Guatemala can Arévalo improve human rights and corruption issues

PBI Special Report, 2020

Peace Brigades International Special Report on social struggles in Guatemala's northern province of Alta Verapaz. From a human rights perspective, It tackles the region's history, from colonization and the imposition of capitalism, to the internal armed conflict. It then covers today's major social issues such as impunity, land access and inequalities, indigenous peoples rights, sexual violence and gender inequality, corporate violence, the impacts of monocultures and corrupcion in the justice system.

Revista de ciencia política (Santiago), 2018

Guatemalan politics were dominated in 2018 by political strife between the Jimmy Morales administration and the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). The most pressing issues in Guatemala continue to be corruption and the weakness of the rule-of-law. The year began with but guarded optimism that CICIG could continue its work despite worries about the President's commitment to democracy, but ended with a constitutional crisis that threatened CICIG's work in Guatemala. With general elections approaching in 2019, democracy in Guatemala hangs in the balance. However, at the end of 2018, the makeup of the election was still in doubt and Guatemala was in a constitutional crisis that has not been resolved.

Critical Studies, 2019

Guatemala is breaking new ground with a series of high-impact war crimes prosecutions. The 2016 Sepur Zarco trial was one such landmark case: it was the first time that Guatemala prosecuted wartime sexual violence, and the first time that a domestic court prosecuted sexual slavery as a crime against humanity. This case also set important precedents in legal and evidentiary practice. Based on my direct observation of the Sepur Zarco case, this paper examines the legal practices that placed the women-survivors, not the defendants, at the forefront of the proceedings, and which proved that the state of Guatemala systematically used sexual violence as a weapon of war against women and as a strategy to control the civilian population. It also examines the evidentiary practices in this case, which allowed not only for a conviction more than 30 years after the crimes, but for a broader understanding of the historical context, including land conflict, that led to the atrocities in Sepur Zarco. By piercing the veil of impunity surrounding wartime atrocities and making visible the faces of the victims-indigenous men and women who have historically been relegated to the margins of Guatemalan society-the Sepur Zarco trial is challenging entrenched narratives of denial that have sustained the power of military officials whose influence continues to shape present-day politics in the Central American nation.

2018

As transitional justice has become both a global idea and a global practice, there is an increasing need to better understand not only the design and implementation of transitional justice mechanisms, but their impact and significance as well. Any such effort requires an examination of the specific mechanisms of transitional justice, as well as the broader political context that gives shape to these mechanisms and their implementation. This monograph seeks to respond to this need by analyzing the experience of transitional justice in three countries that have been relatively understudied: Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador. The study draws upon research and workshops conducted over the course of eighteen months in each of these three countries with transitional justice practitioners, government authorities, and victims associations, to better understand the transitional justice processes in each country and from a comparative perspective. The project workshops were organized in close collaboration with in-country partner organizations: the Institute for Legal Defense (IDL) in Peru; the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH) in Guatemala; and the Foundation for Applied Legal Studies (FESPAD) in El Salvador. These three countries were selected for a number of reasons. First, the transitional justice literature on Latin America has focused primarily on the experience of repressive military rule in the Southern Cone of the region (Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay). While Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador all experienced authoritarian and military rule, they also experienced prolonged internal armed conflicts. The dynamics of post- conflict countries pose distinct challenges for transitional justice efforts. Second, unlike the Southern Cone, where victims were in large part middle and working-class political activists, the vast majority of victims in Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador come from historically marginalized sectors of society: poor, rural farmers. In the case of Peru and Guatemala, the majority of victims are also indigenous: 75% in the case of Peru, 80% in the case of Guatemala. The history of racism and socio-economic exclusion in these countries has meant that victims have faced greater hurdles in having their demands for truth and justice heard, which inevitably impacts the outcome of transitional justice processes. Finally, there have been significant changes over time in the transitional justice processes in each of these three countries that merit closer scrutiny. For example, in the cases of Peru and Guatemala, there have been important efforts to move away from situations of near-total impunity to greater accountability for crimes of the past. While truth commissions challenged official narratives of denial, many sectors of society, including some government officials, continue to deny that such abuses were committed. In the face of ongoing campaigns of denial, there have been significant efforts in each country to develop local memory sites and spaces of commemoration, to develop coalitions to strengthen the voices of victims, and to implement national programs to search for persons who were forcibly disappeared. This report seeks to identify the factors that have allowed for successful transitional justice processes as well as those that have hindered or undermined these processes in each of the three countries; to highlight innovative practices; and to discern key lessons from the transitional justice processes of these three countries that might be useful for other countries transitioning from a period of conflict and authoritarian rule.

