Justice in Guatemala: after more than three decades, soldiers are convicted in wartime sex slavery case.

• Author: Reichard, Lawrence

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A frail, elderly woman in traditional dress gingerly approaches the witness chair and sits down next to her translator. She speaks only Q'eqchi', no Spanish. She's no more than five feet tall and weighs less than 100 pounds; her face is almost completely covered with a colorful Q'eqchi' scarf. Like other witnesses at the Sepur Zarco war crimes trial in Guatemala City, she is afraid of retaliation. Court security is tight, with three security perimeters outside the courtroom and soldiers with automatic weapons inside.

The witness sits upright in her chair and speaks quietly into a microphone. Her testimony is harrowing. She tells how, in 1982, her daughter Dominga Coc, age twenty, and two granddaughters, ages four and seven, went down to the village river to wash clothes; they didn't come back. Soldiers from the Sepur Zarco barracks abducted them and pressed the daughter into slavery for the purposes of sex and labor. Years later, the witness identified her daughter's clothing beside partially decomposed and unidentifiable adult remains. No trace of her granddaughters has ever been found.

In 2014, two former Guatemalan soldiers were arrested for these disappearances and for the sexual enslavement of twelve women in the village of Sepur Zarco, in the hot, steamy, lowland Department of Izabal. The crimes were committed during Guatemala's thirty-six-year civil war, which ended in 1996. It was the first time ever that sexual war crimes were tried in a national, domestic court, as opposed to an international tribunal. And on February 26, 2016, the soldiers were convicted and sentenced: 120 years for former Lieutenant Colonel Esteelmer Reyes Giron and 240 years for former Military Commissioner Heriberto Valdez Asij.

The case was tried by a three-judge panel--Guatemala doesn't have jury trials. And the soldiers were prosecuted by a combination of the Public Ministry and three nonprofits: the National Union of Guatemalan Women, Women Transforming the World, and Colectivo Jalok U, an indigenous women's collective.

One woman who testified via videotape told of being raped daily for six months by five different soldiers. Other victims told of fleeing into remote, uninhabited mountains with nothing but their children and the clothes on their back after their homes and all their possessions were burned by the army. Some stayed in the mountains for years and saw their children die of hunger and exposure.

Much of the prosecution's...