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IMAGE in CHART 13 (Chapel in memory of victims of the 1982 Plan de Sanchez massacre in Baja Verapaz):In July, 2004, the Inter-American Court made public its condemnation of  the Guatemalan government for the July 18, 1982 massacre of 188 Achi-Maya in the village of Plan de Sanchez in the mountains above Rabinal, Baja Verapaz.  In this judgment, and for the first time in its history, the Court ruled that a genocide had taken place.   The Inter-American Court attributed the 1982 massacre and the genocide to Guatemalan army troops.   This is the first ruling by the Inter-American Court against the Guatemalan state for any of the 626 massacres carried out by the army in its scorched earth campaign in the early 1980s.
 Beyond the importance of this judgment for the people of Plan de Sanchez, the Court’s ruling is particularly significant because the following key points were included in the judgment:
�   There was a genocide in Guatemala; 
�   This genocide was part of the framework of the internal armed conflict when the armed forces of the Guatemalan government applied their National Security Doctrine in their counterinsurgency actions; and,
�   These counterinsurgency actions carried out within the Guatemalan government’s National Security Doctrine took place during the the regime of General Efrain Rios Montt who came to power through military coup in March of 1982.

Further, regarding the massacre in Plan de Sanchez, the Court indicated that the armed forces of the Guatemalan government had violated the following rights, each of which is enshrined in the Human Rights Convention of the Organization of American States:
�   The right to personal integrity
�   The right to judicial protection
�   The right to judicial guarantees of equality before the law
�   The right to freedom of conscience
�   The right to freedom of religion
�   The right to private property.

The Plan de Sanchez case was considered by the Inter-American Court at the request of the Inter-American Commission which received the original petition from relatives of the massacres victims.  These survivors requested consideration within the Inter-American Court because of the lack of justice in the Guatemalan legal system.   Since the Plan de Sanchez case was initiated in 1995, there have been more than 200 exhumations of other clandestine cemeteries of massacre victims in Guatemala.  Each of these exhumations has included the filing of a criminal case with forensic evidence against the Guatemalan army and its agents.   To date, only the Rio Negro case has been heard in a Guatemalan court (in 1999) and no army officials were included in the case which found three low-ranking civil patrollers guilty.

The Guatemalan government is currently seeking military aid from the United States.  Sadly, most Guatemalan political parties include former military officials implicated in the genocide - the most prominent being the powerful FRG party headed by Rios Montt.   Moreover, the government has yet to fully purge the armed forces of the intellectual and material authors of genocide.  Before sending guns or money to the Guatemalan army, the US government should consider the Guatemalan legal system’s failure to address these army massacre cases as well as its failure to bring Efrain Rios Montt and other intellectual authors of genocide to justice.