This is chapter one 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 two here.
The day they knocked her down, Claudia Paz y Paz thought she had won the match. It was a Thursday. The attorney general had told her closest colleagues to join her at 11:00 a.m. in her office for a meeting.
Paz y Paz had been under intense political fire for months. In the span of just three years, she had imprisoned entire structures of the Mara Salvatrucha-13 and 18th Street gangs, as well as military personnel accused of war crimes and roughly a hundred members of the Zetas. She had overseen the arrests and extradition to the United States of local drug lords who, thanks to Guatemala’s political godfathers, had enjoyed virtual immunity for years. Paz y Paz had come to symbolize a new era for justice in Central America. But prosecuting the former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide in 2013 put her squarely in the crosshairs of Guatemala’s traditional right-wing power structure.
The country’s business elite had been trying for months to get her out of office by May 2014, though her term was set to end in December. In Paz y Paz’s round, freckled face they saw the specter of leftism, the old communism, coming to capture the justice system and turn it against them. They wanted her out. They wanted to give her a clear demonstration of their enduring and effective power.
This was the game that the attorney general thought she had won on Thursday, February 5. She thought, due to a miscalculation, that the deadline for the Constitutional Court to rule on her case had passed. Her optimism was further bolstered by statements made the previous Thursday by Manuel Barquín, vice president of Congress, endorsing two technical reports issued by the Supreme Court of Justice, which showed favor to Paz y Paz. The law and politics, she thought, were both on her side.
At 11:00 a.m. her entire team showed up. In her usual tone —measured and deliberate, ideal for sharing stories or secrets— Claudia Paz told them about her next move in that long game of chess that is the struggle for justice in Guatemala. Arturo Aguilar, who served for years as her right-hand man and, up to that moment, as her private secretary in the Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP by its initials in Spanish), would leave his post to become a special advisor to the CICIG, the United Nations-backed International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala. Paz y Paz and Aguilar had discussed the plan for several weeks. They had already decided on it and had already spoken to the CICIG commissioner, a former Colombian prosecutor, who offered his full endorsement of the transfer.
Elvyn Díaz participated in the 11:00 o’clock meeting. He was the attorney general’s private undersecretary.
“That day, Claudia told us that she knew 2014 would be her last year at the MP, but that we could still leave things in a good place, so that when we left, everything wouldn’t just fall apart and there wouldn’t be a witch hunt against us,” he says, speaking to me four months later, no longer with the office. “Hence the decision to transfer Arturo.”
“And how did you all respond?” I asked.
“We supported the boss’s decision. We told her: ‘If your team already evaluated it and you think it’s good for the group, go ahead.’”
It was a defensive move. Even though Paz y Paz thought that the fight over the term of her mandate was over, she knew that there would be other attempts to undermine her. With Aguilar’s transfer, she hoped to infuse other institutions with her three years of experience in office, embodied in her team: a dozen young human rights and criminal lawyers with whom she had worked for over a decade. The oldest of the bunch was 50. And some, like Aguilar, were barely over 30.
Díaz is 29 and carries himself like a straight-A student. He talks fast and has a sharp wit and a bitter, sarcastic laugh. Shortly after the meeting, he had lunch with two journalists from Plaza Pública. He was with them when he got the call: The Constitutional Court had cut the attorney general’s term short.
“In December, a group of lawyers from Zone 10 met with Pérez Aguilera, the president of the Constitutional Court, and he told them then that Paz y Paz was leaving in May,” he says. “So we knew that... But we spent a whole week celebrating anyway. They fooled us, and they did a good job, too, I’ll give them that.
* * *
In December 2010, not a single structure of power in Guatemala, not a single person associated with the justice system, would have bet that President Álvaro Colom would choose Claudia Paz y Paz as attorney general. So says, in these exact words, one of the men who most influenced him to do so: Carlos Menocal, a former journalist who at the time served as minister of governance, overseeing the police and prisons.
A stout man in a casual jacket, backpack slung over one shoulder, with a neatly trimmed beard and designer eyeglasses, Menocal hesitates over whether to order a coffee. During our conversation he seems perpetually in a hurry, as if he were very busy and might need to leave at any moment, yet he spends nearly an hour providing details and explanations, as if knowing what happened four years ago was part of his job. In this respect, Carlos Menocal is more journalist than politician.
