Human rights in Guatemala

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Human rights is an issue in Guatemala. The establishment of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala has helped the Attorney General prosecute extrajudicial killings and corruption. There remains widespread impunity for abusers from the Guatemalan Civil War, which ran from 1960 to 1996, and Human Rights Watch considers threats and violence against unionists, journalists and lawyers a major concern. [1]

Contents

A trial for eight former Army members on charges related to the alleged disappearances of 130 people whose bodies were found among 550 at a base now run by the UN called CREOMPAZ has been stalled since it began in 2016 due to witness intimidation, among other factors. [2] [3]

History

After an ongoing civil war which lasted over 36 years in Guatemala, the country began to transition into a more stable and established democratic country. However, political administration were being passed trough the military, in which they began to engulf power over the country. [4] That being said, following the civil war, corruption began to appear all over the country and it eventually engulfed the whole country in common crimes and chaos. In 2013, the crime rate increased to where there was roughly 6,000 homicides per year in Guatemala. These violent killings included deaths of women and children. Not to mention, groups of women and organization began to fight for their rights and security after many years of being silenced. [5] Other cruel upbringings included discrimination towards indigenous groups, gang vandalism increasing, and an overall violation of human rights to the people of Guatemala. While Guatemala was fighting toward ending the corruption, there were many high-level government officials who were involved in organized crime. This resulted in only about 2% of the violent crimes going to trial. [6] In 2015, President Otto Pérez Molina, Vice President Roxana Baldetti, and other high officials lost their power and were prosecuted for participation in human rights violation. [7] Montt was convicted of the charges of genocide and was sentenced to 80–85 years in jail but this was soon over turned 10 days later. During his second trial Efrain Rios Montt died on April 1, 2018, at the age of 91. [8] [7]

Injustices in Indigenous Communities (Maya)

After the civil war, discrimination became a common occurrence towards the indigenous communities like the Mayas. Post war, the Maya community had another battle they were fighting asking for security, residency, and human rights. [9] Not to mention, their access to education, employment, and infrastructure is very limited. [10] Healthcare is a very essential and vital source of living, however, for the Mayans, that is not the case. Following the war, the Maya community remained impoverished which lead to poor health outcomes. [10] As a result, there is little to no healthcare provided for the Mayans. From the civil war to modern day Guatemala, the Maya communities are left alone as they are excluded from the country and government, in which they suffer from discrimination, racism, and structural violence. [11]

Gender

Fourteen women were found victims of sexual abuse by two military officers and sentenced to prison. The two officers both have prior criminal history, one with triple homicide with three women and the other is responsible for the disappearance of the husband's to his female victims . [12] That is just one of the many female homicides that occur in Guatemala. Females in Guatemala are high danger as they become easy target for any men in high power, whether is government officials, military officials, or drug trafficking. As the population of female is increasing, the homicide rate have also increased greatly with women of ages 16–30 are the victims. [13] In addition, the country's constitution does not protect LGBT rights and a bill proposed in 2017 bans students from learning about other sexual orientations and also bans same sex marriage. [14]

According to the International Human Rights Law Group, the Guatemalan criminal justice system is to blame for the poor human rights Guatemala faces. Cerezo announced it would now be their responsibility. [15] The Guatemalan criminal justice system is supposed to work with the court to punish those who violate human rights. However, the system is no longer the only ones working to "cleanse" the country. The public has also began to get involved, but much worse. They have taken the phrase "social cleaning" to another level where high levels of violence are present everywhere in Guatemala with attacks on human rights defenders, violence against women, discrimination towards indigenous communities. [16] With a system implemented to protect human rights in Guatemala the issue of these rights being violated remains. This is partly because the judges are not trained properly which can affect the investigation by causing them to be unreliable. [15] The Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) was established in 2007 and itworks to break down corruption within the country. [12] After a CICIG investigation the 2015 president, Cerezo collected bribes he was later arrested. [12] Human rights violations continue to increase with the Guatemalan people as victims because of improper protections from the government. [15] As a result of the many violations, narcotics has become a common occurrence with many kidnappings, human trafficking, and criminal activities, that have not been stopped due to the corruption of government security and communal leaders rising and gaining power. [17]

