This is chapter two of a chronicle first published by El Faro in Spanish in August 2014. It has now been translated amid the ongoing trial of Benedicto Lucas García on the charge of genocide against the Maya Ixil people. Read chapter one here.
Claudia Paz y Paz’s son was sitting in his mother’s office, reading patiently, bored, waiting for us to finish the interview. I also wanted it to end, in a sense. Or to start over again. I’d traveled all the way from San Salvador in the hopes of hearing the attorney general articulate a deep and dissecting analysis, one that might help me understand her conflict with the country’s conservative forces, that might sketch out the future. Instead, all I got were the predictable institutional answers, some of them cut out of a press release.
“The court overturned Ríos Montt’s [2013 genocide] conviction. Are we at a point of progress or regression?”
“I think it’s a step forward. The victims had an opportunity to testify in front of the perpetrator, in a situation of equality before the law… According to the victims, for them, this was an act of reparation. Now, given the court’s ruling, we’ll need to repeat the trial.”
“In recent years it seems like there have been moments when the Constitutional Court is open to remaking institutions anew, and then moments when it isn’t.”
“In the Attorney General’s Office, there are decisions that we agree with and decisions that we don’t agree with, but we respect them either way.”
“And do you believe that these decisions are the result of a process of honest judicial reflection, or are they influenced by other interests?”
“They’re legal arguments on which we take a different view. At the time we challenged them, and the court ruled… well, how it ruled…”
“Would you say the judiciary in Guatemala is generally independent? Is the case of [High-Stakes Tribunal Judge] Yassmín Barrios [who handed down the conviction of former de-facto president Efraín Ríos Montt] typical of the system as a whole?”
“There are very good judges, and there are judges who don’t act independently.”
Something didn’t add up. Earlier, I had read an unpublished article by Francisco Goldman, author of “The Art of Political Murder,” the seminal book for understanding the assassination of Bishop Juan Gerardi and how power operates in Guatemala. The article featured an intense interview with Attorney General Paz y Paz, along with two of her associates, Arturo Aguilar and Mynor Melgar. Their candidness in the interview, and the accusations leveled against the people who had boycotted the trial of Ríos Montt, were extraordinary — a far cry from the usual tone taken by the mild-mannered Paz y Paz, and light years away from the interview she was giving me now. Speaking to Goldman, the attorney general referred to “them” — to the “entrenched interests” that during the ex-dictator’s trial had appeared in court “without concealing their identity or doing anything at all” to safeguard their impunity. Among these “interests,” Aguilar and Melgar identified the Association of Guatemalan Military Veterans (AVEMILGUA), “the ideologues of the private sector,” President Otto Pérez Molina, the organization of Guatemalan business elites known as CACIF, and more.
“It was the genocide case that united this country’s most conservative sectors,” Aguilar says in the interview.
“Them,” Paz y Paz emphasizes.
And when Goldman asks her, not mincing words: “Were ‘they’ accomplices to the genocide?”
She responds: “Well, I imagine so, given how afraid they were.”
This is why I had expected her to be more candid in our conversation, more outspoken, and had even interpreted it as a good sign, as a sign of trust, that she had invited me to her office on a Saturday. Instead, I found her reserved, cautious. When I mentioned Goldman’s article, and quoted her own words back to her, she was surprised and said she didn’t remember saying them. There was an awkward silence. Our conversation continued, but the interview ended in a cloud of bewilderment.
Afterwards, as we descended to the ground floor in a private elevator, used by the attorney general for reasons of security, Claudia Paz y Paz asked if I could get her a copy of the article I had quoted. I explained that it was part of the book Crecer a Golpes, which would be out in a few weeks. Again, she looked surprised. As we said our goodbyes, I handed her my copy of the piece, Xeroxed and covered in my notes.
That meeting took place on January 25. A week later, on Friday, January 31, the magazine Contrapoder published a six-page excerpt of Goldman’s interview. To this day, Claudia Paz y Paz believes that it was this article, in Contrapoder, that cost her her job.
* * *
Ricardo Sagastume is late to our meeting at his office, so I have some time to kill. This serves me in two respects: One, I can watch the first half of Spain’s last and ultimately inconsequential soccer match at the World Cup, in Brazil; two, I can look at all the law degrees of his father, Ricardo Sagastume Vidaurre, which hang on the wooden walls of the waiting room. Later, with an obvious air of pride, he’ll show me a photograph of his father from 1982, when he served as president of Guatemala’s Supreme Court of Justice, shortly after being appointed to the position by Efraín Ríos Montt.
As head of a compromised Judiciary controlled by the dictator, Ricardo Sagastume Sr. had supported the suspension of habeas corpus and legitimized the special courts that fed on confessions made under torture, and whose faceless judges had ordered at least 15 executions in one single year. Some thirty years later, the man who filed the injunction before the Constitutional Court that succeeded —just as CACIF had hoped it would— in shortening Claudia Paz y Paz’s mandate by seven months, seems proud of this legacy.
Ricardo Sagastume Jr., also a lawyer, has his own high-profile career in Guatemala. Before the Constitutional Court ruled that Paz y Paz’s term was a continuation of Conrado Reyes’, and should therefore end exactly four years after the latter’s election in May, Sagastume was a professional soccer player. He also ran for president in 2011 with the backing of AVEMILGUA, whose leaders testified in favor of Ríos Montt during his trial. And he served as executive director of Guatemala’s Chamber of Industry, one of the most influential unions in CACIF. His attorney’s office is even located on the fourth floor of the Chamber’s headquarters. Clearly Sagastume has no interest in hiding his ideas or affiliations.
He is, in fact, a man of unusual transparency. “For those of us with some level of influence in the country, institutionality is of little or no importance,” he says at one point during our conversation. He criticizes the myopia of the powerful from the position he reserves for himself among Guatemala’s enlightened right-wing elites. Sagastume is one of those people who, despite being part of a world that thrives on secrets —the world of Guatemala’s business elite— he prides himself on intellectual honesty and tries to lie or conceal as little as possible. He sees himself as a good man. Perhaps deep down he is.
