Unsolved Murder Weakens Faith in Guatemalan Justice System

GUATEMALA CITY — The assassin who crushed the skull of human rights activist Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi a year ago, in the most notorious murder since the end of the civil war here, in effect challenged authorities to a test: Prove that justice and accountability prevail in peacetime Guatemala, a country where for decades heinous crimes went unpunished.

Since the killing, the government has sought help from Spanish detectives and FBI laboratory specialists. Forensics experts exhumed the bishop’s decomposing body, and police chased down every attacker who had beaten his victim with a rock in the previous five years. At one point, prosecutors jailed three men based on three different theories about the murder.

Yet, with the anniversary of the killing now past, Guatemalan police have no suspect in custody and no evidence compelling enough to seek an arrest.

Gerardi’s death on April 26, 1998--two days after he released a scathing report on human rights abuses during this country’s 35-year armed conflict--has become the latest instance of how criminals here still get away with murder. The failed investigation has become the leading example of how Guatemala’s peacetime justice system is failing.

“How are we going to guarantee justice?” asked Rigoberta Menchu, the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner. “If victims do not have the hope of justice, it will be impossible to reach true reconciliation.”

Nor is the Gerardi case an isolated incident. Prosecutions of massacres, narcotics trafficking and “social cleansing” murders of street children have crumbled miserably. Lawyers and judges, not to mention ordinary citizens, worry that police and the courts have become the weak link that will destroy their hopes of forging a new, democratic Guatemala from the scrap metal of the genocidal civil war that ended in 1996.

As they lose their faith in justice and reconciliation, many middle-class Guatemalans are joining together in law-and-order organizations to demand more severe criminal sentences, including the recently implemented death penalty. The poor increasingly resort to lynchings, 73 last year, according to a U.N. report released in March.

Guatemalan courts, without a tradition of independence and integrity, are vulnerable to influence-peddling, whether in the form of drug traffickers’ bribes or as shadowy threats by the powerful. Even cases hailed as breakthroughs in justice ultimately show how few possibilities Guatemalans really have of getting fair trials.

“I have been at this for nine years,” said Hellen Mack, a bespectacled, chain-smoking civil engineer who has relentlessly pursued the killers of her sister, anthropologist Myrna Mack. The late Mack dared to write in 1990 about government policies that the United Nations recently termed genocide against the Maya Indian population.

The former soldier who stabbed Mack to death in her office parking lot was convicted in 1994, marking the first time a military man was sentenced for killing a civilian, according to prosecutors. Earlier this year, a judge ordered the officers accused of ordering the murder to stand trial, but a date has not been set.

“Myrna’s case has served as an inspiration,” Hellen Mack said. “But not all Guatemalans have the opportunities that I have had. It is very expensive to get justice done.”

Justice Too Pricey for the Poor

Getting justice done in Guatemala requires supplementing the meager budget of the prosecutor’s office with private funds.

“In principle, these cases open up the [country’s justice system], but they do not work for poor people,” said Donaldo Garcia Pelaez, chief clerk of the Guatemalan Supreme Court.

Garcia Pelaez works on the top floor of a white downtown building with sweeping marble staircases and hallways where the click of high heels echoes. The setting is far removed from the peeling walls and scuffed floors of the typical Guatemalan courthouse--nearly as far as the ideals of justice that the Supreme Court imparts are from the decisions rendered by harried provincial judges.

For example, legally, the government should pay the cost of prosecuting cases. “But that is not reality,” Garcia Pelaez said. “The prosecutor’s office does not have the budget to pay the expenses of witnesses.”

Nor can overworked prosecutors concentrate on a few cases. Lawyers in private practice typically charge a $250,000 retainer to take on high-profile cases like her sister’s murder, Hellen Mack said. She established a human rights foundation, which receives international contributions and thus spreads the cost of the legal staff working on her sister’s murder among several other cases.

