OneWorld.net (U.S.)

SAN FRANCISCO, Jul 13 (OneWorld) - A judge in Spain has issued arrest warrants for eight former Guatemalan officials, including a former president, Efrain Rios Montt for crimes committed during what is known by many as the Guatemalan Genocide.

Spanish National Court Judge Santiago Pedraz also issued an order to freeze the defendants' assets.

"These people who were arrested are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people," said Matt Eisenbrandt of the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability, which is representing the plaintiffs. "It is important that they be brought to justice."

According to a United Nations sponsored truth commission, over 200,000 people were killed or disappeared between 1960 and 1996 in Guatemala. The Guatemalan Army and paramilitaries that worked with the army were said to be responsible for 626 separate massacres of civilians--including indigenous communities, labor leaders, students, religious people, and other non-armed citizens--under the pretext that they supported anti-government, Communist guerrilla groups.

The worst state-sponsored violence occurred when General Rios Montt was president from 1982 to1983. During those years, human rights groups charge, the army and its counter-insurgency force, began a systematic campaign of repression against mostly poor Mayan Indians.

Working methodically across the Mayan region, activists say, the army and its paramilitary teams attacked and destroyed an estimated 440 Mayan villages.

In 1999 Nobel laureate Rigoberta Menchu Tum and other victims filed a criminal complaint in the Spanish National Court against senior Guatemalan government officials charging them with terrorism, genocide, and systematic torture. Their case is modeled on the prosecution of former Chilean dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, whose case was brought before the same court.

As part of investigating the case, Judge Pedraz traveled to Guatemala to depose key witnesses, but Rios Montt and others protested in the Guatemalan Court system and blocked the Spanish judge from continuing his investigation.

In the order issuing the arrest warrants, Judge Pedraz stated his decision is based on the "obstructionist attitude of the defendants and because there is sufficient evidence that the crimes of genocide, terrorism, torture, murder, and illegal detention were committed by the defendants."

Officials at the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story, but it seems doubtful Rios Montt will be extradited.

Speaking to reporters in Guatemala City Wednesday, Rios Montt painted a different version of history. The former president said he is being accused unfairly by a judge who fails "to remember that there was a war in Guatemala, a guerrilla war in which terrorists destroyed bridges, schools, electric plants, and other buildings of the people," the Associated Press reported.

"There were some officials who committed abuses," Rios Montt admitted during the press conference, but "the army was not a squad of assassins. It was men who acted and reacted in defense of the interests of the nation and the people."

At the time, Guatemala was considered a major front in the Cold War. Washington, under President Ronald Reagan, backed Rios Montt as a bulwark against Communism, providing weapons and military training. Six out of nine of the generals in his cabinet were trained at the U.S. military's School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia.

Since then, the U.S. government has repudiated those actions. Speaking at the unveiling of the United Nations truth commission report in 1999, then-President Bill Clinton told reporters, "it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong."

"The United States must not repeat that mistake," he said. "We must, and we will, instead continue to support the peace and reconciliation process in Guatemala."

The other seven defendants named on the arrest warrants included Oscar Humberto Mejia Victores--also a former dictator in Guatemala--and six senior military officials: Angel Anibal Guevara Rodriguez, Donaldo Alvarez Ruiz, German Chupina Barahona, Pedro Garcia Arredondo, Benedicto Lucas Garcia, and Romeo Lucas Garcia.