Guatemala’s first female attorney general has managed to reduce impunity in a country where over 90 percent of murders go unsolved.

The question is whether the changes will vanish once Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz’s term ends in December 2014.

Never before had a former head of state been tried for genocide in his own country, anywhere in the world. But Paz y Paz managed to bring former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt to trial – above and beyond the fact that the final outcome is hanging by a thread.

The changes undertaken by Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz could collapse if they are not institutionalised. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

Paz y Paz, 46, also carried out a purge in the public prosecutor’s office and achieved unprecedented results in sentences for homicide, rape, extortion and kidnapping.

And she did all this in the only country in the world where the United Nations, in conjunction with the government, set up an International Commission against Impunity (CICIG), in 2007.

Guatemala is considered one of the most violent countries in the world, with a murder rate of 46 per 100,000 population in 2009.

The first change introduced by Paz y Paz was the implementation of a performance evaluation system in the public prosecutor’s office.

The prosecutors who resolve the most cases are rewarded with opportunities for promotion, while those who bring in poor results must explain why they have failed to meet their targets and can face disciplinary processes if negligence is found, Paz y Paz told IPS.

Nearly 80 percent of the prosecutors who had spent two decades in the public prosecutor’s office and were between the ages of 65 and 75 decided to retire when the new system was put into effect.

That paved the way for younger prosecutors better qualified to handle forensic evidence to be promoted to section chiefs and district attorneys.

Another stride forward was the priority put on violence against women. Under the administration of Paz y Paz, a special unit that operates around the clock was opened in the public prosecutor’s office, making it possible for a judge to issue restraining orders and other precautionary measures against the aggressors in a timely fashion, without requiring the victim to go from the public prosecutor’s office to the courthouse.

In addition, a specific unit was established to investigate sex crimes, and more resources were assigned to the special prosecutor’s unit for crimes against women.

Furthermore, a new evaluation system uses surveys to ask victims who have filed a complaint how they were treated and whether they suffered discrimination.The public prosecutor’s office managed to dismantle drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping rackets, thanks to “more proactive investigations, targeting illegal markets or criminal structures.” – Claudia Paz y Paz

The surveys led to the dismissal of a prosecutor in the northern province of San Marcos for sexual harassment of a young woman who had gone to his office to report a rape.

The public prosecutor’s office has also managed to dismantle drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping rackets, thanks to “more proactive investigations, targeting illegal markets or criminal structures,” Paz y Paz said.

In June 2012, a court in Guatemala found 36 members of the Los Zetas – a notoriously violent Mexican drug cartel – guilty of kidnapping, murder and attacks on the security forces. They were sentenced to between two and 158 years in prison.

“The public prosecutor’s office, headed by Claudia Paz y Paz and supported by CICIG, has made important strides,” political scientist Juan Carlos Garzón, a visiting expert from the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told IPS. “A former president has been tried and the clandestine structures have begun to come to light.”

Portillo and Ríos Montt: controversial cases

Another high-profile case was the prosecution of former president Alfonso Portillo, extradited to the United States in May to face charges of conspiracy to launder money during his 2000-2004 term.

The Constitutional Court authorised Portillo’s extradition in 2011, but the fact that he is still facing charges in court in Guatemala has raised questions about whether his extradition was legal.

“Portillo’s extradition was carried out hastily, and was plagued with irregularities,” Lizandro Acuña, a researcher in the area of justice and security in the University of San Carlos Institute on National Problems, told IPS.

Meanwhile, the trial against Ríos Montt continues. The public prosecutor’s office presented evidence and expert and eyewitness testimony to demonstrate that genocide was committed against the Ixil Maya indigenous community during Ríos Montt’s presidency (1982-1983).

The charges include overseeing the armed forces’ murder of at least 1,771 Ixil indigenous people and the rape of 1,485 girls and women during his 17-month rule – the bloodiest period of the 1960-1996 civil war.

In May, Ríos Montt was sentenced to 80 years in prison. But the Constitutional Court overturned the conviction just 10 days later in response to one of the numerous challenges presented by the defence.

The Constitutional Court ordered a retrial, after ruling that the proceedings should be voided dating back to Apr. 19, when one of the judges suspended the trial over a dispute with another judge about who should hear it.

The trial further polarised public opinion, between those who defend the army’s actions and those who are demanding justice for the victims of the armed conflict, who numbered around 250,000 and were mainly highlands Maya Indians.

Ricardo Méndez Ruiz, president of the right-wing Foundation Against Terrorism, made up of retired members of the military and their family members, accuses Paz y Paz of “unleashing a witch hunt against soldiers.”

In 2011, Méndez Ruiz filed a lawsuit against 26 former members of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP), which was active during the civil war – including two of the attorney general’s cousins: Margarita and Laura Hurtado Paz y Paz, who he accused of kidnapping him in 1982.

But Paz y Paz said that clarifying the human rights violations committed during the armed conflict “is not a biased action; it is about being responsible for the duties one assumes as attorney general.”

