And Benedicto worked hand in glove with the U.S. military attache in Guatemala at the time, Colonel George Manis. And Manis and Benedicto jointly developed the tactic of the sweeps through the north-west highlands, which produced the massacres that got Rios Montt ultimately convicted for genocide.
It was under General Benedicto that these massacres started in a large way, and what Rios Montt did was he made them absolutely systematic. And Colonel Manis told me that it was he and Benedicto together who jointly developed this tactic.
So these mass killings were really a joint operation between the U.S. government and the Guatemalan army. And now the Guatemalan courts are, as we see, very bravely, step by step, bringing prosecutions. And they are making the argument, and so far, a successful argument, that these were in fact criminal acts.
And in a very interesting and revealing development, just the other day the current chief of staff of the Guatemalan army, General Sosa Diaz, went to court personally and asked the high court of Guatemala to grant legal protection to anyone who has perpetrated forced disappearance or genocide.
There's a current law on the books, the National Reconciliation Law, which grew out of the peace settlement between the guerrillas and the army in Guatemala, a deal that was reached in the 1990s. That deal gives a partial amnesty for some crimes to former guerrillas and former army officers. But it says that no amnesty will be given for anyone who perpetrated forced disappearance or genocide.
But now the current Guatemalan army chief of staff is going to court to try to overturn that part of the law, to basically say "Well, if you committed genocide or if you committed forced disappearance, it's okay. You can't be prosecuted for that." That's what he's trying to accomplish.
DB: Allan, that brings us to the fact that last Thursday, I believe it was, the new president, the former comedian, Jimmy Morales, was sworn in as Guatemala's new president. His election was supposedly a response to the corruption of the former president. Is Jimmy Morales clean? What can we say about him?
AN: Well, Jimmy Morales got elected mainly because of the timing of the Guatemalan presidential election. The election date was set long in advance, and as it happened the popular uprising which toppled General Perez Molina, the previous president, and also his vice president, that culminated just weeks before the scheduled presidential election.
So when the election was held the only candidates available were all members of the system in Guatemala. The system that people had been rising up and rebelling against. They all had the backing, all the major candidates who had a chance of being elected, had the backing of either killer army officers, drug cartels, or oligarchs.
So it was just a question of choosing among them. And I was in Guatemala at the time. And what everyone I spoke to said was that they were choosing Jimmy simply because he had never been in office before. He had not yet had a chance to steal and abuse the law unlike the other candidates who had already been in there. And also he was a better speaker, he was more articulate. And so he got into office.
It so happened the forces that were backing Jimmy [were] from the political party called FCN. They represent the worst of the massacre officers. The FCN was created by an association of former military officers and when these officers created [it], they said explicitly that they were creating the party in order to shield themselves and their colleagues from prosecution for atrocities. They knew that they had committed massacres, and gang rapes, and forced disappearances, and mass torture. And they knew that they could be prosecuted for that.
So they formed a political party to try to prevent that. And this is the political party that has now brought Jimmy Morales to power. However, it's not clear that that party will succeed in its agenda because a lot of Guatemalan society is on its feet.
And one of the very remarkable aspects of these mass arrests that took places just days before Morales was sworn in as the new president was that they included some people very close to Morales from ... the FCN political party.
And one of those whose initial charges were filed against was Jimmy Morales's right hand man, Colonel Maldonado, who is currently a member of congress. He is the head of Morales's party delegation in congress. The attorney general's office of Guatemala filed initial charges against him, trying to strip his congressional immunity so that he too can be arrested and put on trial with the other officers.
So this legal case is a very serious challenge to the power base of the new president. And it's not clear at this moment that those army officers are going to be able to prevail in protecting themselves, and dominating this new administration. It's a struggle for power. It's a real, ongoing uprising in Guatemala and the outcome is still uncertain.
DB: Allan, I just want to press you a little bit more to lay out the kind of connections that have existed between the U.S. and the mass murderers of Guatemala. I know that you did extraordinary work on the case of Hector Gramajo. Now, Gramajo was very important because, I believe, he was the army chief of staff for the purge of the highlands in Guatemala. He was clearly a mass murderer. He was later welcomed to Harvard and the Kennedy School where I think he was getting either a BA or a Masters in Government to go back and I guess become a politician.
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