GUATEMALA CITY — She holds one of the most dangerous jobs in this spectacularly dangerous country, confronting the most feared and powerful men of the Guatemalan present: gang leaders; dirty public officials; shot-callers in the Mexican drug cartels who have bled in from the north.
She is also taking on the titans of Guatemala's past: military men and security chiefs whom she has accused of human rights abuses during the nation's brutal 35-year civil war. Guatemala's emblematic 20th century strongman, Efrain Rios Montt, has been under house arrest since January, when her office charged him with genocide and crimes against humanity.
Claudia Paz y Paz, a 46-year-old former human rights lawyer, has served as attorney general since December 2010, earning a reputation as the most aggressive prosecutor the Central American nation has seen since the war's end in the mid-1990s.
The challenges she faces are formidable: The Guatemalan homicide rate has roughly doubled in the last decade, because of ghastly cartel slayings in the countryside and a rise in crime, much of it gang-related, in and around Guatemala City, the capital.
Moreover, she inherited an office tarnished by scandal and a dismal conviction rate. Her critics, meanwhile, accuse her of re-fighting the civil war in the courts on behalf of the Guatemalan left, not administering justice, they say, so much as settling scores.
If the pressure gets to her, it does not show. On a recent afternoon, a smiling Paz y Paz slipped quietly into a casual downtown cafe for an interview, wrapped in an oversize shawl. She could have been a Latin protest singer from the 1970s.
Small of stature, with a voice smaller still, she spoke of the criminal charges she had brought against men once considered untouchable here. She referred to them by last name only, in the hard-boiled shorthand of cops and prosecutors everywhere.
"Lopez Fuentes," a general. "De la Cruz," a former national police chief. "Arredondo," another police chief. "Mejia Victores," another general.
"Rios Montt."
The case of Rios Montt stands apart. He ruled for 17 months in the early 1980s when the civil war was at its ugliest, and he went on to play a major role in Guatemalan public life for years, as a congressman and political shot-caller. Some Guatemalans still believe he saved the country from ruin with his ferocious crackdown on communist rebels, his "hard hand" crime-fighting measures and his moralizing evangelical sermons, televised nationwide on Sundays.
Others consider Rios Montt a criminal, the man responsible for the army's burning of villages, massacres of civilians, and the death or internal displacement of tens of thousands of Guatemalans, many of them indigenous Maya. By one estimate, about 86,000 people were killed during Rios Montt's brief tenure as head of state.
He says he is innocent of genocide. His attorneys have been maneuvering to keep him out of court. But the retired general, now 86, is relegated to his rock-walled compound on the tony side of the capital, unable to step out even for the morning paper.
Paz y Paz figures it is a waiting game.
"It's important, because any country that wants to avoid massive human rights violations has to adjudicate them," she said. "If not, you run the risk of repeating them."
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Since 1996, when a peace accord ended the fighting between the government and Marxist rebels, Guatemala has tried to heal its old wounds. But they run deep. A 1999 report by the country's truth and reconciliation commission estimated that more than 200,000 people died in the conflict, and that 93% of the widespread human rights violations were committed by the government or its paramilitary allies.
Current President Otto Perez Molina, elected in November 2011, is a former army general who commanded troops in a civil war hot spot. Some on the Guatemalan left have accused him of war crimes. None of the accusations have been proved.
Then there are Paz y Paz's critics.
"The problem," said Ricardo Mendez Ruiz, who heads a group called the Foundation Against Terrorism, "is when you take your ideology to the public prosecutor's office, to seek vengeance."
Mendez, a 53-year-old Guatemala City businessman, says he was kidnapped and tortured in 1982 by the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, one of the main armed leftist groups during the war. At the time, his father, a military officer, was serving as Rios Montt's interior minister.
Guatemala official takes on nation's ugly past, violent present
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Guatemala official takes on nation's ugly past, violent present
