“To Speak the Law”: Contested Jurisdictions, Legal Legibility, and Sovereignty in Guatemala (original) (raw)

ICONnect 2022 Global Review of Constitutional Law: GUATEMALA

ICONnect 2022 Global Review of Constitutional Law, 2023

In 2022, Guatemala witnessed three main themes: controversial appointments and elections in high-level public positions; legislative initiatives concerning human rights and the configuration of public authorities; and the worsening of the situation of criminalization and restrictions on press freedom, in addition to attacks on judicial independence.

ICONnect 2023 Global Review of Constitutional Law: GUATEMALA

ICONnect 2023 Global Review of Constitutional Law, 2024

In 2023, Guatemala experienced intense waves of events mainly concerning two critical issues of constitutional relevance: Firstly, there was the instrumentalization of justice institutions to criminalize and intimidate key actors who have played a significant role in the fight against corruption and the defense of human rights. Secondly, there was the national electoral process, aimed at defining who would occupy, starting from January 2024, the Presidency and the Vice Presidency of the Republic, seats in the Congress and in the Central American Parliament (PARLACEN), as well as municipal corporations throughout the country.

The judiciary and indigenous rights in Guatemala

International Journal of Constitutional Law, 2007

In Latin America, indigenous peoples constitute a marginalized group that is using the courts, increasingly, as one means by which to pursue and defend its rights. In part, this is a result of the juridifi cation of its collective rights through processes of constitutional reform across the region during the 1980s and 1990s. It is also a consequence of the very limited advances that have been made to date in guaranteeing these rights in practice. The enlarged legal recognition of indigenous autonomy has occurred at the same time as judicial reform in implementation of economic policies promoting free trade and accelerated natural resource exploitation -policies that affect indigenous communities negatively and disproportionately. This combination of factors has meant that indigenous movements more and more have called on the judiciary in defense of their collective rights, albeit often with limited tangible effects.

CICIG: The Pattern of an External Institution Against the Impunity in Guatemala

This paper discusses the causes that motivated the creation of an external institution by the United Nations in Guatemala, and the non-desired effects of its labor for the Guatemalan government in the last year. The principal objective of this article consist in determinate how this singular commission, with no comparison in the world, may rebuild citizens confidence in their institutions after high levels of corruption and impunity related with the legal and legitimated power actors plus the real power actors in a geostrategic country. Those facts are directly related with the main theme of the Congress, because make the citizens and political class to rethink the governing and to whose interests should the government be responsive, all of this has a particular connection with the maintenance of inequality. The methodological approach consist in the statistics review, opinion surveys about corruption and a brief analysis of how social networking was used by Guatemalan citizens to criticize or support the International Commission against the Impunity – CICIG-before and after it accuses the past Guatemalan president and vice president in the case of organized crime for tax fraud.

Guatemala 2018: Facing A Constitutional Crossroad

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.

Intervention by Invitation? Shared Sovereignty in the Fight against Impunity in Guatemala

This article deals with the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a joint hybrid commission to investigate impunity in the context of illegal security networks and organized crime. It was set up as an external governance intervention through an agreement between the UN and the State of Guatemala in 2006 to strengthen state institutions in the face of a worsening security situation. Based on a delegation of governance in the modality of shared sovereignty, CICIG has been operating in the country since 2006, trying to generate support in the national realm and the judicial system of Guatemala while exposed to the critical junctures of the highly contested national debates on its existence. More specifically, the article analyses the patterns of appropriation and rejection of CICIG by different actor constellations. Through a critical discourse analysis, actor constellations are specified, various themes of appropriation and rejection are detected and specific aspects of CICIG's mandate are investigated.