This March 25, the registration of candidates for the June general elections in Guatemala will close. 17 candidates are seeking to win the presidency, although none is in a position to guarantee true access to justice. The country is experiencing a profound regression in terms of respect for human rights and access to justice. “It seems that we continue in the war, only now with votes,” Paulo René Estrada, a human rights defender, told Escala in Paris.
The signing of the peace accords in Guatemala in 1996, which put an end to the armed conflict that bled the country between 1960 and 1996, should serve as a springboard for the Central American country to close, through the application of justice and the rights of victims to truth and reparation, the wounds left by 36 years of war. But it has not been that way.
Proof of this is the current electoral process that will culminate in the general elections next June. Before closing the registration of the definitive candidates, possible candidates with possibilities of victory were already separated, while impunity and the denial of justice are gaining ground.
How to explain this regression? Virgilio Álvarez, sociologist and executive director of Gazeta.GT, judges that “the process of building the new dictatorship in Guatemala began with the expulsion of the International Commission Against Impunity, in 2019.” This independent international body had the mission of supporting different state institutions in the investigation of crimes committed by members of illegal security forces and clandestine security apparatuses.
The former director of FLACSO Guatemala adds that “Congress does not elect the representatives to the Supreme Court” because the current one is “a Supreme Court of Justice set to hand to be able to comply with everything else.” What is everything else? “Control the entire justice system, which is why the justice operators have had to leave the country, because they are being persecuted by the justice system itself.”
In this context, it is difficult to imagine that the elections scheduled for June will take place in compliance with electoral regulations.
Paulo René Estrada, human rights defender, member of the organization of Relatives of the Disappeared Detainees of Guatemala, who is touring several European countries with the support of the organization Guatemala Collective, affirms for his part that “in the case of Guatemala there has never been a good will on the part of the State and the governments to want to prosecute the crimes” of the previous governments. “It is the same violators of human rights, the same genocidal people who are now the current corrupt ones, the ones who install presidents and remove them,” says the activist, also admitting that since 1996 the indigenous peoples affected by the genocidal policies of the years of military dictatorship have acquired political prominence, however without obtaining full reparation and justice.
Scale in Paris is also on social networks.
Editorial coordination: Florence Valdes
Direction: Souheil Khedir, Mathias Taylor, Vanessa Loiseau