“Álvaro Colom was a little self-conscious because the system of transitional justice wasn’t seeing any progress under his administration,” Menocal says. “The appointment of Claudia Paz, a human rights expert, was the perfect fit.”
“So putting Paz y Paz in office was a personal crusade of Colom’s, to provide justice to the victims of the war?”
“I’d say it was a personal crusade of his, and of some of us who supported him.”
In reality, transitional justice was not Colom’s only concern, nor was it the only concern of his closest ministers. Guatemala was still reeling from the 2007 murder of three Salvadoran members of Central American Parliament at the hands of a group of corrupt police officers. Six days after the crime, an armed commando unit entered the “El Boquerón” maximum security prison where the perpetrators were being held, executed them, and left the same way they had entered. No door was forced. No guard saw anything. No one was ever caught. The government of then-President Óscar Berger, in an act of denial or complicity, tried to blame the crime on other prisoners without any evidence or witnesses.
It’s a known fact that, during the Berger administration, death squads tasked with “social cleansing” operated within the National Civil Police. The massacre at El Boquerón was not the only mass killing committed inside Guatemala’s prisons during those years. Prisons became sites of score-settling between criminal groups, carried out with the complicity of the state. But silencing the perpetrators of a crime with diplomatic implications by shooting them to death inside a prison was the ultimate dramatization of a totally broken justice system.
One year later, by then in power, Álvaro Colom discovered seven microphones and two cameras hidden in his office. Someone was spying on the president of the republic. The man who was supposed to be cleaning up Guatemala’s corrupt security forces couldn’t even trust his own bodyguards.
In 2009 a small revolution gained steam within the justice system, aimed at preventing Guatemala from becoming a failed state. The CICIG, created in 2006 to be an international crutch for a crippled country, began exposing the illegal, parallel apparatus operating within the Guatemalan state, and pressure from the CICIG as well international cooperation managed to provide Guatemala’s prosecutor’s office with new legal and technical investigation tools, like phone-tapping and ballistics labs. On top of this, the gradual emergence of new economic power groups unaffiliated with the traditional families altered the influence map in the judiciary and allowed the Constitutional Court to unseal classified military documents and to rule that disappearance —a crime commonly committed during the civil war— was not subject to a statute of limitations because the injury was of a permanent nature. The Spanish and U.S. governments even sponsored and trained small groups of young officers specialized in the prosecution of homicides and extortion to transform the National Civil Police, long considered an impenetrable hotbed of corruption.
But it wasn’t enough. By March 2010, Colom was forced to dismiss three consecutive governance ministers and two police chiefs in just two years on corruption charges. His government came close to facing a coup in 2009, and found itself navigating a mess of power struggles in which it was difficult to distinguish ambitions of a purely political nature from those with criminal roots. Despite some isolated advances, the magical country that millions of tourists visit every year in search of Maya ruins had become a ruin unto itself.
The final shock came in June 2010: the commissioner of the CICIG, a Spaniard named Carlos Castresana, publicly resigned from his post, claiming that Colom had selected a corrupt attorney general despite knowing, from reports that Castresana had given the president himself, that this individual had ties to drug trafficking. The prosecutor in question, Conrado Reyes, was forced to resign, and the selection process began anew. This is why Colom was able to choose Claudia Paz y Paz later that December.
When I ask Menocal how he explains that the same Álvaro Colom who chose Paz y Paz as attorney general had also, just a few months earlier, chosen Reyes, his political instincts kick back in and he washes the president’s hands of the matter:
“Colom listens a lot. It was an overly democratic decision. He listened to a lot of different sectors, and especially to his party.”
“And everyone says that, in December, he listened to you.”
“And to other close officials. Despite the pressures from his party, from the business community, and from within his own government, in December, he made the right decision for the country, not for his party, not even for himself.”
