Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

2007, at the behest of Guatemalan human rights advocates, including Helen Mack, the United Nations established the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), an independent anti-corruption body, to investigate criminal groups that had come to dominate the country after three decades of civil war. It was a radical international experiment. The CICIG’s mandate was to work directly with national institutions, such as the police, the Public Ministry, and the existing court system. But this presented an immediate problem because many of these offices were controlled by organized crime. The commission’s inaugural chairman was a Spaniard named Carlos Castresana, who lived in a secured villa in Guatemala City that had once been the headquarters for the US Marines. A foiled assassination plot forced him to sleep in a room above his office. “When you come to a country with such extended levels of corruption, it doesn’t matter if you have built a good case,” he later told the journalist David Grann. “Guatemala’s institutions must be purged from the inside—they need an exorcism.” The commission went on to create new institutions that could withstand corrosive influences. One was a special prosecutor’s office that operated within the Public Ministry; another was a set of courts that handled complex investigations. Democrats and Republicans in the US Congress, who saw political corruption as a major driver of drug trafficking and migration, would give close to $45 m...