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They
lounged outside police detective headquarters in Guatemala City,
wearing mismatched suits and leaning on their machine guns as if
they were umbrellas. They were experts in torture, disappearances,
and executions. During the Guatemalan military government’s
undeclared civil war against its own people, which reached its height
in the early 1980s, these men, who composed the death squads, terrorized
Guatemala.
Death squads were literally called escuadrones de la muerte but
often were known as judiciales, a misnomer, as there was nothing
judicial about them.
On Christmas Day, 1980, a judicial followed me out of a movie theater
and told me I could accompany him either to McDonald's for a Big
Mac or to police headquarters. Since the police station was a torture
center, where passers-by heard screams coming from the basement,
I opted for a brief date with a death squad agent. On another occasion,
four heavily armed men in a Bronco Jeep followed two colleagues
and me down a deserted street one night. When a friend, a well-connected
politician, looked into the matter, he reported that, yes, the men
had been after us, but it was just a scare tactic. ("If they
had wanted to kill you, you'd be dead," he reassured me.)
Tens of thousands of people died in Guatemala, either in rural massacres
conducted by uniformed army troops or, in the cities, in the form
of “disappearances”
at the hands of death squads.
Some were members of the military who donned civilian clothing to
carry out the kidnappings. Others, however, were former soldiers,
police, bodyguards, or unemployed civilians deputized to do the
army's dirty work for pay. Judiciales were rural peasants recruited
into so-called civil patrols whom the army told to denounce their
neighbors in return for a gun, some land, some money, or immunity
from becoming army targets themselves. For most of them, it was
nothing political, just money; if you told a judicial you would
pay him twice as much to wash cars, he would wash cars instead.
Death squads kidnap and kill because someone in the government or
the military commands, sanctions, or condones their behavior. Governments,
armed forces, and political organizations have a practical reason
to utilize death squads—deniability—but it is rarely plausible.
Death squad executions violate the laws of armed conflict as well
as many human rights covenants. A related crime, forced disappearances,
is now considered a crime
against humanity under specific circumstances.
The laws of armed conflict as codified in the Four Geneva Conventions
of 1949 explicitly prohibit executions without a fair trial. Common
Article 3, which applies in internal conflict, forbids “violence
to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation,
cruel treatment and torture” of persons who have not taken
part in hostilities. It also forbids “the passing of sentences
and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced
by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees
which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”
Additional Protocol II of 1977, covering internal armed conflict,
states that the court must offer “the essential guarantees
of independence and impartiality.” The court must inform the
accused without delay of the particulars of the offense and provide
necessary rights and defense; no one shall be accused except for
individual penal responsibility; no one shall be held guilty for
a criminal offense which did not exist in law at the time it was
committed; those charged with offenses are presumed innocent until
proven guilty; anyone charged has the right to be tried in his presence
and not to be compelled to testify against himself. Although the
protocol is less widely accepted than the 1949 Conventions, Guatemala
became a party in 1987.
The
Organization of American States in 1994 declared the systematic
practice of forced disappearances a crime against humanity, a standard
adopted by the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Human rights covenants, which apply in situations of riots or disturbances
but may legally be restricted and temporarily suspended during armed
conflict, prohibit the death sentence without a judgment by a competent
court.
The situation in Guatemala was clearly an internal armed conflict,
and humanitarian law applied. Therefore, the government, army, death
squads, and anyone else using force for the government were bound
by its terms.
The death squads left very few survivors, and most of these either
escaped captivity or were released on the eve of Guatemala’s
first civilian election in three decades, when the government was
eager to bend to foreign demands in exchange for the promise of
economic assistance.
Although the army denied any connection to the death squads, no
one believed it. Even in Guatemala, where the army was infamous
for leaving no witnesses or written accounts of its actions (“We’re
not Argentina, we leave no survivors,” boasted former Army
Public Relations Director, Col. Edgar D’Jalma Dominguez, in
1984), it was occasionally indiscreet. When the wife of a trade
unionist sought news of her disappeared husband, she was directed
to an obscure corner office in the National Palace, where a judicial
with a black hood over his face recited the details of the kidnapping
and torture.
(See due process.)
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