Challenging Impunity in Domestic Courts: Human Rights Prosecutions in Latin America

After a year of appeals by defense lawyers and assertions by the sitting president of Guatemala that no genocide had occurred in that small Central American country, the High Risk Court recently ruled in a landmark decision that the trial against former dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt —who stands accused of genocide and crimes against humanity— could move forward. This was a startling development in a country marked by stark inequalities, ethnic divisions, and endemic impunity. For years Guatemala, like its neighbor El Salvador, was considered an outlier in efforts to achieve accountability after atrocity in Latin America. While some countries, including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Peru, had found ways to overturn or bypass standing amnesty laws and prosecute former presidents, dictators and high-ranking military officers for a variety of abuses committed during the dark days of dictatorship, Guatemala and El Salvador remained stubbornly resistant to the “justice cascade.” Building on previously published research examining the efforts to pursue an accountability agenda in these four countries focusing on the relationship between civil society actors, the state, and international courts, this paper will assess what has changed in Guatemala —and what has not in El Salvador, where impunity reigns supreme—to account for these development. In doing so it raises questions about the broader field of transitional justice by interpolating standard tropes about retributive justice (too hard, too costly, too time-consuming) to understand what factors have driven accountability agendas in places like Guatemala, where the genocidaires of the past sit in presidential palaces and yet criminal prosecutions for human rights violations are moving forward in an unprecedented manner, while such shifts have not occurred (at least yet) in other countries, including El Salvador as well as Brazil (where a truth commission was recently established but no prosecutions have occurred to date).