Defining and Understanding Guatemala's Culture of Impunity

Various elements of these acts of violence suffered by these respondents and their family members serve to illustrate the cultural components of impunity that surround them. The Mayan man who first described the extrajudicial executions of his family was confronted by illegal acts perpetrated by legally constituted authorities.

For the ladina mother of the young trade unionist, being threatened at the headquar­ters of the suspected sequestering force, and the subsequent assassination of the attorney of the families of the twenty-seven disappeared, provided clear messages that legal re­dress through the established justice system would be futile. Similarly, for the university student who was attacked and disfigured by members of who he perceived to be a plain­clothes security force, the fact that the police neither investigated nor made a report, normal duties in matters of this nature, was a clear indication to him of judicial collusion in the torture perpetrated upon him.

Impunity can be defined as a “freedom from legal sanction or accountability” (McSherry and Molina 1992: 2) for criminal actions. Impunity, in Guatemala, is exer­cised through several principal mechanisms. The first and most prominent is the terror­via-violence itself, which has traditionally made it impossible to claim one's rights in terms of searching for missing loved ones or in successfully prosecuting torturers and executioners.

Another principal element of the Guatemalan impunity, highly related to the evasion of accountability, is the official denial of state-sponsored violence or subsequent cover­ups. Such denial takes place at the highest levels of state activity, even at the level of ci­vilian presidency. One respondent delineated such denial as enacted by the first civilian presidency after more than a decade of open military rule. When the GAM (Mutual Sup­port Group for the Families of the Disappeared) met with then-president Cerezo and re­quested that he investigate the tens of thousands of disappearances, one respondent de­scribed how she asked Cerezo to investigate the sequester and disappearance of her younger sister and four brothers by sixty uniformed security force effectives. The re­spondent stated that “he said ‘Yes, I'm going to look to see if they're there,' he answered me.”

So then, when we went up there [president's office], all of us from GAM, the coordinating committee... he told us, “Yes, I'm going to give you the names of those who are still alive. And those who are dead... I can't do anything about that.”

So, we were left, all of us, with some shred of hope, right?... if perhaps the name of one of them [five disappeared siblings] would come out there [on the president's list]. And then it came to be two weeks later, which was the day he was to give us the names, and he denied us everything. And he told us “I never said those words to you.”

Even the reporters that were there said they'd written down that he had said that he was going to give us the names [of the disappeared who were still alive]. And at the very hour of truth, he denied everything. And later on, he didn't continue denying us... he simply didn't talk to us.

This element in the culture of impunity authors J. Patrice McSherry and Raul Molina (1992: 3) term “strategic impunity,” which they define as “active measures taken by state official... to derail processes of or demands for truth and justice.”

A final element is that of “structural impunity,” which consists of “mechanisms and structures, institutionalized... in the state that serve to protect those who abuse state power” (McSherry and Molina 1992: 3).