Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 22 2003 (IPS) — Guatemala violated several human rights provisions while investigating the 1990 murder of an anthropologist, the Inter-American Court for Human Rights has ruled, ordering the government to pay damages to her family and to continue to push for prosecution of those responsible.

The Costa Rica-based IACHR found the government ignored several provisions of the American Convention on Human Rights in its handling of the killing by state security forces of Myrna Mack, whose case has become a symbol of the prevailing impunity in Guatemala for abuses committed by its army over some 30 years.

"This decision, and the reparations ordered by the court, recognises the importance of the Mack case and the need for justice in cases of human rights violations committed during Guatemala’s armed conflict," said Neil Hicks of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR), which helped represent the Mack family.

"Guatemala must comply fully with the court’s decision, and bring to account everyone responsible for Myrna’s death," he added.

The ruling, issued last week, comes at a critical moment in Guatemala, where citizens are scheduled to vote next weekend in a run-off election for a new president.

In last month’s first round of elections, a former president who oversaw in the early 1980s the most brutal counter-insurgency campaign in Guatemala’s recent history, General Efrain Rios Montt, placed third.

That worse-than-expected showing took him out of the running, to the immense relief of human rights groups and a number of foreign governments, including the Bush administration, which had indicated before the balloting that it would find working with Rios Montt "difficult".

While neither of the two remaining candidates, Alvaro Colom and Oscar Berger, has been closely linked to the military, rights activists remain very concerned.

Civilian presidents in Guatemala have never been able to fully control the military, which has a history of dealing ruthlessly with anyone who threatens its interests – from ensuring silence over past atrocities to, more recently, protecting drug traffickers and crime mafias that are believed to operate with the cooperation of senior officers.

Last week, for example, an elderly priest, Fr Jose Maria Ruiz Furlan, who championed the poor and criticised the military, was shot to death outside a church in a poor neighbourhood of the capital, Guatemala City. His assailants quickly disappeared, and no one has been arrested.

"Furlan’s killing is just one of many examples that illustrate the magnitude and urgency of the human rights challenges facing the new administration next year," Amnesty International said.

"During 2003," the London-based group said, "political violence showed a disturbing pattern reminiscent of the repression of Guatemala’s bloody and brutal past."

The Mack case, which more than 13 years after the assassination still has not been entirely resolved by the country’s domestic court system, has served in many ways as the ultimate test of impunity in Guatemala.

Investigations, reports, testimony and court verdicts have established that the U.S.-trained anthropologist was stabbed to death by members of a military death squad while on her way home from work on Sep. 11, 1990.

Her work at the time – investigating the destruction and massacre of entire indigenous communities by the Guatemalan military during the country’s armed conflict – was apparently the motive.

Police initially informed the family that she had died in a traffic accident, and later suppressed a 60-page report by their own investigators that concluded it had been a political killing ordered by a key military intelligence unit, known as the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP).

But through the tenacity and courage of her sister, Helen Mack, as well as other rights activists both in Guatemala and overseas, sufficient pressure was brought to bear on the government that, in 1993, an army sergeant serving in the EMP was convicted of the murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Further investigation as a result of relentless efforts by Helen, backed by foreign governments and rights groups, led to the indictment and trial of two colonels and a general – the highest-ranking officials in Guatemala ever to face trial for human rights abuses.

On Oct. 3, 2002, a Guatemalan criminal court convicted former EMP director, Colonel Juan Valencia Osorio, for his role in ordering the murder, but acquitted the other two defendants.

But last May, in a ruling that provoked outrage from rights groups worldwide, an appeals court overturned the conviction, and the case is now pending before Guatemala’s Supreme Court.

In 2001, the Washington-based Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which had undertaken its own review of the case, referred it to the Inter-American Court, requesting that it issue protective orders for Helen and others involved in the case and take other measures to ensure Guatemala met its obligations under the convention.

In its 240-page decision the court found unanimously that Guatemala had violated several articles of the convention, including the right to life, humane treatment, due process guarantees and judicial protection.

In addition, a majority of the court found that to comply with its obligations the government must effectively investigate the facts of the case in order to identify and prosecute all those responsible for the killing and those who covered up the crime; remove all obstacles to justice in the case; and guarantee adequate security for the judicial authorities, prosecutors, witnesses and family members.

The majority also demanded that the government publicly honour the memory of Jose Mérida Escobar, a police investigator who was killed during his probe of the case in 1991; establish a scholarship in Myrna Mack’s name, and name a street or plaza in Guatemala City after her; and pay 266,000 dollars for material damages to the family and 350,000 dollars more for its pain and suffering.

The monetary damages were the highest amount ever awarded by the court, according to Hicks.

Guatemala is bound by the convention to honor court judgments. In the past, the court has ordered the government to take protective measures – that is to protect witnesses or others, including helen mack – and they appear to have done so.

Activists hope the judgment, combined with the public outrage over Fr Furlan’s murder, will refocus the last days of the presidential campaign on the importance of human rights and ending impunity.

Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and LCHR, among others, have been demanding that the two candidates pledge to entirely dismantle the successor agencies to the EMP, which was formally dissolved earlier this year, and commit themselves to support the creation of a special U.N.-sponsored commission.

It would investigate and promote the prosecution of individuals associated with secrete groups that are believed responsible for the rising tide of violence against rights activists and judicial personnel investigating past abuses, including the Mack case..