On May 24th, WEAA’s Marc Steiner Show featured guest Jeffrey Davis, associate professor and chair of political science at UMBC, to discuss the recent guilty verdict for former Guatemalan dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt, its overturning, and possible implications for the U.S. Davis appeared alongside Anita Isaacs, associate professor of political science at Haverford College.
Contextualizing the court cased, Davis told listeners, “This is a trial based on a genocide that took place during Guatemala’s 30-year civil war. During that war more than 200,000 people were killed. 40,000 or more were disappeared. That’s around 3% of their population. To give you an idea, that’s about 8 million Americans if you put it in our terms.”
Davis is the author of Justice Across Borders: The Struggle for Human Rights in U.S. Courts (2008) and the forthcoming Seeking Human Rights in Latin America: Truth, Extra-Territorial Courts and the Process of Justice (Cambridge Univ. Press, Nov. 2013).
