s agendas of statistics-padding or preferential treatment for so-called human rights groups <span style="color: #151606;">(in reality, </span>mostly<span style="color: #151606;"> left-wing militias</span>). For this reason, Paz y Paz was regularly in conflict with prosecutors whose priority was the law, rather than political maneuvering. Unlike the international bureaucrats with whom Paz y Paz played politics, those prosecutors saw the dark side of Eddie Haskell’s face; and numerous officials with long, distinguished records were forced out of the justice ministry, their careers and lives crushed by the Paz y Paz juggernaut.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Reeves’s reporting reflected none of this. It also showed a skewed understanding of human-rights issues. In an <a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/05/28/228683/as-guatemala-replaces-attorney.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">article</span></a> of May 2014, decrying the appointment of Thelma Aldana as attorney general to replace Paz y Paz, he made this revealing statement: “ . . . Aldana may favor amnesty for crimes committed during the 1960-1996 civil war, and her selection is seen by many as a death knell for the genocide prosecution of Ríos Montt, who ruled 1982-1983 in a particularly brutal phase of the war.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Contrary to what Reeves suggests, amnesty in Guatemala is not a retrograde notion. It is the law of the land, a key provision of the 1996 peace accords. It reflects the fact that crimes in the fighting were committed on all sides. In the interest of national reconciliation, it grants a general pardon. The amnesty does not apply to exceptional crimes like genocide, but no genocide was observed or reported during the conflict; members of all ethnic groups had fought on different sides. That has been the Guatemalan reality.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It is most certainly not the international leftist point of view, however. In this view, to which Reeves and his bosses at McClathy subscribe, the only<a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dr-armando-de-la-torre-and-steve-hecht/power-struggle-in-guatemala/"><span style="color: #1255cc;"> crimes in Guatemala </span></a>were committed by the army and its bosses. Since former military and political leaders like Ríos Montt could not be convicted of crimes under the amnesty law, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dr-armando-de-la-torre-and-steve-hecht/obama-revealed-in-guatemala-policy/?utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=c72ce1cc97-Mailchimp_FrontPageMag&amp;utm_term=0_57e32c1dad-c72ce1cc97-156990833"><span style="color: #1255cc;">the charge of genocide was fabricated </span></a>and imported after the fact. Such was Paz y Paz’s view of how to resolve the legal issues left over from the conflict. The ex-<i>guerrilla</i> faction was to be the beneficiary of reconciliation, while former military and political leaders were to be the victims of it.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Reeves’s reporting, in sum, reflects a standard of shoddy journalism that admits careless political judgments as only one of its failings. The essence of the matter is this: aside from Paz y Paz herself, whom Reeves obviously interviewed, all the sources for his stories about the attorney general, with a single exception, are foreign to Guatemala.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The sources have these addresses: the University of Washington (Seattle); the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights (Washington, DC); the Open Society Foundations (New York); the Due Process of Law Foundation (Washington, DC); Human Rights Watch (New York); and George Mason University (Fairfax, VA). The author also cites statements by the Embassy of the United States and by the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, an arm of the United Nations. While those last two groups have postal addresses in Guatemala, they are not Guatemalan.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Here’s the ironic exception: the only Guatemalan group whose views are reflected in Reeves’s reporting is ours: the Pro-Patria League of Guatemala, a nonprofit association. In his report, Reeves labeled the Pro-Patria League as an organ of the extreme right—precisely the way Paz y Paz herself has described us. But our purpose, over several decades, has been to build support for the rule of law in Guatemala. In politics that is a liberal goal, not a rightist one.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It might well be that Reeves wanted to have us in his report because he needed to include <i>some</i> indigenous viewpoint. In any case, the balance is revealing. In Reeves’s journalism, as in life itself, extravagant praise for Paz y Paz came from foreigners, while skepticism came from the home ground. Paz y Paz’s defeat, which Reeves lamented, was entirely fitting, but to the international left she remains a victim and a heroine whose spirit lives on. Call it the Eddie Haskell principle; it’s alive and well and living in this country.</p>
