Crime & Justice, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

GUATEMALA: Candidates Pledge to Revive Death Penalty

Inés Benítez

GUATEMALA CITY, Oct 1 2007 (IPS) - The two presidential candidates who will face off in Guatemala’s Nov. 4 runoff election have both stated that they will remove the current de facto moratorium on capital punishment.

Álvaro Colom of the centre-left National Union of Hope (UNE) says he will do so because the death penalty forms part of the country’s laws, and Otto Pérez Molina of the right-wing Patriot Party (PP) has pledged to do so out of conviction.

Under the government of Alfonso Portillo (2000-2004), Congress revoked 1892 legislation known as the “pardon law”, under which the president can either pardon a death row convict or allow the execution to go ahead.

Since then, Guatemala has no procedure for death row inmates to seek a pardon or the commuting of their sentence, which means a de facto moratorium on executions has been in place since 2000, even though capital punishment is still on the books.

Both candidates have made it clear that if they are elected they will ask Congress to pass a draft law that will allow executions of those on death row to go ahead.

The American Convention on Human Rights, which was ratified by Guatemala in 1978, states that the death penalty cannot be applied as long as any appeal is pending.

In August 2006, the right-wing Unionist Party (PU) submitted a draft law to reinstate the presidential pardon power, which could be debated in October.

“We are prepared to apply the death penalty,” retired general Pérez Molina states on his web site. “For that reason, from our very first day in office we will ask Congress to reinstate it, and for the law to be enforced and the sentences of death row convicts to be applied.”

Colom, an engineer and businessman, is also in favour of the application of capital punishment because “it forms part of our laws, and our laws must be respected.”

He admitted to IPS, however, that he does not see the death penalty as the solution to society’s problems.

In the first round of presidential elections, on Sept. 9, Colom took 28 percent of the vote and Pérez Molina 23 percent.

In Guatemala, 21 inmates have spent between five and 11 years on death row, in isolated wings of high security prisons.

In this impoverished, violence-wracked Central American country, the death sentence is applicable to crimes like murder, kidnapping, rape of children under 10, and some drug trafficking-related offences.

Sixty percent of those on death row in Guatemala have been sentenced for kidnapping (some of the cases involved the death of the victim), and 40 percent for homicide.

Official figures indicate that in the first half of 2007 alone, 2,857 murders were committed, most of them involving the use of firearms.

Opinion polls have shown that a majority of respondents are in favour of the death penalty, as well as the so-called “social cleansing” or vigilante justice carried out by on- and off-duty police officers and private security guards, who often target young men suspected of belonging to youth gangs.

Capital punishment “is a dissuasive factor that curbs the crime wave we are facing,” said Pérez Molina in a televised debate among the leading candidates prior to the Sept. 9 elections.

The retired general’s promise to get tough on crime has been welcomed by a populace fed up with violence and at the mercy of youth gangs and organised crime, and with little faith in the country’s institutions.

Guatemala has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world.

Mariano Rayo, one of the leading PU lawmaker in Congress, told IPS that the proposal to reinstate the pardon law is aimed at eliminating the uncertainty with regard to the application of sentences. He pointed out that inmates have spent years on death row, having exhausted all legal avenues of appeal, and that all that is lacking is the president’s decision to pardon them or allow the execution to go ahead.

In an open letter to Guatemalan legislators in May, the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) expressed its concern over several aspects of the draft law that would reinstate the presidential pardon power. It also called for the abolition of capital punishment in Guatemala.

The FIDH said the draft law runs counter to international human rights law by establishing a timeframe of just 30 days for the president to decide on death penalty cases. It also criticised the fact that if the president fails to make a pronouncement on a case, the sentence automatically proceeds to execution, based on the tacit denial of a pardon.

PP lawmaker Oliverio García told IPS that the draft law “has a few flaws that must be revised” before it is passed, but predicted that as long as the country is afflicted by such high levels of violence, the death penalty will not be abolished.

When two men were executed by firing squad in 1996, one of the executions – which were televised – was botched, requiring a coup de grace to complete the job. The howls of outrage from the international community prompted the government to switch methods.

The latest executions, one of which took place in 1998 and two in 2000, were carried out with lethal injection, and went ahead despite appeals for clemency lodged by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The head of the non-governmental organisation Security in Democracy, Iduvina Hernández, said it was “highly disturbing” that society and the country’s political leaders are in favour of the death penalty.

“In Guatemala, it is politically incorrect to say you are against capital punishment,” said Manfredo Marroquín, the director of another non-governmental organisation, Citizen Action. He said politicians want to show a society that is sick and tired of violence that they are tough on crime.

The vice presidential candidate for the centre-left UNE, Dr. Rafael Espada, says he faces a dilemma. “The death penalty is constitutional. As a doctor I am totally against it, but as a Guatemalan, I respect the law,” he explained to IPS.

“It has been proven that capital punishment is not an effective deterrent, but if the death penalty exists, it exists. That is what the law says,” he added.

For Colom, who is running for the presidency for the third time, “the real problem in Guatemala is the rampant impunity, and that is not solved by killing people.”

“The killing of people by the state not only affects the rights of those people but also undermines the humanity of the rest of society. It merely adds violence to violence,” Marco Antonio Canteo, director of the Guatemalan Institute of Comparative Studies in Penal Sciences, told IPS.

Canteo lamented that the country’s public policies against crime are becoming more and more hard-line, and said that what are really needed are proposals that focus on prevention and effective investigation of crimes.

In this Central America country of 13 million, where the official poverty rate is 51 percent (although unofficial estimates put the figure closer to 80 percent), less than 10 percent of homicides are clarified and lead to a conviction.

“What will it mean for Guatemala to apply the death penalty again, in the present international context?” wondered Canteo, who advocates “new security paradigms” that would not imply a return to the country’s authoritarian past.

According to the London-based rights watchdog Amnesty International, 1,591 executions were carried out in 2006 in 25 countries, compared with 2,148 in 2005, and a total of 3,861 people were condemned to death, down from 5,186 the previous year.

Guatemala is in the midst of its sixth democratic electoral process since 1985, which marked the end of a series of military dictatorships ushered in by a 1954 coup d’etat backed by the CIA (the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency).

The country also suffered a civil war between government forces and a leftist insurgency from 1960-1996, in which more than 200,000 – mainly rural indigenous – people were killed. According to a United Nations truth commission, the security forces were responsible for over 90 percent of the atrocities committed during the armed conflict.

Current President Oscar Berger is in favour of abolition of the death penalty. But analysts say that, given the soaring levels of violence and the majority support for capital punishment in Guatemalan society, whoever succeeds him on Jan. 14 will be reluctant to assume the political costs of failing to sign into law the bill that would allow executions to go ahead.

In 2002, then president Portillo submitted to Congress a draft law to abolish the death penalty, but it was immediately voted down.

Guatemala is one of only three countries in the Americas, along with Cuba and the United States, where the death penalty is still applicable to common crimes.

Colom believes that Guatemala should move in the direction of doing away with capital punishment, but stressed that “today the law must be enforced, and people want to see justice done.”

Jorge Herrera, in charge of the PP’s security plan, told IPS that although Guatemala should head towards abolition, the first step today is for the draft law reinstating the president’s pardon power to be signed into law, to resolve the unjust situation in which death row convicts are living in uncertainty as to what will happen to them.