Human rights activist Emilio Tojin López will speak to UW students today in William H. Gates and Smith halls about the killing of nearly 200,000 Mayan farm workers in the Guatemala genocide.

Lopez is the head of the Guatemalan Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR), an organization of 22 survivors and genocide witnesses from indigenous communities in Guatemala.

AJR is actively working to prosecute former military leaders who were responsible for the mass murders of noncombatants in the early 1980s.

General José Efraan Rios Montt, perhaps the most infamous perpetrator of the genocide, is also AJR's biggest target. Rios Montt ruled Guatemala between 1982 and 1983. His short-lived military regime is blamed for some of the worst atrocities in Guatemala's history, including the annihilation of nearly 600 villages.

The U.S. government supported Rios Montt's regime mostly because he was anticommunist. Rios Montt was eventually forced from office, but he remains politically active in Guatemala today. An attempt to extradite him to Spain to face trial for crimes against Spanish citizens in the genocide was thwarted by a court order.

Rios Montt recently announced that he would run for the Guatemalan congress later this year.

Veryl Pow, a junior and UW Amnesty International coordinator,

emphasized the importance of bringing Rios Montt to justice.

"Without former dictators like Montt brought to justice, Guatemala will still be prone to the humanitarian violations typical of the '80s," Pow said.

Yet, the issue is time-sensitive.

"It will also be important to pressure the Guatemalan government before May 6 to prohibit Rios Montt from starting his candidacy for the president of [the Guatemalan] congress," said Christopher Benoit, a UW law student who helped coordinate the event. "If he wins this position, he will again fall into immunity from criminal prosecution."

Political reform in Guatemala is difficult, due to the military's power in the government.

"Even after the 1996 peace accords, which ended the civil war and called for the creation of democratic institutions, there still is much military influence in Guatemalan politics," Pow said. "This undermines any attempt for genuine democratic reform."

López himself barely survived Montt's regime.

His wife and most of their six children were captured by the military, forcing López and one daughter to flee to Mexico. López became a community leader in the town of Santa Maria Tzeja in the Ixcan region where he worked for more than a decade. Lopez didn't know his family had survived until several years later.

This will be López's first visit to the UW.

"He has never been to the UW, and to the best of my knowledge, to the [Northwest]," Pow said.

Reach reporter Anthony Shelley at news@thedaily.washington.edu.