While the case against Ríos Montt is set to reopen in April 2014, survivors and witnesses who have to testify again report that they have been the targets of intimidation and threats.

The attorney general has not yet announced whether she will seek a new term.

She says she is immersed in the task of institutionalising the changes she has introduced in the public prosecutor’s office, and warns that if her successor is not willing to give continuity to the reforms, the progress made will be reversed.

Garzón said “she has made an enormous effort towards strengthening the institution itself. The question is whether it will be capable of weathering her absence when she’s gone.

“What do the political forces want? To destroy what the public prosecutor’s office has done or to continue along the path that has begun to be followed? It’s a political question, and the outlook is very uncertain,” he said.

Retired general Efraín Ríos Montt (left) will face a new trial, possibly in April 2014. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Louisa Reynolds
GUATEMALA CITY, Jun 11 2013 (IPS)

Fear and mistrust reign in Santa María Nebaj. The people of this Maya Ixil indigenous town in the highlands of northwestern Guatemala are worried about intimidation attempts to keep them from testifying again in a retrial of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt.

Worry began to spread in the town when the witnesses learned they could be summoned to court again to tell their heart-wrenching stories in a new trial, after Guatemala’s Constitutional Court overturned a genocide conviction against Ríos Montt in response to one of the numerous challenges presented by the defence.

Ríos Montt had been sentenced to 80 years in prison on May 10 after he was found guilty of overseeing the armed forces’ murder of at least 1,771 Ixil indigenous people during his 1982-1983 rule – the bloodiest period of the 1960-1996 civil war.

The Constitutional Court ruled that the proceedings should be voided dating back to Apr. 19, when one of the judges suspended the trial over a dispute with another judge about who should hear it.

Under Guatemalan law, a retrial cannot be held in the same court. But because of the backlog of cases in the court where the new trial is to take place, it is not scheduled to start until April 2014.

The court had ruled that Ríos Montt “held absolute power (from March 1982 to August 1983) and as a result had full knowledge of the crimes committed and did not bring them to a halt even though he had the power to do so.”

In the same trial, his intelligence chief, José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, was acquitted on the grounds of insufficient evidence of involvement in the crimes against humanity in question.

The ruling against Ríos Montt was historic, not only for Guatemala but for many other countries in Latin America and other regions, because it was the first time a head of state has been tried for genocide by the courts in his own country.

Strange visitors

Just days after 98 Ixil survivors testified in the trial about gang rapes of girls and women, torture and mass killings, several people came to the town saying they belonged to a government agency for agricultural development and claiming they were carrying out a census.

But the visit by the purported government officials awakened suspicion, because they only went to the homes of those who testified in the trial, and they already had the witnesses’ personal details, such as their names and identity document numbers.

Local residents reported the incident to the local offices of the Centre for Legal Action on Human Rights (CALDH), one of the groups that brought the lawsuit against Ríos Montt.

CALDH found that no such agricultural development agency was registered, and filed a complaint with the prosecution service and the office of the human rights ombudsman, demanding safety guarantees for witnesses and survivors.

During the first trial, the victims were determined to fight for justice despite fears for their safety. “Since I started to fight I haven’t been afraid. I have confidence in what I am saying. We need a real sentence,” Ixil leader Antonio Caba told IPS on Apr. 12, just a few days after testifying in court about the massacres and torture he witnessed at the age of 11.

Helping survivors overcome their fears and become ready to speak in court about such painful, traumatic experiences was a lengthy process that took years of psychological support, CALDH spokesman José Rodríguez told IPS.

According to the 1999 report by the United Nations-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), under Ríos Montt the army and paramilitary militias known as “civil self-defence patrols” committed 334 massacres and 19,000 murders and forced disappearances, and destroyed 600 villages. As a result of the violence, one million people fled their homes.

The 36-year civil war claimed some 250,000 lives, mainly rural indigenous villagers, the CEH reported.

The CEH was created to investigate human rights abuses and crimes against humanity after a peace agreement between the army and the insurgent Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) put an end to the war in 1996.

Something happened on the way to the forum

Throughout the trial, the defence presented a volley of challenges based on technicalities.

The last challenge had been rejected and the trial proceeded to sentencing. But on May 20, the Constitutional Court ruled that the trial should not have continued until the challenge had been addressed, and overturned the conviction of Ríos Montt.

“Since the start of the trial, the defence attorneys have tried to trip up the proceedings through challenges and injunctions, and they finally managed to do so,” Ramón Cadena, director of the Central America division of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), told IPS. “What has prevailed here is malicious litigation that finally ended in a ruling that leads to more impunity.”

The Constitutional Court has not yet clarified whether the change in venue means the trial must start from scratch.

According to Rodríguez, the interpretation by the CALDH lawyers is that it must start over, which means the 98 witnesses would have to testify again.

But due to the setbacks, the survivors have lost faith in the justice system, and over half of them have said they are not willing to give their testimony again, and especially not in the face of tension and attempts at intimidation in the Ixil communities.

“The victims have said they are not a toy, to be summoned to court over and over again. They put their trust in the justice system, and now they feel they have been let down, and they are afraid,” Rodríguez said.