The members of the pre-selection committee had included Paz y Paz on their list of six final candidates for attorney general in hopes that her academic and progressive profile might polish the process in the eyes of the public, at a time when the legitimacy of the country’s political system was in the gutter. They assumed that the president would never do anything as outlandish as choose the lawyer with the most provocative ideas, who had dedicated years to investigating crimes committed during the war, and who had neither friends nor debts in politics. They were wrong. At noon on Thursday, Dec. 9, 2010, Colom told Menocal to get ready, that Paz y Paz would be appointed at 6:00 that afternoon, and that he would be the only member of the cabinet present. He also asked him to send urgent invitations to the other branches of government and to the diplomatic delegations.
Only six ambassadors attended the event, including the U.S. ambassador. The attorney general, who in the years to follow would revolutionize the Public Prosecutor’s Office, was sworn in with a swift ceremony in a small room — a far cry from the pomp and circumstance that had been the norm for her predecessors. Colom had to leave on a trip the next day and he wanted to get the attorney general sworn-in. He feared that, if he waited, groups opposed to the appointment would gain strength and counterattack in his absence.
Under such precarious circumstances, Colom’s political support for Paz y Paz would be of little use to her once in office. Operating with the clear intention of obstructing her work, Congress would spend the next four years failing to appoint representatives to the MP’s advisory council, which is tasked with authorizing administrative decisions such as dismissals. Although Paz y Paz agitated from within the MP and attempted an internal purge, during her tenure as attorney general, she was unable to fire any of the 286 prosecutors and employees whom she had ousted for being corrupt or useless. When she left office, many of these employees were still collecting their salaries, despite having been dismissed from their positions.
Attorney General Paz y Paz never gained full control over the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Elvyn Díaz says that she never managed to reign in the customs division, which only resolved one case during her entire tenure, nor its environmental office, both of which were in the hands of prosecutors she didn’t trust, but who enjoyed protection due to their union affiliations. Nor did she have much influence over offices more geographically removed from the capital, to where she would often assign prosecutors she had suspicions about, but couldn’t outright dismiss.
What’s more, Paz y Paz’s time in office was overshadowed from the outset by the possibility of her dismissal. Rumors that she wouldn’t last long circulated far and wide, including in the pages of the newspapers. In June 2011, barely six months into her term, a journalist asked her about this relentless background noise. Her response at the time assumes an ominous tone three years later: “The law is clear and I stand by what I said: it would be an administrative coup. My appointment is for four years; not less.”
“What do the private sectors that opposed Claudia Paz y Paz achieve with her early departure?” I ask Menocal.
“They banish the specter of a witch hunt with regard to the issue of genocide. The country’s powerful elites think that if Ríos Montt, the general of all generals, the gendarme of the oligarchy, was prosecuted, then anyone could be next. The door has been opened. The floodgates have been opened, and they’re afraid the water could sweep them away. That’s why their first objective is to stop progress on the issue of the genocide. Look, anything to do with transitional justice, no matter how small, makes big waves. I don’t think Colom ever fully assessed the political implications of appointing Claudia Paz y Paz.”
“He didn’t know what he was getting himself into?”
“Exactly. The man who, while in office, issues hundreds of thousands of apologies for crimes committed during the war, who even apologized on behalf of the state for the murder of his own uncle at the hands of the Army in ‘79, didn’t see the waves he would make.”
* * *
Even when she’s going out to buy flowers, Judge Yassmín Barrios travels in a police car. She goes to the supermarket in a pickup with lights and sirens, surrounded by the police who have protected her for the past ten years, ever since the day before the start of the trial for the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi, when someone threw a grenade into the courtyard of her home. Last year she started receiving death threats again, and the judiciary assigned her an armored vehicle, but she only uses it twice a day: to go to and from the court building. Nothing more. She says the vehicle isn’t hers and it uses a lot of gas. “One has to be frugal and not abuse things,” she says with maternal logic. Yassmín Barrios, the judge who convicted Efraín Ríos Montt of genocide in May 2013, always reduces complexities to their simplest logics. And she doesn’t own a car.