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		<title>Obama Revealed in Guatemala Policy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dr-armando-de-la-torre-and-steve-hecht/obama-revealed-in-guatemala-policy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-revealed-in-guatemala-policy</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 21 May 2014 04:25:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Armando de la Torre &#38; Steve Hecht]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guatemala]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[marxist]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Radical]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225917</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Radicalism abroad, radicalism at home. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/2013-03-03T151338Z_2_CBRE9210K7L00_RTROPTP_4_USA-FISCAL-OBAMA-SHUTDOWN-638x255.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225918" alt="Obama speaks about the sequester in Washington" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/2013-03-03T151338Z_2_CBRE9210K7L00_RTROPTP_4_USA-FISCAL-OBAMA-SHUTDOWN-638x255.jpg" width="342" height="202" /></a>If you were observing U.S. diplomacy in search of the curious – and you had decided to eavesdrop at one of its remotest, least-visited quarters – you would go to the Central American republic of Guatemala, where you would find something quite revealing about the nature of Barack Obama.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is not an exercise for a slow day. America’s diplomacy in Guatemala is a devastating exposé of Obama&#8217;s political character. Through U.S. actions in Guatemala—far more than in Benghazi, in the Ukraine, in the Middle East or elsewhere—Obama stands forth, undisguised, as a left-wing radical. If this stuff were happening in the U.S., or in other regions that get any kind of spotlight, people would be confused about it because Obama&#8217;s gigantic spin-machine would be making them dizzy. But this stuff is happening in Guatemala, and Obama feels no need to apply the spin because no one from the United States is looking.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Well, almost no one.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In Guatemala, Obama’s machinations are made clear by how the U.S. embassy is interfering with the country&#8217;s internal matters. And those interventions are occurring in a way that will likely cause you to miss them; because the embassy&#8217;s interventions are being done in Spanish only. Its statements are not announced or catalogued in English; and they go unmentioned in U.S. media.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Except in this one.</span></p>
<p>On April 22, the U.S. embassy in Guatemala issued a <a href="http://photos.state.gov/libraries/guatemala/788/pdfs/pbs12_20140422.pdf">statement</a> criticizing the Guatemalan bar association for sanctioning Judge Yassmin Barrios; the lawyers&#8217; guild had seen fit to suspend her from the practice of law for one year. You would think that the embassy could stay out of a matter like this. But Judge Barrios is a favorite of the U.S.—and even of the White House—because she served as the judge in the <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-24833642">Ríos Montt genocide trial</a>.  Indeed, Barrios had been sanctioned for her actions during that case. But just before the sanctions, she had received the State Department&#8217;s “International Women of Courage” Award of 2014 for her actions in the same case—and received the award, in Washington, from none other than <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/statephotos/12935983274/">First Lady Michelle Obama</a>.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">During the trial, in her haste to reach a guilty verdict against Ríos Montt, the judge had taken the highly questionable step of removing Ríos Montt’s lawyer and then ordering two other lawyers to represent him, without consulting the defendant, in violation of his constitutional rights. In its statement, the embassy denounced the bar association for interfering with what it called judicial independence; but the bar association had only been fulfilling its constitutional duty. It was actually the embassy interfering in the judicial process by throwing its weight around. And the embassy’s tactic apparently worked. Shortly thereafter, the assembly of presidents of the professional associations, in a highly unusual and challengeable manner, cancelled Barrios’s suspension (though confirming her ethical violation).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Consistent with its politics, our embassy had earlier supported another assault on judicial independence. In July 2012, Judge Silvia de León of the capital district read into the court record her description of a judges’ meeting at which Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz had made an unannounced appearance. The attorney general&#8217;s very presence at the meeting was illegal. In a word, Paz y Paz had tried to browbeat the judges into doing things her way. De León’s act in putting the event on record was obviously an expression of alarm. The attorney general’s purpose had obviously been to compromise judicial independence, not uphold it. