Guatemala and the Death Penalty

Guatemalan government officials have been debating the wisdom of reinstating the death penalty in hopes that its application will bring violence under control.  Political parties on the right, the Libertad Democrática Renovada and Partido Patriota in particular, have pushed to reinstate the death penalty as a means of crime prevention and to position themselves as the parties of law and order before the 2011 election.  The URNG was one of the few political parties to criticize the new law.

On October 5th, Congress passed legislation giving the president the authority to issue pardons for those on death row.  The last execution in Guatemala occurred at least ten years ago (1998 or 2000 according to different sources).  The new law would have created a path to execute ten or twenty Guatemalans currently on death row. 

Two weeks ago, the United Nations Office for Human Rights in Guatemala called on the government to promote more effective measures to bring the violence under control such as strengthening its police forces, improving the Public Ministry's capabilities, and attacking the causes of youth violence.  Amnesty International also on the Guatemalan Congress "to abolish the death penalty instead of regulating it."

Colom has said that as a social democrat he does not support the death penalty.  He also said that the power to issue pardons and commute sentences should be decided by the Supreme Court and not the president (Prensa Libre).  In 2005 the IACHR ruled that Guatemala could not apply the death penalty until it had a procedure in place for the granting of presidential pardons. Congress tried to pass a similar law in 2008 to give the president this power, but Colom vetoed the bill.

Guatemala is reconsidering the use of the death penalty at the same time that Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero announced the creation of an International Commission Against the Death Penalty, The commission's goal is to help achieve a "global moratorium" on its use by 2015.


And in the US, Alejandro Enrique Ramirez Umana of El Salvador is scheduled to be the first member of MS-13 to be sentenced to death under the federal system of capital punishment.