Guatemala Solidarity Network

The lamentable resignation of Carlos Castresana, head of the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala, better known by its initials as CICIG, has focussed attention on this important body. We should not forget how unique it is, as you can read in this interesting paper [1] sent to us recently. Its main thrust is that CICIG can be a model for how to organise external intervention to mend legal systems.

CICIG is unique in the sense that it is not entirely an international effort, nor is it wholly domestic, it has a bit of both but ultimately has to fit into the Guatemalan judicial system. It is also unique in being able to suggest reform, and includes training local personnel, all taken together ought to create a lasting legacy.

News this last week from Guatemala centred on the resignation of Carlos Castresana, head of CICIG, the UN International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala. It seems to me that CICIG had been important in providing some measure of hope for the victims of impunity – victims, mostly interestingly, of the Guatemalan State.

Recently, Barbara Schieber in The Guatemala Times, published a piece which again highlighted the contradictions in Guatemala around state responsibility and state ability to tackle the endemic violence affecting that country.

The Association of Bi-national Chambers of Commerce (ASCABI) has requested that the Guatemalan government announces a state of prevention (Un Estado de Prevención is its rightful term and doesn’t translate easily into English). It is, in fact, a decree suspending particular and named constitutional rights. The article states that the limitations to civil and human rights include the following: the right to organise meetings, the right to public demonstrations, and includes state censorship of the media. What is exercising the minds of ASCABI is the level of violence in the country and its effect on their ability to make money, sorry, to provide a better environment for foreign investment.

ASCABI constitutes the Chamber of Commerce of Brazil, Colombia, Israel, Canada, US, Germany, Spain, India, and Mexico. On the face of it this appears a strange mixture though off the top of my head, there is the Canadian interest in quelling any struggles against mining interests.  It might be interesting to see what is of interest to, for example, India, Israel and Germany. This grouping sees the Estado de Prevención as being an effective way to control delinquency and to promote security in Guatemala. What might also be an effective measure should they bother to look, would be fiscal reform. However, surprise, surprise, Guatemala´s private sector opposes any fiscal reform to support the justice and security sectors in their country.

This is not necessarily news to anyone who has taken an interest in the machinations of the oligarch class.  As mentioned previously, a study found that 'Guatemala has one of the lowest tax burdens in Latin America, as well as one of the most generous regimes of exemptions and tax breaks. The study attributes the low tax collection and expenditure to the state's historic control by elite sectors of the economy.' CICIG, Guatemala's International Commission against Impunity, which GSN has frequently mentioned in very positive terms, states that ‘Guatemala has the justice it pays for: it pays little and has poor justice. It has to pay much more money’.

On one side you have the overseas pressure from ASCABI, while internally there is mounting pressure from the oligarchs to change the Constitution through an organisation called ProReforma. This group also uses the problems of crime and violence in Guatemala as an excuse to further their aims.  What ProReforma hopes to achieve is a new form of legislature – one which will be bi-cameral and will hand legislative power to a small group of people based within a Senate. Members of the Senate will serve for 15 years, between the ages of 50 and 65, and will be elected in their 50th year by people of the same age who will then only have that one vote in their lifetime. Three senators will be elected each year to take the place of those three senators retiring at the age of 65.

ProReforma is very well bank-rolled by those interests it serves but is not having things its own way. Despite the lack of funds, community groups, academics, journalists are providing plenty of opposition to the moneyed elite. What is needed is for this group to start paying their share of taxes to the public purse.

There has been much written about constitutional reform in Guatemala and we hope to bring you a flavour of the debate as well as outlining further the issues at stake. We are talking of constitutional reform, it is somewhat challenging to bring a coherence to this topic.

 ‘Rosenberg case takes bizarre twist’ – this is the understated headline in a news item from the InforPress CentroAmerica news service.

 

This follows on from the peculiar situation where a video was released following the murder of a lawyer showing that same lawyer blaming the President for his imminent murder. This caused uproar in Guatemala, especially among that particular class vehemently opposed to Colom’s presidency. The investigation was handed over to CICIG to inject some transparency into the proceedings. The results are stranger than fiction.

 

For a recap, Gillian tried to make sense of things and this was followed by an article from the Inforpress CentroAmerica news service. You can find it here:

http://www.guatemalasolidarity.org.uk/?q=content/art-creating-political-crises.

