The Americas | Justice in Central America

Parachuting in the prosecutors

Two failing states in Latin America have turned to outsiders for help. We report first from Guatemala, on a UN effort to fight organised crime

| GUATEMALA CITY

AFTER years of frustration over its rotten security forces and judiciary, Guatemala's government decided in 2006 to call for outside help. “Asking the justice system to reform itself was like tying up a dog with a string of sausages,” says Eduardo Stein, the then vice-president. The government invited the United Nations to establish a unit of foreign prosecutors to fight the infiltration of Guatemala's institutions by corruption and organised crime. The experiment, known as the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), completed four turbulent years last month.

The commission's main targets are clandestine networks of soldiers and policemen created during a 36-year civil war between military dictators and left-wing guerrillas. These outfits went freelance after a 1996 peace deal, selling their services to drug traffickers from Mexico and Colombia. Largely because of the drug mobs and their allies, Central America's “northern triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador “has become probably the deadliest zone in the world” outside active theatres of war, General Douglas Fraser, head of the United States' Southern Command, said in March.

CICIG raised hopes of ending the impunity for lawbreakers that underpins the carnage. But has it worked? In a balance-sheet released on October 5th the commission highlighted six big cases it took on, five of which ended in convictions. They include the stranger-than-fiction case of Rodrigo Rosenberg, a lawyer who arranged his own murder in an attempt to frame the president—an aim he would probably have achieved had it not been for CICIG's investigation. An apparently strong case against Alfonso Portillo, a former president, for stealing public funds, was dismissed by a court in May, which CICIG took as evidence of the judiciary's continuing corruption.

The commission has faced resistance from those who prefer impunity. “With each case you resolve, you are touching someone ...[or] structures that were previously untouchable,” says Álvaro Colom, the president. CICIG's first head, Carlos Castresana, a clever, cavalier and publicity-seeking Spanish prosecutor, left in June 2010 after allegations about his private life. (He used his dramatic resignation to scotch the appointment as attorney-general of a man CICIG linked to the mobs.)

Mr Castresana's successor, Francisco Dall'Anese, a former Costa Rican attorney-general, has sought a lower profile. Nevertheless, a group of businessmen hired Robert Gelbard, a retired American diplomat turned lobbyist, to spread poison about him in New York and Washington. The businessmen say they back CICIG and intended the criticism to be constructive. Mr Dall'Anese retorts that it was revenge for the arrest (in Spain) of Carlos Vielmann, a former interior minister with ties to the private sector whom CICIG has charged with involvement in a prison massacre.

Even the commission's friends concede that in the early days there was little oversight of Mr Castresana, causing “discomfort in New York about how CICIG was operating,” a senior UN official says. The commission, with 207 staff from 23 countries and a high-walled compound in Guatemala City, costs $20m a year. It has had to take the staff it is offered; some have not been up to scratch, according to a well-placed Guatemalan source.

CICIG's broad remit has led it into cases where its critics say it has no business. In the Rosenberg case, no clandestine networks were involved. But Mr Dall'Anese says that fact was only established by the investigation itself. Some in the UN worry that it is setting the justice agenda rather than supporting it.

Mr Dall'Anese is putting more emphasis on beefing up Guatemala's institutions. The attorney-general's office and the police have new cadres of investigators, and an electronic information platform. There is a new liaison office for the swift swapping of information with foreign agencies, and a new witness-protection scheme (though this must make do with a budget of just $700,000). CICIG has helped to draft new laws on asset seizure and on the regulation of private security guards, who outnumber the public forces by five to one. But its draft laws against corruption, including a new offence of illicit enrichment, are stuck in Congress. For the first time, polls show that CICIG is less popular than the attorney-general's office. That, says Mr Dall'Anese, is tribute to the attorney-general, Claudia Paz y Paz, “a very honest woman [who] has done an extraordinary job” since her appointment in December.

Whether to extend the UN's mandate when it runs out in September 2013 will be up to the next president, probably Otto Pérez Molina, who looks set to win a run-off election on November 6th. A former army general and head of military intelligence, he is mistrusted by the left, though no claims of abuses against him have stuck. Several sources say he will seek an excuse to fire Ms Paz y Paz, who worked for human-rights groups and has prosecuted several of his former comrades. The competent interior minister, Carlos Menocal, is due to depart with Mr Colom.

One way to evaluate CICIG is whether Guatemala's neighbours choose to copy it. Tiny Belize may. Earlier this year the UN drew up modest plans to help El Salvador, where the institutions are not as rotten as Guatemala's but the murder rate last year, at 66 per 100,000 people, was more than 50% higher. But when UN advisers visited San Salvador in February, the attorney-general, Sonia Cortez de Madriz, an opponent of the centre-left president, Mauricio Funes, refused to meet them. Some doubt her motives. Mr Funes has created his own “security cabinet”, drawing together prosecutors, police and intelligence chiefs, which may seek help from other Latin American countries—but not, for now, from the UN.

In Honduras, which last year had the world's highest murder rate, at 82 killings per 100,000, the president has called for foreign help. The UN may visit next month. But Honduras suffers a political schism following a coup in 2009. It does not allow its citizens to be extradited; letting in foreign prosecutors would be a big step.

Mr Colom sees CICIG as a good model, but admits: “For a president, it's not the most comfortable thing” to see one's ministers arrested by a foreign agency. The ultimate test of CICIG's work will be whether Guatemala's authorities can do the agency's job for themselves. If that is still a long way off, it is mainly not the UN's fault.

NOTE: Mr Gelbard has written a letter responding to this article. It is available here.

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline "Parachuting in the prosecutors"

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