On 16 May 2022, Alejandro Giammattei reappointed María Consuelo Porras as attorney general, to serve for another four years. The decision posed a serious risk to human rights and the rule of law in the country. During her initial years in office, Porras has undermined investigations into corruption and human rights abuses, and brought arbitrary criminal proceedings against journalists, judges, and prosecutors. [18]

Solutions

International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala organization was first established on December 12, 2005. After years of human rights violation in Guatemala, government officials began leading towards creating an established organization that would investigate the many variety of cases that were left unsolved. After getting the assistance from the United Nations, the government of Guatemala formulated an organization called Commission of Investigation of Illegal Bodies and Clandestine Security Apparatuses (CICIACS). The creation of this organization was to combat all forms of corruption and crime impacting the country. [19] However, this caused a controversy in Guatemala, which resulted in it being denied because the ruling deemed it to be a violation of the exclusive constitutional delegation of power to the Public Ministry. [6] After being denied the government of Guatemala revised the document and the regulation of the CICIACS to eliminate all the unconstitutional issues that were brought to their attention from the constitutional court. When they were finished they re-introduced the proposition to the court and after the review the Constitutional court approved it. They renamed it International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). The government of Guatemala and the United Nations signed it into order on December 12, 2005. [20] Nonetheless, International Labor Organization Convention No. 169 gives the indigenous peoples the right to approve or disapprove of natural resource development projects that may affect them since they live in rural areas that are sometimes of interest to many project developers. [21]

Related Research Articles

The history of Guatemala traces back to the Maya civilization, with the country's modern history beginning with the Spanish conquest of Guatemala in 1524. By 1000 AD, most of the major Classic-era Maya cities in the Petén Basin, located in the northern lowlands, had been abandoned. The Maya states in the Belize central highlands continued to thrive until the Spanish conquistador Pedro de Alvarado—called "The Invader" by the Maya—arrived in 1525 and began to subdue the indigenous populations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rigoberta Menchú</span> Kiche Guatemalan human rights activist (born 1959)

Rigoberta Menchú Tum is a K'iche' Guatemalan human rights activist, feminist, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Menchú has dedicated her life to publicizing the rights of Guatemala's Indigenous peoples during and after the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996), and to promoting Indigenous rights internationally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Efraín Ríos Montt</span> 38th President of Guatemala from 1982 to 1983

José Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan military officer, politician, and dictator who served as de facto President of Guatemala from 1982 to 1983. His brief tenure as chief executive was one of the bloodiest periods in the long-running Guatemalan Civil War. Ríos Montt's counter-insurgency strategies significantly weakened the Marxist guerrillas organized under the umbrella of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG) while also leading to accusations of war crimes and genocide perpetrated by the Guatemalan Army under his leadership.

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Óscar José Rafael Berger Perdomo is a Guatemalan businessman and politician who served as the 46th president of Guatemala from 2004 to 2008. He previously served as mayor of Guatemala City from 1991 to 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Femicide</span> Murder of women or girls because of their sex

Femicide or feminicide is a term for the murdering of women, often because of their gender. Femicide can be perpetrated by either sex but is more often committed by men. This is most likely due to unequal power between men and women as well as harmful gender roles, stereotypes, or social norms.

In 1994 Guatemala's Commission for Historical Clarification - La Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) - was created as a response to the thousands of atrocities and human rights violations committed during the decades long civil war that began in 1962 and ended in the late 1990s with United Nations-facilitated peace accords. The commission operated under a two-year mandate, from 1997 to 1999, and employed three commissioners: one Guatemalan man, one male non-national, and one Mayan woman. The mandate of the commission was not to judge but to clarify the past with "objectivity, equity and impartiality."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Truth commission</span> Commission tasked with discovering and revealing past wrongdoing

A truth commission, also known as a truth and reconciliation commission or truth and justice commission, is an official body tasked with discovering and revealing past wrongdoing by a government, in the hope of resolving conflict left over from the past. Truth commissions are, under various names, occasionally set up by states emerging from periods of internal unrest, civil war, or dictatorship marked by human rights abuses. In both their truth-seeking and reconciling functions, truth commissions have political implications: they "constantly make choices when they define such basic objectives as truth, reconciliation, justice, memory, reparation, and recognition, and decide how these objectives should be met and whose needs should be served".

