It Took Years, but Guatemala Held a Brutal Dictator Accountable. What Can We Learn?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:57 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 1159. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and today I've got something really special for you. You know, it feels like, certainly right now, and we may be at a low point, it feel like this administration is committing all kinds of, I don't know if atrocities, especially in the context of today's show, perhaps atrocity is too strong a word, but certainly crimes and offenses against civil rights and human rights. It feels like this administration is committing those multiple times a day, and it feels like no one will ever be held to account. So I think Temple Law professor Rachel Lopez is a really interesting person to talk to right now because she's done some fascinating work related to trials following the Guatemalan Civil War and genocide that happened during that. Now, I know that sounds like a really, really grim topic, and It is, but we don't get into anything grim like that. It's more about the process of bringing people to justice. And Guatemala is a real example when it comes to this specific thing. They held people to account decades after the events. So you can see why this is something that's particularly interesting right now. Justice may not come right away and it does take time. But how did the people of Guatemala hold powerful leaders? These were people who were still in places of political power decades later, held them to account, convicted them of war crimes, of genocide. It's something that feels, I don't know, impossible right now, but it's not. It's not impossible. And now Professor Lopez's project was to find these records that were in incredibly rural places, in courthouses with little to no organized storage. And she hunted these records down and has digitally preserved them into the digital archive, the Guatemala Atrocity Trials. And the archive is housed in the Princeton Library and online. Line. This is something we've been trying to bring to the show more. And I want to credit Matt specifically for another guest he found that's going to be really exciting later on. The good folks within the law doing the necessary and difficult and thankless work often. And this is a real inspiring one. I really hope you'll listen in to Professor Rachel Lopez because there's so much here. And as you can imagine, a lot of it might be relevant to our situation in this country. Actually, if we should be so lucky, at least in terms of that long process of justice. So we'll go to our usual break, which you can avoid at patreon.com slash law, and you can support the show and you could bring more conversations like this. This is the stuff we need to hear right now. And I really hope you'll support the Show and keep it going. And you get to lose those ads and you get some bonuses, including High Court scheduled this month. Can't wait. That's going to be a lot of fun. All right. After this break, we'll be on with Temple Law Professor Rachel Lopez.

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0:03:42 Thomas: Rachel, thanks so much for joining us today.

0:03:43 Rachel: Thank you so much for having me.

0:03:45 Thomas: This is a bit of a change of pace for us, but I'm so excited. I don't know where to begin. So I'll just ask. Do you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and your background?

0:03:53 Rachel: Not at all. So I guess I sort of always like to say, just in an effort to kind of demystify my path, because a lot of students ask me, like, how did you become a law professor? And I, I sort of like to, uh, say that I'm an accidental law professor, meaning that most law professors are kind of identified in law school by their professors, you know, usually at Yale or Harvard law school and are sort of marked as being someone that should be an academic. And my path was much more circuitous. I definitely never imagined myself as a law professor and became drawn to this in a way that really connects to what we're going to talk about today, which is my passion for human rights. I graduated in law school in the heart of the Great Recession in June June 2008. I wanted desperately to do human rights and public interest work, but literally one after the other, every job that I applied for and even had interviews set up for disappeared. And so a part of this,

0:04:55 Thomas: Sorry, I'm just imagining they were all in real estate somehow. They were like, yeah, we did human rights on the side, but we flipped houses. So we're out of business now. Sorry.

0:05:05 Rachel: It was so deeply frustrating. I have to say, because in part, my classmates who did private law firms, they offered them deals basically for for half their salary to do public interest work. And so I think that's part of the reason why the entry level jobs for me like weren't available, because they had this plethora of new junior attorneys. And so I just sort of was like looking for other paths to do human rights work. And one path that opened up to me after basically living, I always tell my students there, I lived, I think, on $10,000 that first year doing human rights work. Yeah, it was a very hard time. And so I like to share that with people because I think sometimes people see my path now and they envision something different than actually what happened to me. And I basically ended up working for a judge and then found a way into the academy through doing human rights work at Seton Hall Law School. So there was a legal clinic there that did human rights and immigrants rights work. And I applied for the position and got it. And so that's really how I discovered my love for legal research and teaching.

0:06:16 Rachel: It wasn't something that was really on my radar before that.

0:06:20 Thomas: So the primary motivator was the human rights work, but you just didn't know necessarily what you'd be doing or how you'dbe making that happen.

0:06:27 Rachel: Yeah, I always imagined myself sort of working for the UN or some sort of human rights organization. I didn't ever really, I didn' t really see a path for myself in the legal academy. So it just happened that I saw this posting for, it was basically a teaching fellow at Seton Hall Law School. And I applied and and I think partly because of my language skills was able to get an interview yeah so that was very lucky for me yeah

0:06:52 Thomas: That's cool. Cool. Let's talk about this project, the Guatemala project you're doing. Where do you even start with that? What got you interested in trying to track down records and all this stuff?

