Central America’s Northern Triangle is infamous for high levels of violent crime and human rights abuses, producing “impunity states” in which violence typically goes unpunished. That violence reflects the broader impunity or “transitional injustice” that has persisted since the peace accords and transitions to democracy of the 1980s and 1990s. Several “posttransitional” trials for past human rights violations in recent years in Guatemala were made possible by institutional strengthening efforts in the prosecutorial agency, led by a unique United Nations commission. Significant progress away from broad impunity may also be seen in the 2015 “Guatemalan Spring,” in which a sitting president was forced to resign and submit to prosecution in connection with a corruption scandal. Comparisons of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras suggest that institutional strengthening is necessary before “posttransitional justice,” or an end to impunity more generally, can be possible.
Judicial autonomy from societal actors is argued herein to be a critical aspect of the rule of law and to have been overlooked by the dominance within comparative judicial politics of the role of interbranch judicial independence. These distinct concepts are parsed and then interrelated to form a typology of four “judicial regime types”: liberal regimes, partisan control regimes, clandestine control regimes, and government control regimes. These regime types are then traced in five Central American countries.
Featuring the first in-depth comparison of the judicial politics of five under-studied Central American countries, The Achilles Heel of Democracy offers a novel typology of 'judicial regime types' based on the political independence and societal autonomy of the judiciary. This book highlights the under-theorized influences on the justice system - criminals, activists, and other societal actors, and the ways that they intersect with more overtly political influences. Grounded in interviews with judges, lawyers, and activists, it presents the 'high politics' of constitutional conflicts in the context of national political conflicts as well as the 'low politics' of crime control and the operations of trial-level courts. The book begins in the violent and often authoritarian 1980s in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and spans through the tumultuous 2015 'Guatemalan Spring'; the evolution of Costa Rica's robust liberal judicial regime is traced from the 1950s.
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