“You did what CACIF didn’t dare to do…”
“What nobody dared to do. And I’ll keep on doing it. The constitution had to be respected.”
“But you’re also one of the people who thought that the best thing for the country was for Claudia Paz y Paz to step down as attorney general as soon as possible.”
“Yes. If she had stayed on, it would have been a disaster. We would have lost the ability to govern the country. If we’re experiencing this level of polarization without Dr. Paz y Paz, imagine how terrible things would be with her. Furthermore, the trial of Mr. Sperisen has created an additional element. With or without Claudia Paz y Paz, the situation is a powder keg.”
Sagastume isn’t the first to mention the extrajudicial execution case against former top policeman Erwin Sperisen, though I was surprised to hear about it from him. Human rights defenders and journalists warned me in recent weeks that the same far-right columnists who in 2013 were the first to promote the line “if they condemn Ríos Montt, they condemn all of Guatemala” have now started arguing that the series of trials taking place in Europe for the Pavón Penitentiary Farm executions case are an offense to Guatemala’s sovereignty and to all decent Guatemalans; that the international left is trying to stain the Guatemalan flag, just as it did with the genocide trial; that exemplary officials, honest men, patriots are being lynched, first in Austria, now in Switzerland and Spain.
The matter might be of some interest were it not so clear what had happened at Pavón on the outskirts of Guatemala City, on Sep. 25, 2006.
That day, under the pretext of regaining control of the country’s main prison, which for years had been ruled by gangs of prisoners working in collusion with the authorities, those same authorities entered the prison accompanied by an army of police, arrested more than 1,700 prisoners, and executed seven of their leaders. The official version of events attributed the deaths to a confrontation. Even if there had been a lack of evidence, or a lack of witnesses testifying to the contrary, the fact that the victims were shot point blank would have been enough to expose the lie.
In 2013, the Guatemalan justice system convicted several of the perpetrators of these killings, but by that point, the officials from the Óscar Berger administration responsible for the operation had already escaped to Europe. The deputy director of police investigations, Javier Figueroa, sought refuge in Austria. Erwin Sperisen, the chubby, blonde-haired director of the National Civil Police, and Carlos Vielman, the interior minister, fled to Switzerland and Spain respectively, taking advantage of their dual nationalities. In Central America generally, but especially in racist Guatemala, the elite of the elite love to boast about their European origins and, if possible, their European nationalities, to distinguish themselves from all other Guatemalans.
Figueroa was acquitted in Austrian court of all responsibility for the Pavón executions, but Sperisen, the leader of the operation and, according to the CICIG, one of the men responsible for the death squads that operated in the country between 2004 and 2005, was sentenced to life imprisonment in Switzerland on June 5, 2014, for those seven extrajudicial executions. Vielman is in a Spanish prison, awaiting trial.
“Why do you say that the Sperisen and Vielman trial is a powder keg?”
“Because the wounds of ideologization that we thought had been healed have been reopened,” replies Sagastume.
“But one of the trials was in Switzerland and the other will be in Spain.”
“Yes, but they involve issues that we experience as Guatemalan citizens. We have to admit that justice hasn’t lived up to our expectations. And when the justice in a country works for some and not others, people get frustrated, and it doesn’t matter anymore who gets put on trial, because someone has to pay. The issue of genocide, and now the Sperisen case, pit a small socioeconomic elite against a large majority who think someone has to pay for what’s been happening in the country.”
“Are you implying that this is a revolt against the elites? Don’t you think you’re exaggerating?”
“But these events are of tremendous significance. Mr. Sperisen and Mr. Vielman were part of a government that the entire business sector supported. It openly supported [2003 presidential] candidate Óscar Berger and ultimately joined his government.”
“What you’re saying is that Sperisen and Vielman, whether or not they’re guilty, are being tried with the intention of doing damage to powerful groups?”
“That’s the perception. If we wanted to be objective, we would be prosecuting former interior ministers, prison system directors, and even former presidents of the country. But these were the men they chose.”
When Sagastume speaks of “Guatemalan citizens” it’s clear that he’s referring to traditional elites, industrialists, landowners, big businessmen, and investors who, as it happens, financed and even participated in some of the military operations carried out by the Ríos Montt government in the 80s, and who, during the Berger government, openly integrated themselves into the Executive to the point of almost taking over the cabinet. Foreign Minister Jorge Briz served as chair of Guatemala’s Chamber of Commerce. The country’s top factory owner, Miguel Fernández, was appointed commissioner of investment and competition. That Vielman, a member of a prominent family of businessmen and the former president of the Guatemalan Chamber of Industry, would be appointed minister of the interior was not an isolated decision. Accordingly, the reaction to his prosecution is a group reaction.
A group that, according to the ever-candid Sagastume, feels that their grip on the justice system is slipping.
“The elites have lost the control they once had over the processes for nominating public officials in the justice system. Twenty years ago, participating in the process and getting elected was easy, because there were fewer lawyers and there was more control. Now they don’t have that control.”
“Is that why the country’s business elites were afraid of how far Paz y Paz might take certain cases?”
“There was a series of events designed, firstly, to prosecute actors from the Guatemalan Army during the armed conflict, and next to prosecute other actors who collaborated or contributed to the Guatemalan state winning the war militarily. There was a subsequent phase that, whether it was justified or not, would take a toll on the business sector. That’s what’s happening with the Vielman case. Regardless of the fairness or unfairness of the process, there’s a witch hunt happening in Guatemala.”
“And the people who felt that they were victims of this witch hunt reacted and stopped Paz y Paz.”
“No, I think that, I think that… he…”
It’s amazing to hear this man, who speaks so confidently, suddenly stutter. He continues:
“I don’t think this was the work of the private sector. I’d like to think that they didn’t do anything to obstruct her work... My issue was an interpersonal one, a completely independent matter. The business sector is concerned with production, competition, markets... in short, the things they know how to do.”