0:07:00 Rachel: So I guess I have to start back when I was an undergraduate at Northwestern when I got my first ever research grant so I really had a long -standing interest in Guatemala I didn't really explain I guessI should have maybe talked a little bit about my personal background, but I'm from New Mexico, which is a state that is a mix of Hispanic culture, indigenous culture, and Anglo culture. And Guatemala is a country that in that way is really similar. It's one of the only countries in Latin America that has a majority population of indigenous people, the Mayan population there. And so I was really drawn when I was doing my research in undergrad to Guatemala. And that's when I really, I was studying basically indigenous rights in Guatemala, and I went there for the first time in 2003. And I sort of just fell in love with the country, I think in part because there was a lot of similarities in terms of the cultural backdrop or demographics in that country to my home state of New Mexico. And it just was like a uniquely fascinating country. And I guess I also want to mention because it relates to the The atrocity trials that I have been following ever since is when I was there, Efraín Ríos Montt, who now holds the distinction of being the first head of state to be tried for genocide in a domestic court. He was the head of Congress at that time when I Was there in 2003 and had just launched a campaign for president. I was baffled. I didn't understand how someone who even then people knew he was widely responsible for genocide in the 80s, how he could wield so much power in a country that was, you know, over half made up of indigenous Mayans. And so what I didn't, I guess, really understand or couldn't have even imagined, I guess, is the better way to put it, is that basically over the next decade, there would be these like basically very quiet but seismic shifts that would move the needle towards greater accountability. And then 10 years later, as I mentioned, he became the first head of state to be tried and then convicted for his role in a

0:09:17 Rachel: 1982 massacre in Guatemala.

0:09:20 Thomas: That is really interesting to think about because first off, hard relate. I would hope and I'm glad that this is how we felt. It should be confusing that someone like that would be supported. But like now more and more with what's going on in this country, it's like now it's no longer confusing. Like, oh yeah, people will just support the bad guy. Like I never in in a million years, never was prepared for that.

0:09:42 Thomas: For all their, every movie, every, everything as a kid, you're like, how, what, why would they just support the really bad? Oh, okay. Now I see it. Okay. And secondly, I'm interested in this interim period too. Well, we'll get to it. Can you tell us a little bit about that history? I know it's probably a lot to take on, but maybe the, the kind of the broad strokes of this civil war that you're talking about.

0:10:03 Rachel: Absolutely so I think one really important thing to highlight is given that you know I assume your audience is mostly audience here in the u .s I think it's really important to understand how uniquely intertwined the role of our government is with what happened in guatemala and so really really, it starts there. So essentially, the first democratically elected president, who by no coincidence, I guess, as we'll describe later, is actually the father of now Guatemala's president. He was a pro -democratic. One, he was the first demographically elected president. But he was also deeply committed to redistribution of wealth.

0:10:48 Rachel: And as you might imagine, that rubbed a lot of U .S. companies that were operating in Guatemala the wrong way, in particular United Fruit, which is now Chiquita Banana. And so basically Arevalo, who was the current, Bernardo, who's the current president's father, his name was Jose Arevalos, he and then his successor, Arbenes, both instituted a number of initiatives to essentially expropriate uncultivated land that happened to be owned by the United Fruit Company. And they sort of lobbied the U .S. government to essentially support a military coup in that country in 1954. Yes. And it's a hard thing to think about.

0:11:33 Thomas: It's just so so frustrating. It's like, yeah, it's so horrifying because I'm terrible with history and I don't know this stuff at all, but I do know enough to just assume whatever it was, was our fault. Like I'm totally, my shorthand is like, oh, what did we do? What did we do? And it's really, really sad and depressing to learn. Every time I learn more about like not only what was our thought, what we did, but how no one ever paid for it at all. No one ever in this country. I mean, maybe you'll tell me otherwise, but there's just no consequences for this. It's, it's so horrifying.

0:12:03 Rachel: I think that's one of the really troubling aspects of this is, you know, the U S was It was so deeply involved to the level of, you know, we were supplying weapons that were used in the countryside in the genocide, in the massacres that were happening and ignoring it, essentially, even though, you know, through work of the National Security Archive, we know that, for instance, the CIA and the U.S. department knew that there were terrible things happening in the countryside of Guatemala, yet continued to send weapons and to train the military leaders of Guatemala after they successfully overthrew the democratically elected president of Guatemala. So it's a deeply troubling and disturbing story as it relates to our country's history there.

0:12:52 Thomas: Is it too late for us to have some trials? I don't know how many people are still, you know, around that we're responsible for this on our end, but yeah, maybe, maybe we need to use this as an example for that. I was looking at it as an analogy to Trump, but maybe we could actually forget analogy. Let's go, let's find these actual people from our country who are responsible forthis. But anyway, getting ahead of ourselves. Sorry. Wow.

0:13:12 Rachel: But I guess just Just to underscore that it was really interesting because one of the things that there's actually two U .S. historians in a really compelling book called Bitter Fruit talk about how the United Fruit was able to kind of infiltrate and lobby the State Department and under Eisenhower to get final approval for what they wanted to, which was to overthrow Arbenes, which ultimately happened. And that sort of unleashed this 36 years of civil war in Guatemala, which tragically culminated in the genocide of particularly in one area of Guatemala, the Mayan Hashil.

