“Look, international cooperation is ending….There’s a lack of interest at the political level to force Guatemala to return to the rule of law.”
José Luis Sanz, from El Faro, spoke to Miguel Ángel Gálvez, who has been forced into exile due to his work in bringing perpetrators of historical crimes to justice. He is one more member of the Guatemala judiciary who has been forced to leave due to their challenging impunity and corruption being carried out by state actors and business elites.
Since November, Miguel Ángel Gálvez has been living out of a suitcase. In the hotel room that serves as his home for the week, the coffee pot has been placed on the floor, next to the bed, to make more workspace on the desk. When I arrive for our interview, he shuffles a stack of papers and moves them from the small table to improvise a place for us to talk. This is what exile has meant for him: always improvising, always adapting. And always keeping busy. He spends nearly every day denouncing persecution against him and his fellow judges. Nearly every day, he breaks down while talking about his and his country’s plight.
Prior to his exile last November, Gálvez, 64, was the judge of the historic “Death Squad Dossier” enforced disappearance case. In his career he also sent former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt to trial for genocide, imprisoned ex-President Otto Pérez Molina on charges of corruption, and handled a major government corruption case implicating banks, construction companies, and the media. He was preparing to retire when he found himself in the judicial crosshairs of the very apparatus of corruption he had been attempting to dismantle and was forced to flee the country. By then, the daughter of Ríos Montt, Zury Ríos, was leading the polls in her bid to become president of Guatemala.
You can read the full interview, with links and photos, here, “With the Death Squad Dossier, I understood that Guatemala is designed for impunity”.
Categories: Corruption, Criminalisation, Guatemala, Human Rights, Impunity, Justice, Legal, Military, Solidarity in Action, Solidarity in Action/Guatemala, Violence
Guatemala Solidarity Network 
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