Remarks by Ambassador Samantha Power at the Open Society Foundation Reception Honoring Former Guatemalan Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz and Judge Yassmín Barrios

Well, everyone here I’m sure could share a story or two about the role that Aryeh [Neier] played in our respective work, and in the way he encouraged and amplified everything we set out to do. I’m sure the women on the panel feel the same way I do.

It’s a great honor for me to be here. I’m really grateful to you, Aryeh, for suggesting it. I wouldn’t miss it.

I want to go back, if I can, and describe for you a scene. On April 2nd, 2013, a Maya Ixil woman approached the witness stand in Guatemala’s Supreme Court.

Her head was wrapped in a multicolored rebozo to cover her face. Speaking through a translator, she described the day the soldiers arrived in her village in the Quiche department. She and her children had tried to flee into the mountains along with others from the village, but they were caught. The soldiers beat and stabbed her, and she said later, “I still have the scars." She was forced to watch helplessly as a soldier held her son’s back to the ground and pummeled him. “My son was crying, with blood in his mouth, nose and eyes,” she told the silent courtroom. “My son died.”

At night the soldiers raped her. As she put it, “They threw me around like I was a ball.” She was asked how many soldiers had raped her, and she replied, “There were many, I don’t know how many. I was alone among them.” After the rape, she was forced to stay to cook for the soldiers for several days. “I am unable to have children because of what they did to me,” she testified.

This woman was one of nearly a hundred witnesses and survivors, many of them indigenous people from villages in Quiche, who testified in the trial of the former de facto head of Guatemala, Efraín Ríos Montt, on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. As Aryeh and Jim described, Ríos Montt’s rule – 17 months from 1982 to 1983 – was the most brutal part of Guatemala’s brutal civil war. Just a single year, 1982, accounted for nearly half of the 36-year civil war’s killings and disappearances. The trial focused on just a narrow sliver of abuses committed during Ríos Montt’s time in power – 15 massacres that resulted in the deaths of 1,771 Maya Ixil people.

I begin with the words of this Maya woman because it would have been impossible to imagine her speaking them before Guatemala’s Supreme Court had it not been for the efforts of the two recipients of this award – Claudia Paz y Paz and Yassmín Barrios. So too would it have been impossible to imagine that a former Guatemalan general and head of state could be forced to stand trial in his own country for human rights abuses, much less genocide and crimes against humanity.

Yet the courage and persistence of the two women we are honoring not only makes Ríos Montt’s prosecution possible – their efforts played a critically important role in his eventual conviction.

It was not that Paz y Paz and Barrios were allies. Indeed, their positions required their independence from one another – Paz y Paz, as you all know, was appointed Guatemala’s attorney general in December 2010, while Barrios was a justice on the country’s Special High-Risk Tribunal. One’s job was to bring the cases; the other’s, to judge them. But they were defenders of the same principles – the rule of law, human dignity, and accountability – and both were committed to helping expose one of the darkest periods in their country’s history.

And both of their histories were interwoven with the country’s long-term struggle to come to terms with the atrocities committed in the civil war – a struggle that began long before the Ríos Montt trial. Claudia Paz y Paz, as some of you know, began her work in the human rights office of the Catholic Archdiocese of Guatemala, as others have said, under Bishop Juan Gerardi.

Bishop Gerardi had been forced to flee his diocese – the diocese of Quiche, the same area where that woman’s village had been attacked – he was forced to flee in 1980. The Bishop had the audacity to tell a local Army commander that he should stop his soldiers’ abuses against civilians. The Bishop refused to become an informant – and for that, his life was at risk. It was a dangerous time to be associated with the church in Quiche – more priests, nuns and religious workers were killed in that diocese during the civil war than in any diocese in the entire Western hemisphere. Not long after, in November 1982, a little group called Americas Watch published its first of many searing reports on Guatemala. This one was called “No Neutrals Allowed.”