0:13:48 Thomas: So it was literally that straight of a line to where it was like this action led to this 32 year civil war like was it peaceful before that or I mean I have to imagine there's some amount of like conflict there to

0:14:01 Rachel: In truth, yeah, there was, of course, a strong history of military governance. As I mentioned, this was sort of the birth of democracy in Guatemala. It was a time of great excitement. You know, it was this unique coalition of labor and teachers and the sort of like due to an emerging middle class in Guatemala, it was seen as this sort of window of opportunity for democracy. And it's really interesting because Bernardo Arevalo's dad really took his inspiration from Roosevelt's For Freedoms speech. And he left really very tragically, very disillusioned in the U .S. vision for democracy because he felt that the message was that this was just good for the U.S., but not good for other countries like Guatemala. So in essence, you know, there was a string of military dictators, essentially, including sort of, I guess, the protagonist maybe of this story in the podcast, who was Efrain Rios Montt. And he sort of picked up on his predecessor campaign, which was called the Scorched Earth Campaign. And really, according to military documents, there Was this strategy of quitar el agua del pez is the way that it was described in these documents and what that basically meant was that in order to undermine basically this emerging guerrilla movement basically these revolutionaries who wanted to restore a more democratic sense of governance and redistribution in Guatemala they were being supported heavily by the villages in the the countryside. And so this quitar el agua del pez, which means basically remove the fish from the water, was an effort to essentially displace and exterminate all of the people that were providing aid to these guerrilla, I guess, soldiers, if you want to call them that. And essentially, there was this other classification. They referred to the indigenous people there as the internal enemy

0:14:09 Thomas: Stoke yeah wow

0:16:10 Rachel: Classifying them essentially as people that were a threat to national security

0:16:15 Thomas: Sorry the people who've been there the whole time wow the gall like I don't know how people could think like that I really don't understand it these folks who've literally been here the entire time are the problem not me you know like I don't get it.

0:16:19 Rachel: Yes yes yeah it's really kind of disturbing you know I don't want to be graphic or gory but the things that they did in the countryside are just horrifying you know just horrifying and again just to underscore the cia and the u .s state department were getting cables reports this this was happening, and yet continued to send weapons to Rios Montt and Romero Lucas Garcia's government at the time. And so this sort of, you know, continued pretty much even past these two leaders until there was basically a peace accord in 1996. And since then, basically, there was really a series of efforts to try to hold some of these people that were involved in these terrible terrible massacres to account. And, you know, part of my work ever since then has been to sort of document, to understand these cases, to really part of, I guess, like one of the things that's so perplexing about Guatemala is that it was a country when I started this research that had a 95 % rate of impunity for homicide,

0:16:42 Thomas: Yeah. Boy, that's terrible. Wow.

0:17:40 Rachel: Meaning that only 5 % of homicide cases ever resulted in convictions. And it sort of baffles the mind in a way that in many ways, Guatemala is leading the charge as it relates to atrocity trials. And so my research is like, how is this possible? What are the conditions that allowed for this to happen? And more recently, what is the impact of these trials on democracy today? That's really kind of the heart of the questions I'm asking and the research that I've been doing.

0:18:11 Thomas: Boy I can't help but want to be like what was that missing step in terms of you just telling the story because I feel like it's obviously different but it feels like we're stuck in steps one through x you know and not at that you know reconciliation and justice part. How did that even come about? I mean you go from that horrible situation, genocide, that kind of thing. What was the main I guess reason that the conflict conflict even ended yeah

0:18:33 Rachel: Well it's sort of in part because there was pretty much just I guess the rebel forces were losing steam and I think that people were just growing tired of the conflict and it it you know after 36 years of fighting I think people just wanted peace and so they struck this deal right so it was the deal is very controversial in guatemala one really prominent guatemalan writer Francisco Goldman calls it a pinata of forgiving because basically what the sort of the metaphor being that like excuse my language but like you hit the shit out of a pinada and then you're rewarded with candy is sort of a metaphor he's using there and in essence they basically came to this agreement that was a way of sort of trying to really prevent what has happened today day, these atrocity trials, that the goal was really that these trials would never happen.

0:19:27 Rachel: So much so that they created basically this UN -backed commission called a truth commission that was given the mandate of telling the truth about what happened in these 36 years, but they were told that they could not name names.

0:19:43 Thomas: But don't be mean about it oh my god

0:19:45 Rachel: Yeah, basically they were like, you can't say who actually did these things. You can say what happened, but you can, you know, their mandate it was that they could not name the people who were responsible. And in essence, they didn't do that. But the report in other ways was surprisingly hard hitting. It found that essentially the Guatemalan government was responsible for 200,000 deaths, mostly of civilians, and that really it was the government that was mostly responsible for the deaths during the conflict. And probably the most startling, and I can kind of paint the scene of how this all happened in Guatemala and the impact it had. Their conclusion that was unprecedented was that basically that in this one region of Guatemala, the Achille region, 70 to 90 % of the villages there were wiped off the face of the earth and that acts of genocide occurred in that region.

