Guatemala

Taking the fish’s water away

Comisiones Obreras, Fundación Madrid Paz y Solidaridad

12/01/2012

Opinión

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The military operations “Victoria 82” and “Sofía” demonstrate the aims and strategies of Guatemala’s Army during the darkest period of the country’s recent history. We offer a brief analysis of these military plans from different points of view— historical, anthropological, psycho-social—out of our belief in Guatemala’s infinite capacity to transform its current situation.

Impunity is a sea in which the criminals of armed conflict swim. During the armed conflict, the Army was inspired by the well-known Maoist dictum that “the guerrilla, supported by the people, exists within their community as the fish does in water.” It put into practice a strategy of “taking the fish’s water away,” in other words, destroying the communities that might support the guerrillas, so that they could not use popular support to sustain themselves. In this way, the racist government planned, executed and justified one of the cruelest and least punished genocides in Latin America.

Today, those responsible for these hateful crimes swim in a sea of impunity and occupy important positions of power in the democracy. This situation not only makes a mockery of the victims, survivors and the people as a whole, but also means that the state is committing a serious breach of the rules of international law, as well as jeopardizing the credibility of its institutions at both national and international level. As the United Nations has repeated: the prosecution and conviction of those responsible for crimes, along with the compensation of victims, are obligations on all States and must not be substituted in any way or delayed. Only the determination and tireless efforts of organizations for human rights and victim advocacy have managed, with a few but important sentences, to crack the wall of impunity that stands between the victims and their struggle for justice. Within the framework of open trials for genocide in the country, the Justice and Reconciliation Association (AJR: Asociación Justicia y Reconciliación) demanded that the Guatemalan Army hand over the campaign plans dubbed “Victoria 82” (“Victory 82”) and “Firmeza 83” (“Firmness 83”) and the plans for an operation labeled “Sofía.” The Army gave the Courts of Justice the first two plans in a more complete form than they had given to the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH: Comisión de Esclarecimiento Histórico), but said that Operation Plan Sofía (POS – Plan Operaciones “Sofía”) had been lost. At the end of 2009, the analyst Kate Doyle received one of the twenty original copies of POS.

This plan of operations shows that in 1982, during Ríos Montt’s government, there was a strategy, formulated down to the last detail, to destroy every sign of life in the Ixil area and to leave it in ashes, including the municipalities of Santa María Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal and San Gaspar Chajul. These military documents give: the names of those responsible for the crimes committed as part of this extermination mission; the movements and reports of the patrols operating there; the faxes sent in an unbroken chain of command; the “successes” achieved in obliterating indigenous communities and razing their property to the ground. We humbly dedicate this short publication to all the victims, survivors and their families. To borrow the words of Eduardo Galeano, we wish to say that, “it was worth it, that so many men and women did not die in vain. That there are lives that are wonderfully long, because they continue in others, in those who come after. Lives that remind us that we are not condemned to choose the same.” We thank all of them for continuing to help us “not to lose our way, not to accept the unacceptable, never to give in, and never to get down from the beautiful horse of dignity.”

Comisiones Obreras Trade Union.

Guatemala, Tierra de Árboles, 2011

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