Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 23

19 January 1952—

Rationality in Justice

Before the death of her sister, Helen Mack Chang described her life as conventional and comfortable. An ethnic Chinese whose family lived in Guatemala, Chang was in her late thirties when her younger sister Myrna was stabbed twenty-seven times by a young sergeant from the Estado Mayor Presidencial, the much-feared presidential guard.

Myrna’s murder was an effort on the part of Guatemala’s oppressive junta to stop her investigations into the deaths and displacements of thousands of indigenous Mayans. Killed or driven from their mountain homes over the course of Guatemala’s thirty-five-year civil war, the Mayans were forced into squalid refugee camps. The Guatemalan government refused to acknowledge or take responsibility for their plight. Myrna, an anthropologist, traveled to a number of camps to document personal accounts of persecution and genocide. She had already published some of the material and planned to release more. That’s why she was murdered.

Myrna’s death, Chang said, changed her life forever. Correctly believing that the murder was politically motivated, she began a one-woman crusade to prove her suspicion and to break the culture of impunity for political crimes that Guatemala’s various military regimes had fostered. After nearly a decade, hearings before no fewer than twelve different judges, and the assassination of the lead police investigator, the military commando who murdered Chang’s sister was finally convicted. During that period, Chang’s bulldog persistence in following the chain of evidence also led to the indictment of three high-ranking military officers who ordered the slaying.

During the course of her search for her sister’s murderer, Chang received many death threats and was even occasionally accused by other anti-government activists of being motivated by a desire for revenge. But Chang insisted that she sought justice rather than reprisal. “This is a fight for rationality in justice and for the common happiness that is the fruit of justice,” she said. Her sister’s murder was the catalyst for calling into question the arbitrariness of a justice system that prosecuted some crimes but ignored those committed in the interests of the repressive government. In essence, she said, pursuit of the governmental forces that murdered her sister was “putting on trial the existing policy of terror in Guatemala during the last thirty years.”

Chang’s efforts were honored with the 1993 Right Livelihood Award, a recognition often referred to as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. Shortly afterwards she founded the Myrna Mack Foundation, a human rights advocacy organization, to continue her struggle for “rational”—nonarbitrary—justice in Guatemala.