0:20:40 Thomas: But we can't name any names you know we can can't point the finger though who's you know but it sounds like you're saying they didn't maybe follow that direction to not point the figure did I uh misunderstand

0:20:50 Rachel: I'll give you the dramatic scene of How This Unfolded because I think it's so telling. And I interviewed as as part of this Christian Tamushat, who is a German academic who is charged with heading up this UN -backed truth commission. And there was this, basically this really dramatic scene where he goes to give the president of Guatemala the report. They're in this, it's the National Theater of Guatemala, this beautiful theater, and they're presenting these really hard -hitting findings. And the goal was for them to formally deliver this report to the president. The the president gets so upset, he decides he's not going to accept the report.

0:20:52 Thomas: You oh please wow

0:21:29 Rachel: And in the audience of the National Theater, people start chanting, justicia, justícia, which means justice. So basically, we're saying, this is not going satisfy us, knowing what happened. We're not going to stand for it. And that call for justice has continued. In many ways, that report by the the UN -backed truth commission became the blueprint for the atrocity trials to come. So one article I've written on this post -conflict pluralism really traces how what was meant to be kind of a second rate substitute for justice actually became unwittingly the blueprint for justice, along with another, the work actually of the archdiocese office in Guatemala, who did name names and produced a report called Nunca Mas. Yeah.

0:22:20 Thomas: So the archdiocese did something useful no sorry I'm I'm a little, uh, not a huge fan of, yeah, the Catholic church.

0:22:23 Rachel: No, no, no. I mean, the Catholic. Well, yeah, particularly in Boston. But it's really interesting because the Catholic Church were essentially during this time basically protecting the Guatemalan indigenous people in the countryside. They played a huge role in

0:22:40 Thomas: That's what churches should be doing. Okay, good. Wow.

0:22:41 Rachel: Protecting people. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And they were the ones leading the charge. In fact, they were worried about the UN -backed Truth Commission because it couldn't name names, and they were afraid that they wouldn't essentially do anything that would have any meaning. And so they basically formed their own parallel Truth Commission that really passed a lot of information to the UN Commission.

0:23:02 Thomas: Well we'll call it an inquis. No, no. Can't cut. Nevermind. Can't call it that. Uh, it's, uh. I'm just kidding.

0:23:09 Rachel: No, no, not an Inquisition. Not an Inquistion. Yeah

0:23:13 Thomas: No, that's really cool. They did actual church stuff that you should be doing, you know, as a church. I like it.

0:23:18 Rachel: I mean there's this tradition of liberal theology right that is very social justice focused and that was really this the sect that was doing all this work in Guatemala and it was really incredible because people didn't want to talk it was still people were very very scared but they were able to collect all this incredible documentation that again like laid the groundwork and so many ways for the trials to come.

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0:23:48 Rachel: So that's sort of like part of the story. Another part is a Nobel Prize winner named Rigoberta Menchú filed a complaint in Spain, basically charging a bunch of military officials, amongst them Ríos Montt, with genocide and a number of other crimes that are so -called international crimes. This was important because international crimes under Spanish law at the time were able to be brought in Spanish courts under this concept called universal jurisdiction, which basically meant these crimes are so horrific that they offend all of mankind. And so therefore, we can process these claims here, even though there was no nexus.

0:24:32 Thomas: That's so funny. I was going to ask like, what's the connection to Spain exactly? But then that makes so much sense and that's a a good concept and that should exist we should have that I like that it's such an offense to humanity that our venue is anywhere humanity is I think that's a really good concept

0:24:47 Rachel: And in some ways, it's been expanded to Germany, Belgium. Other places also have this concept of universal jurisdiction. But Spain is sort of, if you will, like the OGs of universal jurisdiction because they processed the first case against Augusto Pinochet.

0:24:57 Thomas: A moment ago you know I feel like I naively asked the question about like what kind of led to the end of this conflict thinking there was you know some like more positive story to that and then it's like well people are tired of dying essentially and it reminded me of like russia and ukraine where there's all this talk about like What's going to end this What's gonna end this and And still, I think naively, at least for me, still want there to be some story of more justice about it. Well, Russia is going to get the hell out of there. And, you know, people are going to realize they obviously were the aggressor. And but it's like, well, the actual practicality is I don't know. Like, I don'T know what's going to happen. I DON'T know if it's just like Russia had enough might to be able to say this part is ours now. And we've killed enough people that it's, like, all right, you know, like it's such a depressing reality. And it sounds like that's maybe a little bit more like what happened was just this not Not exactly justice at the time of the end of the conflict, but just exhaustion and reality setting in of like, how do we just stop the killing?

0:25:54 Rachel: Yeah, and I think there's another part that's important to understand about this, which is, you know, this, you can't really understand the Guatemalan armed conflict without understanding that this was during the Cold War, right? Right. And so so much of what was happening and why the U .S. supported it was because essentially they had been sold a false bill of goods that like Guatemala was becoming a communist country with all this expropriation of land. And so in essence, right, you can sort of see maybe the U。S. Losing interest as the Cold War became less of a, you know, a Cold War. Right. And in essence, I think that's the way conflicts, sadly, often end is because the things that we're motivating and drawing in the political interests that motivate them dry up.

0:26:38 Rachel: I don't know what to make of that exactly as it relates to Ukraine and Russia, but I think there's a lesson there in sort of like how deeply tied the broader global legal order can be tied to even the most local of conflicts.

