Claudia Paz y Paz is Guatemala’s first female Attorney General – although she will not be holding the position for much longer. She is not being made to leave her position for reasons of incompetence, corruption, or legal requirements. Rather, she is being made to leave because she is too good at what she does.
Why and how do you get rid of an Attorney General who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize? On Wednesday, the Constitutional Court ruled that Paz y Paz is to leave her position in three months, although the term for which she was supposed to hold the position is not due to end for ten months. She filed an appeal, which was denied on Friday. According to the New York Times, the rulings are the result of a challenge filed by businessman Ricardo Sagastume, and the ‘ruling was based on a technical reading of Ms. Paz y Paz’s appointment because she was selected after another attorney general was removed.’
If this seems shoddy and selective, that’s because it is. It is also telling that Paz y Paz’s main defenders in this are human rights groups. It rather looks as though the (soon to be former) Attorney General is being targeted for political reasons, because she goes after those with power.
The cases she has pursued are illustrative. In May 2013, Paz y Paz prosecuted Efraín Ríos Montt, the former Guatemalan dictator, for genocide committed against 1771 indigenous Ixil people in the 1980s. The verdict was later rendered void. According to The Guardian, ‘The widespread suspicion is that testimony implicating the president, Otto Pérez Melina, a commander at the time where a massacre took place, led to the annulment.’ Paz y Paz has been insistent in prosecuting crimes from the thirty-six year long civil war. She has gone after drug traffickers and police implicated in drug-related crimes. She has done extraordinary things, more of which you can read about in her NPR profile. This is all on the back of a career as a criminal law specialist, judge, and founder of the Institute for Comparative Criminal Studies of Guatemala, which is a human rights organisation.
The point is that Paz y Paz is a problem for the powerful. As her credibility and effectiveness would be incredibly difficult to undermine, the best option, as we can see, has been to cut her position off with a technicality. It’s a sad point to be reached by a person who has so determinedly pursued actual, not technical, justice. I have no doubt that Paz y Paz’s full-throated passion for justice and the law will be well applied elsewhere. There is no word as yet as to who will take on Paz y Paz’s position. You can bet that, even though she has been removed early, her successor will not lose their job on the same term-based technicality as she did.