Latin American Research Review , 2021

Despite persisting impunity, over the past several years Guatemala has made important strides in prosecuting war crimes committed during the internal armed conflict (1960–1996). This article provides an ethnographic account of the 2018 Molina Theissen trial, which resulted in the conviction of four senior military officials for crimes against humanity, aggravated sexual violence, and forced disappearance. An ethnographic study of this critical human rights trial can help us understand how a country with a relatively weak judicial system and well-organized spoilers has managed to hold the intellectual authors of wartime atrocities responsible for their acts. It also contributes to a richer understanding of the construction, meaning, and impact of human rights prosecutions for victims and the broader society, and what role they play in broader public debates over the historical memory of conflictual pasts.

Since the turn of the 21st century, the establishment and subsequent expansion of three (agro)extractive industries-sugarcane, oil palm, and nickel mining-in the Polochic valley lowlands of northern Guatemala has reduced local indigenous Q'eqchi' campesino (peasant) communities' access to farmland. Over the years, campesino groups and their allies have engaged in various forms of political contestation in "defence of territory". In 2015, Chabil Utzaj, the sugarcane company, ceased operations following a second mass occupation of its plantations. As a result, over 800 campesino households now each have access to around 3.5 ha of farmland. In this dissertation, I employ an extended livelihoods approach consisting of archival research, oral histories, key informant interviews, and household surveys grounded in agrarian political economy to explore how the struggle for defence of territory has contested this latest wave of territorialisation driven by (agro)extractive industries

Book 'Experiences on Justice, Truth and Memory When Facing Crimes Committed by the State', 2020

This chapter examines the attitudes to formal justice system(s), and to legal pluralism, that are present or latent when actors in Latin America call for and achieve the present-day prosecution of past or ongoing atrocity crimes, most - but not all - perpetrated by state forces. It asks whether and how this accountability for past crimes, in the specific form of prosecution, can be made less exclusionary, more accessible and more meaningful for communities, societies and institutions, including by enhancing its functions in reforming present-day policing and justice system capacity: creating 'enclaves of accountability' where previously 'enclaves of impunity' prevailed. Exploring the potential for 'microchanges' in the form of generational replacement in justice institutions in some post-transitional societies, it also considers and values, the many home-grown innovations in legal repertoire by activists, survivors and lawyers acting in relation to domestic (not international) courts. However it notes that successful accountability activism produces pushback from perpetrators and their defenders, and calls for formal justice advances to be protected and complemented by strategies for political and cultural change.

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 2008

Drawing on a range of fieldwork interviews, this paper discusses the opposition of civil society to nonferrous metals mining in Guatemala.

2019

Mining Bodies explores the history of U.S. experimentation in the Central American and Caribbean region during the twentieth century. It focuses in particular on experiments conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS), the Pan American Sanitary Bureau (PASB), and the Guatemalan government during the 1940s in Guatemala on sexually-transmitted infections (STIS). During these experiments, U.S. and Guatemalan doctors intentionally exposed at least 1500 Guatemalans to STIs. The doctors did not provide available treatments nor receive informed consent from the people they experimented upon. This dissertation argues that these experiments arose from a medical research network created by U.S. and Latin American institutions in Guatemala during the twentieth century. They also resulted from systemic factors that included U.S. imperialism in the Central American and Caribbean region, a culture of medicine in the United States and Guatemala, health professionals’ paternalism, and racis...

xperiences on Justice, Truth, and Memory: When Facing Crimes Committed by the State, 2019