Human rights in Mexico refers to moral principles or norms that describe certain standards of human behaviour in Mexico, and are regularly protected as legal rights in municipal and international law. The problems include torture, extrajudicial killings and summary executions, police repression, sexual murder, and, more recently, news reporter assassinations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Human rights in Paraguay</span>

Technically speaking, Paraguayan law prohibits discrimination on grounds of gender, race, language, disability, or social status, but there is nonetheless widespread discrimination.

Impunity is the ability to act with exemption from punishments, losses, or other negative consequences. In the international law of human rights, impunity is failure to bring perpetrators of human rights violations to justice and, as such, itself constitutes a denial of the victims' right to justice and redress. Impunity is especially common in countries which lack the tradition of rule of law, or suffer from pervasive corruption, or contain entrenched systems of patronage, or where the judiciary is weak or members of the security forces are protected by special jurisdictions or immunities. Impunity is sometimes considered a form of denialism of historical crimes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crime and violence in Latin America</span>

Crime and violence affect the lives of millions of people in Latin America. Some consider social inequality to be a major contributing factor to levels of violence in Latin America, where the state fails to prevent crime and organized crime takes over State control in areas where the State is unable to assist the society such as in impoverished communities. In the years following the transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, crime and violence have become major problems in Latin America. The region experienced more than 2.5 million murders between 2000 and 2017. Several studies indicated the existence of an epidemic in the region; the Pan American Health Organization called violence in Latin America "the social pandemic of the 20th century." Apart from the direct human cost, the rise in crime and violence has imposed significant social costs and has made much more difficult the processes of economic and social development, democratic consolidation and regional integration in the Americas.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guatemalan genocide</span> 1981–1983 genocide of Maya people in Guatemala

The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide, or the Silent Holocaust, was the mass killing of the Maya Indigenous people during the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) by successive Guatemalan military governments that first took power following the CIA instigated 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilians at the hands of security forces had been widespread since 1965, and was a longstanding policy of the military regime. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against civilians.

The International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala was an international body charged with investigating and prosecuting serious crime in Guatemala. On January 7, 2019, the agreement between the United Nations and Guatemala was terminated by Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales, evoking CICIG's alleged participation in illegal acts, abuse of authority and acts against the constitution. The UN rejected this unilateral termination, and the country's highest law court ruled against the president's decision. CICIG's term was scheduled to end in September 2019. Morales' decision, approved by the country's business elite, triggered an institutional crisis in Guatemala, as the Constitutional court sided with CICIG. Morales is being investigated concerning his campaign financing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Violence against women in Guatemala</span>

Violence against women in Guatemala reached severe levels during the long-running Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996), and the continuing impact of that conflict has contributed to the present high levels of violence against women in that nation. During the armed conflict, rape was used as a weapon of war.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Claudia Paz y Paz</span>

Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey is a Guatemalan attorney who served as the first female attorney general of Guatemala, from 2010 to 2014. A former judge and litigator, Paz y Paz made unprecedented strides in the prosecution of organized crime, corruption, and human rights violations.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucrecia Hernández Mack</span> Guatemalan politician (1973–2023)

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Iván Velásquez Gómez</span>

Iván Velásquez Gómez is a Colombian jurist and diplomat. From October 2013 to September 2019, he was the head of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). In August 2022, he took office as Minister of National Defence under President Gustavo Petro.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Right to truth</span> Right for victims to know what happened

Right to truth is the right, in the case of grave violations of human rights, for the victims and their families or societies to have access to the truth of what happened. The right to truth is closely related to, but distinct from, the state obligation to investigate and prosecute serious state violations of human rights. Right to truth is a form of victims' rights; it is especially relevant to transitional justice in dealing with past abuses of human rights. In 2006, Yasmin Naqvi concluded that the right to truth "stands somewhere on the threshold of a legal norm and a narrative device ... somewhere above a good argument and somewhere below a clear legal rule".

