A new spate of attacks and threats against law officers and journalists led human rights prosecutor Sergio Morales and foreign minister Edgar Gutiérrez to urge the UN, on 18 June, to speed up the formation of the special commission to investigate the escalation of threats and attacks against rights activists, journalists and officers of the judiciary, attributed to 'illegal and clandestine security organisations'. The government had agreed to its creation back in January, at Morales's behest.
The commission, known by the Spanish acronym Ciciacs, is to be formed by one representative of the UN, one of the Organisation of American States (OAS), and a 'notable citizen' to be chosen by President Alfonso Portillo from among three to be nominated by the human rights prosecutor's office (PDH). According to the original schedule, Ciciacs was meant to be up and running by September, but the UN has still to send a mission to fine-tune the definition of the commission's mandate.
In Morales's original brief, Ciciacs was meant to look into all acts of violence and intimidation since 1994 attributed to 'clandestine security groups'. The PDH has on its files 77 cases that fit the bill.
The recourse to a commission with the participation of international organisations is due to the fact that Guatemala's security forces have been unable or unwilling to identify and arrest the culprits. Even the appointment in 2001 of a special prosecutor to look into crimes against journalists failed to make a difference; the prosecutor, Marco Antonio Cortes, won't even reveal the number of cases he is handling or the status of the investigations, because 'the information is very delicate.'
Defiant response
The future targets of Ciciacs' attentions responded defiantly. On 21 June a group of armed men tried to force their way into the home of prosecutor Thelma Peláez, who is investigating the murder of an official of the human rights prosecutor's office. She was warned off the investigation.
Three days later another group of armed men burst into the home of José Rubén Zamora, chairman of the editorial board of the newspaper El Periódico, stripped, bound and beat him in the presence of his family, and warned him to 'stay out of things'. They said they had received their orders 'from on high'. El Periódico is renowned for its reports on corruption in the government.
Identifying the perpetrators
Procurator Morales blamed the 'clandestine security groups' for the attack on Zamora. He said the training they displayed and the information they had 'can only point to support from inside [the state].'
Frank LaRue, director of the Centro de Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos (CALDH), an NGO, says these groups 'are rooted in the structures of the state; they enjoy the support of prosecutors, judges, members of the military and the security forces, and government officials, which allows them to operate with complete impunity.'
Rights activist Hellen Mack, whose sister Myrna was murdered by a covert security group in 1990, concurs: she says the interests of the high-ranking members of the military involved in these acts has changed over time: they are now drug-trafficking, organised crime and corruption.
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