by the El Reportero’s wire services
Efraín Ríos MonttGuatemala’s Constitutional Court has opened the door to amnesty for former dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, a judicial spokesman told Efe Wednesday.
The ruling was issued Tuesday, but has not been made public pending formal notification of the parties, the spokesman said.
The decision suggests the case against the retired general be dropped on the basis of a amnesty proclaimed in 1986 by Guatemala’s then-military regime, La Prensa Libre daily said Wednesday on its Web site.
The CC, according to the newspaper, ordered trial Judge Carol Patricia Flores to rule on defense lawyers’ motion for a dismissal of the charges against the 87-year-old defendant, who presided over one of the bloodiest phases of the nation’s 1960-1996 civil war.
Rios Montt was convicted in May and sentenced to 80 years in prison for the deaths of 1,771 Ixil Indians between March 1982 and August 1983 as part of a counterinsurgency campaign. But the CC threw out the conviction and ordered a repeat of the trial.
The Guatemalan Supreme Court in June rejected a motion to quash the prosecution of the erstwhile strongman, finding that the 1986 amnesty does not extend to genocide and crimes against humanity. The retrial of Rios Montt is scheduled for April 2014. The CC’s decision is “surprising,” a representative of one of the plaintiffs in the case against him, the Legal Action Center for Human Rights, told Efe Wednesday.
This year’s trial of Rios Montt marked the first time any Guatemalan ruler was called to account for the massacres and atrocities of a conflict that claimed more than 200,000 lives.
Most of the dead were Indian peasants slaughtered by the army and its paramilitary allies.
Tensions heighten on Hispaniola
Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Port-au-Prince over the last week to protest against the government of Haiti’s President Michel Martelly. The main gripe was the high cost of living but participating legislators also accused Martelly of authoritarianism. The head of the senate in the Dominican Republic (DR), Reinaldo Pared Pérez, responded by claiming that certain sectors in Haiti had whipped up international hysteria against a controversial ruling by the Dominican constitutional tribunal (TC), which leaves hundreds of thousands of residents of Haitian descent stateless, in a bid to divert attention away from pre-coup protests in Haiti. It could just as easily be claimed that his far-fetched scenario is an attempt to shift attention away from a ruling which has earned his country international condemnation and is also threatening its regional foreign policy. (Reported by Latin News).
Colombia-FARC peace talks continue in Havana
Peace talks between the FARC-EP (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People’’s Army) and Colombia’’s government continue to be held in Havana, focusing today on the second topic of a six-point agenda.
On the third day of the 16th round of negotiations that started last Wednesday, both parts will discus about the issue of political participation in order to achieve a partial agreement like the one reached last May regarding agricultural development.
Tomorrow the talks will be adjourned until next Sunday, when both parts are expected to resume negotiations at the Havana International Convention Center, permanent venues of the meetings.