Gerardi returned to Guatemala after several years in exile, and was put in charge of the Archdiocese’s new human rights office. He swiftly set about assembling a team to document the then mostly-untold atrocities of the war. Claudia Paz y Paz was the only woman on that team. The cases they documented – seeking out the victims in the communities where they lived, and allowing them to speak in their native Maya languages – laid the foundation for a landmark report published in 1998, called “Guatemala: Never Again.” This 1,400-page, four-volume report named more than 52,000 civilian victims of the civil war and documented 410 massacres in detail. In many instances, it even identified the military units responsible – and where possible their commanders and soldiers.

The report found that 80 percent of the killings of civilians were attributable to the military, and that the majority had been committed on Ríos Montt’s watch. At the time the report came out, no Guatemalan military officer had ever been convicted for a human rights abuse.

Guatemala had never seen anything like this report. It achieved on paper what the trial of Ríos Montt later did through television broadcast – it humanized the suffering. Victims and communities were named and their horrific suffering reported in detail, giving granularity to what previously had been an indistinguishable and – to many Guatemalans – unknown mass of suffering. Gerardi’s aim, he had once told a member of the human rights team, was to create a document that would “enter readers through their pores.” The report did that. It also broke the country’s silence about the abuses by the country’s most powerful and feared institution – the military. And Claudia Paz y Paz had both contributed to, and learned from, documenting some of the cases that went into that critical report.

As many of you know, two days after “Never Again” was released, Bishop Gerardi was bludgeoned to death, with a concrete slab, in the garage of his parish house. His face was so disfigured as to be unrecognizable. And the investigation of his killing was in large part carried out by his own human rights team. A panel of three judges was assigned to hear the case. On the eve of the trial’s first day – March 21st, 2001 – one of the judges was at home, cooking dinner for her mother, when two grenades exploded in her back yard. The attack likely was intended to cause her to flee, thereby delaying the trial, and perhaps instilling fear in the other judges. Instead, the targeted judge showed up at the courthouse the next morning. And, months later, she and the other two judges on the panel convicted the members of the military for the Bishop’s murder. The judge was Yassmín Barrios, as you all know. And the conviction marked the first time senior Guatemalan military officers had been punished for human rights abuse.

Returning to this history is important – and not only because of the role that Bishop Gerardi’s life and death played in both Paz y Paz and Barrios’s formation and trajectories. His murder was intended to send a clear message to all of those pressing for justice for the crimes in Guatemala’s civil war: Abandon your efforts or face the consequences. It was the message delivered with devastating frequency and brutality, in killing after killing of Guatemalan human rights defenders and civil society leaders – such is the murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack, who was documenting abuses in the same region and was stabbed 27 times by a military official in her office in Guatemala City. The history is also important because it situates the efforts and achievements of today’s awardees in a decades-long struggle for justice – one waged by a community of advocates who had little reason to believe that they could achieve what they set out to do, but who tried anyway.

These women are bound together by more than history. Let me speak to three of the qualities that they share, which I believe are crucial both to who they are, and why they have been effective in building the rule of law in a country historically defined by near-absolute impunity.

The first quality, of course, is their courage; courage in braving risks and willingness to make profound personal sacrifices. I’ll just give a few examples. After the ruling was issued in the Ríos Montt trial, his legal team persuaded Guatemala’s bar association to suspend Judge Barrios from practicing law for a year, on the grounds that she had “humiliated” and “disrespected” one of the defense lawyers. Paz y Paz, who was eligible for another term as Attorney General, and had arguably achieved more than anyone in the recent history of that office to advance accountability in Guatemala, was not appointed to another term by then-President Perez Molina. Both women were publicly smeared by their opponents; they insulted everything from their intelligence to their impartiality to their hairstyles. Both received threats. In the midst of her tenure, Paz y Paz’s son became seriously ill, and she started making regular trips back and forth with him to the United States so that he could receive treatment. Still, she stayed on.

But their courage and their sacrifice alone is not what led to their impact. Also crucial was the rigor of the work that they did. The case that Paz y Paz’s prosecutor’s office built against Ríos Montt was made up of more than just heart-rending testimonies. It also included compelling statistical evidence showing that, in the affected regions during Ríos Montt’s rule, the Guatemalan army killed indigenous people at a rate eight times higher than that of the non-indigenous population – a key piece of evidence in making the case for genocide. To show that the vast majority of those killed were not combatants, the prosecutor’s office questioned a forensic anthropologist, who testified that of the 420 bodies exhumed from the region, more than a third were kids, and 83 percent of them had fatal injuries consistent with executions. On the part of Judge Barrios, her professionalism was evidenced in the extremely thorough 718-page ruling that she and the other two judges issued in the case. It also shone in the way she and other judges responded to the seemingly endless dilatory measures and obstructionist tactics thrown their way by the Ríos Montt team, aimed at nullifying the trial on a technicality, or at the very least slowing the trial down to a crawl.