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">U.S. Ambassador Arnold Chacon was made aware of Judge de León’s story; it was the two authors of this article who shared it with him, along with other perpetrations by Paz y Paz. The ambassador showed no interest in what we told him. In public he could always be counted on to defend Paz y Paz, an official favored by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself. Earlier this year, just before leaving his post in Guatemala, Chacon made</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht563VqHhws"> a video in Spanish</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, addressed to the people of Guatemala, in which he declared that it was “a privilege for my government to count on a partner like Dr. Paz y Paz.” Chacon himself was being promoted to the post of director general of the Foreign Service. His service might well be described by a couplet from Gilbert &amp; Sullivan: “I always voted at my party’s call/and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Ríos Montt genocide trial was the centerpiece of Obama’s and Paz y Paz’s </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dr-armando-de-la-torre-and-steve-hecht/power-struggle-in-guatemala/">political agenda</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in Guatemala. During the trial, the State Department issued a press release that </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://photos.state.gov/libraries/guatemala/788/pdfs/pbs16_20130410.pdf">all but called </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for Ríos Montt’s conviction. The Ríos Montt trial has been intensely, not to say entirely, political in nature. At rare times it has been touched by considerations of law or legality, but only by coincidence. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Power in Guatemala today is crudely and improbably divided between the two factions that have more weight than anyone else: the traditional ruling oligarchs—who emerged from the country’s long conflict with their power intact—and the Marxist ex-guerrillas. With the leftist operative Paz y Paz as attorney general, and radical activists like Yassmin Barrios in key judicial posts, charges were brought against Ríos Montt that would have been dismissed out-of-hand in a system with true rule of law.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The oligarchs consented for the case to move forward, so as not to disturb the ruling coalition. When the trial became unbearable for them, they had it reset almost to its beginning with an order from Guatemala’s highest court. The Left impatiently ignored the order and pressed ahead for a conclusion – which is when Judge Barrios illegally ordered the two lawyers to represent Ríos Montt. Very quickly thereafter, she obtained a &#8220;guilty&#8221; verdict and slapped the 86-year-old Ríos Montt with an 80-year sentence—which was immediately set aside by another procedural ruling. So the trial has been delayed; but the genocide charge remains on the table, and the judicial process against Ríos Montt is now scheduled to resume early in 2015.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The essence of the case becomes clear when you apply the facts of history to the definition of genocide – a simple exercise that few parties in the debate appear to have done. For example: to the seven Nobel Peace Prize laureates who </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://nobelwomensinitiative.org/2013/04/nobel-laureates-call-for-case-against-rios-montt-to-proceed-in-guatemala/">argued publicly</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for a conviction, the so-called genocide was &#8220;a ‘scorched earth’ campaign aimed at wiping out support for leftist guerrillas during Guatemala’s civil war.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Nobel laureates are entirely misguided on this point. &#8220;A campaign aimed at wiping out support for leftist guerrillas&#8221; is an effort to destroy the guerrilla movement. That is not the same as genocide.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Here is what genocide, by definition, is: the systematic destruction of all or part of a racial, ethnic, religious or national group. While “part” may open a small window of debate, the facts do not substantially support the charge. During the armed conflict, all races, all ethnic, religious and national groups fought on different sides, or stayed neutral. Crimes were committed by all sides to the conflict. And those crimes were explicitly absolved in the amnesty that ended the fighting.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">During the conflict, no genocide was observed or reported. The charge of genocide was imported after the fact by the international Left, and it was politically motivated. Since various exceptional crimes had been exempted from the amnesty, the charge of genocide became a giant stick that the Left could use to beat its opposition. And the Obama administration has provided open and vigorous support for this Leftist program.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The evidence of history does show that Ríos Montt is guilty of a serious crime; but it is not the crime of genocide. His crime is that he and his regime, during the armed conflict, contributed mightily to defeating the Marxist guerrillas. The Marxists, when they commenced their insurgency, assumed that the impoverished peasants would quickly side with their effort to overthrow the government. The peasants, in their wisdom, did largely the opposite; they turned to the army for help. The army trained and armed many peasants, organizing them into civilian defense patrols which finally handed the guerrillas a military defeat. These are facts that the international left, ever since, has been desperate to conceal and deny.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Marxists signed the peace accords of 1996 so they could continue their quest for power by political means. Like all other signers, they were pledged to reconciliation, but unlike others they practiced their solidarity in one direction only. With Paz y Paz in the post of attorney general, the guerrillas gained an opportunity to persecute and destroy their old enemies in the army. This chance they exploited to maximum effect with the help of the Obama administration. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Obama administration supports the ex-guerrillas because the two groups, in their essence, are the same. The tactic they mutually value is that of &#8220;divide and conquer&#8221; using race, gender and class warfare as tools. In Guatemala, the self-proclaimed “human-rights” groups – former guerrillas who expertly co-opted the concept – have a vested interest in keeping people poor and dependent. It is the lifeblood rationale in their struggle for power, and for foreign material and political support. The last things they want are development, progress and the rule of law. The oligarchs play along because they want to keep their economic advantages, which come largely from the privilege of being above the law. While these two groups co-govern with impunity, the rest of society suffers – people of all races, ethnic groups, religions and social classes beneath the oligarch level.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In the U.S., Obama portrays himself as the selfless defender of the public good, while painting his opponents as selfishly motivated and, by implication, evil. Drawing on the human tendency to blame the other, Obama and his partisans sow fear and hatred against their enemies, giving themselves a two-for-one benefit: blame their failures on the enemy, and use that same failure to create a greater number of people dependent on government. Republicans, even under Obama, have a sufficient stake in the system – a share of power, and substantial privileges – to play along. While the rival parties co-govern with near-perfect impunity, most other Americans are adversely affected – people of all races, ethnic groups, religions and social classes who are not part of the elites.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Obama administration’s blatant support for the ex-guerrillas of Guatemala shows the unvarnished Obama agenda. The U.S. embassy and its friends mercilessly oppose, with callous disregard for the facts, those Guatemalans who faithfully execute their duties, like Judge de León and the officials of the bar association – people who really do support the rule of law, and thereby threaten the leftist agenda.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Obama administration and the Guatemalan Left are cousins in the struggle to remake the world as they think it should be, completely convinced that they have a monopoly on truth. But true principles are their enemy. So is the rule of law. Principled actors would not behave as they do. People of principle understand that no one owns the truth, and that principled opposition must be welcome. In a system of laws and constitutional protections, that is the appropriate way to act. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Obama and his minions have obviously missed that part of the program. And now, in Guatemala, they are putting their twisted politics into play. With the administration’s immunity from domestic scandal and the lack of U.S. journalistic interest in Guatemala, the U.S. president is working here, openly and ardently, on behalf of an undemocratic movement, completely free from concerns of exposure.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Hopefully, that is, until now.</span></p>
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		<title>Power Struggle in Guatemala</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dr-armando-de-la-torre-and-steve-hecht/power-struggle-in-guatemala/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=power-struggle-in-guatemala</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dr-armando-de-la-torre-and-steve-hecht/power-struggle-in-guatemala/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 13 Nov 2013 04:25:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dr. Armando de la Torre &#38; Steve Hecht]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Claudia Paz y Paz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Efrain Rios Montt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guatemala]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trial]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=210218</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama administration's destructive role. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/2013_05_12_MATAMOROS_PROTEST_001.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210259" alt="Pro Rios Montt Protest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/2013_05_12_MATAMOROS_PROTEST_001-385x350.jpg" width="270" height="245" /></a>In late 2011, Guatemala’s powerful attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, brought criminal charges of genocide against the country’s former leader, General Efrain Rios Montt. In May of this year, at the end of a long and highly unusual trial, the 86-year-old Rios Montt—who had helped save Guatemala from a leftist insurgency—was convicted of genocide and sentenced to 80 years in jail. The international Left celebrated the verdict, which promised to give the Left a dramatic increase in power. U.S. media highlighted the verdict but ignored a fact well known to Guatemalans: the U.S. had lobbied for Rios Montt to be convicted.</p>
<p>Shortly after the verdict, Guatemala’s highest judicial authority, its constitutional court, overturned the trial on procedural irregularities, declaring it null and void. In mid-October, however, the same court revived the case by instructing a lower-court judge to determine whether the amnesty granted at the end of Guatemala’s civil conflict should apply to Rios Montt. If amnesty applies, the trial is over. If amnesty does not apply, the trial will proceed.</p>
