Guatamala's conviction of former president Efraín Ríos Montt set a precedent for holding heads of state accountable, but the power structures of the country's military dictatorship remain in place. From States of Impunity.
On life in prison generally, the most common complaints across five countries were about hygiene and space.
Former Swedish deputy foreign minister and UN ambassador Pierre Schori remembers circumstances and characters, including the late prime minister Olof Palme, that linked him to Gabriel García Márquez, in the work they did on Latin America.
'What they call transnational development companies. For us they represent death and destruction’, yet when it comes to the pursuit of justice through law, too often activists are on the wrong side. Jennifer Allsopp reports from Belfast at the Nobel Women’s Initiative Conference.
In March began the trial of ex-Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt, who is accused of having orchestrated genocide and crimes against humanity during his 1982-1983 rule. While the trial is an achievement in itself, obscure legal battles make its outcome highly unpredictable.
After two very recent attacks on Maya community leaders in Guatemala, the challenges faced by the lawyers applying domestic law and international indigenous rights legislation to these conflicts are revealing, as legal concepts are reinterpreted by governments in indigenous communities across the
The wave of violence afflicting Mexico and the northern triangle of Central America (Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador) is caused by three developments: changes in the global drug market, the effect of the war against organised crime and the international financial crisis, making the problem not
A deep strategic rethink is needed to reverse the dismal failure of the war on drugs and gangs, particularly in the way this has been fought across Central America and the Caribbean. Intimate community engagement and integral policy approaches are crucial steps in moving on from the bankrupt iron
Guatemala’s elite, which has tried since 1996 to engage in politics to ensure that democracy produces conservatism and economic libertarianism, is now expressing some unorthodox ideas. The most radical will say over the dinner table that the answer to the security crisis is more violence.
Forces of globalization provide the link between the areas of extreme criminal violence in poorer countries and the random attacks carried out by fundamentalists in the west. On all sides, economic interconnectedness has brought wealth to some, criminal opportunities to others, and vulnerability t