Even those who have the backing of international contributions or personal fortunes learn the limits of Guatemalan justice.

With Menchu’s support, prosecutors managed to get the case of the 1995 slayings of at least a dozen war refugees in the northern Guatemala settlement of Xaman tried in a civilian, rather than a military, court.

The prosecutor who achieved that watershed decision fled the country, fearing death threats, Menchu said. Subsequently, she said, evidence was misplaced and mishandled so badly that she became convinced that the prosecution was purposely bungling the case, leading her to withdraw her support as a co-plaintiff.

Human rights prosecutor Julio Arango adamantly denies that claim and added that he regretted Menchu’s decision to withdraw from the case.

The Botran family, which owns one of Central America’s largest distilleries, invested an undisclosed amount of money to help the government prosecute the 1996 kidnapping and murder of 68-year-old matriarch Isabel Boniface de Botran. Three abductors were sentenced to death last September.

But the alleged mastermind, Fernando Palacios Luna, known as “the Negotiator,” walked out of Guatemala’s highest-security prison two years ago, bribing his way past seven sets of locked doors. He was captured in December 1997 in neighboring El Salvador, which has no death penalty, after allegedly committing another kidnapping there.

Judicial Corruption Runs Rampant

In cases without a wealthy, grieving family or indignant activist with international backing, defendants do not have to be O. J. Simpson to outspend the prosecution.

Guatemalans angrily cite the case of five Europeans, including a former executive of Swiss food giant Nestle and his son, who were convicted of smuggling cocaine out of the country in the stems of cut flowers. Last September, they received sentences ranging from 12 to 20 years.

The judge in the case was killed last week, three months after two of the men were acquitted on appeal, and the remaining three were dealt minor sentences commutable to a fine.

“How could they possibly receive such an absurd sentence on appeal when police found various kilograms of cocaine in the cars and on them personally?” asked Garcia Pelaez.

No one is suggesting that Guatemalan judicial corruption began with drug traffickers. Over the past five years, 372 judges have been dismissed for corruption. In the face of increased public pressure, more than half were forced from office last year, according to Justice Ministry records.

Contributing to the problem is the low salaries of lawyers and judges and the preparation for those who choose legal careers.

“The average Guatemalan lawyer is educated under a lax regime of indefinite duration and scarce academic demands,” stated a report recently published by a government-appointed committee of judges, police, lawyers and private citizens, including Hellen Mack.

One result is that Guatemalans who can afford it take their cases outside this country. After a Guatemalan court dismissed charges against two police officers accused in the 1990 torture-murders of five street children, the local affiliate of Covenant House--the New York-based organization that provides shelter for homeless and runaway youths--took the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in San Jose, Costa Rica. Since its inception two decades ago, the court has decided cases under the auspices of the Organization of American States.

The court heard testimony in January and is expected to deliver a verdict late this year.

“Our goal is to get the judicial system working in the country, so that there is justice,” said Bruce Harris, Central America director of Covenant House. “There is no justice for poor people.”

The Street Solution: Lynchings

Instead, the poor increasingly attack one another. The U.N. investigation of Guatemalan lynchings released in March revealed that “some lynching victims were completely innocent of the crimes that caused the general anger. In the overwhelming majority of cases, people accused of minor crimes have been tortured and killed.”

Even the middle class, in its own way, has begun to take on the role of law enforcement. Middle-class families formed the country’s first Neighborhood Watch here a decade ago to cut down on crime by keeping an eye on one another’s homes.

Faced with the increased amount and violence of crime, the organization has become a national lobbying group demanding tougher laws and reform of the justice system. But such reform seems remote after Guatemalan voters earlier this month rejected constitutional amendments needed to implement the 3-year-old peace accords, including 25 related to an overhaul of the justice system.

Before the vote, Hellen Mack warned that its failure would mean that “we will be stuck with an 18th century justice system. The country will fall apart, and a state of law will never become reality.”