Sagastume says that being the way he is and saying the things he says has caused problems “with them,” as he gestures to the ceiling, to the highest floors of the building, to the offices of the Chamber of Industry to which he belongs. It’s easy to believe. He makes one last comment, which sounds like a confession.
“You know, we’re afraid of being called members of a specific elite. But so what? We’re citizens like everyone else! The thing is, we’re not used to participating, because whenever we need something to go a certain way, we’ve always just slammed our fist down on the table” —he makes the gesture, pounding his fist on the table— “and everything gets sorted out. But of course, in the long run, that hurts us as a country…”
* * *
It was with a slamming of a fist on a table that Guatemala’s Congress —already in the process of electing a new attorney general, and with Paz y Paz already registered for re-election— approved, on May 13, 2014, a document stating that there had never been a genocide in Guatemala. “The elements that make up the aforementioned criminal offenses make it legally unfeasible for them to have occurred in Guatemala, principally in terms of the commission of genocide on our national soil,” the text reads. There were some who reacted with indignation, insisting that only a judge could make such a determination. Others, as a joke, asked the congressional deputies to likewise decree that Guatemala had won a World Cup, despite having never qualified for one.
That document has no legal value. The crime of genocide still exists in the Guatemalan Penal Code, and a judge can apply it if they consider that sufficient evidence exists to do so. In addition, in 1951, Guatemala ratified the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide by signing the Rome Statute. But that legislative agreement, technically a mere “resolution item,” sent an aggressive political message.
The man responsible for securing enough votes to pass the resolution was Luis José Fernández Chenal, vice chair of the Patriot Party. The proposal was introduced by two deputies from the Institutional Republican Party (PRI), the last remnants of what was once, the decade prior, a powerful political force known as the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG), a party founded by Ríos Montt that was key to his political resurrection and his rise to become president of Congress in 2009. It makes sense. Two representatives of a party in decline, honoring that party’s history and its former leader. The question is why Fernández Chenal, a 33-year-old with a meteoric career in the ruling party, the political godson of Otto Pérez Molina, a legislative shark who boasts about growing up after the war and considers his lack of ideology to be a merit, maneuvered to push through a resolution as controversial as it was useless.
“At the end of the day, as the leader of my party’s congressional bloc says, a resolution item is a political love poem. It has no connection to the law whatsoever,” Sagastume says, sitting in an office as luxurious as it is empty, a few meters from the halls of Congress. “Today, for example, we’re going to try to pass a resolution item for the 40th anniversary of the death of Miguel Ángel Asturias.
“And the poem about the genocide? Where did that come from?”
“Well, as the ruling coalition in Congress, you have to agree to issues that aren’t yours. We say, ‘We want to include a loan,’ and the other side says, ‘That’s fine, just let me include this certain issue.’ That’s what happened. The PRI said, ‘I’ll give you the two votes and you give me the resolution item in return.’”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that. To be clear, we never knew exactly what the text would say. ‘Let’s make a final point about national reconciliation,’ they said. The resolution was proposed by a deputy who had been in office for four or five legislative sessions, so nobody thought he’d write up some bullshit.”
The resolution was processed through Congress like a bank transaction. Nobody read the text beforehand. Almost nobody paid attention to its contents while it was being read out in the plenary session. It barely passed, with 87 votes out of 158. A narrow margin. 47 deputies were not present.
“I told the folks with URNG, who are left-wing: ‘Have you read the resolution? Go and read it, don’t act like sheep and just vote for it. Because we’re over there talking about the trial of the century and so on, and I don’t know what else…’” Fernández says, giving no indication he’s joking.
The votes from LIDER, the main opposition party, were easy to get. Days before, one of its founders, Edgar Ajcip, had resigned from the party, accusing its deputies of illegal business dealings and abuse of power. In exchange for votes in favor of the resolution item, the Patriot Party ensured that the legislative commission that would be tasked with investigating these crimes was never approved.
Nobody realized the extent of the trickery until the next day, when they read the headlines: “Congress declares there was no genocide.” Now, suddenly, the issue was the subject of fierce debate. Fernández Chenal says that in the subsequent plenary session seven deputies publicly apologized for having voted in favor: “Sorry, I made a mistake, I heard wrong,” they said, according to Chenal.
“The only ones who seemed relatively happy about it all were the two deputies from the PRI. One came out of the FRG and the other is a lawyer for the Castillo family, which has close ties to the Chamber of Industry and CACIF.”
“And what about you and your colleagues in the Patriot Party?”
“Don’t think we were throwing a big party about it. A lot of people, given President Pérez Molina’s military status, probably viewed it in a positive light. But it’s an issue that got blown out of proportion. The average Guatemalan is way more focused on being able to go out on the streets and not have their phone stolen than on finding out if there were clandestine graves in Chimaltenango 20 or 25 years ago. Look, in the Ixil area we won two mayoral seats and lost one. And in Quiché, we won by a huge margin. It’s not as if the trial affected us electorally. As I said, it got blown out of proportion.”
Fernández Chenal’s cynicism is a perfect match for a congress like Guatemala’s, where political parties get created and disappear with such frequency that the majority of deputies have belonged to at least two. Fourteen of the current deputies were active in the ranks of the FRG. The current congressional president, Arístides Crespo, a member of the Patriot Party, is one of them. Another is the lead congressional representative of the TODOS party. And because interests take precedence over ideology, all the parties have at least one former member of Ríos Montt’s party in their faction. That they would consider the issue of the genocide inconsequential, far removed from real politics, is all the more absurd when you consider that one of the Patriot Party deputies is the brother of Francisco García Gudiel, Ríos Montt’s histrionic defense attorney, responsible for the attempt to disqualify Yassmín Barrios. Guatemala is a tangled ball of yarn, its political elites a knot of personal connections at the top of the tangle.
