Caribbean & Central America - June 2017 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Guatemala’s interior minister Francisco Rivas last month was forced to dismiss the head of the prison service (DGSP), Nicolás García Fuentes, who had been in the post less than a year. His sacking followed the escape on 10 May of high profile prisoner Maritza Lemus, alias ‘La Patrona’, who was being held in jail at the Mariscal Zavala military base, in the capital, Guatemala City. García’s deputy, Antonio Santos, was named as his interim successor although he quit after just two days in the job. While Santos has since been replaced, again on an interim basis, by Mirna Fajardo, the DGSP head of human resources, and ‘La Patrona’ has since been recaptured, the high-profile prison break – and instability at the helm of the DGSP – serves as the latest reminder of the ongoing prison crisis facing President Jimmy Morales and his conservative Frente de Convergencia Nacional (FCN-Nación) government.

According to the local press, Lemus had received a prison sentence of over 94 years in 2015 for heading up criminal gangs which operated in three of the country’s departments – Jutiapa, Santa Rosa, and Escuintla. Legal action against eight individuals – including Walter Hernández Méndez, the head of security at the prison – has since been announced in relation to the escape of Lemus who was then recaptured on 25 May in El Salvador’s Ahuachapán municipality, the capital of the eponymous department. Rivas attributed her recapture to the work of the trinational task force installed last year by President Morales along with his counterparts from El Salvador (Salvador Sánchez Cerén) and Honduras (Juan Orlando Hernández) – see box.

García’s himself had replaced Carlos de León Zea, who was fired in July 2016 along with his deputy, Ninfa Gómez, and Norberto de Jesús Ortega Barco, the director of El Pavón prison which is located outside Guatemala City. The dismissals were in response to a shoot-out which took place that month in El Pavón which resulted in 14 deaths – including the country’s most famous prisoner (Ret) General Byron Lima Oliva (see sidebar). Even before the shoot-out which had cost De León his job, President Morales had already acknowledged the need for prison reform, floating the possibility of constructing new facilities in order to reduce overcrowding in the country’s 22 existing prisons. He also revealed plans to increase the salaries of the country’s 3,600 prison guards and install equipment to prevent arms and drugs trafficking into jails.

International concerns

Institutions such as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and US State Department have long flagged up concerns regarding the state of the prison service in Guatemala. In a report released in January 2017, the OHCHR highlights the “urgent need to address the structural problems of the penitentiary system, including chronic overcrowding (currently at 219 per cent), inadequate infrastructure, and failure to ensure the security of those detained, which has led to 54 violent deaths within the penitentiary system as at October [2016].”

Meanwhile, in March 2017, the US State Department released its annual human rights report which also highlighted as a key problem “harsh and sometimes life-threatening prison conditions”. The US State Department report cites figures from the prison system registry which show that, as of 6 September, there were 20,743 inmates, including 1,974 women, held in facilities designed to hold 6,742 people. Noting that of these prisoners, 46% were in pretrial detention, the same report also highlights that while the law establishes a three-month limit for pretrial detention, authorities regularly held detainees past their legal trial or release dates.

Regional cooperation

Interior Minister Rivas was quick to attribute the recapture of Lemus to the work of the trinational task force – involving officials from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador – which seeks to target criminal organizations and prioritises the fight against local ‘mara’ street gangs, the illicit trafficking of firearms, drug trafficking, and people trafficking, among other things.

The task force was established in November 2016, as part of the Plan of the Alliance for Prosperity (PAP), launched in 2014 in coordination with the US government, aimed at addressing the root causes of the Central American unaccompanied child migrant crisis.

While likely to be well received by the US government led by President Donald Trump, the latest signs of regional security efforts come as the future of US cooperation in the sub-region remains uncertain. On 23 May, the US administration submitted its 2018 draft budget to the US Congress which proposed a 39% drop in economic, humanitarian, and security assistance to Central America from 2016 to 2018.

As regards the three countries in question, assistance to El Salvador would drop 39% from 2016 to 2018 to reach US$46.3m; Guatemala would see a drop of 39%, to US$80.6m in 2018, and Honduras would see a drop of 31% to US$67.9m in 2018.

• Lima

Lima was convicted in 2001 of one of the most notorious crimes committed during the 1960-1996 civil war – the 1998 murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi, the head of the local Roman Catholic Church’s human-rights office (Odhag). Gerardi was murdered two days after a report was released which accused the Guatemalan military of civil war atrocities. Lima had most recently made headlines in 2014 when he was charged with running a multi-million-dollar criminal network from prison [RC-14-10]. At the time, he was serving a 20-year prison sentence for Gerardi’s murder, but he was due to be released on parole in September 2014.