IN WHAT looks like a student lecture hall in the concrete bowels of Guatemala's Supreme Court building lawyers confront each other behind flimsy trestle tables Despite the simplicity of its surroundings the trial of three retired army officers which began this month is historic It is the first time that senior officers have faced justice for crimes committed during a 36-year dirty war against left-wing guerrillas that left 200 000 dead most of them killed by the army The officers a general and two colonels are accused of ordering the murder in 1990 of Myrna Mack an anthropologist and human-rights campaigner She was stabbed 29 times in the street only a few hundred yards from the presidential palace in Guatemala city In 1993 a soldier in the army's elite presidential-security division EMP which functioned as a death squad was convicted of killing Ms Mack But he was merely the executioner Though the dirty war ended with a 1996 peace deal and civilian governments had replaced dictatorships a decade before that the army remains the most powerful political force in Guatemala So the trial comes as a surprise--all the more so since the three defendants are in prison and have been refused bail For the first time the army's order of battle and methods are being revealed in public This evidence has been pieced together from declassified American documents by Kate Doyle an analyst at the National Security Archive an NGO in Washington DC who has been called as a prosecution witness But the trial which is expected to end this month is likely to be an exception rather than the rule according to Nery Rodenas the director of the Archbishop of Guatemala's office of human rights That is because Ms Mack's case has had an extraordinarily tenacious champion in her sister Hellen Mack a lawyer who has brought it to international attention Those such as Mr Rodenas and Ms Mack who attempt to investigate the crimes of the past face threats and violence Such intimidation has increased since the conviction last year of three officers from the EMP for the murder in 1998 of Bishop Juan Gerardi The bishop was killed days after he had presented a church report on the dirty war In May an accountant at the Rigoberta Menchu Foundation which pursues prosecutions against former military officers was killed A witness in the Mack case was flown in from Canada where he fled after death threats The peace accord called for the disbanding of the presidential-security division President Alfonso Portillo has frequently promised to do so most recently in July but this year increased its budget In practice it is not Mr Portillo who decides such matters but Efrain Rios Montt a former military dictator during the most repressive phase of the war He is now president of Congress and the leader of the ruling party Human-rights groups want him prosecuted for genocide His supporters want to lift a constitutional ban on dictators standing for president in time for an election in November 2003 Guatemala's future will depend on which side wins # # # Word count 521 Copyright 2002 The Economist Newspaper Ltd All rights reserved