Respondents Describe the Culture of Impunity
Respondents have described two salient elements of impunity that show a pattern of expected and “normative” behavior under the state terror system, delineating and shaping the culture of impunity which confronts their familial and communal lives and structures.
These elements are the fear of legal redress for alleged rights violations, generated through the systematic exercise of violence, and the systematic non-prosecution of those perceived as guilty for these violations and acts of violence.In terms of the fear of legal redress, interview data above have already alluded to this phenomenon, with the assassination of an attorney, the torture/murder of an entire family, and the “voiced secret” of a plainclothes torture squad teaching a “lesson” to a university student activist as examples. [Un secreto a voces in Guatemalan Spanish signifies an indirect, yet very real, intention or desire of a party in a dispute.] One respondent with a disappeared son, who involved herself with the Mutual Support Group [GAM] in order to claim her ‘right to know' regarding the whereabouts of her son, had been repeatedly and violently harassed by the local Civil Patrol [army-directed village-based counterinsurgency force].
The Civil Patrols don't stop from threatening me! Since I come here [GAM] they told me that Nineth [group's president] eats people's bones. Only by dead people's bones does she live, they told me, because they [GAM] only take the bones out of the clandestine cemeteries.
And, when I left the village about two weeks ago, they fired three shots near my shack. Not ten meters from my house they fired off three shots! “You're doing things with Nineth!” “Of course... I'm going for my son!” “But sooner or later you're going to fall beside your son! First went your son and then... you're next!” the chiefs of the Civil Patrol told me. Because now I am scared when I come here [GAM].
If I leave here [capital city] and arrive home in the evening, I fall directly into their hands, because they are controlling the roads [after nightfall].As respondents report being afraid to claim their rights through legal redress, they have turned to the formation of non-governmental organizations in order to claim those same rights and to press their demands for justice. These organizations serve as parallel legal realms of seeking justice outside the formal legal system through which they have been excluded due to fear and structural inadequacy. These organizations, however, are targets of violence in the same way that those working within the formal legal system are subject to violence for pressing for the domination of a culture of the rule of law over the present culture of impunity.
The systematic non-prosecution of those guilty, whether materially or intellectually, for state-sanctioned terrorist violence, has been a given for decades in the landscape of Guatemalan impunity. “Justice isn't seen as the product of some act, but rather as something that's worth something to someone. So then, justice can't be made, because reality's not applied,” stated the brother of a university student who had been found tortured to death and dismembered in a plastic bag thrown in a trash can. This same respondent states that if “justice” is applied at all, “It's applied only to the rich and to those who bribe.” A number of my respondents report knowing who has sequestered their family members, disappearing them or torturing and killing them. In the same breath, however, they describe how the possibility of legal redress and the prosecution of the alleged guilty parties, either through litigation or organizationally, is precluded by the wielding of fear-via-state terror.