But her cries were lost among the dirt streets and clay
houses in the Guatemalan highland village of Nebaj as thousands
of supporters cheered a man they consider a messiah rather than
a monster.
Twenty years after heading a violent 1982-83 dictatorship
considered one of the bloodiest periods in Guatemalan history,
retired Gen. Efrain Rios Montt is running for president.
His upbeat campaign ahead of Nov. 9 elections is leading
him back to the villages where rights groups say he ordered
thousands of Mayas massacred in a campaign to wipe out leftist
rebels at the height of the Central American nation's 36-year
civil war.
At 77, Rios Montt is enjoying a political comeback as head
of Congress and the ruling Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG).
Now elderly, he was barred from standing for the party in
1990 and 1995 by an article in Guatemala's 1985 constitution
banning ex-dictators from the country's top job.
In a ruling that horrified rights groups, Guatemala's
highest court on July 14 allowed Rios Montt to stand, agreeing
with his argument that the law was created after his term.
An appeal by opposition parties that led the lower Supreme
Court to suspend his candidacy on July 20 was overruled,
seemingly assuring him a place on the ballot sheet.
Home to ex-paramilitaries forced to fight rebels during his
rule and now receiving state compensation under a program
critics say is a bid to snare votes for the FRG, war-ravaged
outposts like Nebaj are, strangely, major power bases for the
veteran politician.
But in villages which are often still tense since 1996
peace accords, and where widows of massacre victims and
ex-militiamen reluctantly rub shoulders, not everyone is
pleased to see him.
CHASED OUT OF TOWN
In the central Guatemalan village of Rabinal, amid hills
dotted with mass graves, massacre survivors carrying relatives'
remains in coffins gate-crashed a campaign meeting and pelted
Rios Montt with stones. He was forced to flee in a helicopter.
Christina Laur, part of a team of activists and lawyers
working in Guatemala to have Rios Montt tried on charges
including genocide during the war in which 200,000 people died,
said such a reaction to his campaign was inevitable.
"It's a massive slap in the face to victims," she said.
Polls in pro-business newspapers highly critical of Rios
Montt's protege President Alfonso Portillo and his party put
market-friendly candidate Oscar Berger, the choice of
Guatemala's elite, well ahead of the FRG.
But foreign diplomats and many analysts say Rios Montt
could win on his populist ticket.
Rights groups are horrified at the prospect, fearing an
escalation in a wave of attacks and intimidation over the past
two years against activists, attributed to a shadowy organized
crime network linked to the military.
Those fears were heightened on July 24 when 3,000 Rios
Montt supporters, some wearing ski masks and armed with clubs,
overran Guatemala City's financial district in a riot.
But in war-ravaged villages like Nebaj in Guatemala's
western highlands, many remember Rios Montt as a no-nonsense
leader who defeated regrouping rebels, and some even consider
him a hero.
At a campaign rally here, about 3,000 supporters, mostly
ex-paramilitaries who had received their first compensation
payment, waited hours in the sun for a glimpse of him.
Gesticulating wildly on the podium with the energy of a
much younger man, Rios Montt hawked the FRG's populist message
in his high-pitched voice.
"The FRG is the party of the people," he screeched. "Of
who?" "The people!" the crowd shouted back.
MAN OF PEACE?
Many in Nebaj say the March 1982 coup that brought Rios
Montt to power ushered in an era of relative peace after years
of indiscriminate killing under dictator Gen. Romeo Lucas
Garcia.
Around Nebaj, massacres continued into Rios Montt's rule,
but fighting died down as the army got the upper hand, and some
locals say they at last knew where they stood.
"The fighting stopped," said 70-year-old corn farmer,
former paramilitary and Rios Montt supporter Rafael Guzman.
"Under Rios Montt most people realized that if they
cooperated with the army they would survive," said David Stoll,
a U.S. anthropologist and expert on Nebaj.
But as crowds flocked to see Rios Montt, others hid
indoors.
Mayan widows wearing green and yellow woven headdresses and
shawls sat in a dingy office discussing their own compensation
bid -- for their husbands' murders during Rios Montt's rule.
Catalina Brito hasn't seen her husband since 40 soldiers
kidnapped him on the outskirts of Nebaj in December 1982.
"He's an assassin," she said of Rios Montt. "How can people
support an assassin?"
