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With Ríos Montt Behind Bars, Will U.S. Officials Be Indicted for Backing Genocide?

1,614 views · Published 13 May 2013 · 2:07 · Indexed 21 September 2026

Channel: Democracy Now! · 2013 · News & Politics

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Watch the full interview with journalist Allan Nairn at http://owl.li/kYAc5. Former U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt has been sentenced to 80 years in prison after being found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. Ríos Montt was convicted of overseeing the slaughter of more than 1,700 people in Guatemala's Ixil region after seizing power in 1982. Journalist Allan Nairn, who returned to Guatemala to cover the trial after reporting on the massacres extensively in the early 1980s, tells Democracy Now! that as the genocide investigation widens, U.S. officials who supported Ríos Montt's regime could be the next to be indicted.

ALLAN NAIRN: One final legal point I should make, the mandate that the judge gave, the order to the attorney general, Judge Barrios's order to the attorney general, Paz y Paz, to further investigate everyone involved in Ríos Montt's crimes, that could encompass U.S. officials, because the U.S. military attachés in Guatemala, the CIA people who were on the ground aiding the G2 military intelligence unit, the policy-making officials back in Washington, people like Elliott Abrams and the other high officials of the Reagan administration, they were direct accessories to and accomplices to the Guatemalan military. There were supplying money, weapons, political support, intelligence. They, under the law—under international and Guatemalan law, they could be charged. The courts and the attorney general could have right to seek their extradition from the U.S. Also, in the investigation process, they could subpoena U.S. documents, because there would be extensive reports and National Security Agency intercepts of Guatemalan army communications from that period, and there would also be still-classified reports on exactly what the CIA and the DIA and the White House and the State Department were doing with Ríos Montt and with the commanders in the field, people like, well, before Ríos Montt, General Benedicto Lucas García, afterward Pérez Molina. So, both President Pérez Molina and the U.S. are now potential targets for criminal investigation for these crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity in Guatemala.

See all Democracy Now! coverage of the Ríos Montt trial at
http://www.democracynow.org/topics/guatemala.

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