Her house is small, objectively small. Minuscule, compared to her fame. When we arrive at her house, she welcomes us at the front door herself, under the uncomfortable gaze of her bodyguards, who are resigned to the judge’s simple ways. She is dressed as any one of her neighbors might dress, in a plaid skirt and a blue sweater, oblivious to fashion. The judge barely allows herself the vanity of asking permission to put on some make-up after she discovers that there will be a photographer for the interview. She returns with a fresh face, red lips, and the lines of her eyes painted a standard black. Even her vanity renounces grandeur.
“Is it hard being a judge in Guatemala?”
“Yes, definitely. Not because of the cases we hear, but because of the context that surrounds us.”
“What context?”
“The prevailing situation of violence and the lack of security for judges.”
“Do you think there are judges who recuse themselves from certain cases out of fear?”
“I can’t answer questions about other people. You would have to ask them. Each of them would know why they’re recusing themselves. What I can tell you is that judges can only recuse themselves if they have a reason. Otherwise, you’re obligated to perform your duties.”
“One reason, for example, could be that someone threw two grenades into your backyard, as happened to you.”
“That was the night before the trial, the hearing was the next day. And I showed up for work.”
“What motivates you to press ahead on cases like these, cases that are so delicate?”
“I’m a judge, plain and simple. When I started my career, I took an oath. It’s just part of being a judge.”
Before Claudia Paz y Paz’s early departure from office redrew the map Guatemala’s justice system, the original idea for this story was to profile the small handful of people who in recent years appeared to have snatched the country from the jaws of organized crime and pacts of impunity. A handful of untouchables. Some middle-ranking police officers, career prosecutors, women of international stature like Paz y Paz or Barrios. A caste of tightrope-walkers who, traversing a political minefield and working in highly compromised institutions, set precedents unthinkable in neighboring countries like El Salvador or Honduras, which, by 2014, have proven themselves incapable of prosecuting 95 percent of today’s criminals and not a single human rights violator of the past.
During the eight weeks of Ríos Montt’s trial, Barrios was a small, curly-haired David fighting against history, against the shrill lawyers for the defense, and against the invisible Goliath of political and media pressure. The plaintiffs tried to move cautiously, so as not to set the country on fire, while Ríos Montt’s supporters and the business elite accused Paz y Paz and Barrios of tearing the country to pieces and putting the peace accords at risk. The Guatemalan right closed ranks, re-established ties with influential retired military officers, and set aside their differences for the sake of a common goal. There were several legal attempts to stop the hearings, and the perpetual fear that some political stunt might cut the trial short.
Knowing they were walking a tightrope, the Public Prosecutor’s Office went so far as to withdraw witnesses at the last minute, so as to avoid incriminating President Otto Pérez Molina, a retired general and a field commander in the time of the massacres, and thus to spare him the temptation to intervene in secret to stop the trial.
In a brief survey conducted at the time by Rafael Landívar University, 72 percent of respondents took it for granted that the trial would either be truncated, or the former dictator would be declared innocent without an adequate assessment of the evidence against him. Another study by the same university showed that 61 percent of articles by columnists writing for the country’s main newspapers supported Ríos Montt’s prosecution. But Judge Barrios’ feeling, as she says, was that there was a media siege.
Perhaps Guatemala’s elites don’t even need to have majority support to tip the scales. As the trial progressed, there was a growing sense that their influence was penetrating into the heart of the process. Or maybe it was like a compressed spring, nestled in the collective consciousness of the country, reacting to the voice of its old masters like a hypnotized person who relives memories when they hear a certain word or melody.
Even so, March and April 2013 were months of hope for everyone who had spent decades calling for reforms to the Guatemalan justice system. In less than a decade, the country had gone from barbaric executions at the hands of the police to investigating and prosecuting not just common criminals, but former dictators who in the name of their ideas had acted as murderously as President Berger’s executioners. If we add to this the fact that since 2010 the country had experienced a slow but steady decline in the homicide rate, Guatemala’s justice system was experiencing a new spring.
But since May 10, 2013, when Barrios convicted Ríos Montt, a series of setbacks started piling up. An invisible hand began shaking the wire that Paz y Paz, Yassmín Barrios, and the rest of the untouchables had been balancing so delicately on.