 

The findings from CICIG were recently released to great surprise and bewilderment.

 

The report from Inforpress CentroAmerica follows. There is also this from The Guatemalan Times.

 

 

 

Rosenberg case takes bizarre twist.

 

 

Rodrigo Rosenberg became a household name in Guatemala after he posthumously accused the President and First Lady of ordering his Mother’s Day murder last year. His words, left behind in video taped days before he was shot to death on a tree-lined boulevard, sent tens of thousands of protesters into the streets and sparked youth-led reform movements. But the case that once seemed powerful enough to topple a presi­dency came to a bizarre end on January 12 as investigators concluded that Rosenberg, distraught over the murder of his girlfriend and her father, ordered his own death.

 

An eight-month investigation found that Rosenberg asked two cousins of his ex-wife to arrange the killing of a man who was extorting and threatening him. The extor­tionist was fictitious, though, and Rosenberg was actually planning his own assassination. Unaware that the target was Rosenberg, the cousins contracted 11 hit men, more than half of whom are former or current military or police officers, to carry out the killing, investigators said.

              

The investigation cleared Presi­dent Alvaro Colom and his accused accomplices of any involvement. “This was the most serious crisis of my political career”, Colom told reporters. “Fortunately, I’m patient. My government has emerged streng­thened.”

             

In the days before his death, Rosenberg, a divorced corporate attorney, was depressed over the killings of one of his clients and his client’s daughter, with whom he was in a long-term relationship, a family member said. A Harvard- and Oxford-educated lawyer, Rosenberg represented coffee baron Khalil Musa. Musa and his daughter Mar­jorie were shot to death in front of a Guatemala City shopping center in April.

         

“It was Rodrigo Rosenberg him­self that requested the help of his ex-wife’s cousins... to whom he said, ‘I have an extortionist who is threa­tening me, and I want to kill him’”, said Carlos Castresana, the Spanish lawyer who heads the Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a UN-backed investigatory body. CICIG, which conducted the investigation with the help of the FBI and Guatemalan investiga­tors, presented its conclusions in a televised press conference.

          

Investigators said arrest warrants have been issued for the cousins, pharmaceutical-company owners and brothers José Estuardo and José Ramon Valdez Paiz. They are reportedly in hiding. The hit men, three of whom cooperated with the investigation, were arrested last year and are awaiting trial.

 

 

Colom restores tarnished reputation

 

Rosenberg believed that Colom was involved in the Musa killings, which remain unsolved. In the video, re­corded the week before his death, Rosenberg alleged that Colom, his wife and two associates were using the state-owned development bank Banrural for money laundering. The group then ordered the Musa killings to conceal the scheme, Rosenberg alleged.

 

“If you are watching this message, it is because I was assassinated by President Alvaro Colom, with help from [presidential secretary] Gusta­vo Alejos... I knew exactly how [they] were responsible for that cowardly murder [of Musa], and I told them so”, he said calmly in the video, dressed in a suit and tie. In leaving the recording, “he wanted to change the system, to change the culture of corruption and impunity that we live with in Guatemala”, says his nephew Rodrigo Rodas.

 

But if Rosenberg’s intent was to challenge Colom’s legitimacy, he appears to have done the opposite. “Colom’s position has been enor­mously strengthened. He comes out not only vindicated but looking like a statesman,” says Anita Isaacs, a Guatemala expert at Haverford Co­llege who has testified before the US Congress on peace building in the country.

 

Reform groups vow to carry on

 

Colom, a nominally left-of-center candidate, won office with the su­pport of indigenous, rural Mayans and has vowed to help alleviate wi­despread poverty in the countryside with programs that have angered the nation’s oligarchy, including cash rewards to poor parents who send their children to school regularly.

 

Colom says his vindication will enable him to restart stalled initia­tives, like a tax-reform package and fighting violent crime. “The issue of security is one of the most impor­tant reforms for my government,” he says. “It’s the issue that affects Guatemalans more than any other”. Indeed, the country has a murder rate more than 8 times that of the US. Only 3.5% of last year’s 6,451 slayings were solved, CICIG said.

 

Rosenberg’s videotaped calls for justice, which became an Internet sensation, resonated with tens of thousands of protesters – many of them students from the country’s conservative private universities and children of the country’s élite, who rallied in front of the presidential pa­lace demanding Colom’s resignation.

