LATIN AMERICA: Women Scale the Hierarchies of Justice

By Diana Cariboni Reprint | | Print |

Diana Cariboni*

MONTEVIDEO, Aug 15 2003 (IPS) - Women do not yet represent 50 percent of the ranks of Latin America’s judicial systems, but many of the trials that are in the media spotlight – those involving major corruption scandals or human rights violations – are in the hands of female judges and prosecutors.

"If a woman is going to enter certain fields she has to be up to scratch," says Nicaraguan judge Juana Méndez, who indicted placed under arrest former president Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2002) for corruption, misappropriation of public funds and illicit enrichment.

Alemán is accused of embezzling an estimated 100 million dollars in a country where nearly 70 percent of the five million inhabitants live in poverty and more than one million subsist on less than a dollar a day.

"We are about to enter the plenary phase, that is, the moment in which the accused is ruled innocent or guilty," Méndez said in an IPS interview from her office in Managua.

But the road to this point has not been easy for the Nicaraguan judge.

"I’ve received strong criticism. There are enormous risks for me and for my family. There are people who are digging into my private life. I have to be accompanied by a bodyguard for my physical safety," she said. This has been particularly true during the Alemán trial.

"They yelled threats at me in the street, and on the telephone. They said they would kill me and my children. The situation reached the point that the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights asked the Nicaraguan government to assign me special protection," said Méndez.

And it proved expensive. Out of her monthly salary of about 1,000 dollars she had to pay for the meals of the security personnel that the government assigned to protect her. In contrast, a judge in the United States earns between 5,000 and 13,000 dollars a month.

"But in the end, the best reward is the contribution made towards a culture of governance and respect for law in Nicaragua and the Americas," she said.

Like her country and its complicated history, the judge has been marked by a hard life. Widow of a Sandinista guerrilla commander, she had to raise her three children by herself. But nothing could keep her from serving as a judge for the past 10 years, and now she is a candidate to become a justice on the Nicaraguan Supreme Court.

The anti-corruption battle in Ecuador also has women on the front line.

Ecuador’s Attorney General Mariana Yépez asked the Supreme Court on Jul.. 10 to order preventative imprisonment of former president Gustavo Noboa (2000-2003) for alleged million-dollar damages to the state during renegotiations of the nation’s foreign debt.

As a result of the arrest order, Noboa fled into exile. The Dominican Republic granted him refuge.

But it is Peru where the highest profile case is wending its way through the courts, and two women judges have been leading the way.

The anti-corruption court presided by judge Inés Villa began the trial in February of former presidential adviser Vladimiro Montesinos, a central figure in the government of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000).

Another judge, Inés Tello, is part of the three-member team in charge of the Montesinos investigation.

Montesinos faces 50 charges, ranging from money laundering and drug trafficking to human rights violations and murder. The colourful former right-hand man of Fujimori and spy-master fled the country in 2001, but was arrested in Caracas and returned to Peru where he has been in prison ever since.

In Argentina, white-collar crime – starring embezzlement and fraudulent bank collapses – was a prominent feature of the 1990s legal landscape.

Last December, judge Marcela Garmendia sentenced bank executive Francisco Trusso to eight years in prison for defrauding savers at the Provincial Credit Bank (BCP), which went bankrupt in 1997.

Another Argentine judge, María Servini de Cubría, in March 2002 convicted banker Carlos Rohm of economic subversion and "illicit association", and issued an arrest and extradition request to the United States for his brother and partner José Rohm.

Carlos Rohm was president of the Banco General de Negocios and vice-president of Banco Comercial del Uruguay, firms that went under after their owners drained their assets.

Judge Servini – although under fire for her decisions that favoured government figures in the 1990s – has indicted six officials from Chile’s Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) for the 1974 assassination in Buenos Aires of Chilean general Carlos Prats.

In Chile and in Uruguay, countries that maintain an international image of transparency, charges of corruption have recently come to the fore, and women judges and prosecutors have proven their leadership as they tackle these cases.

Chilean judge Gloria Ana Chevesich has indicted and continues investigating business executives and officials of the Ricardo Lagos administration and of the University of Chile for crimes related to the illegal diversion of tax revenues to pay unmerited salary bonuses.

Criminal prosecutor Mirtha Guianze is the only one in Uruguay who has been able to put an official behind bars for crimes committed during the country’s military dictatorship (1973-1985).

The official is former foreign minister and former senator Juan Carlos Blanco, who was involved in the 1976 kidnap of leftist activist and teacher Elena Quinteros from the grounds of the Venezuelan embassy in Montevideo where she had sought refuge.

Blanco spent seven months in prison for co-masterminding the "illegitimate deprivation of Quinteros’s freedom". Guianze later requested – and judge Eduardo Cavalli accepted the petition – that Blanco be indicted as co-conspirator in the murder of Quinteros. The case will ultimately find its way to the Supreme Court.

Blanco is a civilian, but the military personnel who tortured and killed Quinteros are protected by Uruguay’s 1989 amnesty law that put an end to investigations into the crimes of the dictatorship.

Guianze’s legal career was interrupted in 1980 when the military government removed her form her post. After 1985, and the return of democracy, she began work again in the public arena. Since 2000 she has headed the association of magistrates at the Public Prosecutor’s Office, a ministry-level agency.

Mother of three and grandmother of two, Guianze has investigated numerous cases of corruption, "which revealed practices that were often tolerated over the years," she told IPS.

Such as the case she is currently pursuing, which has to do with conflicts of interest in distributing publicity for state entities amongst the mass media. In a small country like Uruguay, with just over three million people, "granting major state advertising contracts to certain media outlets is a violation of the right to information, and the process involved corruption," she explained.

Although there are more and more women in Latin America’s prosecutor offices and special courts, their presence decreases farther up the judicial hierarchy.

Women are few among appeals court justices, and there are just a handful in the region’s supreme courts.

A report published by the Latin American Social Sciences Faculty (FLACSO) states that women held 45 percent of the region’s criminal court judgeships in 1995, and 20 percent of the judgeships in the appelate courts. But they were virtually absent from the highest courts.

According to United Nations figures, the proportion of women supreme court justices in South America does not surpass 10 percent, while in Central America it varies between 10 and 20 percent.

The only female supreme court justice in Argentina was Margarita Argúas, who served from 1970 to 1973, designated to the bench in the final throes of a military regime.

If the courts of first and second instance are taken into account, as well as the public prosecutor’s office and the public ministry, the presence of women in Argentina’s federal sphere is 20 percent.

In Chile, the Supreme Court did not have a woman justice until 2001. The "pioneer" was María Antonia Morales. In the country’s appeals courts, however, in the 1995-1998 period, the portion of female judges rose from 27 to 35 percent.

The first female federal supreme court justice in Brazil was Ellen Gracie, who was designated to the court in 2000. She remains the only woman on that bench.

In the opinion of Uruguay’s Guianze, the judicial sphere is more gender balanced than are either politics or business.

"A woman can achieve a place in the judicial hierarchy on merit, without regard to sex, a circumstance that generally is not found in other arenas, where other factors are in play," said the prosecutor.

But why are so many cases that are so crucial for upholding and reinforcing democracy being investigated by women prosecutors or tried by women judges?

Argentina’s Carmen Argibay, ‘ad litem’ judge of the International Criminal Court for the Former Yugoslavia, says it should come as no surprise that many cases dealing with delicate issues are in the hands of women.

"Around a decade ago in Costa Rica a study was conducted of the judiciaries of Central America, and one of the conclusions was that women are less inclined to corruption," she said in an IPS interview via telephone from The Hague.

Argibay was referring to research compiled by Tirsa Rivera Bustamante and published in 1991 by the Centre for the Administration of Justice. The surveys included in the study showed that society had a more positive perception of women than of men when it came to imparting justice.

Although the publication recognised that these were preliminary findings, "the prevailing opinion was that female judges are considered more honest and less corruptible than men, and more strict in applying the law."

In Costa Rica, "judges of both sexes enjoy broad social trust, but the male judges in general consider their female colleagues to be less susceptible to corruption," says the study.

According to Nicaraguan judge Méndez, "survival, the need to take good care of our children and at the same time carry out multiple duties means that we women judges have to be very responsible."

Uruguayan Guianze noted that "women tend to act with greater independence, they don’t feel like their hands are tied by the circles of power from which they have traditionally been excluded, and women possess greater sensitivity for handling matters related to human rights."

"Having been victims of discrimination," said Argibay, women "know that the issues which many of their male colleague consider marginal – discrimination, domestic violence, corruption – are in reality central and important."

"But that doesn’t mean there are no corrupt female judges or prosecutors. They do exist, but in a much smaller proportion (than among their male colleagues)," she added.

And Argibay knows of what she speaks. She worked in the Argentine justice system when it was subject to the will of the different military regimes during decades past, and hit by a wave of unprecedented government corruption in the 1990s.

She was a judiciary employee until the beginning of the last dictatorship (1976-1984), was imprisoned by the military regime for nine months, and then "sought refuge" in a private law practice.

Argibay returned to the public sphere in 1983, founding the Argentine Association of Women Judges, and served as the president of the International Association of Women Judges.

Male and female judges alike are subjected to the same types of pressures, agreed the women interviewed for this report.

According to Argibay, "pressure, threats or persecution are part of daily life in nearly all judicial systems. It may vary in intensity, depending on political and social circumstances, but they nearly always exist."

"Whoever stands up to the powers that be and tries to reveal that which others are trying to keep hidden is exposed to these pressures. Customarily the accused try to discredit the work of the investigator, as far as the public eye is concerned, in order to dissuade the investigator from pursuing the case," said Guianze, who was targeted during the proceedings against Uruguay’s former minister Blanco.

Do women have greater resources than do men to withstand these pressures?

"It might be that women are better able to stand up to pressure and threats because these are aimed or created based on male behaviours. And because the male reaction tends to be more violent, this places men at a disadvantage for confronting them," ventured Argibay.

The reality is that intimidation sometimes crosses the line, and members of the judiciary are murdered, including women. Last month, Yampole Lozano Osorio, an investigator for the Colombian Attorney General’s Office, was killed in the eastern city of Cali by a gunman on a motorcycle.

Lozano Osorio was 33. She began working for the Attorney General’s Office in 2000, after studying law and political science at the University of Santiago, in Cali. In less than one month, two members of that office were assassinated.

* With reporting by Néfer Muñoz (Costa Rica) and Marcela Valente (Argentina).