Hard Red Spring (72 page)

February 1999—
The Historical Clarification Commission, established by the UN under the peace agreement, publishes its report on the war: more than two hundred thousand casualties and forty-five thousand “disappeared,” with the state responsible for 92 percent of arbitrary executions and 91 percent of disappearances, and the United States identified as a major contributor to the violence. Over half of the massacres and scorched-earth operations are tied to Ríos Montt's term. Of the forty-five thousand “disappeared,” five thousand are children. Later government reports will conclude that the Guatemalan Army
stole Mayan children to sell for adoption in the U.S. and Europe. A few days after the UN report is released, President Clinton arrives in Guatemala to offer a formal apology.

July 1, 2006—
The Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) goes into effect for Guatemala, allowing U.S. businesses to relocate their factories there to take advantage of cheap labor and lack of regulations. At this time, 39 percent of Guatemala's employment is rooted in agriculture, mostly small-scale farms.

2007–2008—
The influx of cheap, subsidized U.S. corn into Guatemala forces traditional Mayan farming and food supply into a global market. Many small-scale farmers cannot compete, and sell their land to large monocultural enterprises geared toward exporting bananas, coffee, vegetables, sugar, and palm oil to the U.S. The number of farms in Guatemala falls dramatically as land is reconcentrated into the hands of a few large producers. By 2014, 1.86 percent of farms will own 52 percent of the arable land. Many of the former farmers must find work in the exploding number of U.S.-owned apparel factories.

2008–2009—
The global recession hits the Guatemalan manufacturing sector particularly hard. By 2011, the unemployment rate more than doubles from the pre-CAFTA rate. By 2014, apparel exports to the U.S. fall almost 40 percent due to decreased demand. Once self-sufficient in food production, Guatemala is now dependent on imports for half its cereal grains supply. The price of corn spikes 240 percent due to the global food crisis.

January 14, 2012—
The proportion of the population that is food-insecure has increased by 80 percent since the 1990s. Amid rising hunger and out-of-control drug violence, retired general Otto Pérez Molina is elected President of Guatemala. The head of Ríos Montt's security apparatus from 1982 to 1983 and a former member of the
kaibiles
, the elite right-wing death squad, he promises to take a “hard line” against the cartels. That year, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime rates Guatemala as having the fifth-highest homicide rate in the world—higher than the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo. Thirty-four percent of Guatemalans report that someone in their household was the victim of crime in the previous year.

May 10, 2013—
After months of testimony that also implicates current President Pérez Molina, former president José Efraín Ríos Montt is found guilty of genocide by a Guatemalan court and sentenced to eighty years in prison. He is eighty-six years old. That year, the price of tortillas in Guatemala doubles due to rising global corn prices and increased American ethanol production.

May 20, 2013—
Ríos Montt's genocide conviction is overturned, 3–2, by the Guatemalan Constitutional Court on a procedural technicality.

October 1, 2013–September 30, 2014—
Guatemala ranks among the twelve worst countries in the world for income disparity, with the top 10 percent of earners accounting for 47 percent of national income—up five percentage
points from the pre-CAFTA era; 54.8 percent of Guatemalans live in poverty, with 29.1 percent living in extreme poverty; 49.8 percent of Guatemalan children are chronically malnourished. During this period, 67,339 unaccompanied minors flood the U.S.–Mexico border in hopes of gaining asylum. Seventy-six percent of the children come from CAFTA countries. The rest are from Mexico. Twenty-five percent of the children—some as young as five—come from Guatemala. According to USAID and the Department of Homeland Security, the children are fleeing violence, forcible recruitment into gangs, and poverty. Nearly half of the children are girls, many of whom are routinely raped during the journey. Nearly 80 percent of these unaccompanied minors travel with smugglers, making them vulnerable to trafficking. Approximately one-third have made the journey in hopes of being reunited with their parents, who work in the United States illegally for lack of jobs in their home countries.

January 5, 2015—
The retrial of former president José Efraín Ríos Montt begins. The defense immediately seeks the recusal of one of the judges for bias, based on her graduate thesis on the war. The motion is accepted. With a limited number of judges in the country even qualified to hear complex cases in high-risk court, and with the defense having challenged a number of them already, finding a replacement judge will be difficult. For this, the trial is suspended indefinitely on the same day that it began.

June 10, 2015—
Guatemala's Supreme Court rules that President Pérez Molina should be investigated for his involvement in a multimillion-dollar customs fraud ring. On September 1, the Guatemalan Congress strips him of presidential immunity. By September 3, in response to mass protests and increasing evidence that he may have led the vast fraud ring, Pérez Molina resigns the presidency. Within hours of his resignation, he is jailed to await trial.

July 7, 2015—
Guatemala's forensic authority determines that due to his dementia, Ríos Montt is mentally unfit to stand trial.

August 25, 2015—
The court rules that Ríos Montt will still be retried. The new trial is set for January 11, 2016. However, due to his cognitive deterioration, a special trial will proceed in which all evidence and witnesses will be presented behind closed doors, with a defense representative. Ríos Montt will not be required to attend his genocide trial. Nor will he suffer punishment if found guilty.

I must thank my A-Team: Anthony Walton, Alice Tasman, and Anjali Singh. Anthony patiently suffered my first draft and my million frustrations. Alice, my agent, led me and this book through the desert. And Anjali, with fresh eyes and insight, tamed this beast at long last into something reasonable.

Hard Red Spring
is built upon many years of research. The following books proved especially vital to my understanding of Guatemala:
Bitter Fruit
by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer;
Doing Business with the Dictators
by Paul J. Dosal;
Secret History
by Nick Cullather;
Unfinished Conquest
by Victor Perera; and
I, Rigoberta Menchú
edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray.

Thank you to my editor, Kathryn Court, for your confidence and gentle hand.

Thank you, Sarah Stein, first mate of my Viking crew.

I am indebted to Liz Shesko, my friend and guide to Guatemala. As well as showing me cities and villages, she fearlessly led me through jungles, around army ant nests, up to active volcanic rims, past the gauntlet of machismo, through ruins and the ruination of twenty-five-cent mojito night.

Mitch Fraas, Dave Cole, and Sharon Gonzalez, I am grateful for your expertise.

And lastly, firstly, this book is dedicated to E. For E, for everything, for making me notebooks when I ran out.

*
The dialogue in this interview is fictionalized in
Hard Red Spring
, since requests for copies of the interview went unanswered by the Christian Broadcasting Network.

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