Yuliana Ramazzini writes in El Faro on the continuing corruption of the Guatemala judicial system through an interview with former Attorney General, Claudia Paz y Paz, internationally known for bringing to trial the first charges of genocide in Guatemalan history, against former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt.
In the last two months of 2024, Guatemala’s Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights suffered an internal earthquake threatening a series of cases of serious human rights violations against the country’s military elites. Since the beginning of November, Attorney General Consuelo Porras has transferred or fired many of the most senior prosecutors, including those for years working the current genocide trial against former general Benedicto Lucas García. The process, which in early November was on the verge of concluding, may now have to start from scratch, by court order, with new prosecutors and new judges.
The harassment within the Public Prosecutor’s Office has reached such heights that those willing to speak on the record, with first and last name, about the dismantling of high-impact prosecutor units are beyond the country’s borders, living in the exile that Porras has fed, in leaps and bounds, since mid-2021. “I don’t trust the current Public Prosecutor’s Office, which absolutely lacks independence and any kind of rigor for its accusations to have the necessary evidence,” says Claudia Paz y Paz, attorney general from 2010 to 2014, in this interview. Paz y Paz is internationally known for bringing to trial the first charges of genocide in Guatemalan history, against former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. Regarding the transfers in the Prosecutor’s Office for Human Rights, she does not mince words: It is, she says, “a clear sign of the interest of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in ensuring impunity in these cases.”
Paz y Paz, exiled in Costa Rica, is now the director for Central America and Mexico of the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL). In Guatemala, a country that tends to speak between the lines, she is a serene woman who speaks with the same frankness that characterized her a decade ago, when she was still Guatemala’s first female attorney general. In her regional analysis, she puts the criminalization waged in the Guatemalan judicial system on the same level as the repression of the Nicaraguan dictatorship. “The pact for impunity and co-optation of the justice system is one of the reasons why Guatemala entered Chapter 4B (of the Inter-American Commission) alongside Nicaragua,” she observes. “As long as Consuelo Porras continues to serve as attorney general, and as long as there is no fully independent judiciary, and there are judges who contribute to her actions, (…) anyone against her interests, or the interests of the sectors that support her, is at risk of criminal prosecution,” she says.
You can read the full article, with links and photos, here, Claudia Paz y Paz: “What Consuelo Porras seeks in Guatemala is impunity in all cases”
Categories: Corruption, Criminalisation, Culture, Guatemala, Human Rights, Impunity, Justice, Violence
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