Containing Large-Scale Criminal Violence Through Internationalized Prosecution: How the Collaboration Between the CICIG and Guatemala’s Law Enforcement Contributed to a Sustained Reduction in the Murder Rate

• Published date: 01 August 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140221139386
• Author: Guillermo Trejo,Camilo Nieto-Matiz
• Date: 01 August 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2023, Vol. 56(9) 1328–1364

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140221139386

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Containing Large-Scale

Criminal Violence

Through Internationalized

Prosecution: How the

Collaboration Between

the CICIG and

Guatemala’sLaw

Enforcement Contributed

to a Sustained Reduction

in the Murder Rate

Guillermo Trejo

1

and Camilo Nieto-Matiz

2



Abstract

How do post-conf‌lict societies contain large-scale criminal violence when

state security forces that committed atrocities during a civil war remain

unpunished and become key players in the criminal underworld? This article

explores the impact on violence reduction of internationalized prosecution

(IP): cooperation agreements between an international organization and a

country’s public prosecutors to dismantle state-criminal networks through

judicial action. We assess the IP process by which the United Nations–

sponsored International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala

(CICIG) and Guatemala’s law enforcement dismantled over 70 criminal

1

University of Notre Dame, IN, USA

2

University of Texas at San Antonio, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Guillermo Trejo, Department of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, 312 Hesburgh

Center, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA.

Email: gtrejo@nd.edu

structures led by death squads and the civil war military establishment. Using

synthetic control models, we estimate that Guatemala’s IP process plausibly

prevented the occurrence of between 20,000 and 30,000 homicides, from

2008 until 2019. Case studies show how IP contributed to violence reduction

by removing criminal structures and deterring both state-criminal collusion

and the state’s use of iron-f‌ist militarized policies against crime.

Keywords

large-scale criminal violence, state-criminal structures, internationalized

prosecution, International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala,

Guatemala

One of the most surprising developments in countries that transition from

authoritarian rule to democracy and in societies overcoming civil war is the

outbreak of major waves of large-scale criminal violence (Arias and

Goldstein, 2010;Cruz, 2011;Yashar, 2018). In several Latin American

countries, criminal wars—armed conf‌licts by which states f‌ight organized

criminal groups (OCGs) and OCGs f‌ight among themselves for control over

illicit economies and territories—have emerged as one of the most lethal types

of conf‌lict in the world today, surpassing the death toll of the typical civil war

of the second half of the 20th century (Lessing, 2017;Trejo & Ley, 2020).

While students in the social sciences have recognized this phenomenon and

are beginning to explain its main drivers, we know little about the policies by

which governments and societies can contain large-scale criminal violence

and build self-sustaining peace.

In this article, we investigate a remarkable reduction of large-scale criminal

violence that took place in Guatemala between 2008 and 2019. After tran-

sitioning to democracy in 1986 and signing a peace agreement that ended a 36-

year civil war in 1996, Guatemala experienced a dramatic outbreak of criminal

wars and large-scale criminal violence and by 2008 had become one of the

world’s deadliest countries with a homicide rate of 46.7 murders per 100,000

population (Brockett, 2019;Cruz, 2011). In the next decade, however,

Guatemala experienced a sustained decline in the murder rate, reaching 25

murders per 100,000 in 2019. A substantial and sustained reduction in large-

scale criminal violence in such a short period of time is surprising because in

most cases, a dramatic reduction is followed by a major relapse (Cruz &

Dur´

an-Mart´

ınez, 2016).

Sociologists have long suggested that improvements in socioeconomic

conditions that foster community cohesion (e.g., reduction in poverty, in-

equality, lop-sided demographic structures, proportion of mono-parental

households, and education def‌icits) can drive homicide rates down

Trejo and Nieto-Matiz 1329

(Sampson, 1993). Political economists have argued that changes in criminal

markets that inhibit criminal competition can reduce murder rates (Reuter,

2009). Security scholars have claimed that changes in state security policies,

favoring conditional crackdowns on OCGs (Lessing, 2017) or even direct

negotiations (Cruz & Dur´

an-Mart´

ınez, 2016) instead of military confronta-

tion, can contain large-scale criminal violence. Students of democracy have

held that institutional reforms that confer greater judicial independence from

executive power and introduce greater internal and external civilian controls

over the police and the military may stimulate the use of judicial strategies,

rather than military ones, to dismantle OCGs and reduce criminal violence

(Gonz´

alez, 2020;Yashar, 2018).

Guatemala’s major reduction in large-scale criminal violence is theoreti-

cally puzzling. None of the socioeconomic drivers typically associated with

criminal violence underwent any signif‌icant change as the country’s homicide

rate steadily declined between 2008 and 2019. Moreover, the decline of the

murder rate began in 2008 at a time when Mexican drug cartels—including the

Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel—made a decisive move into Guatemala and

engaged in deadly territorial battles over the control of drug traff‌icking routes

(Dudley, 2011). And Guatemala had previously experienced a dramatic in-

crease in criminal violence in the early 2000s, even though the country had

introduced a series of legal reforms intended to equip the Public Prosecutor’s

Off‌ice (Ministerio P´

ublico, MP) and the National Police to effectively con-

front OCGs through new tools of investigation and prosecution.

We suggest that an ambitious process of internationalized prosecution

(IP)—by which the United Nations–sponsored International Commission

Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) working together with teams of

Guatemalan special prosecutors and the police dismantled over 70 criminal

structures from 2008 to 2019—contributed in decisive ways to containing

large-scale criminal violence and to the sustained reduction of Guatemala’s

murder rate. Operating under Guatemalan law, this international-domestic

partnership dismantled multiple state-criminal networks of elite members of

the military, the police, and death squads who had been at the forefront of the

counterinsurgency campaign that led to genocide during the civil war and had

morphed into the criminal underworld after the war to become leading actors

in the production of large-scale criminal violence (Peacock & Beltr ´

an, 2003).

Internationalized prosecution is a strategy of joint cooperation between an

international organization and a host country to investigate and prosecute state

security forces that have 1) colluded with OCGs to create powerful criminal

structures, 2) established tight controls over illicit economies through force

and widespread human rights violations, and 3) gained control over ordinary

institutions of justice to secure impunity. IP is most prevalent in post-conf‌lict

societies in which security forces that committed atrocities in autocracy and/or

civil war remained intact, morphed in the criminal underworld, and

1330 Comparative Political Studies 56(9)