Impunity in Guatemala: Institutions, Strategies and Problems

Our society for the most part has a set of written laws by which it operates under. Laws govern our behavior in society and list punishments by which individuals that break them will be prosecuted and sentenced. Our criminal justice system is essential made up of three major intuitions which see a case from the beginning and through the trial and finally to the punishment phase ("How Does the Criminal Justice System Work?," 2014). Our society needs laws and punishment for those who violet the laws otherwise we would live in a world of chaos. In this paper we will examine various aspects of the criminal process from arrest through sentencing and appeal.

The Mayan people’s struggle for equality led to tensions with the government of Guatemala. Since Mayans are the indigenous people of the country, they felt they should have the same opportunities and recognition as other ethnic groups in the region (Genocide). However, “when Spanish explorers conquered this region in the 16th century, the Mayans became slaves in their own homeland” (ibid). The Mayans were no longer able to exercise their rights, and lost their identity in their homeland. As a result, in the 1970s, the Mayans decided to take matters into their own hands and rebel against the Guatemalan government (GUATEMALA 1982). Years of pent up aggression were finally being expressed, but the government

The author of this book is Juan Jose Arevalo and he was a professor of philosophy who became Guatemala’s first democratically elected president in 1944. He was elected after a popular uprising against the United States, backed by Dictator Jorge Ubico, which began the Guatemalan Revolution. He stayed in office until 1951 and had survived 15 coup attempts. During his presidency he had passed several social reform policies that included an increase in minimum wage and a series of literacy programs. He also directed and ministered the drafting of a new constitution in 1945. Arevalo focused much on the need of advancement with individuals and communities. After he was exiled as being a university professor he went back to Guatemala to help the new post-Ubico government, focusing on the areas of social security and drafting of a new constitution. He developed the term “spiritual socialism”, in which he defined his political philosophy as. The philosophy was pointed towards the moral development of Guatemalans with the intent to liberate man psychologically. Arevalo strongly believed that this theoretical doctrine was vital to the making of a progressive and peaceful Guatemalan society. He felt in order to create an ideal society it was necessary to allow the citizens the freedom to pursue their own opinions, property, and way of life. He proclaimed that protecting the freewill of the citizens creates more support for governmental institutions, which in turn ensures the security of

United States’ system has its foundation on an agreement between the people and the government to ensure that individual liberties continue to prosper under a free society. The Declaration of Independence lists three important rights that the Founding Fathers considered natural and unalienable. They are the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Government exists to protect these rights. On other hand, the purpose of Guatemala’s government, according to the Guatemala’s Constitution, is to promote the common welfare, the consolidation of the regime of legality, security, equality, justice, liberty and peace. Both countries have its foundation on democracy; nevertheless, there are specific characteristics that mark a difference between them.

Hardbine’s corpse” (134). In Guatemala City, it is evident the police will do anything to

The extracurricular activity I attended for this report on peace studies was Dr. Catherine Nolin’s public lecture called “Transnational Ruptures in a Time of Impunity: Genocide, Mining and Migration”. Dr. Nolin is an associate professor at the university of Northern British Columbia. Her focus was placed upon the past and present violence in Guatemala. More specifically, the genocide of the 1980s, the migration that followed, and the role of Canadian mining companies in present mining operations within Guatemala. Dr. Nolin visited indigenous communities in Guatemala, where she listened to the people’s stories related to crimes that Canadian mining companies had committed. These crimes included rape and murder, so the professor went back to Guatemala with a lawyer who was able to start legal claims in Canada against the mining companies. The story does not start with the Canadian mining companies as this was after the terrible genocide.

Society has a need for quality and equal justice along with protection for everyone and the process of how to effectively implement such a thing has been an issue for many years. Focusing on the problems of society incorporates methods of trying to fix it from political measures to law enforcement measures. The combined effort of the two brings out the issue of what method should be used to dominate the problems. Looking at

The Guatemalan civil war began because the government and military were greatly abusing the citizen’s human rights. In result to this communist led gorillas began an active political war of terror in 1961. There underlying cause of this is the discontent both politically and economically between the people and the government. Economically the government supported the domination of an elite class in society. This

When dealing with the subject of universal jurisdiction there is a starting point that cannot be ignored. In practice there are still various international crimes that go unpunished despite the international obligation to prosecute those who committed them, though principle of universal jurisdiction is extensively discussed. Constraints of real politics or diplomacy clashed with the concept of universal jurisdiction. Political reasons have prevailed over legal reasoning in a number of cases.

