The military officials held in connection with the 1990 extrajudicial execution of anthropologist Myrna Mack.
The common law prisoners, armed with firearms and grenades smuggled into the prison over the past several months, reportedly targeted the police and military detainees because they were angry at the special privileges they enjoyed in prison and the authority this allowed them to exercise over other prisoners. The military prisoners have now been transferred to a high security prison outside Guatemala City. They charge that they had been warning prison authorities about the arms coming into the prison since last December, but that nothing had been done.
Human rights defenders in Guatemala said they too knew the uprising was coming, but believed that it was orchestrated to serve as the excuse to illegally move military officers held there to military prisons. Bishop Gerardi was killed outside his home in April 1998, two days after he had publicly presented the findings of the in-depth inquiry carried out by the Guatemalan Catholic church into the gross human rights abuses committed during Guatemala's long-term civil conflict. The report laid the responsibility for the vast majority of the abuses squarely at the door of the Guatemalan military and their civilian allies, the civil patrols. The landmark convictions in the Gerardi case, the first against military officers for human rights abuses, had been widely hailed in both Guatemala and abroad as indication that the Guatemalan legal system could be made to function to bring perpetrators of human rights abuses to justice, no matter what their rank or position.
However, the convictions came at a high cost: in addition to the witnesses killed, by the time the case against Sergeant Villanueva and his two superiors came to trial, dozens of others involved in the case had reported serious intimidation, and another dozen, including a member of Presidential Chiefs of Staff who implicated colleagues in the murder, had fled the country. A judge and three prosecutors involved in the case were also forced to flee Guatemala, in fear of their lives.