Quite understandably, the region has been transfixed by the forced resignation of Guatemalan President Otto Perez last week amid a maelstrom of corruption allegations that stripped his Cabinet of ministers and left him facing the prospect of charges of stealing customs revenues.
What was unique in the breathtaking course of events is that the exhaustive ‘La Linea’ probe was piloted by an independent commission that began operating in Guatemala in 2007. The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (ICIG) had been mobilised by the UN at the request of Guatemala following the end of the civil war in the Central American country. Ravaged by paramilitary groups, drug traffickers and an eroded criminal justice system, Guatemala requested help from the UN for the composing of an independent commission which would conduct its own probes. Having paved the way for corruption and other charges to be brought against a variety of officials since 2007, ICIG would have now claimed its biggest success in Mr Perez’s resignation even if further underlining how deep-seated and insidious corruption remains in Guatemala.
The attractiveness of the ICIG is that it was established as an independent body designed to aid the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the National Civil Police and other Guatemalan institutions in the investigation of a range of crimes. It focuses on complex cases and the implementing of steps to bolster the justice system. The provisions of the agreement between Guatemala and the UN enables it to act as a complementary prosecutor and it also has a warrant to file administrative complaints against public officials and to ensure confidentiality for people cooperating in investigations. It is this architecture that has enabled it to gather potent evidence against leading officials of the government including Mr Perez and the former Vice President Roxana Baldetti.
Following the January 26, 2008 massacre at Lusignan, Stabroek News had stated in its January 28, 2008 editorial that the Guatemalan model was an option that the Jagdeo administration should consider in light of the gruesome killings as it had signally failed to guarantee the safety of Guyanese amid the ongoing breakdown of law and order. Of course, the Jagdeo administration would never have contemplated such a bold initiative as former President Jagdeo and his party officials and security experts knew that to do so would risk having layer after layer of corrupt enterprise peeled back and prosecutions founded on substantial evidence. This would also have effectively meant a loss of control over the police force and the rest of the security apparatus which neither the government nor the PPP was prepared to countenance during the period 1992 to 2015.
Times have changed. A new government is in place. It is headed by President Granger who is recognised as being well-versed on the gamut of security challenges facing the country. With a long career in the Guyana Defence Force and having absorbed and contributed to the large body of work produced by the Disciplined Forces Commission among other such experiences, President Granger is in an excellent position to judge the serious deficiencies in the criminal justice system and to determine whether it is capable of delivering the quality of justice that citizens have been clamouring for. The list is daunting and begins with the 1993 killing of Monica Reece, a watershed for the country as it demonstrated the brutishness of the murderer/s and the rank incompetence and corruptibility of the police force.
It would then progress to the 2002 prison break and the collapse of law and order that followed, the rise of the death squads and activities of drug lord Roger Khan, the Buxton-based crime gangs, the three massacres of 2008, the savage murder of a sitting Minister of Government and family members, extra-judicial deaths, the targeted killing of policemen, and the unsolved deaths of hundreds of mainly men from 2002 onwards.
Not to be ignored is the cry for justice from the families of hundreds as exemplified by Kamla Singh in yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek who five years on is still deeply aggrieved at the murder of her daughter and grandchild in a hail of bullets on a dark night in September.
In addition, successive administrations since 1992 have comprehensively failed to address the depredations of the Colombia-centred drug trade which has seen gangland killings, corruption of the security forces, increasing amounts of cocaine filtering into the local market and the unchecked rise of the nouveau riche who have laundered proceeds, creating all types of distortions. The illicit weapons trade also remains a major challenge.
In the four months since taking office, after the first change in government in 23 years, the APNU+AFC administration has embarked upon a series of audits of state entities, projects and individual transactions. Major discoveries have already been made which may warrant high quality investigations of white collar crimes leading to complex prosecutions. A former minister of the government is already before the court in one matter and being investigated in another. Other former senior officials are expected to be investigated in a variety of matters.
Considering the lifespan of the previous government and the compromised system of law and order there is also an expectation that old and newer matters will come to the fore through whistleblowing pertaining to tax evasion in the business sector and matters like under invoicing. Many of these cases – like the Polar Beer scam – which surfaced during the PPP/C’s period in office were deftly escorted from the limelight or handled with a tap on the wrist.
Given its checkered past and its present state is President Granger confident that even with planned improvements, the Guyana Police Force will be up to the task of fully probing and presenting cases that can be successfully prosecuted in the coming months and years? There is also another good reason for this question. The new administration must also send an unmistakable signal to its own officials that there will be zero tolerance for any transgressions of the law and where these occur there will be swift and stiff penalties for the guilty.
This is what will have to be carefully considered by the government. If the answer is not unequivocal then perhaps President Granger should consider approaching the UN for assistance with a Commission similar to the Guatemalan configuration. Its sweep would be narrower considering that we are not in a post-civil war situation. Such a model would immediately do two things: it would make even less tenable the claims that the new administration is engaged in a witch hunt against former government officials and secondly it would imbue great confidence among members of the public in the activities of a probe team with an international flair and without any perceptible attachments to the two parties which have dominated public life for so long. Is the APNU+AFC administration prepared to take such a bold step?