0:26:53 Thomas: And it sounds like what may have happened is just corporate interests in the form of a fruit company know that the way to make stuff happen or somebody knows the way to make something happen is to speak to the U .S. government in certain terms, you know, communism and Red Scare terms and kind of translate things into those terms to get them to support whoever when in reality, like who knows what the actual connection is. There's many levels of like this shouldn't have happened, but just how deeply shallow it is that it's massive genocide and conflict. And it's at its core about a fruit company, possibly. Like it's just like so depressing.

0:27:26 Rachel: It is. Yeah. Yeah.

0:27:27 Thomas: Capitalism was a bad idea. Maybe we should go back and revisit some of those things. But anyway, it's so fascinating. I could talk about this forever, especially because I really am truly so ignorant on this stuff. So I appreciate you giving me a little bit of a crash course here. Where should we pick it up?

0:27:31 Rachel: I guess just fast forward many years and, you know, basically 10 years later, Rios Montt gets tried. He's indicted and then convicted of genocide in his own country. It is sadly not the end of the story. He was basically, he had his conviction overturned on pretty much very shaky procedural grounds that are sort of hard to explain without knowing Guatemalan law. He was supposed to be retried it wasn't like that he was acquitted but in essence he basically became very ill and died before his retrial but even still it still marks a really historic moment given that it was the first time that a head of state was convicted of genocide despite the later overturning of that decision

0:28:26 Thomas: So you're saying there was this time between the end of the war and said when you were in Guatemala, he was like still in a position of authority, right? And was even gearing up for like a run for, I think you said a run from the presidency or something.

0:28:38 Rachel: Yep that's right yep he was a candidate for president yeah

0:28:41 Thomas: Yeah. Talk about that. Cause that feels like a very relevant perhaps process, that process of it feels like maybe justice is not done initially. And at least in terms of this person, right. I I mean, it sounds like he was maybe almost got away with it. And then what, decades later, there's consequences or in terms of from the end of the war to when there's this conviction. Can you talk about that period a little bit?

0:29:03 Rachel: Yeah. So, well, one to really underscore. So the period in which he was accused and convicted of committing genocide was in 1982. And so he wasn't convicted right until basically 2013. And so can you imagine what that looks like really three decades of waiting for justice and pushing for accountability?

0:29:27 Thomas: And it's not like he's hiding. It's not. It's like they lost him. It's Not like he Was hiding. He was in. We found him in another country with a fake mustache on. It's Like he was just there. So mind blowing. But it feels so relevant to me right now.

0:29:39 Rachel: It is. It's, you know, and I think there's just, I don't know, It's really interesting because, again, this plays out in a very fascinating way, given the modern context of Guatemala. So it just is such an incredible story of the continuity of history. So I mentioned to you that the first democratically elected president of Guatemala, his son is now the president of Guatamala. One of his opponents was the daughter of Rios Montt. So it just comes full circle in this way that is unprecedented. And I think this is a good way to maybe understand a little bit how it was possible that Rios Montt, essentially three decades later after committing these atrocities, was able to be held to account because Guatemala is this place of continuous, even till today, push and pull between more clandestine former military leaders now intertwined with narco traffickers and more democracy -seeking sort of human rights advocates on the other side. And so there's always this push -pull back and forth, even till today, as we see, you know, with Arevalo winning, but winning against Rios Montt's daughter, who basically said that genocide never happened and attended every day of his trial. So that continuity

0:30:02 Thomas: My gosh. No way. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Wow,

0:30:57 Rachel: Is pretty stark. Another sort of through line is the U .S. role in all of this, which maybe this is an uplifting note, is the U .S. actually played a very positive role in supporting these trials. There was support both for these human rights trials and for a number of anti -corruption measures that happened in Guatemala that really set the stage for these trials to happen. And in essence, basically like there was so much corruption in Guatemala, that again, they called the UN back in to set up an Anti -Corruption Commission there. And they started investigating, charging and convicting current presidents of Guatemala for corruption.

0:31:42 Rachel: And very interestingly, there was pretty direct a link between those who were stealing money from Guatemala at the time and those who were committing genocide and atrocities in the countryside in the 80s and 90s. So much so that one of the presidents, Perez Molina, was investigated by this UN body for essentially stealing money from the Guatemalan people in his role as president. And during the genocide trial of Rios Montt, his name comes up as someone who was active in the Ischial region committing genocide.

0:32:18 Thomas: What a dramatic turn of events. So was there consequences for that guy?

0:32:22 Rachel: Well, he didn't want to step down. He didn't wanna step down, but the Guatemalans people week after week protested in the main square of Guatemala and ultimately in part because of their persistence and everyday presence in the mean square of guatemala and the u .s government saying you can't keep power under these circumstances he resigned he's now in

0:32:45 Thomas: Boy, I sure wish we had some sort of real benevolent superpower out there to do that to us. Can someone just make us do that? That'd be nice.