<p>Most people in Guatemala have been unable to follow the complicated legal battle. But almost everyone here understands that no genocide was committed. Most also know the country is riddled with corruption, and they know of the system’s crushing incompetence. Those who put it all together can see that no decision, even a judicial one, is based in law when powerful interests are at play.</p>
<p>The only law that governs in Guatemala today is one that’s never directly stated and requires an act of will to discover. America’s diplomats have all the information they need to discover it, but they’ve chosen not to. And U.S. media that have sympathized with Guatemala&#8217;s leftist insurgents—big guns like <i>The New York Times,</i> CBS and PBS—will shed no light on the matter. But a major conservative medium, <i>The Wall Street Journal,</i> dropped a very broad hint when it began running articles that reflected the views of the former guerrillas.</p>
<p>“Guatemala Opens Inquiry Into Disappearance of Ex-Rebel Fighter” by Nicholas Casey, on November 5, 2011, pointed clearly to the agenda that the ex-guerrilla Left was using to extort favors from the man who was about to win the presidency, retired General Otto Perez. “If you do not give us a share of power in your administration,” leftists could clearly be heard in the article telling Perez, “we are going to make your life miserable with these kinds of investigations.” And <i>The Journal</i>’s story, on its face, was backing the leftist instigators.</p>
<p><i>The</i> <i>Journal,</i> which pays more attention to Guatemala than do most American media, has steadily taken the side of that country’s oligarchs. So its interest in the fate of a missing guerrilla commander was a matter of some significance. Might it signal a new alignment of political forces?</p>
<p>Indeed it did, and the new alignment is this: power in Guatemala is now being shared by an unlikely coalition of the extreme right and the extreme left. Former guerrillas, practicing Marxists, are in bed with the oligarchs and their political stooges, each party helping the other in countless, invisible ways. <i>The Wall Street Journal</i> won’t directly say it; <i>The New York Times</i> will not even hint at it; and neither will speak for the broad majority of people, from the upper middle classes to the rural peasants, whose interests are being attacked every day by the coalition of extremes.</p>
<p>In this arrangement, the oligarchs have the presidency of Otto Perez and the former guerrillas have the justice ministry of Claudia Paz y Paz. The oligarchs continue to do their moneymaking “business as usual” without interference from the Marxists, who are in charge of law enforcement. This division of power explains the anomaly of a former leader, whose fight against the leftist insurgency had been a boon to the oligarchs, being prosecuted under the rule of an oligarchs’ president.</p>
<p>Attorney General Paz y Paz worked very hard to bring the case against Rios Montt. She is a dogmatic leftist with family ties to former insurgent groups. Her career has been devoted to settling scores with those who prevented a Marxist takeover of her country. She is a doctor of law who operates with a stunning indifference to legal protocol. Her ministry actually promotes illicit land-grabbing operations by armed leftist gangs in Guatemala’s countryside.</p>
<p>If Paz y Paz were submitted to a vote of the people in her own ministry, she would be ousted in a landslide. But beyond Guatemala, in the precincts of international institutions and “progressive” media, it is all smiles for the heroic justicer and woman who is said to defend the interests of the oppressed. And she receives open, enthusiastic backing from the Obama State Department, whose policy is aided by the silence of the press.</p>
<p>Speaking to a Guatemalan columnist, U.S. Ambassador Arnold Chacon said that Paz y Paz is a personal favorite of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s. The ambassador explained that, whenever he visited the State Department during Clinton’s tenure, he was ushered into the Secretary’s office ahead of many others because Clinton wanted first-hand reports of Paz y Paz’s activities. According to other sources, Clinton used her weight with President-elect Perez to keep Paz y Paz in office, as her term had begun under the previous president.</p>
<p>Most egregiously, the U.S. embassy provided explicit support to Paz y Paz and her ministry during Rios Montt’s prosecution. In a highly questionable move, Ambassador Chacon attended a critical session of the trial. The embassy then took the step of issuing <a href="http://photos.state.gov/libraries/guatemala/788/pdfs/pbs16_20130410.pdf">a statement</a> that all but called for Rios Montt’s conviction. The statement, in Spanish only and unmentioned by U.S. media, extravagantly lauded the process of justice under Paz y Paz’s ministry. It then said:  “We exhort all Guatemalans to respect the legitimacy and integrity of this process.”</p>
<p>What business does a U.S. embassy have to lecture a foreign populace? Who authorized this foolish proclamation? Do we have an embassy out of control, or a State Department that doesn’t know what it’s about, or both?</p>
<p>The outright support of the U.S. embassy for the prosecution in this case—like the case itself—is incomprehensible from any vantage point besides that of raw politics. After all,  the charge was genocide—not wanton or excessive violence, not the abuse of civilians by armed forces, but “the systematic extermination of an entire people or national group,” to quote the dictionary definition.</p>
