Corruption Goes Both Ways

I had an interesting conversation with a New Zealander whose been in Guatemala for four years doing his PhD thesis on contemporary pressures on Mayan religion and culture. He has a friend who works in the legal profession here and had an interesting example of how the justice system works in Guatemala.

It starts with Paco, who's a low level criminal who specializes in disappearing people for as little as 12 dollars upwards depending on the importance on the person in question. He works for a much more powerful man who is on trial for a litany of offenses and is asked to go tell the prosecuting attorney in the case to back off. He goes to this woman's office and brandishes a pistol in her face and tells her to drop the case. She in so many words tells him to fuck off so he pistol whips her and then, because why not, steals her laptop. Since she is intimately aware of the operation of the man she is trying, she knows who Paco is from surveillance photos and goes to the police and tells them what happened. The police go to the bar that Paco uses as a base of operations, arrests him, and because they haven't caught him in the act of doing anything illegal, drop a few bullets and some cocaine on the ground. Boom, you've got illegal weapon and drug charges.

Paco goes to prison, but since the case against him is weak and they know that if he comes before the judge he'll likely get released, his court appointed attorney just keeps missing his court date. After three months of this in which he's been hanging out in prison, they give him another court appointed attorney. Unfortunately for him, this new attorney is a friend of the woman he pistol whipped. She, however, is willing to show up for his court date. More bad luck for Paco since the gun and drug charges they're holding him on carry a maximum sentence of two years in prison and his new attorney decides that the best legal decision is to plea bargain . . . for a four year prison sentence.

This doesn't even get into the prison system, which is almost fully controlled internally by the gangs. The guards control the walls, but inside the gangs run kidnappings, drug operations, and brothels.

It adds up to an interesting picture of justice in a system that appears to require corruption from both sides in order to operate. At least it seems everyone understands the rules.