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General Benedicto Lucas García, an emblematic military leader from the Guatemalan armed conflict, who since April is standing trial accused of carrying out genocide against the Maya Ixil people, has been indicted three times in the past decade for war crimes.
Lucas, head of the General Staff under the dictatorship of his brother, Romeo (1978-1982), was accused in 2016 of forced disappearance in the CREOMPAZ case, related to over 550 victims tied by hands and feet in clandestine graves, but in February the Constitutional Court upheld his exoneration alongside six fellow officers, leaving the crime unpunished.
Lucas was convicted in 2018 in the disappearance of 14-year-old Marco Antonio Molina Theissen and crimes against humanity and rape of Emma, Marco’s sister, receiving 58 years in prison, which were commuted to house arrest in 2023. In November 2019, he was accused of genocide with two co-defendants: César Octavio Noguera Argueta, who died in 2020, and Manuel Callejas y Callejas, who was declared unfit to stand trial in January due to Parkinson’s Disease.
On April 5, after over four years of delays, the trial began. Lucas, excused for medical reasons, took an oath through a livestream from the Military Hospital, where he has listened to more than 85 hearings. His lawyers advised him not to immediately testify because he would need more time to read the accusation. But he did venture his first comments: ”My wife is an Indigenous-German cruce [literally, “crossbreed”, but referring to mixed ancestry] and I am a protector of the campesino [Maya] race.”
The prosecution and defense presented their opening arguments. The Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR), an adhesive plaintiff, emphasized those of the prosecution: that the military campaign that Benedicto Lucas directed in the Ixil region was aimed mainly at extermination of Maya Ixil people.
The prosecution highlighted “two phases of military intervention —prevention and intervention— which were consented to, programmed, directed, ordered, and supervised by the now accused” and identified “[at least] 800 victims, 23 massacres, and at least 42 persons disappeared during the time the accused was in office,” stated an AJR attorney.
In addition, the investigation for the case turned up evidence of approximately 60 massacres, of which only 34 could be established in the expert, testimonial, and documentary evidence presented in court.
Raúl Nájera, investigator at the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala (ODHAG), another of the plaintiff organizations, told El Faro English that the prosecution will also seek to prove Lucas’ “direct participation,” adding: “He [Lucas] supervised what was happening in the theater of operations specifically in the region.”
“Shoot! Shoot!”
A state witness, Robert Nickelsberg, a photographer for the Times Magazine in the early 1980s, had accompanied Lucas García in January 1982 in one of the helicopters in which he was mobilized to the region, and authorized fire on civilians. Nickelsberg testified through a videoconference showing the pictures he took at that moment.
There was poor translation at the hearing. The interpreter, for example, mistranslated that he had begun his career in photojournalism in 1997, when he had said 1977. And when a prosecutor asked about a picture of Lucas García in front of a helicopter, and the machine guns attached to it, Nickelsberg replied that, at that spot, the weapons were not fired at the ground, but rather in the air. The interpreter translated that the guns were not discharged there, but in other areas.
Nickelsberg finally testified that he observed how his fellow helicopter passengers began to shoot at the non-combatant civilian population with Lucas García as co-pilot.
In 2017, Nickelsberg published his testimony in the New York Times: “The General invited Chris [from the Washington Post] and me to make a helicopter flight over the rural mountainous area of Quiché, where they would find the enemy with a simple and lethal logic: anyone who ran from our white Bell helicopter was either guerrilla or a sympathizer.“
“Accompanied by two snipers at the door and an intelligence officer, General Lucas Garcia sat in the co-pilot's place and directed the flight over the rural areas [...] when we saw a group of women running to get away from the approaching helicopter,” he continued. “He ordered the pilot to fly in circles over the fields at our feet and to lean as low as possible so that the snipers at the gate could see better. He then shouted the order to open fire: ‘Shoot! Shoot!’”
Nickelsberg added that Lucas Garcia explained to them that, since the campesinos ran away from the helicopter, they must have been at fault.
On July 4, Lucas García gave his declaration: “San Juan Cotzal, Quiché is where there is the biggest guerrilla problem. I don't know why the guerrillas settled there, and it was where they caused the most damage.”
When asked if he knew that soldiers were killing women and children in the Ixil region, he said no: that, if that was true, he would have ordered them to be shot.
Typification of genocide
Lucas García asserted that his subordinates gave him regular information on military operations. The prosecution asked: If he affirms that he knew what was happening, what explanation could he give for the dead? Who killed them?
He denied having received that specific information because, if he had, they would have initiated an investigation “because it is very easy to lie” in those initial reports. “If I had committed a mistake of that nature, a crime, I would declare it because I value my life and I believe in God and I have done good to many people,” he told the court.
Apart from these 34 massacres committed between July 16, 1978 and Mar. 23, 1982, there were 30 cases of sexual violence.
“Although there are only 30 incidents of sexual violence [presented in court], it does not mean that only these incidents occurred in that period. These are the ones we were able to document thanks to the courage of the women who dared, after a long process, to participate in the case,” says Nájera.