0:32:53 Rachel: Prison yeah and it's a story I think of the power of people too of course of course it is a story without a doubt of the u .s supporting these and we can talk about why they did if you're interested in that too but I don't want to lose sight of the fact that these were mass mobilizations of a scale that per capita would be unimaginable here I mean we see some protests of course in the u s but just the sustained nature of these I mean this wasn't just sort of like a one -day protest this was day after day week after week of people literally camping out in the main square demanding justice justice. And that I think is like an example for all of us of the power that people can hold.

0:33:36 Thomas: Yeah I was gonna say a moment ago I can't believe that story that you said with the daughter of the guy and the son of the other one and it's like I think didn't that happen in Italy was it gosh I want to say it was like a Mussolini descendant or somebody maybe

0:33:48 Rachel: Is that right? I don't even know. Yes.

0:33:48 Thomas: I'm mixing it up gosh I'm trying to remember but it was it's crazy and now it's even more wild with today's internet where you see like daughter of Mussolino on Twitter being like actually he was a great guy you know and you're just like this is crazy how do we live in this world where this is happening

0:34:02 Rachel: Yes, there's sort of like family lineages that carry forward atrocities, right? In a very troubling way.

0:34:05 Thomas: Yeah these names that you thought were just like oh that's history you know that's the history part and it's like oh no they're still there that's

0:34:15 Rachel: Yeah, history, you can see there's a through line in all of this. And in Guatemala, I think because it's so small, you Can really see it very cutely. Yeah.

0:34:20 Thomas: Crazy yeah Yeah. When I think again, it confessing just not my area, like I'm just terrible, this kind of stuff, like my brain doesn't remember these kinds of things. So it's always tricky for me. But I feel like you always want to be making the end of the story. You know, I think it's very human impulse to be like beginning, middle end, you know, like this, there was this, there was this there was this and then the end they were like this person sucks and that's the end of the story and it's like no it's always ongoing and somehow there's always people still supporting the bad people you know and it's like it's such it's so hard to resist that that wanting to think of it in the terms of like and that was resolved and it just isn't that way it seems like in real life yeah

0:34:57 Rachel: And I'm so glad you framed it that way. Because I think a lot of researchers, I think tend to sort of pick case studies and sort of hop in and out of different examples. I've been studying Guatemala since 2003. And I just, I feel like it's given me an insight into what you point out, which is how the push and pull of justice evolves over time. And there's almost never kind of a neat bow at the end of the story.

0:35:24 Thomas: And it was Mussolini by the way it's Alessandra Mussolino granddaughter of Benito Mussoloni and yeah she She she left. She was a political leader and left politics in December 2020 for a reality television career.

0:35:28 Rachel: Is that right? Yes. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah.

0:35:39 Thomas: And it's just like, what what is this world? What is this World? Anyway, so I am interested in that middle phase because it feels like that's something we could be entering again. It's different. And, you know, I know these things are not identical by any means, but that feeling of we missed out on justice. Justice didn't happen maybe the first time around for some folks. But as you say, so convicted of genocide for what sounds like 30 years later, I think, based on the years that you said. And that growing movement to hold people to account, that is really inspiring because it just, it feels lately like the tendency is all the other way, that it's all to forget. The more it gets in the rear view, the less salient it is and the less people have this desire and this energy to hold People to Account. But it's really inspiring, at least on paper anyway, to hear that it kind of went the other way in this case.

0:36:25 Rachel: And the push continues. These trials are still ongoing. I mean, there are constant efforts to thwart them. So there's still many, many trials, including there's this crime under international law of enforced disappearance, which is basically when people are kidnapped and never heard from again, and no one knows what happened to them. And basically what happened was was they unearthed at a military base called Crayon Paz, essentially the largest mass grave of people that were presumed to be disappeared forever. And that case has been making its way through the Guatemalan courts. It's sadly, I think, at a place where it could be derailed. But these are cases, this is sort of not just one case, but many cases that continue to be processed through the Guatemala courts. Courts and so again sort of the push and pull for criminal accountability continues yeah

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0:38:56 Thomas: I can't believe how much time I've let go by. We got to get to where you come in, what you were trying to do. The project tells a little bit about that.

0:39:03 Rachel: So I was lucky enough to get a fulbright scholarship to go and do research in guatemala in 2016 and that was when a lot of these really prominent cases riosman had already been convicted and was being retried but at the time there was another really prominent case which is called the Sepur Zarco case and it It was another sort of historic case because it was the first time that a national court prosecuted sexual violence as a crime against humanity. In essence, there was these Mayan women that were kept as sexual slaves at a military base, and they brought this incredible case and were able to get a conviction in that case as well. It was a really incredible time to be there. I was able to attend a lot of the hearings that were happening in 2016 and really wanted to examine the documents and learn more about the cases that were successful.

