This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.
Turning Point: Evan Gershkovich is the first American journalist to be arrested on espionage charges in Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
At the end of the 20th century, the neologism “lawfare” — a combination of “law” and “warfare” — became a common term for describing how powerful people used judicial systems to attack their opponents. In this way, the very institution charged with ensuring that justice was served was converted into a tool of oppression, a weapon used by the powerful to secure their political objectives and repress dissidence. Common tactics of judicial warfare included prosecution without any grounds; obstructing and delaying trials to indefinitely neutralize those being prosecuted; media campaigns designed to smear opponents; disinformation; and the invalidation of international law.
In Latin America, the criminalization and imprisonment of environmentalists, as well as Indigenous leaders who fight against the expropriation of their land by multinational businesses, has become widespread.
My own fiction hasn’t yet drawn inspiration from judicial warfare. But for writers of my generation, the state violence that, like institutional corruption and racism, characterizes the history of Guatemala is an urgent, almost mandatory, theme on which almost all of us have fed. In fact, my first short stories and novels were nurtured by the violent atmosphere of Guatemala.
One of my uncles was burned to death on the afternoon of Jan. 31, 1980, during the occupation of the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala, along with a committee of Maya leaders who had traveled to the capital to denounce a series of severe human rights abuses committed by the Guatemalan army in their home territories. These abuses would signal the start of the genocide of the Maya Ixil. After a phone call from the embassy, which had just been occupied, my sister Magalí and I, who were barely 20 years old at the time, were sent there to deliver heart medicine to our uncle. He inadvertently had been taken hostage while at the embassy to speak about the organization of an international judicial conference. A cordon of officers from the national police blocked our path, and a well-known journalist, who had arrived a few moments earlier, warned us that the police were about to storm the embassy. We saw several officers climb onto a second-floor balcony, armed with assault weapons and what appeared to be flamethrowers. We heard an explosion, and a small black cloud billowed from a window. Seconds later, more than 60 feet from the besieged building, we smelled the odor of charred flesh.
The memory of that afternoon, when 37 people burned to death, would not stop haunting me, and on one occasion I awoke from a dream in which I was eating a chunk of roasted meat that came from my uncle’s burned body. It was as though the aspiring writer in me sensed that the violence of my surroundings would become a kind of literary sustenance.
The destruction of the natural world — and the corruption that accompanies it — is another theme that has fertilized my writing.
My first novel, “Lo que soñó Sebastián,” (“What Sebastian Dreamt”) begins with the conflict between Sebastián Sosa, a young and idealistic environmentalist from the city, and a family of poachers in the Petén jungle. Sosa’s attempt to impose his values has catastrophic consequences for him and those around him.
In the early and mid-1980s, shortly after the genocide of the Maya Ixil in Guatemala, great swaths of jungle began to be laid waste by powerful landowners to convert them into cattle ranches and plantations growing sugar cane and African oil palms. During the government of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt (who 30 years later would be tried and found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity), my sister Magalí — inspired by the writings of St. Francis of Assisi, Chief Seattle and Rachel Carson — founded one of the first environmental nongovernment organizations in Guatemala, Defensores de la Naturaleza. She and her associates convinced a group of influential people of the need to create protected areas in all parts of the country.
In 1986, Guatemala’s first democratically elected government — after a series of military dictatorships — forbade the exploitation of these natural reserves, which were already being prospected by logging and paper companies. As a result, Magalí was perceived by people of her own social circle, who included cattle ranchers and owners of logging companies and big plantations whose business had been affected, as a traitor fanatically committed to the protection of the natural world at the cost of economic progress. In the press, she was labeled a communist, an “eco-hysteric” and an eco-terrorist.
One of my most recent novels, “El país de Toó,” (“The Country of Toó”) revolves around the Maya peoples’ resistance to a destructive mining industry protected by the law.
At the beginning of this century, when few people in Guatemala were aware of the devastating, irreversible effects of modern open-pit mining on the environment, some mining companies began to buy great tracts of land. A few years before the mining onslaught, a law had been drafted to regulate mining — with the help of legal experts who turned out to be employees of the mining companies.
According to an official environmental impact study, this law allowed Montana Exploradora, a subsidiary of the powerful Canadian mining company Glamis Gold, to use completely free of charge, and to mix with cyanide and other harmful chemical products, up to 1.6 million gallons of water a day in Sipacapa, an extremely poor municipality of Guatemala’s western highlands. A family in Sipacapa consumes an average of 1,320 gallons of water a month.
Some of Guatemala’s wealthiest mineral deposits are found in the western highlands, where the density of the Maya population is extremely high. Since 1996, Guatemala has granted more than 300 requests for licenses for mineral exploration and exploitation. For the first time, Western environmentalist interests and ancestral Maya conservationism would unite in a common struggle. In recent decades many Maya activists have been assassinated — or indicted and jailed on accusations of terrorism, theft, the illegal obstruction of roads or almost any felony — for resisting the invasion of their lands.
Events similar to the struggles we’ve seen unfolding in Guatemala’s Maya territories take place in “The Country of Toó.” The novel features corrupt institutions, just as today Guatemala’s highest courts are dominated by judges of verifiable complicity with politically powerful groups and organized crime. Some of them appear on the Engel List of Corrupt and Undemocratic Actors in Central America, created by the United States and published annually since 2021. The novel, however, concludes with the birth of a small Maya nation in an emancipated territory of a Central American republic infected since its founding by political corruption.
Now, as was the case 40 years ago (and perhaps as it has always been), reality and fiction appear interchangeable. Judicial warfare continues to spread globally: from the United States, where former President Donald Trump attempted to contest the 2020 election results, to Russia, where President Vladimir Putin uses legal manipulation to jail independent journalists who cast light on the stories that he has fabricated to justify the invasion of Ukraine. From Nigeria to Kenya, from Israel to China, the law has become a weapon.
In Guatemala, after the democratic election of a candidate from the center-left opposition last August, the chief prosecutor of the Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity, who is a distinguished member of the Engel List, announced a series of legal measures against the leaders of the winning party, including the president-elect, for the alleged use of false data on the electoral lists.
In the coming years, the tendency to turn justice into a political game will probably contribute to the imprisonment for imaginary crimes of an ever larger number of activists, journalists and writers. Perhaps this global trend toward legal distortion — like the state violence, racism and corruption that for decades have nourished my writing and that of many colleagues — will feed a new wave of literature written from behind bars.
Rodrigo Rey Rosa was born and raised in Guatemala City. He is a novelist and journalist.