90 events of forced disappearance and the complete destruction of 32 villages were also documented, in addition to forced displacement in which around 190 deaths were identified due to bombing, starvation, thirst, cold, and curable diseases.
Diego Leiva, archival investigator at the Human Rights Office of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, adds that more than 500 complaints were systematized for this case.
Nájera explains that this is the evidence they were able to present in accordance with the Law of Genocide in Guatemala, which typifies “deaths of members of the group, the subjection of members of the group to conditions that caused the destruction of members of the group, and the subjection of members of the group to serious injuries that affected the physical and mental integrity of the members of the group.”
Two witnesses for the defense are scheduled to testify on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. The verdict is expected to come in the first weeks of November, shortly after the parties present their conclusions.
El Faro English requested an interview with Lucas and his defense team through one of his two public defenders, both in-person and by message. They received the request but did not respond.
Why now?
Criminal accusations of genocide in Guatemala were first filed by AJR in 2001, recalls Nájera, “against those responsible for events between 1978 and 1985.” This period involved three military regimes: Romeo Lucas García, Efraín Ríos Montt, and Humberto Mejía Víctores.
The filing included acts committed in the Ixil, Ixcán, and Huehuetenango regions. “The base of the investigation was so broad that it was covering too much ground,” he adds.
That is why plaintiffs decided to split the case in two and ask for legal counsel from the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH) and ODHAG. The former took the case against General Ríos Montt and the latter took the case against Lucas García.
“For reasons unknown to me, CALDH advanced much faster with the investigation in the case of Ríos Montt,” adds Nájera.
Leiva, on the other hand, proposes: “The good relationship between the Public Prosecutor's Office and the plaintiffs helped the two genocide trials to be elaborated in a methodological manner. But, why was the trial of Ríos Montt tried first? I think it had to do with a transitional justice strategy.”
“When Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz took over, she drew a lot of attention from international cooperation, so we had support,” Leiva continues. “The pressure with Ríos Montt was because perhaps he was a more emblematic figure and the most atrocious massacres are the ones committed by Ríos Montt.”
It was not until 2008 that the ODHAG managed to prosecute the Lucas García case. The preliminary phase of investigation lasted until 2018. Nájera asserts that, even though they wanted to have brought the trial of Ríos Montt and the trial of Lucas García in parallel, it was impossible for the Public Prosecutor's Office due to workload.
Orlando López, a former human rights prosecutor of the Public Prosecutor's Office, explains that these genocide cases have taken so long because of their complexity and the years that have passed: “We are talking about massacres. In the end it is not one event, one homicide, one murder, or one rape, but several. The cases are regularly assigned to a prosecutor who does not work only on that case.”
The 2013 genocide trial against Ríos Montt drew intense local and international media coverage that generated much public debate about the use of the word “genocide”, as well as about the fact that he was being tried in the country where the crimes were committed — unprecedented for genocide cases around the world.
López and Leiva agree that the political and social context from 2009 to 2011 influenced the speeding-up of proceedings in the Ríos Montt case. “We started to see progress in these cases with Attorney General José Amílcar Velásquez Zárate [2008-2010] and Claudia Paz y Paz [2010-2014] to push forward the cases looking for those responsible,” concludes López. “What would have happened without these two attorneys general? It is likely that the cases would have gone nowhere to this day.”
“Justice of memory”
On May 10, 2013, Efraín Ríos Montt was found guilty of genocide committed against the Ixil people between 1982 and 1983 and sentenced to 80 years in prison. Eleven days later, the Constitutional Court (CC) annulled the sentence.
The CC's ruling stated that an injunction had not been complied with regarding a recusal presented by Ríos Montt's defense; everything related to the hearing of the oral and public debate —which is when the trial takes place and Ríos Montt and the other accused were convicted— was suspended, explains constitutional lawyer Édgar Ortiz.
The same CC ordered a retrial in 2015, but Ríos Montt was diagnosed with senile dementia. He died in 2018 in the course of his second trial.
According to Nájera, investigators in the Lucas García case waited until the Ríos Montt case was over to avoid political hurdles. Thelma Aldana, attorney general from 2014 to 2018, he says, did not give the go-ahead to continue: “She told us that we had to strengthen the investigation related to crimes against humanity, not genocide.”
While the genocide case against Benedicto Lucas was ready to be presented during Aldana's term, it was not until 2019 that Lucas García, Noguera Argueta, “G3” chief of military operations, and intelligence director Callejas y Callejas were arrested. The men were already in custody for the Molina Theissen and CREOMPAZ cases. They waited another three years to get their trial scheduled in 2024.
Leiva, the archival investigator at the Public Prosecutor’s Office who worked on both the Lucas García and Ríos Montt genocide case files, hopes that courtroom testimony has provided a degree of redress.
“With the [Ríos Montt] genocide sentence, I believe we attained historical justice and justice of memory, rather than legal justice,” he reflects. “People went to court to identify the man who was considered the most genocidal in this country, point their finger, and say, ‘He gave the order, he committed the murders.’”
This article first appeared in the October 28 edition of the El Faro English newsletter. Subscribe here.
