Intervention by Invitation? Shared Sovereignty in the Fight against Impunity in Guatemala (original) (raw)
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CICIG: The Pattern of an External Institution Against the Impunity in Guatemala
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SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
principal investigator and author of the report, would like to thank Aída Romero Jiménez for her editorial assistance, translation, and administrative support for this project and this document. He also wishes to thank the entire Center for Latin American & Latino Studies (CLALS) team for its support, especially its director, Eric Hershberg, Professor Fulton Armstrong, and other anonymous reviewers for their comments on prior drafts. For more information on our project, you can visit our webpage: https://www.american.edu/centers/latin-american-latino-studies/prospects-for-an-International-Commission-against-Impunity-and-Corruption-in-El-Salvador-Lessonsfrom-Neighboring-Countries-in-Central-America.cfm CICIG and MACCIH were innovative attempts to reduce exclusionary governance by a restricted group of elites, to enhance democratic governance, and to model holding even the well-connected and powerful to account.
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Guatemala experienced a brutal armed conflict between 1960 and 1996, shaped by a series of complex and mutually reinforcing factors, manifest through a combination of ideological, ethnic and socioeconomic drivers reinforced by and framed within historical conditions of social and political exclusion, systemic institutional weakness and severe societal cleavage and division, in particular along racial lines. 6 The conflict was waged as guerrilla insurgencies-united through the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (National Guatemalan Revolutionary Unity, URNG)-mobilised against the lack of access to formal political channels, economic exclusion and horizontal inequalities, in particular, lack of access to and control of land. 7
This article is an ethnographic account of the various stages of a trial of local army collaborators accused of perpetrating massacres of civilians. The defendants were municipal-level paramilitaries; the complainants were survivors, and the prosecution was conducted by the state. International human rights lawyers used evidence from these cases to build a national-level case for the prosecution of the intellectual authors of state violence, but did not provide assistance for the prosecution of the local-level material authors. The case is used to highlight some of the tensions between the interests of communities and the practitioners of international human rights law, in the context of both groups' efforts to hold a criminal state accountable. The author argues that, in some cases, local-level trials are an essential component to postwar community reconstruction and that these cases should receive support from the international human rights community. Downloaded from Finally, the door opened and the announcement was made. The defendants were found guilty, and they would face the death penalty. A few in the crowd shouted and cheered, others looked awash with relief. The paramilitary supporters (held behind police lines) seemed dazed by the information. With mixed emotions, I rejoined the group of local activists from ADIVIMA and we all returned, in caravan, to Rabinal.