0:40:02 Rachel: Again, to sort of answer this question of like, how was it possible that these cases were able to make it through? I wanted to like actually get my hands on like the hard documents of the cases, but it was almost Almost impossible because these cases, many of them in the early days of Guatemalan criminal accountability for these atrocities, oftentimes the trials happened in far flung courts, like in very rural areas, because that's where the worst atrocities happened. And there's no sort of like centralized archive of court documents. No pacer, no pacer. There's no pacer in Guatemala. Actually, they are making some efforts to try to digitize some court decisions. But, you know, these decisions were happening. And, you know, like, I'll give you an example of sort of one of the cases that I was able to recover this case called Rio Negro. There was an initial case that had happened, but no one had really the court file. And so in essence, there was this massacre called the Rio Negro massacre. That's one of the most well -known

0:40:37 Thomas: Pacer. Oh

0:41:12 Rachel: Massacres tragically in Guatemala and essentially there was two parts to the proceedings that happened related to this massacre but the first one happened in 1998 and I was able to go to the tribunal that was basically in the middle of nowhere you know I was there with my then partner now husband and we basically rented a car and drove Drove for five hours on a dirt road. Got a flat tire even.

0:41:39 Rachel: I remember this acutely. We're driving because there was literally no one around. So we're driving with this flat tire like, are we ever going to get there? And we managed to arrive at this courthouse in this little teeny town. There was no copiers. There was basically the files were kept in this dark, damp room. But I was able to find the original case file of this decision. And really, it was just sort of like this effort of doing that again and again and again to document these cases that allowed me to create this digital archive that's now being housed at Princeton, where I was a fellow last year. When I took pictures of these case files, literally with my iPad, taking picture by picture of the court files until I had, you know, what amounted to hundreds and hundreds and then ultimately thousands of pages of court documents documenting essentially the evolution of these cases in Guatemala. And that basically is what has now become what I understand to be basically the largest digital file of atrocity cases in Guatemala. And that's what we launched this year at Princeton.

0:42:51 Thomas: It just is so mind blowing that there would be these, what seemed like major trials, but then nobody knows about it. Like how does that even happen?

0:42:59 Rachel: Yeah, I don't think it's the case that nobody knows. They're well -known cases. Some of them aren't. Some Some of them are less well known. I was able to uncover ones that are not part of sort of what is known by the broader public. There are certainly those cases that are, were not as widely known, but Rio Negro, this case in particular is very much a case that people know about. I think the reason that people don't have access to the files is really because they happened so far away from the, you know, sort of like the Capitol, which is where all of the trials, these high profile trials are happening in Guatemala City with the creation of what are called high risk tribunals.

0:43:38 Rachel: So where all the high risk cases are now being adjudicated.

0:43:38 Thomas: What does high risk mean? I'm sorry.

0:43:43 Rachel: Yeah, so this is another part of the story. So I mentioned to you that there was this UN-backed essentially anti-corruption commission. The shorthand name of it is CICIG. And they basically pushed forward all of these incredible reforms to the judiciary, including the creation of what are called high risk tribunals. These are tribunales were basically created to adjudicate the most sensitive cases in Guatemala. So the corruption cases, the cases involving human rights violations during the armed conflict, and importantly, for US support, the narco trafficking cases that have been adjudicated in Guatemala, and basically, these high risk tribunals, they're located in essentially the Justice Tower of Guatemala, there's a lot of security and resources that have been put into these trials. And that's why to answer sort of my original research question, like how is this all possible? Part of it has been made possible because of these high-risk tribunals and the protection that comes with processing cases in that form, because otherwise there is no way that someone as powerful or who was as powerful as the Rios Montt could ever be tried, or now Benedicto Lucas Garcia, who was his predecessor, who's on trial as well.

0:44:59 Thomas: So it's not as though people didn't know about them. Yeah, I guess I was reacting to, I'd seen you uncovered some stuff that was at least semi -forgotten to history.

0:45:06 Rachel: There are certainly those cases that have been forgotten. You know, oftentimes people focus on the Rios Montt trial, not really understanding that there are a host of cases with successful convictions in Guatemala. I was able to document 34 of them. And this archive that I've created has the original documents of 24 of the cases. So basically what's included now in the the Princeton archive is the final sentencing decision in those cases where I could get the original record for the cases. But it was painstakingly difficult. I can't even describe and the effort is ongoing to get those documents, the original case file that I'm certain would be lost without it. In fact, some of them have been lost, which is why it's not a complete set. There were ones that were destroyed by hurricanes and other things that when I went to the courthouse, there was no record of them, but I was able to document 24 of those cases and get the hard copies of them.

0:46:07 Thomas: That's so cool. That sounds like such a fascinating process. Tell some more of the story. So you had the flat tire story. I mean, is anything else notable about your efforts to track these down?

0:46:16 Rachel: Well, this is maybe just a funny story. So, you know, part of the story is like Guatemala is particularly because there's regions that are essentially almost governed by narco traffickers, like the narco traficantes. So it's not so safe to be roaming around

0:46:28 Thomas: Yeah ,I was going to ask earlier, but yeah.

0:46:32 Rachel: In the countryside. But I had my partner, Forrest, with me at the time. And so I probably would have never done this by myself. But he was basically my chauffeur as I went to these different trials. And he would wait outside of the courtroom while I spent hours taking individual photos with my iPad of these trials. And one time we were at this little courthouse in the middle of nowhere, and I was doing this and you know he would just wait outside because I had to you know I was like trying to convince him to trust me and they were like who is who's that guy like is that your body guard and they're like he looks like Fidel Castro so yeah so that's I always tease him that he looks like Fidela Castro so Yeah, just like these little anecdotes and another one sort of trying to to basically we were driving because I wanted to interview one of the indigenous groups that had been involved in pushing for one of The Cases. And essentially, we couldn't reach them because there was like so many cows in the way that basically we had to turn back around.

