GUATEMALA CITY, (Reuters) – A Guatemalan court ruled yesterday that ex-dictator Efrain Rios Montt will be given a “special trial” next year on genocide charges in which the 89-year-old will not have to testify and will not be sent to prison if convicted, due to mental incapacity.
The ruling revives the hopes of those seeking a new sentence against Rios Montt two years after a historic conviction of the former strongman was thrown out on a technicality.
Guatemala’s forensic authority declared in July that Rios Montt was mentally unfit to be tried again on the charges that he was responsible for the killings of nearly 2,000 indigenous Maya during a particularly brutal stretch of the country’s 36-year civil war.
Rios Montt’s opponents accuse him of implementing a scorched earth policy, and his earlier conviction had been hailed as a landmark for justice in the Central American nation. The conflict claimed as many as 250,000 lives.
The new trial will start in January, though Rios Montt, who was diagnosed with irreversible mixed dementia in July, will stay in hospital or under house arrest throughout, without having to testify.