<p>Guatemala experienced more than three decades of armed conflict in which each of the contending parties had an armed force. It was not simply a situation—as the Left would have it—in which an oppressive state power imposed its depredations on an innocent, largely indigenous, civilian populace. The Leftists had their <i>guerrillas, </i> extensively financed from abroad, who committed spectacular violence through kidnapping, murder and terrorism. The international media and institutions like the UN—to say nothing of Paz y Paz’s ministry—have all but ignored the crimes committed by the guerrillas. Since the truce that halted the armed conflict in 1996 also included a provision of amnesty, that may be seen as appropriate. But the spirit of amnesty is not upheld if it is applied to one side only; and Paz y Paz has been carrying out a legal revanchism in her prosecution of Rios Montt.</p>
<p>When Rios Montt was chief of state, he agreed to have the UN issue a human rights report, which it did from 1983 straight through to 1997; each report covering the previous year, and the lastreport covering the year in which the peace accords were signed. <i>Not once</i> did the UN ombudsman mention the crime of genocide in these annual reports. The UN had observers in Guatemala for about five years, and neither did they mention genocide. The UN was a party to the peace accords; had genocide occurred, UN officials would have been accomplices to it for not having denounced it.</p>
<p>The defense pointed to those facts and argued that no finding of genocide had ever been made. The court ignored this argument and simply moved to the testimony of witnesses. The prosecution put on about 100 witnesses. They mostly testified to things they had seen—massacres, rapes, mutilations, and more. Some witnesses claimed to have been raped repeatedly at military bases. Victims appeared to have been coached to say ‘yes’ to all questions about having been raped, so they just said they returned to the bases and were raped again. One witness claimed his two-year-old son had been murdered but, considering his age when he testified, the witness would have been nine years old at the time.</p>
<p>The prosecution established that atrocities had occurred, but they did not connect those atrocities to the charge of genocide. They appeared to argue that the crimes were so vile, the charge of genocide should be made to fit. When the defense tried to cross-examine, the court repeatedly interrupted the defense and restricted its questions.</p>
<p>Likewise, the prosecution’s experts were given great latitude to say whatever they wanted. They freely gave their opinions about what had occurred, but did not make the case for genocide. When the defense tried to scrutinize those opinions in cross-examination, the court repeatedly overruled it. Effectively, defense lawyers were disallowed from mounting a defense.</p>
<p>After about three weeks of the trial, defense lawyers decided that they were in a farcical proceeding and that their clients would be convicted no matter what. They stated their intention to abandon the court-room, an unprecedented move. The trial judge must not have been paying attention, because when the lawyers walked out the judge was caught by surprise. The walkout brought the trial to a halt, and the judge was caught up in a calamity. In the next session, part of the defense team returned to the court under pressure from family-members of the accused. But the unusual move by defense lawyers had dealt the court a blow. It was the following session of the trial that U.S. Ambassador Chacon attended, giving the clear message that he had come to support the judge and the process. There followed Rios Montt’s conviction and the action of the constitutional court, setting aside the final weeks of the proceedings.</p>
<p>Other circumstances beyond the trial provided a powerful argument against the genocide charge. When Rios Montt, always a popular politician, ran for president in 2003, he lost the campaign but won the preponderant support of the very people, the Ixils, whom he was later accused of annihilating. During the trial, thousands of Ixil people—in the face of deafening silence by international media—protested publicly on behalf of Rios Montt. If the genocide charge had contained any truth at all, those Ixils would have been like Jews demonstrating for Hitler. During the leftist insurgency, many of the Ixil people had actually fought alongside Rios Montt, both in the army and in the anti-guerrilla militias which rural peasants had asked the army to help them organize. The decades of internecine conflict in Guatemala had seen the same fact dramatized again and again: members of the same ethnic groups fighting on different sides of the conflict. And the fact points to a truth which Guatemalans intuitively recognize: genocide is a crime impossible to commit against yourself.</p>
<p>You can, however, take a ride to hell with the U.S. embassy. In a perfect parroting of Leftist verbiage, the embassy statement asserted that measures like the trial were “an important step toward reconciliation.” How would Guatemalans see as reconciliation a faulty verdict imposed by ex-guerrillas with the overt support of the United States? But some people never quit. According to sources, our State Department is already lobbying for Paz y Paz’s reappointment when her present term expires next year.</p>
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