Genocide Trial In Guatemala Summary

Improved Essays
Guatemala suffered a thirty-six year period of armed conflict which came to an end signed peach accords in 1996. During that time period, 200,000 people were killed, 45,000 disappeared by force, a million people were displaced, along with 626 documented massacres, and 400 villages destroyed due to government operations according to the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH). Of those that were victimized, four out of five were indigenous Maya. After reviewing the statistics, the CEH declared that the Guatemalan state was guilty of committing “acts of genocide” against the Mayan group distributed across four regions of the country. It was thirty years after the crimes were committed until a judgment was made against someone concerning …show more content…
Through her research, Burt comes to three main conclusions. First, by connecting the Genocide trial to the overall transitional justice processes in Guatemala, it is evident that the current setbacks Guatemala is experiencing are not unexpected and should be considered as backlash to the initial transitional justice success. Second, the genocide trial demonstrates a “victim-centered” approach to prosecuting human rights cases and shows how victims of sexual violence were incorporated by prosecutors to help prove that there was a genocide in Guatemala. Lastly, the Guatemalan Genocide case is historically and politically significant for the survivors and Guatemala as a whole despite the fact that the verdict was …show more content…
As a trial observer in the Guatemala genocide case, Burt witnessed how the prosecutor was respectful to victims, wanted to avoid victimization, and empower them through the legal process. It was noted that the identity of the victims would be reserved, the victims were ensured they would not have to repeatedly testify, and the victims were offered protection if needed. These circumstances led women to testify in court about their sufferings, which broke the silence regarding such crimes. Burt recorded one women in her testimony saying, “Today my life is going to change, because at last I am talking about what has happened to me; I am unburdening

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Annotated Bibliography Oglesby, Elizabeth. " Guatemalan Genocide." Modern Genocide: Understanding Causes and Consequences, ABC-CLIO, 2016, moderngenocide.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1764507. Accessed 11 Sept. 2016. Elizabeth Oglesby suggests that the Guatemalan Civil War led directly to the Guatemalan genocide.…

    • 752 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout history people have always attempted to eliminate each other for various reasons. In April 1994 Rwanda was in a brutal between the ethnic groups the Hutus and Tutsis. The Hutus led a genocide against another ethnic group the Tutsi in a gruesome civil war. Jean Hatzfeld’s book Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak. Hatzfeld interviews with a group of Hutu mass murderers that were all friends and came from the same region.…

    • 988 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Cambodian Genocide happened between 1975 and 1979, this directly relates to the Holocaust because of how cruel and inhumane this particular genocide was. What was so awful about this genocide is that the government that was in place, the Khmer Rouge, forced millions of people out of their homes and into the wilderness. People were also forced to work in terrible conditions in labor camps. This relates to the forced labor and heartless treatment of the Jews that the Nazis perpetrated.…

    • 493 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Rigoberta Menchú became one of the most controversial Nobel Peace Prize winners when her testimony was put under a microscope and discrepancies were found by multiple people working in academia. This is given in the edited manuscript of her verbal testimony in the book I, Rigoberta Menchú, as it presents itself as a truth of her life, although that’s debatable. Blame could be put on her editor, Elizabeth Burgos, herself, or the Guatemalan people who knew her personally that gave their own testimonies on Menchú’s life from their perspectives. Her reasoning for putting it out was in question, along with what she narrated as her version of the truth. The complexity of this issue resolves itself by redefining the problem.…

    • 955 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Rwandan genocide was a one hundred day slaughter of the Tutsi population. There were a number of factors leading up to this event and why nobody stopped the killings include worldly indifference, lack of information, fear of intervention, and the absence of resources and knowledge for help. In April 6th, 1994, an airplane holding President Habyarimana was shot down killing him and the rest of it’s passengers. Habyarimana was of the Hutu population and the Hutus believed that a member of the Tutsi population had to do with this killing.…

    • 1209 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    INTRODUCTION Cambodia, which has fewer people but larger land used to be peaceful and nonaligned. But the genocide occurred by surprise, “The dead are crying out for justice. Their voices must be heard. It is the responsibility of the survivors to speak out for those who are unable to speak, in order that the genocide and holocaust will never happen again in this world” (Pran 10). The terror shrouded the country and silently influences people’s life.…

    • 1275 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The world’s reaction to the Rwandan genocide in 1994 is widely considered as one of the biggest failures of humanity and the UN, hundreds of thousands of innocent lives were lost over the course of the 100 day mass killing. The response has been described as” too little, too late” as an earlier intervention could have saved many more lives, which brings the question why did the world wait? Why did we fail all of these innocent people? The answer lies within the structure of our world’s political system and the different ideals and definitions of key concepts by different states. While no one state can be blamed completely for the lack of aid, the Rwandan genocide brought forward the need for a more comprehensive action plan for intervention…

