On Tuesday, Guatemalan authorities arrested three additional suspects in the 1990 murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack (two men are already serving time). Mack's research involved documenting human rights abuses committed against the country's indigenous. She was stabbed over two dozen times in front of her home in Guatemala City on September 11th.
One of those arrested was a former police officer who led the investigation into Mack's death while details on the other two men were unavailable. However, the Myrna Mack Foundation released a statement indicating that the "arrests are related to the slaying of Jose Merida Escobar, a police investigator who determined the anthropologist's killing had been ordered by the government. Merida Escobar was killed in 1991, shortly after revealing his findings to a court." The police did not address the foundation's description of the arrests.
Like the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi eight years later, Mack's murder intimidated but did not stop those carrying out investigations into wartime human rights abuses.
In other criminal justice news, Erwin Sperisen was sentenced to life in prison following a trial in Switzerland that found him guilty of participating in the "summary execution and subsequent cover-up of the murder of seven inmates in Guatemala’s Pavón prison in September 2006." The former police chief shot and killed at least one of the victims. Little consolation to Sperisen, but he was found not guilty of executing three prisoners who had escaped another jail one year earlier.
Sperisen should have stayed in Guatemala instead of fleeing to his ancestral homeland. Former presidential candidate Alejandro Giammattei who was also involved in the Pavon murders fled to Honduras. He was arrested and spent ten months in prison before being found not guilty by Judge Carol Patricia Flores. Giammattei then ran for president in 2011 on the CASA ticket winning 1 percent of the vote, a sharp drop from the 17 percent he had captured in 2007.
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