GUATEMALA CITY — Admitting the government was to blame for human rights abuses including the massacre of 200 people during Guatemala's civil war, President Alfonso Portillo has promised to compensate victims' families.
The government also vowed to do all it can to prosecute those responsible, Portillo said Wednesday. It was not immediately known how much compensation the families of victims would receive.
The cases the government admitted responsibility for included the massacre of 200 people in the village of Plan de Sanchez in 1982, the massacre of 120 people in Dos Erres the same year, the politically motivated slaying of anthropologist Myrna Mack in 1990, the killing of 12 university students in 1989 and the disappearance of journalist Irma Flaker in 1980.
"It is very courageous what the president did today," said Chilean Claudio Grossman, representative of the Organization of American States' InterAmerican Human Rights Commission.
The commission visited Guatemala to sign an agreement with the government declaring the state's responsibility as an institution. The commission said it will monitor the government's actions to ensure it fulfills its promises.
Guatemala's 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996, claimed more than 200,000 victims, human rights officials say.
A U.N. commission in 1999 accused the state of committing genocide during the war and recommended the state recognize these cases.
Frank LaRue, director of the Human Rights Legal Action Center said he was surprised by Portillo's action and called it "an important step in human rights for human rights in Guatemala." His organization represents the massacre victims from both villages.
Portillo, who took power in January, had a close campaign relationship with former dictator Efrain Rios Montt — the current president of the legislature whose 1982-83 reign oversaw some of the most destructive anti-insurgency campaigns of the civil war.
Mack, who worked with a group that had accused the army of human rights violations, was stabbed 27 times by two attackers in broad daylight outside her office.
Police insisted the attack on Sept. 11, 1990, was a common robbery. But after an international outcry — fed in part by Mack's academic ties and in part by her sister's advocacy — the government had presidential guard Noel de Jesus Beteta Alvarez extradited from California to stand trial.
Yet even after Beteta was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison, the government maintained that Mack's slaying was a robbery gone awry.