“That said, there’s a second message contained in the resolution item,” the vice chair of the Patriot Party says. “Congress approves the budget for the MP [the Public Prosecutor’s Office], and Congress also approves the Judiciary’s budget, so the message sent to the new attorney general was ‘look, we don’t want to hear any talk about investigating genocide.’”
“That seems pretty clear.”
“Well yeah, you can read between the lines.”
I ask Fernández Chenal what issue his party so urgently needed to pass, and in exchange for what support was the resolution’s approval negotiated.
“I’d have to... if you give me five minutes I’ll remember. It had to be a major issue... I mean, you also wouldn’t believe that…”
Fernández’s account adds to the uncertainty surrounding the role played by Otto Pérez Molina and his party in the changes made to the Guatemalan justice system over the past year. Representatives from multiple civil society organizations say that the president, because of his military ties, his history of campaigning in Quiché, and the pressures exerted by business groups, played a key role in the annulment of the trial and in putting an end to the Paz y Paz era. The former attorney general’s inner circle is not unanimous in their assessment of the cause, but they all agree that without Pérez Molina’s endorsement, or his refusal to intervene, neither of the two developments could have happened.
Former Minister of Governance Mauricio López Bonilla, also an ex-military officer, and one of the officials closest to the president, disagrees with this hypothesis. I spoke to him over a long breakfast. He’s a quick-witted, intelligent man who knows he has all the answers. He worked very closely with Paz y Paz, and sources with the MP along with several mid-level officials from the Executive confirmed that the level of inter-institutional coordination between them was extraordinary. A man like him, who aspires one day to be president, doesn’t let ideological differences cloud his path to success.
“Did this administration celebrate Claudia Paz y Paz’s departure from the Public Prosecutor’s Office?
No. Our security team operated under the expectation that she would be able to continue in her position. Given the degree of precarity that often characterizes the country’s institutions, individual people tend to stand out, but we believe in the processes.”
“Does that mean your team favored her, or that it doesn’t matter to you who the person is?”
“What I mean is that it’s traditional for every president to want their own attorney general. Colom did it, Berger did it, Portillo did it... All the presidents come in with a questionnaire designed for the attorney general not to be able to answer, then they dismiss him and appoint another one. Just like everyone wants to have their own president of the Bank of Guatemala and their own solicitor general. President Otto Pérez, despite all the pressures he faced as a result of the ideological struggle that persists in the country, kept Claudia Paz y Paz on, contrary to all the rumors that he would dismiss her.”
“Who pressured him to remove Paz y Paz?”
“There’s always been pressure from many groups. Pressure from right-wing groups, who thought that an attorney general with a background in human rights wasn’t the best choice. But I’d invite you to ask Claudia Paz y Paz if she ever received a single phone call from the president to ask her for a favor, to exert pressure, or to talk to her about a specific case. Never.”
“So why isn’t she still the attorney general?”
“What the president decides, and what we in the government decide about handover in the Public Prosecutor’s Office, doesn’t guarantee any decision by the nominating commissions. But if Claudia Paz y Paz was among the group of six, there was a very high likelihood that she’d be appointed by the president. That’s something we knew.
Sources close to the nominating commissions, which serve as the preliminary filter in the selection process, suggest that this was precisely what prevented Claudia Paz y Paz from becoming one of the six final attorney general candidates on offer to the president. The nominating commission didn’t want to risk a situation in which Pérez Molina, influenced by the attorney general’s international image and the MP’s impressive track record, might choose to re-elect her to the post. So, despite boasting the second-highest score of all the candidates, in terms of qualifications and experience, only four of the thirteen commissioners voted for her. Four.
That day, the elites opposed to the prosecution of Ríos Montt —the “they” referenced by Claudia Paz in her interview with Goldman— breathed a sigh of relief. Ricardo Sagastume, the lawyer who cut the attorney general’s term short, put it like this: “When Paz y Paz failed to make the final cut of six nominees, it was like someone had been making a layer cake but suddenly stopped adding layers. The ideological issue was eliminated, and all that remained were special interests — the usual question of who was behind each of the six.” Ideology was a problem, but interests, whether group or individual, are negotiable, and provided “them” with the solution to the problem of justice.
“Did CACIF back Claudia Paz?”
“That’s entering the realm of speculation. CACIF isn’t a completely homogenous body. There are different currents of thought.”
“But CACIF issued official statements critical of her performance as attorney general.”
“I don’t remember... I don’t remember any official pronouncement. And there was also so much noise coming from groups who supported Claudia. There were even people collecting statements from other countries. You know the old saying, ‘Don’t help me, friend.’ Often if there’s a lot of insistence, resistance also increases. And how militant your supporters are also raises the level of confrontation.”
“Are you saying that whoever had the power to decide whether Claudia Paz would stay on felt threatened by the more radical wing of civil society?”
“No. I’m saying there’s a reason why Claudia Paz y Paz was the candidate with the highest number of objections. It was a trial of strength, if we want to look at it that way.”
* * *
The offices of the magazine Contrapoder are located on the top floor of a building in Guatemala City’s Zone 9 — close, very close, to Zone 10, the iconic district of trendy hotels and bars, known for being the headquarters of the country’s biggest corporations and their law firms. The three brains behind the magazine are sitting around a glass table: Director Juan Luis Font, Deputy Director Claudia Méndez, and Editor-in-Chief Paola Hurtado.
Claudia and Paola are investigative reporters with long and prestigious careers. Juan Luis directed the newspaper elPeriódico at a time when it was a benchmark for journalistic independence in Guatemala, and his years in television have made him the main face of credible, no-frills journalism in the country. Juan Luis is respected by the Left and listened to attently by right-wing elites.
“First of all, I want to tell you what happened with Frank’s interview,” Claudia tells me. She’s a long-time friend of Francisco Goldman and was the author’s main accomplice in researching the material for his 2007 book, The Art of Political Murder. In fact, she was the one who helped him get the controversial interview with Paz y Paz.
“That’s why I came,” I say.