First came the swift annulment of the trial, just ten days after the conviction. The Constitutional Court, which was controlled, according to sources from both the left and the right, by traditional business elites and, to a lesser extent, by the Executive in power at the time, alleged procedural irregularities with the aim of forcing a retrial. In theory, the new trial would take place in January 2015. Then came the attack on Claudia Paz, which ended with her early departure from office.
In the middle of all this, the Guatemalan Bar Association tried to suspend Yassmín Barrios for alleged ethical misconduct in her treatment of a defense lawyer during the trial. The sanction was never applied and was ultimately dismissed by the Constitutional Court, but a black mark had been branded on anyone who had tried to bring the former dictator to justice.
It was as if someone had decreed the end of the spring.
“Do you feel like you’re involved in a struggle between two Guatemalas?” we ask Barrios.
“Why are you asking me that?”
“Because clearly there are two Guatemalas, at least. One that wanted to see the Ríos Montt trial reach its conclusion and another that didn’t. There’s a part of Guatemala that identifies with you, and another that denounces and puts pressure on you.”
“I’m a woman who believes in justice, nothing more. I’m a lawyer. I believe in justice. It’s that simple. It isn’t complicated.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It is. I’m a woman. I’m a lawyer. I believe in justice. Plain and simple.”
The judge’s restrained answers would frustrate any interviewer. All attempts to get her to comment on the context of the trial or on Guatemalan politics prove useless. She refuses to answer questions about the impact of the trial on Guatemalan society or the degree to which the country’s justice system is independent. She won’t even consider discussing whether Guatemala is still a racist country, 30 years after the genocide.
At times, she acts as if we were in her courtroom and she were the presiding judge. She responds from her sofa, sitting with her back straight and her hands in her lap, almost motionless, wearing a perpetual smile, and on four separate occasions she asks for a question to be rephrased because she doesn’t agree with its premise, or because the matter exceeds her purview as a judge. Perhaps she’s being so prudent because she knows that any word she says can be used against her by her adversaries.
But there’s another possibility. A more likely one. Yassmín Barrios is so proper in her behavior and actions, so by-the-book, that it can be hard, as a journalist, to find a single crack, flaw, or dark side. In fact, in her case, you won’t find any. Perhaps she’s not cautious with her words because she’s afraid of her enemies, but rather, because only someone with a character as discreet and restrained as hers could survive over a decade on the front lines of a justice system besieged by economic, political, and other special interests.
“If Ríos Montt were to face a new trial, what would that mean for Guatemala’s justice system?”
“I can talk about what was incumbent upon us, as judges,” Barrios says, weighing her words carefully again. “Our ruling, and I say ‘our’ because I was one of three judges who handed it down, is a sign of progress. Not just the arguments made during the trial itself, but the fact that we reached a conviction. The court considered witness testimonies, expert analysis, and documentary evidence, and determined that the accused was responsible for crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity. This represents progress not just for Guatemala but for Latin America and for the whole world.”
“There’s another interpretation: putting a former head of state on trial for genocide is undoubtedly a step forward, but on the other hand, there were the reactions outside the courtroom, and the final result, the annulment of the conviction…”
“I should clarify that the conviction wasn’t annulled, the trial was annulled. These are different things. The court didn’t annul our analysis. It didn’t find any flaws with the conviction, it didn’t study it. And this is very important.”
“In other words…”
“It’s a case sui generis. There is no precedent of its kind in our criminal legal system.”
“And do you think the annulment went against the legal system?”
“I think the most important thing is what other people think.”
“What other people think” is a confusing concept here. When the Constitutional Court declared a mistrial in the case of Ríos Montt, many international organizations viewed it as a legal irregularity. Civil society organizations denounced the political motives behind the decision, and the commissioner of the CICIG at the time, the Costa Rican Francisco Dall’Anesse, said in a public statement made three months later that it was an “illegal annulment.”
At the other end of the spectrum, as one might expect, there was a different reaction. Representatives from CACIF, the main organization representing Guatemala’s business class, had requested the annulment of the trial themselves and had accused Commissioner Dall’Anesse of violating the Guatemalan Constitution by challenging a court ruling. At that point, Dall’Anesse had just one month left at his post, and was effectively out of the game. A statement issued by CICIG during the trial, which condemned the media campaign aimed at pressuring the court to declare Ríos Montt innocent, had brought him into conflict with the Pérez Molina government, which complained through diplomatic channels to the UN, forcing him out of office. Taking sides against Ríos Montt in the genocide trial earns you powerful enemies in Guatemala.