Guatemala once was a magnificent vacation country for many Americans. Now, many Americans are choosing a different getaway.Guatemala has seen many changes to daily life due to drug cartels and street gangs. Drug cartels and street gangs have been taking over the cities and rural areas. These two very dangerous groups of people have been threatening some people and killing others. Many families have to pay to guarantee a safe life. If a family can not pay, they have to escape their homeland. The cartels and gangs ruined many families and traumatised many more. The citizens need help but, not from only themselves. The government needs to help and realize that there is a problem that can ruin their country. The government needs to take

Giselle Portenier’s “Guatemala: Killer’s Paradise” is a documentary released in 2007 that focuses on the increasingly rising murder rate of women in Guatemala that largely go unsolved. This documentary illustrates the persistent gender expectations and perpetuate gendered violence since the Guatemalan Civil War as well as the lack of proper response from government institutions. Gender expectations and prejudices that arose out of the Guatemalan Civil War have developed a machoist, misogynistic society that is strife with physical and sexual violence toward women through which this societal violence has been entrenched through state inaction.

The conviction of innocent people is perhaps the worst nightmare of a criminal justice system. sending someone to jail for a crime that he has not committed, without the system having been able to discriminate effectively against the author, is one of the main mistakes that can be committed and with very serious consequences for the life of the affected person and their environment, which can hardly be repaired with subsequent economic compensation. Unfortunately, comparative experience shows us that there is no criminal justice system immune to the possibility of making mistakes of this kind. On the contrary, in recent years, investigations have been carried out in several countries that show the enormous fallibility of criminal justice systems.

Decolonization can cause a great deal of tension between the colonizers and the colonized of a country. This is especially true for the country of Guatemala, where Spanish colonizers settled on and started to conquer Mayan or indigenous peoples land. During the late 1900’s, a civil war broke out between the indigenous people and the government of Guatemala. The result of the civil war was a genocide, killing and displacing thousands of innocent Mayan’s; and destroying most of their land. The government attempted to abolish the indigenous people because they feared that the Mayan’s were turning communistic.(Rey 241) A genocide was started that would remove the Mayan culture and history from Guatemala, ending the existence of the indigenous people. Rigorberto Menchu’s book I, Rigorberto Menchu describes the events that took place during this brutal genocide and how the indigenous people lived through this genocide.

The Rwandan genocide not only wiped out ordinary civilians but on the sector level devastated the criminal justice system of Rwanda due to the murders of judiciaries, lawyers, judges, prosecutors who unfortunately fell victims to these mass atrocities (Longman 2009, Human Rights Watch 2011). Accountability for these atrocities was difficult to achieve due to the high numbers of civilians who partipated in the genocide, and the high prison population of individuals detained for these crimes which the national courts, and international courts were unable to process and trial efficiently. The Gacaca system an indigenous system of conflict resolution adapted to the needs of providing communal justice, by involving Rwandan’s within the Justice process. Aside from trailing and prosecuting ‘gacaca’s mandate was extended to include a focus on truth-telling, reconciliation and the reintegration of prisoners’. Palmer (2005:4) The extension of Gacacas mandate to include reconciliation and truth telling was a necessary measure as it played a strong role in not only providing justice for the victims of the genocide, but provides perpetrator the opportunity to express remorse for their actions, which was an absent factor of both the national and international mechanisms. For reconciliation to be truly fostered, perpetrators must acknowledge that their actions were wrongful, negatively impacting on individuals, and must be given a platform, to express these feelings and remorse which the gacaca system aimed to provide, in a complex three-part interaction between the victim, perpetrator and members of the community who witnessed the violence. In order to examine the extent to which Gacaca, has fulfilled its primary goals, an outline of Gacaca’s Jurisdictions is strongly

The Republic of Guatemala aware of the situation of modern slavery fully believes that the