Of course, for all the significance of the Ríos Montt case, this rigor is something that both women have demonstrated across the range of cases that they work – including those where the spotlight was not nearly as bright. Under Claudia Paz y Paz, Guatemala’s impunity rate reportedly fell from 95 percent to 70 percent – still a long way to go – including the prosecution of scores of members of violent organized crime groups like the Zetas. She also dramatically strengthened the institutional relationship between the Attorney General’s Office and the UN-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). Judge Barrios, for her part, has served in a series of high-risk cases – in addition to the Gerardi murder and the Ríos Montt case – including the Myrna Mack murder case, and the trial of members of the military for the 1981 Dos Erres massacre.

The third characteristic Paz y Paz and Barrios share – alongside their willingness to make great sacrifices, and the superlative quality and rigor of their work – is their profound humility. It is palpable. For those of us who have not met either of them before, I know you will hear it in the way that they speak. They will often use the “nosotros y nosotras,” the “we” voice, instead of the “I.” They see themselves not as women who did something exceptional, but as public servants and citizens who did their jobs. To the extent that they are proud, they are proud of their teams, and of victims like the Ixil woman who was brave enough to tell her story to the Court. When Barrios was asked in a recent interview if she felt as though handing down the first genocide conviction by a national court was making history, she replied, “I was simply making justice.”

Let me conclude.

As many of you know, ten days after the ruling in the historic Ríos Montt case was issued, it was rolled back on procedural grounds by Guatemala’s Constitutional Court. In response, some have argued that this somehow nullifies its impact; or, worse, perversely sets accountability even further back than if Ríos Montt had never stood trial in the first place.

Here is what Judge Barrios said when asked if she felt defeated when she heard the decision had been rolled back. She said, “No, not at all. The trial was a breakthrough for Guatemala... Amid all the bombardment and the media campaign that took place, we managed to demonstrate that Guatemala indeed does have an independent legal system – that we have committed, responsible, principled judges.”

Asked a similar question, Paz y Paz said: “I believe that the trial was very important for my country. For the first time, the victims had the opportunity to say in front of the perpetrator what happened in the villages. They could tell it in their own language. And by telling this, they recovered part of the dignity that was stolen when they suffered so many human rights violations.”

True, a court rolled back the decision that these women worked so hard to secure. But the Ríos Montt trial shifted the balance in Guatemala in a way that will be very, very difficult to reverse. An entire nation watched as the former leader – an individual and an institution long believed beyond the reach of the law – was made to account for his atrocities. An entire nation watched as indigenous people once made to feel ashamed for speaking their languages were given the opportunity to speak in the Supreme Court, while Ríos Montt and others were forced to listen. “Those who died,” said one survivor, “our family members who we lost, were not animals. They were human beings who had a right to life.” And with this work, a generation of prosecutors and judges saw what it looked like for all of the rights and principles that they had learned about to actually be practiced. None of that can be overturned by the decision of a court.

The introduction to Bishop Gerardi’s “Never Again” report read: “Every history is a journey through much suffering, but also of great yearning to live. Many people whose dignity some had tried to take away came forward to tell their history and said, “Believe me.”

The Maya Ixil woman whose words I read at the beginning of my remarks ended her testimony before the Supreme Court as follows: “I’m not here to lie. I’ve committed no offense…I say all of this so that it doesn’t happen again.”

In no small part because of the efforts of Claudia Paz y Paz and Yassmín Barrios– people in Guatemala heard that woman. They heard her voice. They believe her. A piece of the dignity that others tried to take away from her, and countless others, has been restored. Guatemalans better understand their past, and know deep down, in their pores, what cannot be allowed to happen again. Thank you.

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