Guatemala, Public Security, Corruption, and Criminal Justice

Guatemala’s progress in prosecuting corruption and abuse in recent years is at risk after the government decided not to extend the mandate of the United Nations-backed International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). CICIG ceased operation in September 2019. Additionally, the attorney general had not taken steps to safeguard the prosecution of more than 60 ongoing corruption cases, including those against more than a dozen current and former Congress members, former ministers, former President Otto Pérez Molina, and former Vice-President Roxana Baldetti. In July, the Guatemalan and US governments signed an agreement that would establish Guatemala as a “safe third country.” Violence and extortion by powerful criminal organizations remain serious problems in Guatemala. Gang-related violence is an important factor motivating people, including unaccompanied children and young adults, to leave the country.In recent years, investigations by CICIG and the Attorney General’s Office have exposed more than 60 corruption schemes, implicating officials in all three branches of government, and prompting the resignation and arrest of the country’s then-president and vice-president in 2015.

However, Guatemala suffers from high levels of impunity, partly because criminal proceedings against powerful actors often suffer unreasonably long delays due to excessive use of motions by criminal defendants. Those delays are compounded by courts often failing to respect legally mandated timeframes and sometimes taking months to reschedule suspended hearings. Intimidation against judges and prosecutors and corruption within the justice system continue to be problems. As a result, trials have not yet started for most major corruption cases brought since 2015.

Accountability for Past Human Rights Violations
The limited progress that Guatemala made in recent years in judging crimes of the past seems to have come to a standstill. In November 2018, a former special forces member was convicted for his role in the 1982 Dos Erres massacre, in which Guatemalan army special forces killed around 200 civilians as part of its counterinsurgency policy during the armed conflict. In 2011 and 2012, five others had been convicted for their roles in the massacre. However, 10 others remain at large and three high-level former officials, including former leader Efraín Ríos Montt, died before facing trial.

In June, in a case regarding sexual violence against 36 Maya Achí women in the 1980s,  a pretrial judge dismissed proceedings against six former paramilitaries and ordered the immediate release of the defendants after she excluded key evidence from the case, including testimonies from victims and witnesses. At time of writing, plaintiffs’ appeals against the decision remained pending, as did the request from the prosecutor to strip the judge of immunity and charge her with malfeasance and denial of justice.

The same judge had reached a similar decision in the CREOMPAZ case, involving enforced disappearances and sexual violence at a military base during Guatemala’s internal armed conflict. The judge excluded 123 of the 152 victims from the case and excluded key military documents from the evidence. In March 2019, Guatemalan Congress passed the second (of three required) approvals of a bill that would provide amnesty for genocide and other past atrocities, in clear violation of international human rights law. That same month, the Inter-American Court on Human Rights ordered Guatemala, in a binding ruling, to shelve the proposed legislation and in July 2019, Guatemala’s Constitutional Court issued a similar ruling.

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/guatemala#