It was probably the trust between the journalist and his source that led Claudia Paz and her associates to speak so openly to Goldman, and to assume, without asking, that the conversation was just a private chat between friends. The journalist recorded the conversation and, because he and the prosecutor never agreed that it would be off the record, he published it. Claudia Méndez knew from the beginning that Goldman was planning to use the interview for a book, and she says that when she heard it was about to be released, she suggested to her culture editor that he purchase the reproduction rights, without even reading it. When the editor reviewed the galley and read its content, he apparently found it interesting, but not especially explosive. Clearly he was less sensitive to the accusations it contained than the members of CACIF.
“I have a source who says that when they saw it, they said: ‘That’s it, enough is enough, we’re done,’” Paola says.
“No, the decision to make her step down wasn’t based on a news article,” Claudia counters. “It had been in the works for a long time. In fact, we published the piece in December. I was in a meeting with some lawyers who told me: ‘We’re thinking of asking the Constitutional Court when Paz y Paz has to leave, whether it’ll be in May or December.’”
“Of course, but let’s not be naïve,” Paola responds. “The article helped speed it along. It put a date on the decision. It had an impact. It had such an impact that when Claudia Paz came to do an interview on the channel, she was furious...”
Juan Luis Font is the same age as Paz y Paz, and they have known each other since they were three years old. The world of Guatemala’s well-to-do is a small one. They celebrated birthdays and the weddings of mutual friends together. He says that he never saw her so angry as the day that, shortly after the Constitutional Court cut her term short, she was invited on the television program hosted by the team at Contrapoder. He says that shortly before the show, the attorney general complained to him backstage, her eyes squinting in anger.
“You knew what this would lead to,” she told him.
“I’m sorry, Claudia, but all we did was print an interview you gave,” Juan Luis responded. “Do you think the article had an impact?”
Her response was sharp. She was hurt. “It wasn’t the right time.”
Through their sources, all three journalists had come to realize —just as Paz y Paz and her former private undersecretary Elvyn Díaz at some point realized— that the genocide sentence had caused various businessmen and political operatives, people with diverse interests, who otherwise couldn’t agree on anything, to say to each other, in the second half of 2013: “If we don’t defend ourselves, if we don’t close ranks, they’ll string us up by our necks.” There was a shared sense that the attorney general aimed to prosecute all of them for supporting Ríos Montt in the 1980s.
“But Claudia Paz y Paz said to me at one point: ‘Juan, considering everything it took to make this trial happen, do you think it would be possible to it again, to prosecute someone else?’” Juan Luis recalls. He says the right invented their own horror stories, that they frightened themselves.
Juan Luis grew up in the small town of Retalhuleu, in southern Guatemala, among ranchers and businessmen sympathetic to Ríos Montt — some of whom had participated in counterinsurgency bombing operations. He knows the minds of the men who made and make decisions in the country. He has spoken thousands of times with many of these men. I ask him to what extent all of this, all the power struggles over the justice system, is ideological, or if, in reality, it’s about the fear of losing the comfort of being above good and evil, of having no judge but your own conscience, if you have one.
“I don’t think it’s ideological,” he says. “I think it’s more about group interests. But they interpret these group interests as ideology, and consider anyone who questions the group interests to be ideological enemies.”
“I’ve never seen people here pull their hair out and violently attack their opponents for ideological reasons,” Paola adds. “The fear is that the criminal prosecutions could expand the radius to include them.”
“They benefited from the defeat of the guerrillas,” Juan Luis says. “That’s why they don’t question the methods that were used. ‘It’s what needed to happen,’ they say.”
“But when you paid Sperisen’s or Figueroa’s salary with private funds, or gave Vielman money to buy illegal weapons, when you know you were part of that, that’s when the alarm bells start going off,” adds Paola, speaking about the future, about what lies ahead.
It strikes me that they’ve been talking for a while now about “them,” about unnamed elites, about the same “them” that Aguilar, Melgar, and Claudia Paz y Paz referred to in their interview with Goldman. I point this out, and Juan Luis jumps up like a spring and grabs a recent edition of Contrapoder, from June, in which they had published an interview with Otto Pérez Molina.
“The president talks about ‘them’ too!” he says.
Then he points me to a part of the interview where Pérez Molina talks about his relationship with businessmen and the power struggles with CACIF over the regulation of hydroelectric and mining operations. He says, “They’re afraid we’ll keep going and start getting involved in other issues, like the state having a greater level of influence and involvement in these businesses.”
“But ‘them’ in this case is a huge group that ultimately is made up of wide swaths of the middle class,” explains Juan Luis. “That’s why I also think that the Sperisen and Vielman case is going to provoke even more backlash than the genocide case, because in the genocide case the responsibility was more generalized, but in this case, well, imagine if someone actually started looking into the specific funding streams...”
Silence falls over the room, an atmosphere almost of mourning, or of the exhaustion that builds before mustering some great effort.
“Do any of you think that ‘they’ will ever face justice in Guatemala?”
“For acts of violence committed during the war, no,” says Juan Luis Font, pausing briefly to think, then adding: “And for other kinds of acts, no.”
* * *
“Were you aware of the extent to which you would be testing the system?” I ask Elvyn Díaz, the attorney general’s sarcastic former undersecretary. We’re meeting in a bar with a bohemian vibe. One of the rooms features a conceptual art installation consisting of 200 knives hanging from the ceiling, and in the next room they serve gin and tonics, fries with bacon, and cheese croquettes. Díaz says he’s leaving the Public Prosecutor’s Office satisfied with everything they’ve achieved, optimistic. Nevertheless, his comments exude a certain bitterness. He didn’t like losing the battle. Deep down he feels that Claudia and her colleagues didn’t deserve the blow.
“I don’t think so. Not me, personally. But we didn’t adequately evaluate everyone involved in the system. We forgot the Constitutional Court was involved... and we’ve already seen what they’re made of.”
