Rios Montt and Arpaio: Where Impunity Reigns
Rios Montt and Arpaio: Where Impunity Reigns
Friday, 14 June 2013 10:24 By Roberto Cintli Rodriguez, Truthout | Op-Ed
In Guatemala, former dictator Rios Montt was first found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity, and then the Supreme Court overturned the verdict. His 80-year sentence was also vacated. A few days later, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in Arizona, was slapped down by US District Court Judge Murray Snow. The federal judge ordered him to halt his racial profiling practices, particularly his immigration sweeps that target people of "apparent Mexican ancestry."
Sometimes there are news items that go together - even when they are apparently unrelated. With Rios Montt, we have one of the biggest human rights violators in the history of humanity, who used the cover of religion to unleash the military against his own people. Arpaio's face connotes something similar; the unbridled and unapologetic flaunting of raw (state) power and the wanton use of police powers to racially profile and destroy families, with the full backing of an electorate that continues to cheer him on.
Guatemala has been an apartheid state for generations. The so-called 36-year civil war was one of the most brutal and bloody chapters in modern history, particularly on this continent. It was not so much a war as a scorched-earth campaign of extermination, targeting primarily indigenous peoples (Maya) and anyone that dared to think, to organize or to speak up. More than 200,000 were killed; some 60,000 were disappeared; countless were tortured; and many hundreds of thousands were internally displaced - while many hundreds of thousands fled the country.
That the ex-dictator would be convicted for genocide and crimes against humanity gives us a hint at the level of barbarism committed by a series of US-supported military regimes, actually beginning in 1954, when the military, with CIA assistance, ousted democratically-elected Jacobo Arbenz. And yet, the roots of this apartheid state may be traced not to the 1950s, but to the Spanish invasion itself, 500 years earlier, an invasion that set in motion a colonial regime of dehumanization on both this continent and Africa. Its effects are still clearly visible.
More:
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16970-rios-montt-and-arpaio-where-impunity-reigns
