Memories of a Friend in the Field

Justice for Pepe, Justice for Guatemala

Victoria Sanford
Lehman C, CUNY
Columbia U

Pepe Mendez

August 22, 2007 The last time I saw Pepe, he was laughing with his wife, loading their twins into the car, smiling and waving goodbye. But that’s not right. On Saturday (Aug 18, 2007), I received the terrible news that my friend Pepe Mendez, son of Guatemalan Human Rights Activist Amilcar Mendez, had been brutally assassinated on Friday (Aug 17, 2007) afternoon on his way home from work.

Now I have a photo from last Saturday’s news. The car is stopped and the driver’s door is open with Pepe’s bullet-ridden, bleeding body lying in the middle of a Guatemala City street. Now he is one of the thousands of Guatemalans who have been killed during the decade since the peace accords were signed in 1996.

Just in the past five years of “peacetime,” there have been 20,943 registered murders in Guatemala. If the number of murder victims continues to rise at the current rate, more people will die in the first 25 years of peace, than died in the 36-year internal armed conflict and genocide that took the lives of 200,000 Guatemalans. And there is no more justice today than there was 20 years ago. Of the 5,338 murders registered by the national police in 2005, only eight were brought to justice.

Pepe was 28 years old, married and the father of twins. I have known Pepe since he was 12 years old. As a teenager, he accompanied me on my first human rights research trip to Nebaj and also taught me how to 4WD in deep mud on steep mountain roads. He was kind, gentle and always willing to help anyone in need.

As a child, Pepe survived the grenades thrown at his family’s home when his father spoke out for the rights of indigenous men to not be forcibly conscripted into the Guatemalan army’s civil patrols. He helped his father videotape the atrocities and destruction left in the wake of the army’s counterinsurgency campaigns. He accompanied his father to exile in California in the early 1990s. In April of this year, Pepe helped to rescue a journalist who had been injured in a rural lynching.

Pepe’s murder is a clear revenge killing for Amilcar’s ongoing human rights work—recognized internationally by the Carter Center (1990), RFK Memorial Center (1990) and Mitterrand Foundation (1994). It is also retribution for a denouncement of human rights violations and escalating organized violence that Pepe and Amilcar sent to the Robert F Kennedy Memorial Center less than 24 hours before Pepe’s assassination. The denouncement was submitted at the request of Guatemala’s UNE (Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza, National Unity for Hope) vice-presidential candidate Espada who believed his own assassination was imminent.

Threats, attacks and now assassinations are once again the landscape of Guatemalan politics in a country where genocidaires like former General Efrain Rios Montt live with impunity and war criminals like former General Otto Perez Molina’s campaign for the presidency using the recourse of fear while wartime networks of paramilitaries are reactivated and terrorize the population into submission. The assassination of Pepe Mendez should awaken the international community from its complacency in Central American politics.

Pepe’s assassination deserves full attention from the international community and the US government. The US ambassador to Guatemala should follow through with his offer of FBI assistance in the investigation of Pepe’s assassination. The Guatemalan government needs to appoint a special prosecutor to Pepe’s case to bring both the intellectual and material authors of this crime to justice. The Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman needs to be included throughout the process to ensure transparency. The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights needs to extend the protective measures ordered for Amilcar to include his entire family.

And to break the cycle of impunity in Guatemala, the government must extradite Rios Montt and the other genocidaires to the Spanish Tribunal that has issued an international arrest warrant charging them with genocide, terrorism, torture, assassination and illegal detention. Until these war criminals are brought to justice, there will be no end to impunity in Guatemala.

Victoria Sanford is associate professor of anthropology at Lehman College, City University of New York and a research associate at Columbia University’s Center for International Conflict Resolution.