He tells me he’s worried about the sense of despair sweeping over the human rights community. He thinks that he and the rest of Paz y Paz’s team should talk to those organizations, explain what they’ve achieved, all the precedents that were set in terms of procedures, transparency, cases closed. He wants to tell them that their project of reforming the justice system isn’t over.
“If there’s one thing Claudia did right, it’s that she put her neck on the line for everything: for the successes and the failures,” he says. “There was a whole team behind Claudia, but she took on all the administrative fallout that would have made us look like idiots, all the preliminary hearings were on her... She made sure of that. She avoided screwing over her younger colleagues, because she knew that one day we’d have to stick our necks out too. And she did it all so well.”
“She has a clear long-term vision,” I say.
“We always have.”
Díaz tells me that he and many of his colleagues now consider it a mistake not to have nominated another candidate in addition to Claudia Paz, in the process of electing a new attorney general. He thinks that by not suggesting alternative candidates —by not putting forward a plan B, even though they knew that Paz y Paz’s candidacy had an army arrayed against it— they left the top prosecutor’s office in the hands of other interests.
* * *
Today is Claudia Paz y Paz’s last day as attorney general. A handful of secretaries and prosecutors bid her a tearful farewell as she leaves the office. Outside, a group of about 70 people, including human rights defenders and relatives of victims, have laid down a carpet of flowers and pine needles for her to walk on as she exits the building and descends the steps to the street, where her car is waiting. As she walks down the floral carpet to the applause of her supporters, women come out to greet her, hugging her, handing her a flower or two and whispering words in her ears. After each embrace, Claudia’s small eyes and round face fill with more and more emotion, until she drops her guard completely, bursts out of the cold armor she wore as attorney general, and cries too.
Benjamín Manuel, one of the directors of the Association for Justice and Reconciliation (AJR), the organization of war victims that brought charges against Ríos Montt, watches the scene from a few meters away, wearing the hard expression typical of the rural working poor. The look of someone with no emotions to hide. Manuel is short, closer to 70 than 60, and his shoes and pant legs are caked with mud. He traveled four hours from Baja Verapaz to be here, to stand in silence for these few minutes on Friday, May 16.
Walking one step behind her, Paz y Paz’s sister collects the flowers from the ground, a huge bouquet already in her hand. The attorney general’s family is there to support her. For Paz y Paz, leading the Public Prosecutor’s Office, and especially leaving it, is much more than just a matter of employment. For her, and for the people showing up to support her, Claudia Paz’s legacy is measured in much more than just statistics. She is the woman who toppled the symbolic barriers that insulated Guatemala’s justice system. Even if, just ten days later, some of those barriers would be raised back up.
Paz y Paz finally makes it to her vehicle. She waves goodbye, accepts one last hug, and disappears behind her tinted windows. The journey down the 80-foot-long staircase has taken her over 15 minutes. Her engine starts and the car leaves. Benjamín stays where he is, exchanges a few words with some acquaintances, people from the association, relatives of victims, and then sets off on his journey home.
* * *
The National Palace of Culture is the main symbol of political power in Guatemala. It is located in the capital’s central square, next to the Metropolitan Cathedral and the Human Rights Office of the Archbishop (ODHA), where both Claudia Paz and the slain bishop and human rights defender Juan José Gerardi once worked, and on whose columns are carved the names of the victims —the dead and the disappeared— collected by the Interdiocesan Project for the Recovery of Historical Memory (REHMI). Today, more than 200 guests have gathered in the National Palace’s Room of the Flags and are seated in rows of chairs waiting for the ceremonies to start. Almost all are men dressed in dark suits. In the eighth row, there is a woman wearing traditional Quiché clothing. She is a congresswoman, they tell me. Marimba music plays. A minute before the authorities enter the hall, former President Vinicio Cerezo arrives, smiling and greeting the guests as he walks in. The national anthem. Otto Pérez Molina swears in the new attorney general, Thelma Aldana. Speeches.
The new attorney general speaks about the quest for social harmony, affirms her “unwavering commitment to the independence of the MP,” and says that she will continue any “correct actions” that her predecessor may have taken. After Aldana, the president speaks about the magnificent work of the Public Prosecutor’s Office under the leadership of Claudia Paz y Paz. He insists three times that he has always respected the independence and autonomy of the attorney general, that the process of electing a new one was transparent, and that today is a great day for the country’s institutional integrity.
Paz y Paz gets up from her chair at the main table just once, to hug Aldana and to shake hands with the president after everyone finishes speaking. She had prepared a farewell speech, but no one invited her to read it.
* * *
After the event, I meet with Paz y Paz at the Public Prosecutor’s Office building. She has yet to complete the administrative process of handing over the office to her successor. The shelves are already empty. The outgoing attorney general is again accompanied by some of her family members. Four months have now passed since our previous meeting, and I’m hoping to find her free from the constraints of her position, more relaxed, willing to speak more openly, especially after yesterday’s emotional catharsis on the steps.
But no.
With an ever-present smile, with diplomacy, Claudia Paz dodges all of my invitations to give some dimension to the year that has passed since Ríos Montt’s conviction, and to the evidence that the sectors responsible for the subsequent annulment are still on a war path. I talk to her about congress’s resolution item, and the attempt to disqualify Yassmín Barrios, which could be seen as a threat to whomever might preside over the second trial. But she stays firmly planted on the level of legal assessment and qualifies the former development as “surprising” and the attack on Barrios as “extremely delicate.” She views the sanctions by the Guatemalan Bar Association against the judge as a legal aberration.
“If tomorrow the Supreme Court issues a ruling that this group of lawyers doesn’t like, could the group really sanction them and assert that they’re no longer Supreme Court justices?” she says.
She is especially taciturn when talking about her own situation, her implicit dismissal. She hides her frustration.
“Claudia, what did you do to make these people so angry?”
“That whole time, the Public Prosecutor’s Office was doing its job. It’s a judicial process. Some people will feel like the rulings protect their interests and others will feel like they don’t.”
“It seems like the people who feel affected are the people with a lot of power in the country.”
“I believe that, yes, this was the first time that sectors with power, people with power, faced judgement.”
