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A woman's tireless efforts to find her sister's killers have resulted in a landmark human rights trial against high-ranking military officers.
By DAVID ADAMS, Times Latin America Correspondent
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 3, 2002
As she cradled the head of her murdered sister on a Guatemala City sidewalk 12 years ago, Helen Mack vowed she would seek justice.
"I just ask her . . . to give me support and strength in order to pursue this case," Helen Mack, 50, said in a recent interview.
It has been a long battle. But the wait is almost over.
In a landmark human rights trial due to end today, three high-ranking Guatemalan military officers are being prosecuted for ordering the murder of Mack's sister, Myrna, one of the country's leading anthropologists.
The trial is seen as a test case for Guatemala's weak justice system, which has never before prosecuted senior military officers.
Whatever the verdict, analysts say the fact that the case is being heard at all is a victory. During the country's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996, the Guatemalan military enjoyed virtual impunity. With an estimated 200,000 dead, it was by far Central America's longest and bloodiest conflict.
The murder came while Myrna Mack was investigating the desperate situation of displaced indigenous peasants caught up in the war. In 1989, she published a study that blamed their plight on a ruthless military counterinsurgency strategy designed to flush out left-wing guerrillas in the remote Mayan highlands. The military's action created a virtual free-fire zone in which all civilians were considered guerrilla collaborators.
As a result of her work, she allegedly came under military surveillance. She alerted friends and family that she was being watched.
Soon after, she was stabbed more than 20 times in the street as she left her office.
Her sister quickly became convinced that Myrna was murdered on the orders of high-ranking officers in charge of the counterinsurgency policy.
Helen Mack's quest for justice converted a once-conservative businesswoman into one of Latin America's most tireless human rights campaigners. Experts say that without her persistence the case would never have gotten this far.
"It took the extraordinary determination and love of a sister, the almost obsessive willingness to risk everything to get us to this point," said Rob Varenik, who is attending the trial on behalf of the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.
"What this experience has given Guatemala is a true hero. You know, she is, pound for pound, the greatest threat to impunity that Guatemala has seen."
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Helen Mack exploited her sister's reputation as an internationally respected anthropologist to pressure the government for answers in a way that almost no one had dared previously.
"She hasn't just walked the road to justice. She has paved it," said Varenik.
For years, her courageous efforts were beset by judicial delays and irregularities, as well as numerous death threats. The case went through the hands of more than a dozen judges. Witnesses were murdered or forced to flee the country. Official documents disappeared.
Even so, in 1993, a member of the Presidential High Command (known by its Spanish initials, EMP), Sgt. Noel Beteta, was convicted and sentenced to 25 years for committing the murder.
But Helen Mack continued to pressure authorities to uncover those who ordered the crime, convinced Beteta could not have acted without his superior's knowledge.
In order to do that, she had to penetrate one of Latin America's most hermetic military institutions, focusing unwelcome attention on the intelligence-gathering apparatus behind the nation's counterinsurgency strategy.
The three men now on trial -- Gen. Edgar Godoy, Col. Juan Valencia and Col. Juan Oliva -- all held key military positions in the EMP, which officially functioned as the president's security team. But prosecutors say the EMP secretly operated as a paramilitary death squad during the war, kidnapping, torturing and executing suspected rebel sympathizers.
Analysts say the verdict could go either way. The case against the three is hampered by the absence of any direct evidence linking the men to the crime.
The military has shown few cracks as the institution closed ranks around the accused men.
In a taped 1994 confession, Beteta accused the three of ordering him to kill Myrna Mack. However, during the trial he retracted his statement, accusing Helen Mack's legal team of bribing him with cocaine to make false statements.
Instead, prosecutors used expert testimony and official documents to show a chain of command emanating from the EMP, which dictated Beteta's actions. That wasn't easy, especially because the Guatemalan military denied almost all access to its records. Helen Mack's legal team was instead assisted by declassified U.S. intelligence documents obtained through Freedom of Information requests.
One released document from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, dated February 1990, described in detail the structure and operations of Guatemalan military intelligence. Another U.S. State Department document written by the U.S. ambassador in May 1991, described a pattern of "selective violence" by the military, citing the Myrna Mack case as an example.
While human rights activists are hopeful about the verdict, which could be reached today, they say much more remains to be done in Guatemala to end the military's impunity.
Key reforms agreed to in the 1996 peace accords have yet to be implemented, including abolishing the EMP. The government has promised to put the president's security in the hands of civilians. But the unit remains intact.