Sepur Zarco trials begins in Guatemala

The Sepur Zarco trial is currently underway in Guatemala. Nina Lakhani has background on the trial for The Guardian.

First the army came for the men. Fifteen Mayan peasant leaders in the tiny hamlet of Sepur Zarco in eastern Guatemala were seized and killed or forcibly disappeared.

A few weeks later, they came back for the women. Soldiers raped them in front of their children, burned down their houses and crops, stole their meagre belongings and made them move into shacks outside the nearby military base.

Every two or three days, each woman was made to report for 12-hour “shifts” at the base where they were forced to cook, clean and submit to systematic rape, often by several soldiers.

It was 1982, one of the bloodiest years of the country’s civil war as counter-insurgency operations against ethnic Mayans intensified under the rule of the military dictator and evangelical Christian, Efraín Ríos Montt.

More than 30 years later, two former military officers will finally face charges of sexual and domestic slavery and forced disappearance in a landmark trial which opens on Monday.

The trial marks the first in the world that sexual slavery perpetrated during an armed conflict has been prosecuted in the country where the crimes took place.

The Washington Office on Latin America's Jo-Marie Burt is following the trial on Twitter (@jomaburt).When it comes to holding former military officials for human rights violations, Argentina and Chile tend to lead the way in Latin America. Guatemala still has a ways to go but its efforts across the Colom, Perez Molina, and Morales administrations and Paz y Paz and Aldana terms are impressive. Transitional justice has not been confined to a single administration or single attorney general. I'm hopeful that this is a positive sign of institutional change.  

I don't think that you can separate Guatemala's progress against corruption with its progress in the pursuit of transitional justice. They reinforce each other. Neither has gone smoothly but they are both helping to make Guatemala a little better than it was yesterday.

The entire trial is expected to last forty days.