Guatemalan Rights Leader: 99% of Crimes Unpunished

MEXICO CITY – Some 99 percent of cases tried in Guatemalan courts after the country’s 36-year conflict ended went unpunished, Nery Rodenas, executive director of the Human Rights Office of the Guatemalan archbishop, or ODHAG, said while on a visit to Mexico.

“In Guatemala the accords might have been reached with very good intentions, but they didn’t bring the transformation that was hoped for,” Rodenas said last July 21 at a teaching conference in the Mexican capital, according to a communiqué released Saturday.

The note from the Human Rights Commission of the Federal District, or CDHDF, said that, according to Rodenas, “no case” related to the abuses against disappeared student and campesino leaders “was ever punished” by the Central American country’s courts.

The activist deplored that, although the Guatemalan Congress ratified the peace accords reached in the country after 36 years of civil war, it has not complied with them.

The Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification once said there were 250,000 victims in that conflict, considered indigenous genocide.