Quetzaltenango. The Guatemalan judiciary and the far-right “Foundation Against Terrorism” have targeted former prosecutor Orlando López, who works to investigate the crimes of the Efrain Rios Montt dictatorship.
A large police force arrested López on March 16. Five days later, Judge Ruth Ambrosio ordered “further investigations,” but López was transferred from prison to house arrest after paying 25,000 quetzales.
López is accused of his activities as a lawyer and notary, which he is said to have practiced in 2019 alongside his job as a public prosecutor. The public prosecutor’s office accuses him of “abuse of office” because the two activities “were incompatible”.
López’s lawyer Jovita Tzul Tzul emphasizes that he was “already suspended from the prosecutor’s office without pay in 2016, so that at the time in question he had the right to work for another employer,” as the newspaper La Hora writes on March 21.
The suspension was based on a traffic accident in 2016 in which López was involved and in which a motorist was killed. The facts of the case could not be finally clarified.
Lawyer Tzul sees the right-wing extremist “Foundation Against Terrorism” behind López’s imprisonment. The foundation, set up to support indicted military officers, referred to Lopez in a “worrying manner” on its Twitter account. Members of the foundation were present at his hearing on March 21. Its president, Ricardo Méndez-Ruiz, approached López and “murmured incomprehensible words.” Later he called for “eight years of preventive detention” for the former prosecutor, La Hora wrote.
In 2013, López, as prosecutor, led the investigation that led to the trial of former dictator Efrain Rios Montt. Rios Montt seized power in March 1982. A few months later, government soldiers murdered tens of thousands of civilians in the “Victoria” and “Sofia” military operations. In May 2013, Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison for genocide, which was overturned by the Constitutional Court due to alleged procedural errors. Montt died – suffering from dementia – in 2018 without a judgment having become final.
Before his arrest in March, López was a lawyer with the Human Rights Office of the Archdiocese of Guatemala (ODHAG). In addition to representing political prisoners from the resistance against mining projects and land grabs, he was responsible for questioning witnesses in the so-called second genocide trial. The trial against the former military Benedicto Lucas Garcia, brother of former President Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia (1978-1982), as well as Manuell Callejas and the now deceased César Noguera Argueta was held in 2020 under judge Miguel Ángel Gálvez, who fled into exile last year initiated. Galvez had conducted the case against Rios Montt. The accused are accused of 31 massacres, 23 communities in the Ixil region were “razed to the ground”, wrote Prensa Libre in August 2021.
ODHAG appears in the proceedings as a joint plaintiff, and Orlando López was responsible for interrogating the witnesses, among other things. 125 witnesses are to be questioned in the next few weeks in the process. López should appear as a co-prosecutor, which is made impossible by the house arrest.
Luisa Fernanda Nicolau, coordinator of the department for the defense of human rights at ODHAG, said in a previously unpublished interview with the Catholic Dreikönigsaktion Austria, available to Amerika 21, that it fills her with “great pain and concern” that “our brother and colleague in prison came”. Now he was able to leave it again, there “his safety was endangered”. At the same time, she is concerned about the “safety and physical integrity” of other colleagues who “defend human rights” in current cases and in cases from the “armed conflict”.