.Helen Mack Chang, a human-rights activist who was appointed to direct a government commission for police reform, says that Paz y Paz brought systemic change to the attorney-general’s office. “Instead of investigating crimes one by one, from an endless pile of files, she started investigating the structures, the criminal organizations. She reorganized the whole process.”
In 2013, government prosecutors, with the help of human-rights lawyers, attempted something unprecedented: they accused former military dictator Efraín Rios Montt of genocide against the Ixil, a Mayan people who are indigenous to Guatemala, on the grounds that his troops had killed almost two thousand Ixil and displaced some thirty thousand of them. As dozens of indigenous people testified before the court, the trial came to be about more than Ríos Montt’s responsibility; it took on all of the abuses that the Guatemalan military and wealthy landowners inflicted on the indigenous population during the dirty war of the early nineteen-eighties. One of the witnesses, a former Army mechanic named Hugo Leonardo Reyes, who was assigned to the Ixil areas during the Rios Montt dictatorship, testified that the commander in charge of the local military garrison had burned down villages and ordered the execution of Ixils. The name of the local commander, he said, was Otto Pérez Molina.
President Perez Molina immediately denied the accusations and blamed Judge Yassmin Barrios for putting Guatemala’s political stability at risk by allowing witnesses “to tell such damaging lies.” Conservative media pundits, who deny any racism in the structure of Guatemalan society, unleashed an aggressive campaign against the trial, denying that there was genocide and stating that, if war crimes were ever committed, they should be judged in the context of the Cold War, in which the Army was fighting Communist aggression. After weeks of testimony and deliberations, Judge Yassmin Barrios found Rios Montt guilty. Later, the Supreme Court annulled the conviction on a technicality and suspended Judge Barrios for a year. The Supreme Court also shortened the term of the attorney general, Paz y Paz. She was not reëlected. Pérez Molina announced his intention not to renew the CICIG’s mandate.