* * *
Judge Pablo Xitumul, who together with Patricia Bustamante and Yassmín Barrios presided over the court that convicted Ríos Montt, claims to have never received any direct pressures or threats during the trial. But, he says, his phone was tapped, and he hasn’t forgotten the moment when one of the former general’s defense lawyers shouted at him during court: “I won’t rest until I see you behind bars!” In another case, those words might not have meant much. In this case, they carried a weight heavy enough that the judge still remembers them one year after it was all over.
“In those days, military patrols would pass by my house, right in front of my door, because I live on the side of the highway. They patrolled the area throughout the trial. At first, I thought, “Oh, great, they’re providing security.” But eight or 15 days after the trial was over, they left and haven’t returned since. Could this be a coincidence?”
“Do you think it was?”
Xitumul, who grew up in a small Achí Maya village in the municipality of Rabinal, in the department of Baja Verapaz, goes silent for a second, then smiles and squints his narrow eyes even more, if that’s possible.
“And another thing: the National Civil Police detained my oldest son, who works at a restaurant chain and sometimes gets home at 10:00 or 11:00 at night, something like five times during that same period. They would pull him over just as he was getting home, tell him to get off his motorbike, and ask for his ID. Could this be a random coincidence? I don’t think so.”
Pablo Xitumul just got out of court and receives me in his office, which is crammed with a desk, three chairs, and a sofa, leaving barely enough room to walk. Together with Barrios and Bustamante, he has just sentenced six members of a gang of kidnappers to twenty or so years in prison. As with the genocide trial, during the entire process, Xitumul has not spoken a word. He sits stiff and silent in his seat, from time to time deliberating with his colleagues in whispers, but never speaking publicly. I’d venture to say that very few people in Guatemala have ever heard him speak. For most Guatemalans, High Risk Court A has only one face: Yassmín Barrios, the focus of all eyes and the target of all attacks —on her hairstyle, her gestures, her alleged ideology— from the people who want Ríos Montt to be declared innocent.
“They had specific objectives. The first was to destabilize the trial. And how do you destabilize the trial? By changing the president [of the court]. Any one of us who was in the presidency would have been attacked. They would have found a way,” says Xitumul.
“And what, do you think, was the motive behind those attacks?”
“It had to do with the nature of the trial, the type of person being tried, and with the underlying issue, which is the armed conflict.”
“But other war-crimes cases have been tried without causing such backlash.”
“This time, the primary objective was to prevent these sorts of people from facing trial in the first place, not because of the specific individuals in question, but because in Guatemala, and in other countries, the military, business, and political elites have all come to an agreement. They were afraid that the prosecution of one of these people would have a domino effect that would eventually reach the business leaders.”
“It seems like this is the key factor: the business leaders.”
“They did everything they could. They failed to prevent the trial from starting, so the focus shifted to stopping the trial: at the quarter mark, at the halfway mark, approaching the end... But that didn’t work either. So they did what they could.”
At this point, it’s clear that this quiet man of the court is, in private, much less reserved with his opinions than Yassmín Barrios. Pablo Xitumul has a detached way of speaking, as if everything they could take away from him didn’t matter, as if he had seen it all before. It could be because his father disappeared in 1982, when he was just seven years old, and he has had to stand up to powerful people ever since. He tells me how, three months after his father’s disappearance, he and his mother went to the Chixoy Dam, where his father had worked, to claim his unpaid wages. The managers told them they needed a death certificate. They told them to go check all the corpses found along the road from Guatemala City to Cobán in recent months. He says that he stood his ground, argued with the officials, and managed to get his mother “a little check.”
It’s not that Xitumul is a natural-born crusader for justice: Years later, when he decided to study the law, it was by process of elimination. His studies had already been interrupted once, when he ran out of money, and he didn’t want that to happen again. Law school was the only degree program with a schedule that would allow him to keep working, to pay for tuition. Xitumul is much like Barrios in this regard: He has an exceedingly practical outlook and judgement.