Cadena said he had little hope that a new conviction against Ríos Montt would be achieved if a new trial was held.

“Although judges are showing greater independence, there are economic interests that are not going to allow the powerful to be tried,” he said.

The drug problem should be tackled not as a security issue but as a public health question, with policies for “prevention, treatment and rehabilitation,” delegations from the 34 countries participating in the 43rd General Assembly of the Organisation of American States agreed.

The meeting, which opened Tuesday Jun. 4 in the colonial Guatemalan city of Antigua, on the theme “For a Comprehensive Policy against the World Drug Problem in the Americas,” will conclude Thursday Jun. 6 with a final declaration that, it is hoped, will express a consensus position on the most viable strategies to fight drug trafficking in the region.

However, in spite of agreement that the issue should be addressed from a public health standpoint instead of the law enforcement approach used in most countries in the region today, the draft Antigua Declaration of the General Assembly of the OAS does not include concrete actions, or even a vague road map for the future.

What remains contentious and what foreign ministers must resolve before the conclusion of the OAS meeting is the follow-up mechanism that should be implemented.

Fourteen countries are proposing that the OAS Permanent Council call an extraordinary General Assembly in 2014 in Guatemala, with the goal of moving forward in the debate on new strategies to combat drug trafficking and in the design of an action plan for the period 2016-2020.

Under this proposal, the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD) would be in charge of preparatory work for the meeting.

But the other 20 countries (Cuba has been suspended since the early 1960s) are opposed to the proposal, including the United States which is in favour of continuing to debate the drugs issue but is against an extraordinary assembly and CICAD involvement.

Canada is concretely proposing that the OAS Permanent Council, instead of CICAD, determine how the issue is followed up.

Another novelty is the incorporation of “a cross-cutting human rights perspective” and a gender perspective into public policies arising from the OAS summit, with the purpose of reducing demand and supply of illegal drugs.

Too little, too slow

Sandino Asturias, head of the Centro de Estudios de Guatemala (CEG – Centre for Guatemalan Studies), told IPS that the consensus on the need to treat drug trafficking as a health problem, rather than a public security issue, reflects a change in tackling this scourge even by the United States, as it implicitly admits that the armed fight against drug trafficking has failed.

In Mexico, under conservative President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), more than 83,000 people were killed in the context of the fight against organised crime, according to official figures. But the demand for drugs from consumer countries, especially the United States, has not declined. As a result, there is a growing consensus among governments in Latin America that it is time to consider new strategies.

“Some Latin American countries have been exerting pressure, and the idea that Washington only makes demands and the region must comply is beginning to change. I think there have been developments since the arrival of (U.S. President Barack) Obama, in the sense that there is more self-criticism,” Asturias said.

David Martínez-Amador, an expert with Proyecto Criminova in Mexico, which publishes academic papers on criminology, said that the health approach “has been put on the table.” But he criticised the fact that concrete policies, and sanctions against the use of armies in the war on drugs, have not been agreed.

“Like most of these forums, it ends with motivational speeches, hoping for discussions to continue while waiting for the extraordinary meeting; it’s a waste of time,” Martínez-Amador told IPS.

Several countries are taking steps to implement regulatory frameworks to legalise production of marijuana, including Argentina, Spain, Portugal, and in particular Uruguay, where parliament, at the behest of the leftwing Broad Front government, is debating a bill to legalise and regulate the sale of marijuana.

“This forum is just that, a forum, but when the doors close, each country has to blaze its own trail,” said the Mexican expert.

Turning the page

Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina, the host of this week’s OAS Assembly, proposed legalising drugs in early 2012, to shocked reactions.

During his election campaign he had said he was opposed to the idea, and days after he took office on Jan. 14, 2012, the government created a special agency to fight drug trafficking headed by its own drugs tsar, and confirmed that the Kaibil Commando, an elite army unit accused of the worst human rights violations during the 1960-1996 internal armed conflict, would lead the drug war.

No one, not even members of his own cabinet, could foresee that just one month later the retired general, who campaigned for the presidency on promises of coming down hard on crime, would declare that the time had come to consider decriminalisation as a possible solution to the rising tide of drug-related violence.

In April 2012, he tabled the issue again at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, although the United States responded negatively.

Several hypotheses have been put forward as to why Pérez Molina is defending the legalisation of drugs.

The British weekly newspaper The Economist speculated that the Guatemalan president was trying to get more funds from the United States, while Natalie Kitroeff, a researcher for the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations think tank, said he was exerting pressure to lift the arms embargo imposed in 1978 on Guatemala due to human rights abuses committed during the civil war.

“The president is motivated by his image. (Pérez Molina) wants to be seen internationally as someone committed to democracy, not tainted by the past,” Asturias said.

The OAS summit is an opportunity for him to “turn the page” after the controversial trial of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, in which a witness directly implicated Pérez Molina of having participated in massacres in the highland department (province) of Quiché while commanding the Gumarcaj Task Force, Asturias said.