“Do you think those sectors were more offended by the cases targeting corrupt politicians or by the trial of Ríos Montt?”
“There’s no doubt that the groups close to Ríos Montt and Rodríguez Sánchez made sure his voice would be heard more than the victims... And there was a political reaction against me, that much is clear. They’ve filed more lawsuits against me in these four months than in the previous three years.”
“And ultimately they chose not to reelect you.”
“The law obliged the commissioners to evaluate the academic, ethical, and professional values of the candidates, but after that, they can raise their hands to choose you or not. What are the reasons they decided not to raise their hands in my case? I can’t say, I don’t know.”
“Do you think the president had something to do with it?”
The president has always respected the autonomy of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.”
In our January interview, Paz y Paz had said that maintaining the transformations to the MP would depend on her successor, the next attorney general, having a commitment to the rule of law. She said that the important thing would be to choose a successor on merit. Thelma Aldana, in this respect, is a confusing figure with a mixed record. In 2009, she was one of the Supreme Court candidates that the CICIG accused of being controlled by a businessman known as “El Rey del Tenis.” The criticisms leveled against her by CICIG prosecutor Carlos Castresana were harsh: “Even though [...] the grading process aims to select candidates with a high profile, in the case of the magistrate, the rating she obtained in the following areas is striking. Merits in the area of human development: ZERO; participation in civil organizations and associations: ZERO; defense of the rule of law: ZERO; promoting human rights: ZERO; defense and promotion of multiculturalism...”
Despite this, Aldana was appointed to the Supreme Court and during her four years on the bench she never received a bad review. Claudia Paz thinks that she should be given the benefit of the doubt:
“We’ll have to wait and see. She was president of the Supreme Court and did some very important work supporting women who were victims of violence. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Hoping to get her to dispense with the formulaic responses, I remind Paz y Paz that she can say what she thinks now; she’s no longer the Attorney General. “Actually I still am, until 4:00 in the afternoon,” she says with a smile. “Ok then let’s do the interview at 5:00,” I joke.
She takes the joke in stride but doesn’t give in. I manage to break through her armor just once, when I point out that two days ago, 48 hours before she left the MP, she oversaw the arrest of Jairo Orellana Morales, a powerful local drug lord from the Zacapa region who specializes in drug trafficking and, according to reports from the U.S. government, has ties to the Zetas. Now Claudia Paz is smiling from ear to ear, her face so stretched she almost shuts her eyes, and she lets herself open up about the case. During the rest of our interview, she responds with extraordinary prudence.
“Does seeking justice in Guatemala continue to mean weighing the political consequences of every step?”
“Justice must be done, because it’s what the law demands and what the victims demand.”
Leaving office doesn’t mean Paz y Paz is leaving the game. She plans to return to academia, to teach at a university in Washington, D.C., to try to make an impact from there, and maybe one day to return to Guatemala. That’s why she’s still so cautious about what she says. And it’s not the only thing she’s cautious about.
I won’t learn about it for another two weeks, but tonight, Claudia Paz is leaving the country by plane. She and her team know that, once she’s been stripped of her immunity, the pending requests for preliminary hearings against her will become formal complaints, and they’re afraid of facing potential legal action. There are even rumors that the authorities intend to arrest her tomorrow, Sunday, or maybe Monday. This would be a major scandal, but her team isn’t willing to take the risk. Once she’s out of office, the attorney general who convicted Efraín Ríos Montt will be whisked out of the country in less than five hours.
* * *
Our car finally leaves the traffic of the capital behind and we make our way northeast, toward Nebaj. It’s almost ten in the morning. Today, June 30, is Army Day in Guatemala, a holiday that used to be celebrated with a military parade through the city’s main avenues. Used to. In 2008, the government yielded to pressure from organizations representing the children of the dead and disappeared, which boycotted the parades and succeeded in turning June 30 into a day of remembrance. Now the military commemorations are confined to the barracks, and the streets downtown are lined with murals and endless mosaics made from photos of the disappeared, which stay up all year round. On one wall in Zone 1, someone has graffitied: “Memory, disputed territory.”
A little over a year had passed since the genocide ruling, issued on May 10, 2013. Despite the conviction’s annulment, Guatemalans commemorated the anniversary in the capital and in several villages in the department of Quiché. In Chajul, one of the department’s three municipalities, which together with Nebaj and Cotzal make up the Ixil area, a few hundred people from around the region gathered to eat, give testimony, and honor the day with flowers. If Guatemala was once considered a single nation, since the conviction it has become clearer than ever that it is, in debates over history and justice, at least two.
The urban landscape transforms into small villages that line the sides of the road for a few hours, then disappear, leaving fields and forests in every direction. Allen González, who worked alongside Bishop Juan Gerardi with the Diocesan Caritas in Santa Cruz del Quiché in the late 1970s, is at the wheel. He had to leave the region when Gerardi, parishioners, and priests dying around him, and having escaped two attempts on his own life, decided to close the diocese. Not just to leave, but to close the diocese. In the 80s, Allen founded the Guatemalan Church in Exile. In the late 90s, he returned to the country to work on small-scale development projects with Ixil communities.
Allen is pessimistic about the future. He views Claudia Paz’s departure as a warning sign for those who continue to seek justice for crimes committed during the war. Even so, he says that the trial nevertheless served to demonstrate that it is not the people from the communities, from the Indigenous villages, who are evading justice; rather, it is the very powers that created the laws who now seek to avoid them — now that the justice system is no longer tailor-made to their interests.
“This is a long road, and we’ve barely started,” he says.
We pass through the canton of Santabal. Allen tells me that, a few kilometers from the road, there are two small communities home to more than 80 widows of people who were disappeared or killed in the 80s. A little farther down the road, he points out an enormous mansion surrounded by white walls.
“They turned this place into a torture house. In those days, masked soldiers would board the buses and take whoever they wanted and interrogate them for days.”
“Do you think there will be a second trial for Ríos Montt?”