“Would you say that Guatemala’s justice system is influenced by political pressures?”
“Oh, absolutely, yes. There are tons of pressures. We begin our judicial career as a justice of the peace and make our way all the way up to the instance courts, which is where we are now. We all go through a selection and evaluation process and are appointed for a period of five years. But what about judges on the Supreme Court, or the appellate courts, or the Constitutional Court?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“Well, they come from outside, many of them have never even been judges, but they get sponsored by political parties or business groups. And so all of that compromises their performance. Many people have become magistrates through friendships, through personal connections. There have always been groups that maneuver to gain access. That’s why, for me, there’s no guarantee that justice will really be served.”
“You paint a dark picture. You’re pessimistic.”
“I’m just being honest. Look, I live in Guatemala, and I’ve seen how as soon as Supreme Court justices get appointed, they’re going out to breakfast with powerful economic groups, going out to lunch, having little talks, chats. I can’t go and sit with them, I’m a judge. I’m committed to my work and I don’t want to compromise my decisions. I have enough to eat, I have my basic needs met. A lot of people want to have more and to live in luxury, and that’s why they forget about justice.”
Xitumul’s cynicism might be informed by his own disappointment. As he admits himself, in 2009, he was a candidate for an appellate court judgeship. He knew that he wasn’t qualified for the Supreme Court, but thought that he had the academic merits and professional experience to join a more technical court. But in the pre-selection phase, he was awarded only 46 points out of 100 and was not included in the final list submitted to the congressionally-appointed selection commission. He was frustrated. He says he won’t ever participate in a process like that again.
“But believe it or not, the candidates who scored 86, 88, 89 points didn’t get in either, including my classmate Yassmín, who was one of the most qualified.”
“They didn’t make it either?”
“They only included her on the list to keep up appearances. But when it came to the votes in congress, they didn’t even consider her. And in my case, it wasn’t because of the points either; there were people who scored 29, 30 points who made the list, and now those people are the magistrates of the court.”
* * *
Before forcing Attorney General Conrado Reyes to resign in 2010, CICIG had already shaken up the Guatemalan justice system with another public denunciation. On Oct. 6, 2009, Commissioner Carlos Castresana denounced a group of lawyers for trying to take control of the Supreme Court of Justice for their own benefit. He claimed that six of the thirteen final candidates to join the court had connections with a lawyer and businessman who had secretly pulled the strings to get them there: Roberto López Villatoro, popularly and derogatorily known in Guatemala as “El Rey del Tenis” — “The Tennis Shoe King.”
Villatoro personifies a certain sector of emergent entrepreneurs who are growing rich in the shadow of the state —he earned his nickname securing government contracts for footwear— and, in the past decade, has personally gone to battle with CACIF over what was once their exclusive domain of influence: the Supreme Court, the Bar Association, and the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. López Villatoro is a public figure who navigates the gray areas of the system with confidence and ease. He’s the operator you call when you need a shortcut, when you need political solutions to legal problems, or pseudo-legal solutions to political disputes.
I’ve asked Villatoro to sit down for an interview, to corroborate Xitumul’s claim that the Guatemalan justice system runs on networks of favors. The man everyone knows as a master in this business of favors.
He arranges for us to meet at a café in Zone 10, an upscale area of the capital where you’ll find organic cocktails and designer clothes that I’ve only seen at marinas or in pictures of cricket games. Before we start, he asks me if I want to talk on the record or if I’d prefer him to tell the whole truth. When I say I need both, he shoots me a sly smile and breaks protocol:
“I have a friend who says Guatemala is like a game of chess, where the king’s a faggot, the queen is a whore, and the bishops on both sides do business with each other. All on a round board.”
Reading between the lines, El Rey del Tenis is telling me that he’s a bishop.
“They say you’re the one who pulls the strings to get someone selected for the Supreme Court.”
“People in this country exaggerate, they blow things out of proportion. I mean, I think I have a good understanding of how the justice system operates. I’ve done my homework. I have three masters degrees…”
“You know how to navigate the selection system.”