References

  1. ↑ "Guatemala | Country Page | World | Human Rights Watch". www.hrw.org.
  2. ↑ "Eight Military Officers to Stand Trial in CREOMPAZ Grave Crimes Case". International Justice Monitor. June 17, 2016.
  3. ↑ "Human rights in Guatemala". Amnesty International.
  4. ↑ Hey, Hilde (1995). Gross human rights violations: a search for causes: a study of Guatemala and Costa Rica. International studies in human rights. The Hague ; Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. ISBN   978-90-411-0146-4.
  5. ↑ Blacklock, C.; MacDonald, L. (1998). "Human Rights and Citizenship in Guatemala and Mexico: From "Strategic" to "New" Universalism?". Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society. 5 (2): 132–157. doi:10.1093/sp/5.2.132 . Retrieved 2024-11-13.
  6. 1 2 "International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala". CICIG (International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala) (in European Spanish). 2018-03-05. Retrieved 2018-10-19.
  7. 1 2 Pallister, Kevin (2017). "Guatemala: The Fight for Accountability and the Rule of Law". Revista de Ciencia Política (Santiago). 37 (2): 471–492. doi: 10.4067/s0718-090x2017000200471 . ISSN   0718-090X.
  8. ↑ "Former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt dies while facing genocide charges". NBC News. Retrieved 2018-11-22.
  9. ↑ Burrell, Jennifer (2010). "In and Out of Rights: Security, Migration, and Human Rights Talk in Postwar Guatemala". The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. 15 (1): 90–115. doi:10.1111/j.1935-4940.2010.01064.x. ISSN   1935-4940.
  10. 1 2 "The Right to Health in Indigenous Guatemala: Prevailing Historical Structures in the Context of Health Care – Health and Human Rights Journal". www.hhrjournal.org. Retrieved 2024-12-09.
  11. ↑ Pitarch Ramón, Pedro; Speed, Shannon; Leyva Solano, Xochitl, eds. (2008). Human rights in the Maya region: global politics, cultural contentions, and moral engagements. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN   978-0-8223-4296-0. OCLC   209335072.
  12. 1 2 3 "World Report 2018: Rights Trends in Guatemala". Human Rights Watch. 2018-01-05. Retrieved 2018-10-18.
  13. ↑ Natsiuk, M. V.; Chekman, I. S. (April 1975). "[Level of nicotinamide coenzymes in the liver and myocardium of rats poisoned with dichlorethane]". Biulleten' Eksperimental'noi Biologii I Meditsiny. 79 (4): 58–60. ISSN   0365-9615. PMID   104.
  14. ↑ Human Rights Watch (2018-01-05), "Guatemala: Events of 2017", English, retrieved 2023-12-27
  15. 1 2 3 Group, International Human Rights Law (1990). "Review of Maximizing Deniability: The Justice System and Human Rights in Guatemala". Human Rights Quarterly. 12 (1): 180–181. doi:10.2307/762176. JSTOR   762176.{{cite journal}}: |last1= has generic name (help)
  16. ↑ Elgueta, Sebastian (2010-11-01). "A Human Rights Murder Mystery in Guatemala: Alternative Formats for Reporting on Complex Challenges to Human Rights". Journal of Human Rights Practice. 2 (3): 408–421. doi:10.1093/jhuman/huq011. ISSN   1757-9619.
  17. ↑ Elgueta, S. (2010-11-01). "A Human Rights Murder Mystery in Guatemala: Alternative Formats for Reporting on Complex Challenges to Human Rights". Journal of Human Rights Practice. 2 (3): 408–421. doi:10.1093/jhuman/huq011. ISSN   1757-9619.
  18. ↑ "Guatemala: Attorney General's Reappointment Threatens Rights". Human Rights Watch. 19 May 2022. Retrieved 19 May 2022.
  19. ↑ Moran, Paulina (2023-06-15). "The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG): A Solution to Organized Crime?". Philippe Zacaïr, Stacy Mallicoat. doi:10.5281/ZENODO.8067571.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  20. ↑ "CICIG (International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala) | Department of Political Affairs". www.un.org. United Nations. Retrieved 2018-10-19.
  21. ↑ Chan, W. F.; Ong, H. C.; Wong, W. P. (1975). "Acute bacterial myositis following septic abortion. An unusual complication". International Journal of Gynaecology and Obstetrics: The Official Organ of the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics. 13 (1): 6–8. doi:10.1002/j.1879-3479.1975.tb00325.x. ISSN   0020-7292. PMID   260.
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