Brave sister scents victory in death plot trial

Twelve years ago, an internationally known anthropologist who trained in England was stabbed to death in a Guatemala City street. Now three senior members of the military alleged to have ordered her killing are finally on trial in what is being greeted by human rights groups as a major test for the country's justice system.

On 11 September 1990 Myrna Mack, who had studied at Manchester and Durham universities, was killed, aged 40, on the pavement outside the offices of the Guatemalan Association for the Advancement of the Social Sciences (Avancso), an organisation she had helped to start. The murder came in the wake of work she had been doing with villagers who had been displaced by the military during the long civil war that claimed 200,000 lives and ended in 1996.

As part of her work with Avancso, Mack documented the massacres in the rural areas of the country and shared her research results with church and human rights groups. In early September 1990, a group of some of those displaced villagers published a statement in the Guatemalan media criticising the army. Four days later, Mack was stabbed more than 20 times in the street. Her murder was seen as a warning to civil rights groups and anyone involved with them.

The detective initially in charge of the case, José Mérida Escobar, was shot and killed shortly after completing a report which had implicated the military and attempts were made to insinuate that Mack had been the victim of a crime of passion. Academics and human rights groups put pressure on the Guatemalan government and Noel de Beteta Alverez, a sergeant major working for a secret military intelligence unit, was charged, convicted and jailed for 25 years for the murder in 1993.

But Mack's relatives and friends have always believed that his orders came from senior figures in the military and continued to press for a full investigation. Many potential witnesses fled the country and a total of 12 different judges had examined the case before the trial finally started last week of retired General Edgar Augusto Godoy Gaitán, Colonel Juan Valencia Osorio and Colonel Juan Guillermo Oliva Carrera.

The case has been of such international concern that the Inter-American Human Rights Court in Costa Rica has agreed to hear a case against the Guatemalan government for its failure to ensure justice for the Mack family. That case will open in November.

The person most responsible for bringing the case to trial is Mack's sister, Helen, who has become a familiar figure in Guatemala over the past decade. Helen Mack, aged 50, is a business administrator and has employed a Guatemalan law that allows private citizens to prosecute cases. Her efforts, despite death threats, to have the case investigated won her Sweden's Right Livelihood Award, sometimes known as the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize. The award helped her to establish the Myrna Mack Foundation, which campaigns for reform of Guatemala's judicial system.

'I have been waiting for so many years for this,' Helen Mack told The Observer. 'I was very sceptical of the judicial system so it was a surprise that it has happened.' She believes that the trial, in front of a tribunal of three judges, is going well: 'I think every day we have been proving all of the elements.'

Those who have pressed for the trial are still the subject of threats. In June, Avancso director Clara Arenas was included on a death threat naming 11 human rights activists and journalists. In the first week of the trial a Guatemalan human rights worker in Quiche was murdered and his tongue and eyes cut out.