“Knowing a lot of people and knowing how the justice system works gives you the experience you need to understand the forces at work in the country, and how to navigate them. Always in accordance with the laws established by the constitution and the laws of the court, of course.”
“Tell me, what do I have to do to become a magistrate?”
“You have to talk to academics, to the deans of the country’s law schools, to the leaders of the Bar Association guilds, and then, obviously, you have to talk to the country’s political leaders. The system was created with the good intention of giving weight to different sectors, but somewhere along the way, the judiciary lost its independence.”
“In other words, by the time you become a high-level judge, you owe too many favors.”
“Yeah, obviously, because you have to do the work of lobbying. No one gets there on their own. No one gets there if they’re not supported by some sector, by some political party. You can be a judge with an impeccable career record, but they’re not going to evaluate you based on your rulings or decisions. That’s just the reality.”
As if every road in contemporary Guatemalan politics must inevitably lead to Ríos Montt, El Rey del Tenis is the ex-husband of Zury Ríos, the former dictator’s daughter. In 2009, CICIG said that it was investigating Villatoro for possible illicit business dealings, but the commission never charged him and never proved anything. CICIG was also unable to stop the Supreme Court selection process, and three of the candidates sponsored by López Villatoro are now members of the court. Gustavo Berganza, one of the best journalists covering power struggles in Guatemala, says that the man who sits in front of me today is much more influential now than when they tried to bring him down five years ago.
Regarding the accusations made against him by CICIG in 2009, López Villatoro says that Castresana allowed himself to be manipulated by the traditional elites, who wanted to block him and other lawyers so that they wouldn’t have to share their quotas of influence. López Villatoro is in the business of accumulating support from lawyers and then focusing it on certain candidates. When those candidates get into office, they’re expected to be grateful and kind to him, and to the guild he represents. When I ask him if what Berganza says is true —that he’s more influential now than when Castresana tried to bring him down— he agrees.
“Time has proven us right,” he says. “Thousands of lawyers are once again putting their trust in our proposal.”
There are other questions that López Villatoro doesn’t want to answer. There are people or issues, like the power struggles in the Public Prosecutor’s Office, that he doesn’t want to talk about. It’s a question of calculation. People like him know that tomorrow the spiral of interests can turn your erstwhile adversary into a potential ally. Perhaps it’s also the certainty that there are some enemies that you just shouldn’t mess with, unless you have a good reason to. In circles of Guatemalan lawyers, the Constitutional Court is often called the “celestial court,” not only because its decisions are unappealable, but because it receives direct orders from the country’s most powerful men. Even for someone like López Villatoro, it is still difficult to influence the gods of that Olympus.
Guatemala’s justice system is in an increasingly open power struggle. The very existence of a figure like this bishop, and his army of pawns fighting to seize power from the old kings, proves it. Paz y Paz’s years of audacity prove it. Ríos Montt’s short-lived conviction proves it. In fact, not even the Constitutional Court is completely immune from the tug-of-wars of influential groups anymore. The February 5 decision to truncate Claudia Paz y Paz’s term was made unanimously by all five magistrates, but the annulment of the former dictator’s first trial was not. The vote was divided, three against two.
López Villatoro, far from a romantic and firmly committed to his interests, has declared the games open. He obviously thinks that those who proceed with patience and prudence will win.
It’s an increasingly prevalent virtue, prudence. Ever since the celestial court declared a mistrial in the case of Ríos Montt, more than 90 judges have recused themselves from hearing the case. They don’t want to be the new Yassmín Barrios or the next Pablo Xitumul. One might think that they’re doing it to avoid provoking the elites with another conviction, but how then to explain that not even three judges would want to win favor with CACIF by acquitting him? The calculation is more complicated, and has little to do with ideals of justice. Judges with future ambitions fear that the right-wing unity galvanized by the trial may be fleeting — that the tables will continue to turn, and that no matter which way they rule, time will eventually find them in the wrong square on that round chess board.
*With reporting from Valeria Guzmán. Carlos Dada took part in preparing and conducting the interview with Yassmín Barrios. Translated by Max Granger. Read chapter two: When Guatemalan Justice Learned the Word Exile.
