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Óscar Humberto Mejía Víctores (9 December 1930 – 1 February 2016) was the 27th President of Guatemala from 8 August 1983 to 14 January 1986. A member of the military, he was president during the apex of repression and death squad activity during Guatemala's civil war, and is one of the dictators that presided over the Guatemalan Genocide.
When he was minister of defense, he rallied a coup against President Efraín Ríos Montt, which he justified by declaring that the government was being abused by religious fanatics. He allowed for a return to democracy, with elections for a constituent assembly in 1984 followed by general elections in 1985, which ended the military dictatorship that had been in power since 1970.
Biography edit
Mejía Víctores deposed Efraín Ríos Montt on August 8, 1983, after having served as his Minister of Defense. He became the de facto president and justified the coup by saying that "religious fanatics" were abusing their positions in the government and also because of "official corruption."
By the time Mejía Víctores assumed power, the counterinsurgency under the ruling military junta had largely succeeded in its objective of detaching the insurgency from its civilian support base. Additionally, Guatemalan military intelligence (G-2) had succeeded in infiltrating most of the political institutions. It eradicated opponents in the government through terror and selective assassinations. The counterinsurgency program had militarized Guatemalan society, creating a fearful atmosphere of terror that suppressed most public agitation and insurgency. The military had consolidated its power in virtually all sectors of society.
After the August 1983 coup, both the U.S. intelligence community and human rights observers noted that while cases of human rights abuses in rural Guatemala were on the decline, death squad activity in the city was on the rise. Additionally, as the levels of wholesale extrajudicial killings and massacres decreased, the rates of abduction and forced disappearance increased.
The situation in Guatemala City soon began to resemble the situation under Lucas Garcia. In Mejia Víctores's first full month in power, the number of documented monthly kidnappings jumped from 12 in August to 56 in September. The victims included a number of U.S. Agency for International Development employees, officials from moderate and leftist political parties, and Catholic priests.
In a report to the United Nations, Guatemala's Human Rights Commission reported 713 extrajudicial killings and 506 disappearances of Guatemalans in the period from January to September 1984. A secret United States Department of Defense report from March 1986 noted that from 8 August 1983 to 31 December 1985, there were a total of 2,883 recorded kidnappings (3.29 daily); and kidnappings averaged a total of 137 a month through 1984 (a total of approximately 1,644 cases). The report linked these violations to a systematic program of abduction and killing by the security forces under Mejía Víctores, noting, "while criminal activity accounts for a small percentage of the cases, and from time to time individuals ‘disappear’ to go elsewhere, the security forces and paramilitary groups are responsible for most kidnappings. Insurgent groups do not now normally use kidnapping as a political tactic."
As under Lucas García, part of the modus operandi of government repression during the Mejía government involved interrogating victims at military bases, police stations, or government safe houses. Information about alleged connections with insurgents was "extracted through torture." The security forces used the information to make joint military/police raids on suspected guerrilla safe-houses throughout Guatemala City.
In the process, the government secretly captured hundreds of individuals who were never seen again, or whose bodies were later found, showing signs of torture and mutilation. Such activities were often carried out by specialized units of the National Police. Between 1984 and 1986, the secret police (G-2) maintained an operations center for the counterinsurgency programs in southwest Guatemala at the southern airbase at Retalhuleu. There, the G-2 operated a clandestine interrogation center for suspected insurgents and collaborators.
Captured suspects were reportedly detained in water-filled pits along the perimeter of the base, which was covered with cages. To avoid drowning, prisoners were forced to hold onto the cages over the pits. The bodies of prisoners tortured to death and live prisoners marked for disappearance were thrown out of IAI-201 Aravas by the Guatemalan Air Force over the Pacific Ocean ("death flights").
Along with former Presidents Efraín Ríos Montt and Fernando Romeo Lucas García (deceased), President Mejía was charged with murder, kidnapping and genocide in a Spanish court.