“No. I think they’re going to drag their feet until that man dies. They’re going to play that never-ending game they always play here. Not to mention there’s the idea that putting him on trial is dividing the country.”
“(…)”
“It’s funny, you know. It seems like in Guatemala, injustice unites people more than justice.”
We arrive in Nebaj, a small town emblematic of the repression against the Ixil people. The central square, in front of the church, is where the executions took place. Nevertheless, the place was governed for years by the FRG, the party founded by Ríos Montt, and then later by the Patriot Party. During the trial, Otto Pérez Molina visited this town square wearing traditional Ixil clothing and handing out bags of food. The war divided the Ixil people between those who sought refuge in the town center, under protection of the Army, and those who fled to the mountains to die of hunger and be branded guerrillas. I see some Mara Salvatrucha graffiti painted on a wall behind the church. A few days ago, I learned that Nebaj is the municipality with the highest rate of adolescent suicides in Guatemala. If the Ixil past is terrifying, the future is also bleak.
* * *
Ever since I met Gaspar Velasco in 2010, I’ve heard him speak the names of his three sons dozens of times: Miguel Velasco Hermoso, Francisco Velasco Hermoso, and Juan Velasco Hermoso. All three were murdered during the Efraín Ríos Montt period, from March 1982 to August 1983. In total, he lost nine relatives during the war — fathers, brothers, sons. The Guatemalan state, in carrying out a policy of reconciliation and reparations, has compensated him for two of their deaths. That’s the limit. You can claim ten or 20 deaths, but the state will only pay you for a maximum of two. He says he was given 44,000 quetzals, or about $6,000. He spent it on some land to grow crops. He lost the land he once owned when he left his village, Bijolom, to escape the army.
The home where he receives me was also built with his own hands, from concrete blocks and metal sheets provided in recent years by the government. The state has supplied victims whose homes were burned by the Army in the 80s with materials to build new ones — small shacks with dirt-floors and flimsy roofs, like the kind crammed together in the slums of any Central American city.
Four years ago the village of La Libertad, located 25 kilometers north of Nebaj, was built entirely of wood. Now it’s full of those cinder block houses, although the community’s younger residents —those who thirty years ago were too young to have a home of their own to lose, and who have not received any help from the state— still live between the old wood planks. The young people who stayed, that is. In the center of town, a crew of workers is busy laying the foundation for what will be the biggest and most modern house in La Libertad, by far. Two floors, with a full electrical installation. The property belongs to a family whose daughter migrated to the United States.
Gaspar is an old jokester with a toothless smile. He’s one of the few people who speak Spanish in La Libertad. He’s a former director of the Association for Justice and Reconciliation, a role he delegated to a neighbor shortly before the trial. He also testified against Ríos Montt, attending the hearings day after day, week after week. On the day of the conviction, I watched him smile for hours on end. Not a euphoric smile, but the smile of someone satisfied with a job well done. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to him since.
“Does it make you feel defeated that the court overturned the conviction?”
“How could we be weak when we went through everything we went through, everything we suffered? They have money and they know we’re poor. That’s what happened. But the internationals know the facts now. Everyone knows what Ríos Montt did. How could we be weak when we’ve already gone to court two times?”
Sometimes it feels unreal to speak with the victims of the genocide, who continue to keep their cause alive so many years later. They have no room in their hearts for defeat. It’s as if they measure success and its deadlines on a different scale. In the book Guatemala: las líneas de su mano, Luis Cardoza y Aragón writes that, for Indigenous Maya, time does not exist. On our way to Nebaj, Allen told me that the key to understanding the Ixil is that they don’t live through themselves, they live through their community, so their focus isn’t on their own personal futures, it’s on the future of the community. I suppose that’s what drives Gaspar, who at 70 years old is exploding with life.
“There are always people… people who get discouraged. But not everyone,” Gaspar says. “Those of us who bear witness and give testimony know that the time will come when we will change the law, when we will change Guatemala. Because even if they take my life, none of this is for me, it’s for Guatemala.”
“And what about the Ixil youth?” I ask.
“Before, they would say, ‘We don’t know what the war was like, we don’t know what happened.’ But now they’re learning, because there’s a book about the conviction. That has helped. Now the young people know that we weren’t lying to them when we told them what happened.”
Gaspar assures me that if there’s a new trial, he’ll testify again. Standing next to him is Tomás Raimundo, who also testified before Judge Barrios. On his other side, looking like a skinny, dark-skinned Don Quixote, stands Francisco Matom. He only speaks Ixil, but with the help of an interpreter he once told me that he had watched his own brother’s body burn on the side of a road in 1983. Like most of his neighbors, he survives off the crops he grows and never misses a meeting about the trial, about mobilizing against mining in the area, or about fixing the town spring. I know him as a man of sharp ideas, who doesn’t beat around the bush:
“Now everyone knows what happened,” he told me at the time. “Now even our children know what happened. And you can’t overturn what has happened.”
“So,” I ask Don Gaspar again, “even though the conviction was overturned, the trial was still important, still meaningful?
“Ay Dios! The book spread the truth all over Guatemala, not just in Huehuetenango, not just in Quiché. Now everyone knows how it all happened, what the genocide was like.”
“And if Ríos Montt dies before he’s convicted?”
“If he dies without facing judgement, the world already knows what happened, and all of Guatemala should feel judged.”
Francisco uses different words to express what remains — what nothing and no one, not the closing of the case in Guatemala City, not the dismissal of a judge or the removal of an attorney general, can change. Unconcerned with the push and pull of the powerful, with the elites and their fears of losing control of the country, Francisco leans against the wall and delivers his own judgement:
“Whether I die or Ríos Montt dies no longer matters, because he has his family, he has his past, and he has his conscience.”
*With reporting from Valeria Guzmán. Carlos Dada took part in preparing and conducting the two interviews with Claudia Paz y Paz. Translated by Max Granger. Read chapter one: The Genocide Trial and the Tightrope.