 

Using that momentum, protesters organized reform-minded groups pushing for more government trans­parency and accountability. The groups have vowed to continue even after learning that their martyr effec­tively killed himself. “We are not disappointed because of the case”, says Alejandro Quinteros, who foun­ded Movimiento Civico Nacional, the most prominent new reform group. “We are disappointed because our government is not doing anything to reduce crime in Guatemala”.

 

Media react cautiously to fin­dings

 

The country’s main papers have greeted CICIG’s findings with cau­tious acceptance – mainly because of Castresana’s ability to present concrete evidence regarding the case’s key questions. The media in general are congratulating CICIG for its professionalism. However, many analysts have pointed out that the case will not be solved entirely until the murders of Khalil Musa and his daughter have also been resolved.

 

Many editors and columnists argue that Rosenberg’s original ac­cusations against the government, including money laundering and wide-scale corruption, are still va­lid until proven otherwise. Few are prepared to separate the death of Rosenberg from those of the Musas; indeed, the two cases are considered one.

 

For example the Chamber of Industry publicly accepts CICIG’s verdict but is also calling for an investigation into the Musa mur­ders to finalize the Rosenberg case. The Chamber of Industry, along with other groups representing the country’s powerful private sector (the Chamber of Commerce (CA­CIF) and the Association of Agro-industries), invested massively in acquiring paid declarations for the case, as well as organizing public demonstrations against the govern­ment.

 

Meanwhile, comments by newspa­per readers on the Internet show that the vast majority are not impressed with CICIG’s findings. Such com­ments do not always reflect the wider public view, however, as only a very small proportion of the population have online access.

 

CICIG’s work involved close part­nership with the General Attorney’s Office, a state institution that has of­ten been accused of corruption. Ne­vertheless, many have congratulated Castrasena’s team of investigators for having withstood considerable pres­sure from the government’s political opponents and the media, Castresana to do the best job they could.

 

Castresena himself has said that “this is how all murder cases should be investigated in Guatemala”. Few other cases will have cost so much time and money though, and it remains to be seen whether similar levels of resources will be invested in the Musa murders, CICIG’s new priority. Unfor­tunately the disadvantage in this case is that CICIG was called in several weeks later, making the investigations that much more difficult.

 

Pre-election fodder

 

One of the reasons why the Musa murders and the Rosenberg case are so firmly linked is because they both seemed to implicate the current go­vernment. The cases have therefore become a political weapon, ahead of the 2011 election race. As a Social De­mocrat, President Colom’s relations­hip to the country’s private sector is becoming increasingly strained.

 

A Social Democrat in Guatemala is considered a leftist by the conserva­tive sectors of society; indeed, many US think tanks often refer to Colom as left-of-center. Being a leftist in Latin America today implies that you a close ally of Hugo Chavez, a terrible oversimplification of the regional political tendencies that can lead to grave consequences, as demonstrated already by the Honduran coup.

 

The murders of Rosenberg and the Musas, together with the country’s overall reaction, are symptomatic of Guatemala’s persisting class (and, some might say, caste) system.

Guatemala has essentially been divided between the powerful and the powerless since colonial times. So to understand the labyrinthine web of the Rosenberg case, yet alone today’s Guatemalan society as a whole, it is crucial to understand Guatemala’s past.

 

Last Sunday, among the now routine roll-call of violent death in Guatemala appeared one name for whom the grave would not be silent. “Good Afternoon, my name is Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano… sadly if you are watching or hearing this message it is because I was murdered by President Alvaro Colom…” His accusations have been seized on to generate the most serious political crisis seen in Guatemala for some years. Allegations are made about other people too: the president’s wife, private secretary and a major party funder.

You might think that the only anti-impunity measure that Guatemala needs is to have a justice system that works. However, that is simple to say and very difficult to bring about after “agents or former agents of the State have woven a secret, behind-the-scenes network dedicated to obstructing justice. They have created a virtual alternative government that functions clandestinely with its own standardized and consistent modus operandi. In such a context, crimes are not clarified, and those responsible are not identified. Society finally forgets the cases and becomes resigned”, according to the Institute of Political, Economic and Social Studies in 2000.