0:47:21 Thomas: Like, yes. That's funny. Yeah.

0:47:43 Rachel: So it definitely was an interesting year in so many ways. But the archive in some ways feels momentous for me on a personal level, because I was worried for some time that also I didn't have a means through which I could share these documents. And it was really only through being a fellow at Princeton and all the incredible resources available there that I was able to create this digital archive that now is open to the public online. And the summaries of the cases are available in English and Spanish. The goal is really for them to be available both for researchers here, but also to the Guatemalan people so they can have access to these primary documents as well.

0:48:22 Thomas: What would you say folks can learn from this? What is the goal now? First off, is the search done? Are you still working on more of these documents? And secondly, what are you hoping will be the good results of this?

0:48:33 Rachel: There's so many, for me, so many takeaways ways and like digging through the documents they're so interesting on so many levels one takeaway is how these atrocity trials evolved over time the early ones the ones that happened in like the late 90s they were often brought against low -level officials so they were characterized as being crimes committed like regular crimes like murder or kidnapping by like like rogue actors, like one of the documents describes them as like rogue farmers or as like basically these civil patrols that had a relationship to the Guatemalan military, but weren't operating at all under official orders, right? Which we now of course know was not the case. And so both sort of like who was charged and how they characterize the crimes evolved dramatically over the course of the trials to the point where most interestingly, even for the same crimes there are two different cases one trying them basically as being like rogue actors that were just like acting on their own to the point of charging the highest level both military and sort of executive officials in the country for genocide and crimes against humanity and that evolution is sort of in a way breathtaking right to see that paper trail of that is just

0:49:59 Rachel: Unreal as a researcher.

0:50:00 Thomas: How many years are we talking in terms of like that evolution?

0:50:03 Rachel: So the first case was a case that was filed in 1991. So even before the peace accords in Guatemala, it was a piece involving Mirna Mack, who was an anthropologist who was doing research involving the displaced indigenous people in the countryside, and basically was documenting what was happening, sort of what was basically an effort to purge whole areas of Guatemala and removed the indigenous population there either to massacre them or to create a circumstance of internal refugees. And this anthropologist Mirna Mack was documenting this and they identified her and the documents show this, the court documents and the military documents as what I described before, an internal enemy.

0:50:48 Rachel: She got this classification of internal enemy, and was murdered for that classification.

0:50:52 Thomas: Oh, my God. Wow. Hmm.

0:50:54 Rachel: So this is the first case I was able to find in which there was criminal accountability for her murder. It was charged as basically what translates into U.S. crimes as aggravated assault and assassination, but again, charging low-level people, you know, just like the people who pulled the trigger as like rogue actors, right? Many years later, they were able to charge the high level officials, the people that were responsible, essentially the chief and the sub chief of the presidential security unit with her death. Years later, it just is so telling of the story of how these crimes evolved over time. Maybe there's some hope in that, that even when things feel hopeless, or there's not a lot of movement, that it is possible if you stay dedicated and continue to push for even essentially the head of state to be held accountable for the worst crimes that they've done.

0:51:59 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, fingers crossed. I agree. That's a nice, that's a nice sentiment. That is so fascinating. It sounds like at first during the when the conflict still going getting justice, it sounds like it does need to be on a smaller scale makes sense. It's like, well, someone was, you know, murdered and there's some accountability for like the almost everyday nature of the crime where it's like yeah, there was a murder versus over time it becoming no, it's about systemic human rights abuses.

0:52:27 Thomas: And it's interesting to see that that makes sense that it would have to take that trajectory. Wow, Well, there's so much more I could ask you about. I hope I'll get a chance to. Maybe we can do this again because there's so many components to the story that we haven't even gotten to. But yeah, thank you so much for your time. And I want to make sure, is there anywhere you want to point the listeners in particular to learn more, follow your work, anything at all?

0:52:47 Rachel: Well, I guess just to say, first of all, of course, I would point them to the digital archive at Princeton. It's called the Guatemala Atrocity Trial Archive. You know, it's a database. It's searchable. You can, there's summaries in English and Spanish. And so I hope that people, if they're interested, we'll take a look at the documents themselves. And I do have research coming out of this. And so I wrote a piece called Post-Conflict Pluralism that really was looking at how the truth commissions were the blueprint for the trials that came later on. And more recently, a piece that is about to be published called The Paradox of Punishing for a Democratic Future really tries to link up how kind of the legacy of these trials is informing democratic behavior today in Guatemala and how it links up to what we talked about in terms of the current president, Bernard Arevalo and Zuri Rios, and how what happened decades ago still has such resonance and import in that country today.

0:53:48 Thomas: I will want to catch that one. Well, thank you so much, Professor Rachel Lopez. Again, thank you for your time. Really fascinating work.

0:53:55 Rachel: Thank you so much for the invitation. I really appreciate the chance to share this now decades-long passion and research that I have for the country and this incredible story of justice.