    • 1831 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Reconciliation In Rwanda

    • 1968 Words
    • 8 Pages

    According to Mathilde Uwanyirigira, another Tutsi survivor of the Rwandan genocide in an interview from the Genocide Archive of Rwanda, “Forgiving those people is not an easy matter and it does not even seem very worth it… I would like those people get punished, they deserve to be severely punished. It is difficult to see a killer saying his mea culpa that he killed five or ten people and he gets freed.” There is a general consensus among genocide survivors in Rwanda about how the government is riddled with people who have killed during the genocide; not all those involved have been investigated and punished accordingly, and those who are brought to court get off the hook easily by confessing and apologizing without doing much…

    • 1968 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Back in 1994, Rwanda faced its darker period of time in its history. A horrifying and historical genocide took place over three months on Rwandan soil. The horror and brutality of that act has been compared to what happened in Nazi Germany over World War II. About one million Rwandan people got literally exterminated by their countrymen because of their ethnic group given by Belgian colonizers over occupation (1916-1962). Nevertheless, that tragedy could have been lower and prevented if some countries would have intervened and did not think to their own interests first.…

    • 324 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Cambodian Genocide was an event where a mass amount of Cambodians were killed for their ethnic differences. The website states, “The Cambodian Genocide took place in Cambodia, a country in Southeast Asia. It began shortly after Cambodia’s seizure of power from the government of Lon Nol in 1975 and lasted until the Khmer Rouge was overthrown by the Vietnamese in 1978. North Vietnamese forces seized South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, and by the Khmer Rouge and its leader, Pol Pot, in 1975.” Around 156,000 Cambodians died in the civil war, more than half being civilians.…

    • 529 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    The government of Guatemala failed to address this problem until the 2013 arrest of Ríos Montt, a long-awaited victory for those grieving for the country’s bloody crimes. However, the decades long practicing of massacring civilians and lacking…

    • 2175 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Genocide In Nicaragua

    • 587 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In 1909 then Nicaraguan President Adolfo Diaz took power and called for the “Platt Amendment.” The amendment ensured the United States involvement in Cuban affairs, both foreign and domestic, and gave the U.S. legal standing in claims to certain economic and military territories on the island. Diaz was a business man and he had an agenda that conflicted with that of the U.S. As a result of this conflict, the U.S. drove Diaz into exile. At this point, the major problems of Nicaragua were that they were a country in ruins with a weak export economy and $1.6 billion in debt. Nicaragua experienced the lowest per capita income in Central America.…

    • 587 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Cambodian Genocide

    • 917 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The term ‘genocide’ has inflicted a feeling of evil and fear for many for thousands of years. It’s no wonder why the word gives off such a negative vibe, as the countless instances of genocide all over the world have always been unspeakable and unimaginable. The Cambodian Genocide that took place during the late twentieth century was no exception, it was filled with torture, death and tragedy that all clearly follow the eight stages of genocide. Classification, the first stage of genocide, is when divisions such as ‘us and them’ are made. During the Cambodian Genocide, targets included many variations of people including doctors, artists, teachers, journalists, monks, etc; basically anyone wealthy and/or educated.…

    • 917 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Guatemala's Refugees

    • 770 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The Guatemalan Military Government had a iron grip on the nation for decades, and they were willing to use any means to keep it. The Marxist Guerrilla groups, later formed as the U.R.N.G., wanted to return the prosperous Communist led era of the 1940’s, before the 1954 coup replaced the Democratic Communist Jacobo Árbenz with the first military dictator Castillo Armas. The United States Government orchestrated the 1954, and funded the Guatemalan Government for decades even during the most questionable moments to quell the fear of neighboring Communist states during their divisive Cold War with Soviet Russia. Caught in the middle of this conflict were he indigenous Mayan tribes of the highlands, who were targeted by the army in the later stages of the war due to their neighboring with the Guerrillas and population overlaps with the Guerrillas. This targeting lead to a Genocide in the early 1980’s slaughtering over 150,000 innocent Mayans dead, and leaving the minority of survivors homeless and in great poverty.…

    • 770 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Genocide In Cambodia

    • 882 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Throughout history, many genocides have taken place all over the world. One of those being the Cambodian Genocide in 1975 to 1979. According to Yale´s Genocide Studies Program, this event ¨was one of the worst human tragedies of the last century.¨ In 1975, approximately one fourth of Cambodia's population was killed. The rise of the communist power, Khmer Rouge, caused the country to fall into horrible devastation.…

    • 882 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays

Related Topics