Caribbean & Central America - August 2014 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Earlier this month a Guatemalan court sentenced former guerrilla, Fermín Felipe Solano Barrillas, to 90 years imprisonment for terrorism and crimes against humanity committed during the country’s 1960-1996 civil war. While a handful of former military officials received sentences for war crimes committed under the previous Alvaro Colom administration (2008-2012), the conviction of a former guerrilla is unprecedented.

The leader of the defunct Organización del Pueblo en Armas (Orpa), one of the four groups comprising the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG) guerrilla group, Solano was arrested in May 2013 for his suspected involvement in the November 1988 massacre of 22 peasant farmers in El Aguacate, in the central department of Chimaltenango.

The United Nations Historical Clarification Commission (CEH), which was established by the 1994 Oslo Accord, found that the guerrillas were responsible for 3% of all human rights violations committed during the civil war, which resulted in over 200,000 people killed or disappeared. In contrast the CEH found that 93% of violations were committed by agents of the State, particularly the army. At the time of Solano’s arrest, some slammed it as an attempt to distract attention from the high-profile trial of former dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983), who in May 2013 received an historic conviction for genocide and crimes against humanity, only for it to be overturned ten days later [RC-13-06].

Yet Solano’s arrest, which followed the filing of a complaint by the prominent human rights NGO Grupo Apoyo Mutuo (GAM), was hailed by leading human rights activists like Helen Mack of the Fundación Myrna Mack. She said it was important in terms of illustrating that “justice is not of the Left or the Right”. At the time then attorney general, Claudia Paz y Paz, also a respected human rights activist, told reporters that it was the “priority” of her office to investigate “all crimes” whether committed by a State official or a guerrilla.

Progress in the fight against malnutrition?

On 14 July Luis Monterroso, the head of the Guatemalan government’s secretariat for food security (Sesan), told reporters that cases of chronic child malnutrition were down by 23.3% so far this year compared with the same period in 2013, with 7,802 children under the age of five reported to have symptoms of chronic malnutrition, down from 10,168 over the same period last year. Monterroso added that while in January 2012- when the Partido Patriota (PP) government led by President Otto Pérez Molina took office- the mortality rate for child malnutrition was 2.2 per 100 children, this dropped to 1.1 by 2013 and that currently the figure is of 0.7.

Upon taking office President Pérez Molina declared that reducing chronic child malnutrition was one of his three main priorities (along with public security and boosting investment and economic competitiveness) and he pledged to cut this by 10% by the end of his term in 2015, through the Plan Hambre Cero (PHC) government initiative. This initiative includes programmes like the ‘1,000 days window of opportunity’, which supports mothers from pregnancy up until their children are two years old, ensuring that they both have access to a healthy diet.

However, doubts persist as to the efficacy of the PHC. A February report by the NGO, Colectivo de Estudios Rurales Ixim (Ceri), noted the poor execution of the PHC’s budget and criticised the lack of transparency surrounding access to Sesan information as well as the poor coordination between different institutions involved in the initiative. According to Ceri’s report, the PHC’s budget last year was Q$3.67m (US$473m) but by December 2013 only 70.63% of it had been executed (compared with 92% in 2012). The Ceri report also underlines that the PHC does not really address the structural causes of the child malnutrition problem, which figures like United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier de Schutter, have noted lie in Guatemala’s “intolerable” levels of inequality and unequal distribution of wealth [RC-09-09]. Ceri has reiterated its calls to approve a rural development law, initiative 4084, which it says would guarantee food security and widen access to rural lands, but which has been stuck in congress since 2009.

• FAO report

According to the State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013 report by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Guatemala has the worst rate of food insecurity in Central America, with 30.5% of the population (total 15m) undernourished. This is worse than Nicaragua (21.7%); El Salvador (11.9%); Honduras and Panama (8.7%) and Costa Rica (8.2%).