SEPARATE OPINION OF JUDGE A.A. CANÇADO TRINDADE 1. I have voted in favor of the adoption of this judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on reparations in the Plan de Sánchez Massacre v. Guatemala. However, in this separate opinion, I wish to record the personal reflections that this judgment of the Court has prompted, as I did in my previous separate opinion in the judgment on merits in the instant case. My reflections focus on four central issues: a) State crime revisited; b) time and law revisited; c) reparations for State crime; and d) the primacy of law over brute force. I. State crime revisited 2. In an affidavit of March 9, 2004, submitted to the Court, one of the victims (Benjamín Manuel Jerónimo) declared that the said Plan de Sánchez massacre, which took place on July 18, 1982, was perpetrated by “members of the Army, the Civil Self-Defense Patrols (PAC), and the Judicial Police” (para. 32(a)). In his report given during the public hearing before the Court, on April 23 and 24, 2004, the expert witness, Augusto Willemsen-Díaz, stated that, from 1979 to 1983: "[T]he Maya were oppressed, persecuted, harassed, attacked and put to death violently; this is reflected in the 200,000 deaths and 626 massacres that can be attributed to the State’s security forces. The indigenous peoples, the collective conscience, and the cultural identity of the survivors and their next of kin, were drastically affected; they were forced to flee their lands, abandon their traditional community structure based on the nuclear and extended family, and live in fear under military control" (para. 38(d)). 3. In my separate opinion in the judgment on merits in this case, I had already underscored the particular gravity of the facts of this case (paras. 2-5). In this judgment on reparations in the same Case of the Plan de Sánchez Massacre, the Court established, as one of the proven facts, that: "[t]he survivors and the next of kin of those murdered in the event were reluctant to seek justice and denounce the clandestine cemeteries in the village, owing to the very real fear of permanent harassment, threat and surveillance by the regional military authorities" (para. 49(5)). 4. Moreover, this judgment has expressly recognized the “extreme gravity of the facts” (para. 93). As I indicated in my separate opinion in the judgment on merits in this case: "According to the American Convention, it is perfectly possible to determine the aggravated international responsibility of the State, with all the juridical consequences in relation to reparations; these include, the State’s compliance with the obligation to determine the individual criminal liability of the perpetrators of the violations of the protected rights, and their corresponding punishment. This is not the first time that the Inter-American Court has identified an aggravated international responsibility (in the terms of paragraph 51 of the [...] judgment on [merits] in the Case of the Plan de Sánchez Massacre). It its previous judgment of November 25, 2003, in Myrna Mack Chang v. Guatemala, the Court concluded that, from the proven facts, the ‘aggravated international responsibility’ of the defendant State was evident (para. 25). 5. And, later on in the same opinion, I added my belief that: