Why not prosecute former guerrillas?

Francisco Mauricio Martinez has an article up at Prensa Libre asking why haven't any former guerrillas been arrested and/or prosecuted for war crimes in Guatemala. He says that this issue always comes up at campaign time and that this year's election is no different. I don't think that he was saying that they should prosecute former guerrillas. He was just stating the obvious that nobody seems particularly concerned with going after them.

The guerrillas that comprised the URNG (FAR, ORPA, EGP and PGT) committed many crimes during thirty plus years of war. That's true. The Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH) found that the guerrillas were responsible for about 3% of all violations committed. Three percent is a small share of the human rights violations committed, but that includes thousands of incidents of extrajudicial killings, sixteen - thirty two massacres, and kidnapping. They killed several foreign diplomats (civilians) including the US Ambassador in 1968. And the person believed responsible for killing the US ambassador is FAR Commander Pablo Monsanto. Monsanto was the presidential candidate for the ANN in 2007 and has been an adviser to President Colom's administration.

Obviously, one main reason why former guerrillas are not being arrested and brought before the courts is that they committed so few human rights violations compared to the state's other security forces. However, it's not just that they committed fewer acts of violence. It's also the intensity of the violence. Here's a bit of what I wrote for Moving From Violence to Sustainable Peace in 2009.

The Guatemalan soldiers were encouraged to be as violent as possible. Soldiers were promoted and praised based upon “the ability to kill, to take initiative during massacres, and to demonstrate cruelty in the course of operations” (REMHI 1999: 129). The army educated its recruits to believe that the guerrillas were the cause of the country’s problems, that the army was the “victim,” and that “the act of serving in the army was in itself a direct asset for the good of the country” (REMHI 1999: 128). This mindset was used to justify horrendous atrocities.

They engaged in wide-scale murder, torture, rape, forced disappearances, collective punishment, and forced recruitment of soldiers (including minors) in order to control society and to break the social fabric of communities (REMHI 1999). The military turned communities and families against each other by forcing them to take part in torture and killings. At one point, roughly one million citizens participated in Civilian Self-Defense Patrols (PACS) which the military relied upon to search for guerrilla units and to keep the rest of the civilian population under control. No one was safe from the violence as “soldiers or patrollers frequently refer to the killing of children as a way of eliminating the possibility of rebuilding the community and of circumventing the victims’ efforts to attain justice” (REMHI 1999: 31). According to REMHI (1999: 134), the state and its agents were responsible for over 400 massacres which involved “collective murders associated with community destruction.”

The guerrillas, on the other hand, were more selective and humane in their use of violence. They sometimes killed, with or without substantial evidence, those that they suspected of cooperating with the military. They killed several within their own ranks for disobeying orders and for putting
the lives of the other rebels in danger. The guerrillas put communities in danger even after it was well-known how the military would respond and were not prepared or willing to defend those that they had put in the army’s crosshairs (Montes 2007). The rebels were also found responsible for having committed at least 16 massacres (REMHI 1999: 140). Unlike the state,  however,

Techniques such as the use of informers, congregating the people in one place, separating them into groups, and orgies were not reported in massacres attributed to guerrilla forces. There are, moreover, no cases of obligatory participation, rapes, repeated massacres, or razed hamlets.(REMHI 1999: 14)

None of these killings, by the government’s security forces or the guerrillas, were traditional in the sense of having been committed in the midst of battle. Human rights violations attributed to the guerrillas must be condemned, but it would be a mistake to put them on par with those for which the state was responsible.

If you had to choose one group to prosecute for crimes committed during the conflict, it's clearly the armed forces. What the military did in order to protect an unjust system was far worse than anything the guerrillas did in their attempt to revolutionize it. However, that doesn't mean that the guerrillas should not be held to account for the crimes that they committed in the midst of the conflict.

I tend to agree with what Cesar Montes suggests at the end of the article. They should prosecute army officers and guerrillas who committed human rights violations. I'm not convinced that's going to happen anytime soon and I do worry about Guatemala's capacity to investigate, prosecute, and punish thousands of individuals fairly.

Perhaps, instead, they should pass a law that permanently bans these individuals from public office. The evidence required to ban someone would be lower than what is needed to find them guilty of war crimes. And obviously the punishment would not involve jail time.

For the most part the ban would be symbolic (except maybe for the country's next president), but that symbolism would be pretty powerful.