José Luis Sanz wrote a two-piece chronicle in El Faro, published in Spanish in 2014, on CICIG, Claudia Paz y Paz, the genocide trial of Efraín Ríos Montt, and exile. The chronicle has been translated by Max Granger amid the ongoing trial of Benedicto Lucas García on the charge of genocide against the Maya Ixil people.
The day they knocked her down, Claudia Paz y Paz thought she had won the match. It was a Thursday. The attorney general had told her closest colleagues to join her at 11:00 a.m. in her office for a meeting.
Paz y Paz had been under intense political fire for months. In the span of just three years, she had imprisoned entire structures of the Mara Salvatrucha-13 and 18th Street gangs, as well as military personnel accused of war crimes and roughly a hundred members of the Zetas. She had overseen the arrests and extradition to the United States of local drug lords who, thanks to Guatemala’s political godfathers, had enjoyed virtual immunity for years. Paz y Paz had come to symbolize a new era for justice in Central America. But prosecuting the former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide in 2013 put her squarely in the crosshairs of Guatemala’s traditional right-wing power structure.
The country’s business elite had been trying for months to get her out of office by May 2014, though her term was set to end in December. In Paz y Paz’s round, freckled face they saw the specter of leftism, the old communism, coming to capture the justice system and turn it against them. They wanted her out. They wanted to give her a clear demonstration of their enduring and effective power.
This was the game that the attorney general thought she had won on Thursday, February 5. She thought, due to a miscalculation, that the deadline for the Constitutional Court to rule on her case had passed. Her optimism was further bolstered by statements made the previous Thursday by Manuel Barquín, vice president of Congress, endorsing two technical reports issued by the Supreme Court of Justice, which showed favor to Paz y Paz. The law and politics, she thought, were both on her side.
You can read this piece, in full with links and photos, here, The Genocide Trial and the Tightrope, and the second part of the chronicle can be read here, When Guatemalan Justice Learned the Word Exile. They are well worth the time.
Categories: Accompaniment, Corruption, Criminalisation, Guatemala, Human Rights, Impunity, Justice, Legal, Report, Solidarity in Action, Violence
Guatemala Solidarity Network 
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